Health and Wealth

We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market perhaps we should have dashboards of:

- life expectancy (health)
- net worth (wealth)

A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals & society as a whole.

Reasoning:

- Most people can't tell you how to compute GDP
- But they can tell you what net worth and life expectancy are
- So they know what it means for those numbers to go up
- And they know that making them go up is valuable

If these numbers went up for you, life improved.
By adding health, we add Andy Grove's paired metric. We don't just focus on economics alone, because you can optimize & distort financial metrics at the expense of health.

For example, it's been hypothesized that the rise in diabetes is due in part to sugar subsidies.
Btw, some people have mentioned HDI. This is actually a bad metric because it's hard to explain and reason about, and it's not a simple ratio-scale variable.

You can understand 72.3 years of life expectancy. You can't understand 0.614 HDI. https://t.co/jylH7qm3Ev

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.