I see many problems with these suggested measures
Lifespan can be extended in all sorts of authoritarian ways. Ban
smoking is an obvious one. Is there any way to measure the value of
free choice in GDP+?{1}

>I think education, good governance, and possibly more of that list
should be thought of as means we use to increase welfare, not ends.
Are education and healthcare systems the source of economic growth or
the result? Strange question I know but it could be if you measure
amount spent on education you are just measuring GDP in a different
way.
Subjective comparisons with the past. Many people think that the past
there was no crime and the health care was much better. Almost all
evidence(2) I have seen seems to show these beliefs to be not very
accurate. If people do have rose tinted hindsight how can you
counteract this bias?

I am not saying your suggestions are bad. They are much better then
the ones I did not make. But I do think it is worth examining these
ideas to see what happens.
Regards
David


1. It may be that choice has very little value
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/93
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/bschwar1/Sci.Amer.pdf

(2) http://www.isteve.com/abortion.htm


On 27/03/2008, Tom Breton (Tehom) <tehom@...> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > Bhutan is trying to define national welfare
> > http://www.physorg.com/news125462439.html
> >
> > "The main concerns have been identified as psychological well-being,
> > health,
> > education, good governance, living standards, community vitality and
> > ecological diversity."
> >
> > What concerns would you include? And how would these parts of GDP+ be
> > measured?
>
> I'm glad you asked that.
>
> I would include a component to measure self-reported satisfaction.
>
> Now, self-reported satisfaction ("happiness") is notoriously
> problematic. Good fortune doesn't make people as happy as they
> predicted it would, and ill fortune doesn't make them as unhappy as
> they predict. Healthy, rich people aren't that much happier. And so
> on.
>
> To counter this, I would explicitly indicate the baseline for
> comparison and I would make it clear to survey respondents that
> personal circumstantial well-being is what's being asked about. So
> the survey question would be something like "Are you better off than
> you were N years ago?" (to nearly paraphrase a certain political
> slogan)
>
> There's a dilemma lurking there: If the time interval is too large,
> few people can be meaningfully surveyed (Are you better off than you
> were 100 years ago?). If too small, that creates a short time
> horizon.
>
> So I'd want to ask about a range of intervals. That creates issues of
> how to weight answers as a function of both N and respondent's age.
>
> Asking only "better/worse" would result in an overly blocky metric.
> That is, the system would try to make the majority just a little bit
> better off, possibly at the expense of making a minority of citizens a
> whole lot worse off. So I'd offer respondents a range of answers
> along the usual lines of "strongly agree" ... "strongly disagree".
> How to weight them is an issue here too.
>
> Finally, there's the question of gaming the survey. If I held a long
> position on GDP+, I'd be tempted to say I was better off than I really
> was. I might even fool myself into believing I was.
>
> To counter gaming the survey, I suggest incorporating Drazen Prelec's
> "Bayesian Truth Serum" (BTS) - the name perhaps promises too much, but it
> is a sound piece of mechanism design.
>
> Tom Breton (Tehom)
>
>
>
>



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