Aretae

The virtue of excellence

Saturday, January 7, 2012

QoTD

Will Wilkinson explains why Growth is the god-metric:
As far as we know, growth is instrumental to health, happiness, longevity, the development of basic and not-so-basic human capacities, and peace. As far as we know, nothing does as much good.
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3 comments:

Mel said...

I haven't read it yet, but I understand that The Spirit Level complicates that a little. You familiar?

January 9, 2012 at 5:25 PM
Aretae said...

Mel,

1. I am familiar a little with The Spirit Level's argument.

Tino Sanandaji did a pretty aggressive series of posts taking on the data in the book a while back.
Here's the first one: http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/02/spirit-level-is-junk-science.html


2. I've been looking at the data for a while. What Will Wilkinson says here is true. Growth wins over every other factor known, in almost every contest.

3. Regardless all that, the book was available for $4 as a kindle book, so I got it...and will report back.

January 9, 2012 at 10:44 PM
Mel said...

Cool. I am surrounded by liberals who are on the equality thing right now and I am looking for reasonable contrarian opinions, cause I feel like I am getting no arguments.

January 10, 2012 at 4:28 AM

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