it's because our whole lives we're told that "Gross Domestic Product", overall money, is the determinant of "best" and that's so engrained for us.
I grew up in the US and literally never heard this. It’s a way to measure economic behavior but nobody actually cares about that number. For the people who are money focused, they look at things like PPI and individual incomes. I’m not making a value judgement on how much focus should be put on that, but the point is that GDP is irrelevant to citizens.
For a concrete example, Biden/Harris got backlash about the economy sucking despite GDP being great because of the massive erosion in purchasing power during 2022/2023. Them pointing to GDP to show how strong the economy was even made it worse.
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I grew up in the US and literally never heard this. It’s a way to measure economic behavior but nobody actually cares about that number. For the people who are money focused, they look at things like PPI and individual incomes. I’m not making a value judgement on how much focus should be put on that, but the point is that GDP is irrelevant to citizens.
For a concrete example, Biden/Harris got backlash about the economy sucking despite GDP being great because of the massive erosion in purchasing power during 2022/2023. Them pointing to GDP to show how strong the economy was even made it worse.