That’s an odd response. My point was GDP alone is a poor way to measure a country.

It's a measure of the economy.

Or a measure of quality of life. But it sounds like you’re only interested in pro-American talking points.

It's nearly impossible to measure quality of life, because everybody has a different idea of what that means.

You mean like the human development index and various other measurement techniques?

Which is more important to your quality of life - central heating, or indoor plumbing?

Germany has all three. I’m not sure what your point is.

I asked which was more important - i.e. what's your weighting of these?

It is irrelevant, if both are available as base package.

I guess you want to point out that choices are subjective.

That subjectivity is relevant within their classes (air—food-water, security-health-plumbing-heating, smartphone-car-vacation, yaht-designerBrands) Definitely there will be one person who choses to die, just to get latest smartphone, but most people will not.

These classes get less clear/useful as you go up, but most people will agree on the basics.

Tangent: it is important for me personally for my neighbour to have the basics (and more), as that increases my basics like security, sanitary conditions.

GDP is an objective metric, while quality of life is subjective and is inevitably based on arbitrary weightings by the people trying to calculate it.

GDP PPP per capita is better measure of quality of life.

it's not. An economy where only a select few benefit from the GDP (e.g. via stocks - the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks!) is not a "quality of life" measure at all.

[1] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market...

You can select yourself as a beneficiary by buying stocks. With Robinhood, you can do so with less than a C-note.

> the richest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stocks

Most prolly got that way by buying stocks!

It's not a good one though, because weird effects like the AI bubble incest investment web artificially blow up the GDP, and because it doesn't reflect the economy "feeling" the population experiences.

To expand on the latter point - say you have automation enabling more economic growth. A significant amount of people lose their jobs, others are afraid they'll be the next ones on the chopping block, and people hold their money together as a result - if you ask general people on the street or in representative surveys, you'll get the feedback that the economy is going to the dogs, but "the numbers" don't reflect that.

Here in Washington state, they are heaping taxes on us in unprecedented amounts. That's not going to help affordability at all.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/washington-states-tax-blitz-497e...

Wouldn't that be awesome?

I enjoyed living in Germany for a while as an Air Force brat.

Good for you.