Monday, October 8, 2007

GDP and Ideality

Per capita Gross Domestic Product, a commonly used indicator of a country’s production in monetary units, seems to track logarithmically with both happiness and life expectancy (especially the latter), which represent an individual’s quality of life and longevity, respectively. If we were to multiply (normalized) happiness by life expectancy, the result would be a measure of conformance to an ideal world, and would likely also vary logarithmically with per capita GDP.

These facts suggest that the difference between the world economy and an “ideal” economy may be as simple as the difference between a line and a logarithmic curve, where one is a crude approximation of the other.

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