• Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      22
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Had a sociologist class with one of those dirty communist neo something something professors who asked the class “why do we measure how well the country is doing using unemployment or GDP instead of happiness”.

      Crazy thing was that my first instinct was to think how stupid it was to measure happiness. I’m such a fucking brainwashed idiot

      • thejml@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Happiness, while a useful metric, isn’t a very consistent one from person to person, or even from day to day. It’s a very subjective and hard to quantify metric.

        Not that GDP or unemployment are better indicators, but they’re solid numbers that can be definitively and accurately counted and done so consistently over decades.

        Still there has to be a better non-subjective metric than those, they’re not very telling.

        • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          6
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          That was actually a big part of the lecture. Is measuring happiness actually inconsistent. He put a good argument for it not being inconsistent. That we can not only measure happiness pretty consistently but that we can also measure all the things that contribute to it pretty accurately. One of my favorite lectures in school

    • School_Lunch@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Everything depends on scarcity. Supply and demand. There has to be unsatisfied demand otherwise prices would be too low for anyone to make any money… it’s a poorly designed system.