189
Yes he is right, targeting well-being directly is way more sane than pretending ‘market forces’ will mysteriously result in well-being despite all appearances
A rare headline where the answer is yes, as long as he chooses an aggregate measure that's based on objective data that's not easily gamed.
Zack Polanski wants to make things better for ordinary working people. Is he right?
GDP does not include home labour, mostly carried out by women. If you're a woman who takes even one day off from work for childcare, you are "harming" the countries GDP - you have reduced your wage and are not paying others to do that "job". Ohh wait, why don't you hire cleaners, hire gardeners, hire a handyman, hire a chef, and do your part for the economy - just work that third job and the business news will be happy!
How the fuck did we end up with a system where this supposed measure is the most important thing
How the fuck did we end up with a system where this supposed measure is the most important thing
well, here's a chance to change that with a vote
The simple answer is because, while it's not perfect, it's still quite useful, and easier to measure than something more subjective like wellbeing.
Consider an analogous satire to yours: "If you're depressed, or demanding better conditions, you are 'harming' the country's wellbeing - you have reduced your wellbeing and are not granting wellbeing to anyone else by doing so. Why don't you lower your expectations and be happy with what you've got, why don't you avoid seeking treatment for depression so it's not recorded on the statistics!"
All such metrics which aim to comprehensively summarise the state of something complex like an economy or population are subject to things they can't capture, and subject to perverse incentives.
I think a good, honest attempt to make wellbeing a metric by which we judge the country is a fantastic idea, but a simplistic take on GDP - like yours, I'm afraid - is not why.
There's no reason that the measurements that go into a quality-of-life index are necessarily more subjective than those that feed into GDP. It'd be a very good idea to use measures that are hard numbers (life expectancy, infant mortality, days lost from work due to illness, levels of pollutants, etc), and even better, ones that are not easily gamed (say, NHS queue lengths, which have been manipulated in the past). But that's an issue with any choice of metrics.
The relative weightings, on the other hand, depend on political priorities and values, so there will be some subjectivity in those.
My take on it is not trying to be simple. It is showing one fundamental issue that would instantly change the entire calculation if reflected. The fact that it was not a diverse group of people from diverse background probably meant they missed something so fundamental.
The analogy you used just doesnt work in my view. The fact that you're depressed would already lower an equivalent measure of wellbeing. The underlying point that you are depressed does not change whether you seek treatment or not. You're more likely to take sick days, more likely to have other health conditions, more likely to abuse drugs/alcohol, and other factors that could potentially be measured. Being depressed is not a choice but looking after your children or cleaning your own house is a choice.
We should at least make an attempt to try. I agree it would be difficult bit then they were trying to come up with GDP, it would've seemed to be an impossible task but they managed to find a way.
We should also make an attempt to fix the issues with GDP or stop using it as much as it is. Why is it ok to use this metric over any other?
"Why is it OK to use a metric" is a weird question to ask. Why wouldn't it be OK?
You could certainly try and take other things into account but... do you believe that the UK government does not consider any metrics except GDP when designing policy? Do you believe that voters don't consider any other outcomes when deciding whom to vote for? These are clearly not the case, and using several metrics together is equivalent to tweaking one metric to incorporate additional facts.
The way we really see the particular example you picked is by comparing unpaid and paid childcare. So the government could subtract paid childcare from headline GDP statistics, on the assumption that what that actually pays for is something that would otherwise happen anyway without payment.
But what would making this tweak achieve? Do you think people are out there pushing for an expansion to free childcare because it would make GDP figures go up? Because I think we push for that because it's the right thing to do for society.
As for my example, I think if you thought a little bit you'd see how practical ways of measuring depression (such as numbers of diagnoses in the NHS) would be subject to the same perverse incentives you're talking about with how GDP is measured. You suggested some proxies for wellbeing. Let's take number of sick days: the perverse incentive there would be that the government might launch a crackdown on slackers taking sick days they don't need to make the numbers look better, even though that's bad for society.
Maybe this isn't the kind of thing you're worried about with GDP, but then I don't really knwo what is.
You're very correct, in that any measure that becomes valued turns into a gamified target.
I do think that we have a habit of using GDP rather than GNP to obscure how many British products have been bought by Yanks, and have their profits syphoned off overseas.
