No, it's not a reasonable metric at all, because it ignores the fact that the vast majority of per capita GDP growth between the Stone Age and now is not that we have improved the quality of items that existed then. It's that we have invented a huge number of new items that Stone Age humans could not have even conceived. The huge growth in productivity and wealth from the Stone Age to now is not because we make stone tools that are that much better. It's because all they had was stone tools, where we have combine harvesters and backhoes and steel skyscrapers and railroads and container ships and airplanes and medical imaging devices and computers and the Internet and...

We still create beef because beef has value to us. So, sure the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless.

In the end combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gains.

I don't think it's 100x; I think it's a lot more. I was giving reasons why I think that.

> the basket of goods created back then is less valuable than what we create today. But, that does not somehow mean the value created back then is meaningless.

I never said it was.

> combine harvesters are more efficient than hand tools, but they both end up harvesting gains.

Yes, but combine harvesters greatly multiply the productivity of a single human at harvesting grain, which frees up many more other humans to invent so many other things that didn't exist before.

Also, combine harvesters are only one of the things I mentioned.

I am not saying you’re being disingenuous, but you listed stuff without context. A 1% slice of a pie looks tiny, you need numbers to judge these things not lists.

The context is farmers and ranchers still make up 1.3% of the labor force in the US, but globally 28% of the population are just farmers. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.agr.empl.zs Sure, more productive society’s have whither output for everything but agriculture adds up to ~6% global GDP / per capita GDP.

Now, we can argue that today’s food is better, but meat and fish likely made up a significant fraction of the Stone Age diet. So, suggesting it’s more than 6x more expensive using today’s market value seems unlikely. Note, food going bad is irrelevant as the value existed at one point, and food is temporary.

PS: Of course the population is also ~1,000x as large. So total worldwide GDP should be ~100,000x as large by my estimate, if that makes you more comfortable.

If more than 6% of current GDP is from farming, which it is, then everything else adds up to less than 20x the value farming provides. That’s just simple math.

So, we can just compare agricultural production and absolutely ignore everything else because it’s already included in the above calculation.

PS: Now you can argue that you care more about the internet or healthcare than a meal. But, I guarantee you would quickly change your mind if you had not eaten in several months. Food is an absolutely required and unlike air and water not naturally available for free in vast quantities.

but how does it even work - what things on that list have actually remained unchanged? Is a chicken in medieval times really the same as chicken today, and that's just in the last 800 years, not in the last 5000.

And in what direction do you compare? I suppose the price going up shows the growth of the economy, but what does the price going down show. Let's take aluminum, that price would have gone down a lot since medieval times, because it has been very much changed by increase of technical abilities. So we must not look at that because it is no longer like the aluminum of medieval times, but if you can not look at and measure stuff like that how can you actually measure the growth of the economy where value creation takes place.

I would need to see some arguments on how this works to even begin to get past the sounds clever but also sounds wrong stage of thinking.

Of course nobody is doing this silly thing, but trying to think about how the way it is being done works seems to be equally as silly to me.

This should not be a controversial statement. Imagine a simple scenario where Walmart alone, represents the economy and they sell 100 units per year. Then Amazon comes along and starts competing and after a while Walmart is only selling 50 units a year and Amazon is selling 60 units per year. You could now argue that 10 units/year of wealth have been created.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you but it seems you are arguing that 60 units/year of wealth were created in this scenario?

Of course this is only a simple scenario where all the variables are fixed, in the real world there are thousands variables (or more) interacting with each other. Which is why IMO, it's overly simplistic to say that one person's prosperity is zero-sum but also equally simplistic to say that wealth is created independently of the rest of the economy.

The point is primarily one about productivity growth and that causes the economy to grow. Consider agriculture.

When we were all out in the fields plowing them with oxen the whole time, and grinding flour by hand with stones, we didn't have much time to be doing anything else.

The invention of water- and wind-powered mills reduced the amount of time spent milling. Add (in no particular order) the seed drill, the horse-drawn reaper, pesticides, crop rotation, scientific theories of plant breeding, combine harvesters, nitrogen-based fertilizers, insect-resistant bio-engineered crops etc.

Productivity in agriculture in the developed world has DOUBLED since the 1960s.

John Deere invented the self-scouring steel plow and became famous and wealthy as a result. Some of that wealth came as a result of people buying his plow instead of buying someone else's; but the economic growth that resulted from his innovation was in terms of improved efficiency in farming in the plains of the Mid-West.