Saturday, July 13, 2013
Looks about right
Some Australian "scientists" have run up an alternate measure of national strength that works better than GDP. They used a bunch of Gaian ratshit (Cost of water pollution, Cost of air pollution, Cost of noise pollution, Loss of wetlands, Loss of farmland, Loss of forest area and damage from logging roads, Depletion of nonrenewable energy resources, Carbon dioxide emissions damage, Cost of ozone depletion) along with some highly valid measures. Despite the seeming overbalance toward Gaia, the result comes out about right. National happiness peaked in the mid-1970s.
Significantly, their graph for US agrees closely with graphs of real per capita income for productive people, or graphs of income inequality. Mid-70s was the peak of real income for productive people and the trough of income inequality. After 1978 the financiers started to take over, snatching more and more and more and more and more trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions into their own Satanic destructive pockets.
I suspect the researchers must have put a low weight on most of the Gaian shit. In fact real pollution also peaked around 1970, and has gone down steadily since then. If real pollution counted heavily in the mix, 1975 should have been a low point of 'goodness' instead of a high point.
¶ 4:40 AM 
