However even if we except your premise that an increased GDP will help to fulfill this is highly doubtful. A increased GDP can (and does) very well decrease quality of life. Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
In fact one of the reasons why the US has been so successful at increasing GDP is that the population has an increasingly unhealthy livestyle.
For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).
Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.
>Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.
> For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).
That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited. Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?
> Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.
I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim. Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.
> >Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.
> Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.
If human wants were limited, we'd expect to see, for any given country, savings rates increasing as incomes increase. We have not seen this, and in fact have seen the opposite (even in America, savings rates now are less than 50 years ago, when Americans were much poorer).
>Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?
Someone could just as easily suggest that German savings rates are too high because Germans are too fearful about the future so they save more. There's no objectively correct savings rate, so we can't say one country's rate is better than the other's.
>I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim.
My claim is that "human wants" are unlimited, which does not imply that every human's wants are unlimited. If some people have limited wants, and some don't, we'd still expect the sum of human wants to keep increasing. And savings rates suggest that the majority of people don't have limited wants (or at least have not fulfilled those wants).
>Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.
We're talking about wants here, not happiness. Who are we to say that somebody can't have what they want just because there's a chance it will make them unhappy?
I think a more fruitful direction would be to distinguish between empty dopamine, and the kind of want that you can look back on and feel like it was aligned with your broader interests.
I don't want to be dismissive, but this is basically page 1 of any Econ 101 book ;-)
As much as we make fun of economists, it's basically the only thing almost every economist out there will agree on.
Sure, some examples of GDP growth are win-win, like the ones you've listed. But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.
But making growth a goal on its own is a good way to wind up with more toll roads, more complexity that requires an industry to help citizens navigate it (e.g. realters, tax preparers), more cases where the consumer's decision making is tampered with (e.g. advertising, the sale of addictive things), and the creation of problems just so there will be a market for solutions thereto (e.g. Hallmark).
These are all cases of GDP growth that I think most of us can agree we'd be better off without.
The point is that measures that limit GDP will generally also limit the rate at which these things occur. An idea by itself is rarely enough: it needs capital to execute. Things that limit the growth of GDP limit the growth of a nation's capital.
Only if people get their hair cut more as a result. If haircuts take less time, become cheaper and people get their hair cut just as often surely GDP would go down. Same for package delivery.
If demand is not saturating your efficiency improvement then you are maybe capturing a bigger piece of the pie but the pie may shrink or grow. Isn't the pie the proper measure? Why are we measuring scoops of pie passing back and forth?