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Greetings, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to say for this post until I read a few other discussions

Economics

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Greetings, I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to say for this post until I read a few other discussions. As we have all just learned, GDP is the measure of goods and services in a country yearly. Another post I read mentioned the comparison of this in relation to the population. This is referred to as GDP per capita. I would like to state that broadly speaking, I think you can say that the higher the GDP is per capita the happier or better the well-being is. Something I heard recently, and I don't know the validity behind the statement, was that the lower-middle class income household in the US would be considered an Upper class citizen to the rest of the world. Something that I would like to note, and find frustrating, is that when you compare well-being or, possibly by extension, happiness to a countries GDP, you are going to get misconstrued numbers because there are various social aspects that may not be accounted for. It's like creating your own dream world without crime and then getting mad when you wake up. An example of outside social aspects may be media's impacts on expectations and happiness regardless of wealth. Some countries have severely limited media regulations and I wonder how that impacts people. Speaking from the American perspective, you could argue we have some of the most loosely regulated media control. A recent movement I saw on Instagram indicated that many people would constantly compare their own life to other people regardless of how truthful or accurate those posts may have been. This led to less satisfaction in their own life. I view this as an unmeasured impact on the well-being of people regardless of GDP. -Sam Jason Good evening class, We briefly covered GDP in our first unit but this week broke it down even further. Gross Domestic Product is basically just a value (number) that measures how well an economy is performing. It measures the wealth of an economy but it does not measure a nation’s welfare or how well of people of that economy are. To put it simply, higher GDP means more goods and services are being produced/bought, which means more jobs, which means more income. GDP is calculated by adding several flow variables. To get GDP you add personal consumption (value of good/services purchased by households), gross private domestic investment (value of all good/services produced the will be used to produced other goods/services), government purchases (total good/services purchased from firms by the government as well as the total goods/services produced by government agencies) and net exports (to total number of exports – imports purchased). After going through this week’s readings, I think that the second part of this discussion post is something to take note of. Even our text book discusses the problems with GDP, whether it be how it is measured or intangible issues with what should or should not be included. One thing that really caught my attention is understanding how accurate and relevant the GDP that is released by the commerce department really is. Calculating GDP takes time, the first number/figure is just an estimate that changes several times after they are revised. Sometimes it takes years of revisions from a particular calendar year or quarters estimate GDP to reflect what was really going on in our economy during that time period. Some people do more for themselves instead of buying good/services from others. If someone grows their own food and puts time towards doing so, it is not counted in GDP. In lower income countries the good/services produced may not be available on the open market for sale but to be used internally to take care of one another. Those “goods and services” aren’t counted in GDP either. Additionally, just because a nation has high GDP that doesn’t mean people are happy. That may suggest that people do not know how to take time off from work to relax or just cannot afford to do so. When you throw in the concept of per capita real GDP, those overall high numbers for the countries at the top of the chart can start looking much smaller when you take into account the population of a particular nation. I think I learned a lot this week about GDP. Hats off to the economists that are computing our GDP. Our material simplifies how it all works but it has to be very complex.