It's an excellent measure of the typical societal well-being in fact.

On average there is a strong correlation between the two globally and there has been during the entire post WW2 era at the least. It is the rare outlier that doesn't see a correlation between societal well-being and GDP per capita.

Shall we stroll down the list of high GDP nations? Surely it's unnecessary, as we all know the names. Oh ok let's do it anyway.

Ireland $101k | Norway $99k | Switzerland $96k | Qatar $84k | Brunei $80k | Singapore $79k | US $76k | Iceland $74k | Denmark $68k | Australia $67k | Sweden $58k | Netherlands $57k | Canada $57k | Israel $54k | Finland $53k | Austria $53k | Belgium $52k | Germany $51k | New Zealand $50k | UAE $50k | UK $50k | France $44k | Japan $39k | Kuwait $39k | Taiwan $36k | South Korea $35k | and so on

And everyone also knows what the bottom 1/4 or 1/3 of GDP per capita nations look like and how horrible their societal well-being is. The correlation is blatant. It's not perfect of course, it is however very high.

There are no great societal paradises where the GDP per capita is ~$500-$5,000. And there are no countries that are like Zimbabwe, Somalia or North Korea but have $30k+ GDP per capita figures.

The only serious weak spots in the correlation, primarily, are the US being ranked so highly on GDP per capita (but being below eg Finland on societal well-being), and the couple of smaller resource rich nations like Qatar where human rights are weak. For the vast majority of nations the correlation is quite sound and consistently so.

Hmm, actually I wonder the true level of quality of life difference between top of that list and bottom of it. Probably not great predictor inside the list.

Still I agree that between top and bottom there is huge qualitative differences.

> There are no great societal paradises where the GDP per capita is ~$500-$5,000.

Ok, not paradise, but a counterpoint I can think of might be Bhutan at around $3,200.

How is Bhutan a good counterpoint?

that's a country size of Sacramento. Even if it was a societal paradise (don't know much about that, life expectancy seems not great at 71), a sample of 700k people doesn't seem to crush the predictive power of GDP per capita.

That's true. But if GDP per capita goes up, even if GDP goes down, your odds of having society being better off as a result are much better than if GDP goes up while GDP per capita goes down.