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Zack Polanski wants to use wellbeing targets instead of GDP to measure growth. Is he right?
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this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2026
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I suspect that what the person you replied to, meant with "meaningfully improve the lives of US citizens" was that the amount Apple contributes to the GDP of the USA (odd, since much of the goods aren't domestically produced) is disproportionately high compared to its impact on quality of life of people in the US as a whole.
While I'm sure most Apple employees are paid slightly above the median wage, I don't know the median salary for an Apply employee. I also, like you, am not utilitarian enough to think that a handful of people living large in opulence makes up for the way inequality is harming living standards and the economy as whole (not to mention the impact of it all on the planet). Additionally, Apple and large companies don't buy from, or in most cases sell to individuals. They buy and sell mostly to other companies and only at the end do smaller branches or franchises sell to actual people. Mostly you have numbers and goods moving between old fashioned AIs running on human-processing power, but not actual people.
That's imperialism.
It's possible to establish colonies without having a motherland controlling them. Consider the original settlement of Polynesia, or the establishment of new cities by the Sea Peoples. And even when there's a motherland, it's possible that colonies will still compete with each other: for example, the Moorish kingdoms in Spain, which had roots in different ethnicities and tribes in Morocco and fought with each other like crabs in a bucket, which was why the relatively backwards Catholic Monarchs were able to eventually drive them out.
It's also possible to have empires without colonization-- subverting local rulers, then pulling their strings. Much US imperialism has been like that: there's interference in Central and South America, but the US didn't replace the local elites with Yanks. They just bought them off and helped them send their kids to Harvard and Yale.
We always used colonisation for European imperialism in my history classes, but I can see how the word doesn't fully jive with expected meaning.
And we tend to use "neo-colonial" at least in my experience of British education for the US imperialism, too.
Crossed wires, eh?
They seemed a bit confused about the terms they were using, but your glosses don't help, I'm afraid. 'Meaningfully improve' isn't qualified but neither is your 'disproportionately high': 'disproportionate' according to whom and by what metric? A quick search suggests something like 150 million people in the US own an iPhone. It's only by engaging in complex foreign trade that Apple can make and sell their products at the price points they currently use; the foreign aspect of the trade direct impacts every one of those 150 million people by making their phones cheaper. They presumably feel their lives are improved by it. And that's just the iPhone, not counting Apple's various other products, nor the businesses that depend on those products (and the people that depend on the businesses).
So, big tech arguably has a disproportionately large economic impact due to those dependencies. To be clear, I'm not saying this is certainly the case; my point is that the trade companies like Apple engage in is important, it does benefits US citizens in all kinds of ways (direct and indirect) and it makes perfect sense to use GDP as a rough measure of those impacts alongside other metrics.
Yes, it did. It began with people trading across increasing distances, then trying to secure those trade routes (by conquering people along the way), then trying to secure the production itself at source (by conquering the regions where the products were found, grown or made). The Romans conquered the Mediterranean because it was their most important trade route; Columbus was trying to open up new trade routes.
Maybe I'm biased, but I find it hard to believe that those 150 million (nearly half the population of the US?) would see a notable drop in the quality of their lives if their iPhones were Samsung, or Huawai, or any other non-domestic company's.
You're right in that "meaningfully improve" and "disproportionate" aren't precise or scientific terms, either.
And re: colonialism, I think more people have managed international trade without going coloniser than did, so it can't be seen as the sole origin. Needs more to germinate.
On the main issue, I'd say while GDP is far from perfect, it's better to have the measure than not. Even if it works best as part of a range of measures and not over relied upon as it tends to be in popular understandings at the moment, in my view anyhow.
Temper it with more inequality stats, and also median wages vs. cost of living.
Yeah, it's a continuum. Consider the Vikings: they'd do raiding, they'd set up trading posts, they'd do elite replacement, and sometimes they'd move in with their families, do farming and set up businesses.
It's also the case that internal power dynamics within the elites would sometimes shift non-coercive trade to something more coercive, a small faction would benefit hugely, but on a wider scale, it'd be a net loss for the nation doing it. Maintaining a long-term military occupation with a lengthy logistic chain isn't cheap, and unanticipated changes in circumstances can drive the cost for higher. That's one of the causes of the collapse of empires.
Yup, competing factions in power on both sides of the relationship could knock things about.
Vikings were amazing, we (or at least I) still often underestimate or forget their reach. The idea of Vikings in the Middle East and North Africa trading and marrying, and generally being part of the flow of goods, people, and ideas always seems wild.
Anyhow, it's been lovely set of exchanges and I've learnt things and: thanks.