But isn't that the issue?
Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all. She (it was usually a she) could get the kids off to school, pick them up after school, check in on grandma, do the shopping, cook a simple meal.
Now: the working-age person goes to work, perhaps because the family fell apart, perhaps because other rising costs (e.g. health care) forced it. Before and after school care is paid for. Someone is paid to check in on grandma. Walmart+ or Amazon occasionally delivers heat-and-eat meals.
GDP went way up! Amazon contractor has a job delivering boxes. Someone is paid to check in on Grandma, and someone else to watch the kids. Someone works in the factory making heat-and-eat meals.
But are we really better off? Is it better to staff out the kid- and Grandma-watching and to heat up a dinner in the microwave? I'm not sure anyone knows the answer to that question, but I'm certainly not sure that "we really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives."
My wife is back to having a wage, and both kids are back to full-time daycare. They both really enjoy school. And comparing them to their peers who stay at home, they're usually way ahead when it comes to counting and numbers, vocabulary, spelling, reasoning, and social skills. Which I mean makes sense, they're around people who got degrees in education with professionally thought-out lesson plans every day.
But has this changed massively over the past 30 or 40 years? Not really.
Frozen dinners have been around since longer than most of us have been alive. Working couples in the 1980's were figuring out what they'd do with grandma. Nursing homes have been around for a looong time. Mail-order delivery of boxes has been a thing since the end of the 1800's -- there were Sears warehouses long before Amazon warehouses.
That's all I'm saying. However, employees genuinely are much more productive than they were in the 1980's, thanks to e-mail and cell phones and the Internet and collaborative online document editing and so much more. You can get things done in an hour that used to take you 2 weeks of back-and-forth.
The productivity growth is real. It's not an illusion based on what GDP doesn't capture.
> Before: one working-age person in the household worked part time, or did not work at all.
And the whole reason it's a bad thing is that the human values that can't be converted to a measurable, tradeable commodity are often thrown away, because they're invisible to the commodification process.
One of the ways we seem to be absolutely destroying the social fabric for younger people is by eliminating ("privatizing") every last public space and time in which they're allowed to exist without driving there and paying a fee for a structured transactional recreation. We have privatized the commons in an analogous way to the Enclosure Movement in industrializing Great Britain.
Name some?
The issues people care most about atm seem to be getting worse (housing prices, cost of living, etc)
It is very common to focus on some large things that are bad and think that is the big picture without considering how much all the little things really add up to.
Like many of the other items on the list, it’s a change that few people actually asked for and it’s more in the name of surveillance capitalism than consumer preferences or consumer choice.
Sure, social media can con children into thinking they need this. And after it’s normalized then adults might point it out as an improvement, but in the end it’s part of why the “improved” phone takes more hours of labor to pay for and the consumer has fewer options than ever with an illusion of more choice.
And expensive that , at least in Europe, nobody is buying them anymore so the industry is going through layoffs.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/documents/13237-...
Add the backup camera to the improved restraints, the collision warning system, the blind-spot monitor . . . and soon you're talking about some real money.
One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but they're not really luxury toys.
No, humans are not cavemen, as cavemen lived thousands of years ago and had a different lifestyle than modern humans. The term "caveman" is a stock character that became popular in the early 20th century.
There are things that are better, but "batteries" is the only one from your list that I agree with.
it's a fact that the housing standard of living has gone down for the last 26 years. See this graph: Nominal gpd per capita / case shiller housing index. and you'll see it's down 34% over the last 26 years!
Especially not when both phone manufacturers and car manufacturers are engaging in more and more rent seeking behavior
In other words, if you assume non-GDP activity is constant, then GDP does genuinely and accurately reflect economic growth.
Indeed, this is one reason why economists recommend GDP as a useful measure of growth in a country year-over-year, but not for comparing different countries' GDP directly -- the ratio of activity not counted as GDP may be quite different between countries.
Now, if you think that a massive social transformation is underway of non-GDP-registering activities to GDP-registering activities -- e.g. people used to care for their grandmas, now all those people have gotten jobs to pay for care assistants to do it instead -- then yes GDP will show "false growth" in productivity.
But that really doesn't seem to be a major factor. We really are seeing massive amounts of innovation in the economy that improve people's lives. Economists don't just look at GDP -- they look at lots of measures that all tell the same story. Productivity really is going up. GDP growth may not be 100.00% accurate, but it is mostly.