Comment by mantas
1 year ago
On the other hand, if there was a big push for more sleep, some industries would take a nose dive. Live entertainment, bars, social media, gambling etc. Wonder if at the end GDP would be up or down. But I guess it’d be a win for the society as a whole.
And that's one of the reasons GDP is a pretty junky measure.
Yes. IMO modern western problems can’t be solved without ditching GDP. Pretty much any issue from pollution to health to mental health can be solved but it will hurt GDP.
GDP is flawed measure - unfortunately we lack a better one.
The aim is to maximise utility, but we cannot quantify utility, and cannot tell when it increases at the level higher than an individual. So we use GDP and then .... Goodhart's law.
Musing for a minute, I wonder if there's a way to create an anti-GDP and subtract them?
Something like GDP - (Sickness, Mental Health Therapy, Fixing broken windows and flat tires... et. al.)
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Those gdp measures are just transfers of money. They don’t add to net productivity.
More productive workers produce more and generate more wealth, the real thing you want to measure with gdp.
I’m sure GDP is a useful metric for all kinds of economic analysis. But it’s also an “easy target” in such a way where I feel it can be a huge distraction. You could appeal to man’s worse nature in all sorts of ways that reflect well in GDP.
You can still sleep even if you take part in the night entertainment, you'll just have to sleep during the day instead of the night.
Some people can manage to recuperate the night sleep loss during the day, some, like me, can't and it sucks.
But you have to find time for sleeping during the day. It may be not an issue for the performers and people making money in those industries. But audience will shrink a lot.
On the weekends, unless you have to go to work then, you can find time for sleep during the day, no?
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Young people can do much better when it comes to less sleep or sleep cycle disruption. When I was a teenager I worked all nighters on the weekend and never had a problem with sleep.
I worked all nighters as a teenager and then slept at school. I didn’t have trouble in sleeping either, I happily did that during the day at school. But going with very sleep for teenagers is not that good for development. And I guess school is important for all but edge cases. If I hadn’t ended up as self-thought programmer, I may have had issues with school performance.