My bigger issues with GDP is how it does tend to end up as the sole yardstick used in mainstream economics debates, and how it often includes financial services - which seems an artifical inflation; for instance simply paying the fees on a savings account (or even the overdraft fee) count towards GDP figures by default, but then arbitrarily choosing what to exclude makes a whole lot of new problems, and is something else you're right about, too.
any measure that becomes valued turns into a gamified target
That's a cynical management cliche that every newly-minted MBA seems to repeat. Its real intent is to raise awareness that measures can be gamed. But another MBA cliche with more substance is that you cannot manage what you can't measure (again with the caveat that you might be inadvertently creating incentives to cook the books when you do so). Every business and almost every government organisation rely on metrics and KPIs in order to function, and it's difficult to imagine any system where that's not the case.
I learned thermodynamics before I learned economics, so it didn't escape my notice that GDP looks more like a measure of heat than a measure of work. It gives an overall "operating temperature" of the economy, which is a useful thing to know, but it doesn't tell you what good it's doing you. For example, paying a milion people to dig holes, then fill them back in, would be reflected in GDP. The usefulness of that activity is a separate question. Broken window theory, etc.
I learned thermodynamics before I learned economics, so it didn’t escape my notice that GDP looks more like a measure of heat than a measure of work. It gives an overall “operating temperature” of the economy
That's a really good analogy for it, thanks for sharing.
The simple answer is because, while it’s not perfect, it’s still quite useful, and easier to measure than something more subjective like wellbeing.
But it's so much easier to believe that GDP measures how evil the economy is and that politicians only care about the big evil yardstick due to their being evil.
Fact!
GDP in the UK is hugelly manipulated anyways.
I remember back in 2012 when in the aftermath of the 2008 there was a "double dip recession" (a bit of GDP fall, twice) according to Official figures. Well, a few years later a group of Economists calculated GDP from the very same source figures and the result was very different from the Official GDP, with Britain having actually had a Depression (a GDP fall of over 4%).
And don't get me started at the whole scam of using the CPI measure of inflation that excludes housing rather than the CPI-H that includes it in the calculation of the Real GDP (which is the official one) even though house prices go into calculating the Nominal GDP via a mechanism called "inputted rent". Housing inflation goes into the nominal GDP and then the Inflation figures which are used to strip out the inflation from it to make the Official GDP (using something called the GDP Deflator, were the higher the Inflation the lower the resulting GDP) don't include house price inflation.
Thanks to this scam, because housing inflation does go into the raw GDP and the inflation from housing which is never stripped out when making the official GDP figures from it, Britain's realestate bubble ends up at the other end of this process with politicians harping about how great they are at managing the country because GDP went up, the worse the realestate bubble the more they have made Britain "grow".
I suspect that most people in Britain (especially the younger generations) don't at all feel all that "growth", quite the contrary.
Yeah, the BBC are talking 'bout the GDP
That means fuck all to me
I gotta eatYou know a brother's gotta eat
When he ask how I feel, I reply that I'm fed up
Some are drowning in money, I'm barely keeping my head up
Price of life on the rise, I'm feeling like it's a setup
'Cause nobody that I grew with seems to be getting a leg up
He is right.
Sounds like a better measurement than GDP, although it can be harder to measure.
I wonder if Polanski could be really radical and just scrap targets? You combat neo-liberalism by changing the conversation not by joining in.
I've been in organisations that worked that way. I don't recommend it. The reality is that you either have explicit targets or they're implicit. But as soon as you ask "how are we doing?" it's good to have some facts you can use to find out. Otherwise, whoever shouts the loudest gets their way.
There can be alternatives to this neoliberal realism. As I've already said, many societies have thrived without targets. Part of the enslavement is that they convince us that there's no other option: everything reduced to finances, numbers, metrics. Neverending.
Good point let's just vibe the code the economy. You know this can actually starve people, yeah?
And you know that GDP wasn't used before the 1930s? And that Simon Kuznets, the economist who developed it, warned against using it - especially due to its impact on welfare. We really don't need the targets-driven neoliberalism. There are already millions of children hungry every day in the UK, yeah?
I never said GDP should be the target, you said scrap all targets. I don't believe that anyone who's ever attempted anything seriously difficult could hold that position in earnest, You need some kind of numeric feedback or you're cooked.
Kate Raworth uses the term "boundaries"; I'd probably use "thresholds". Targets are insidious and something to avoid. Societies without targets have existed and thrived. So - yes - let's ditch all neoliberal targets!
Yeah cool you can rename it if you want, whatever.
You too. Best wishes in keep setting yourself those daily targets. The acceleration will happen!
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
189 points (99.5% liked)
UK Politics
5464 readers
104 users here now
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS