Quote:
Originally Posted by Vedder
Is it also meaningless that Canada’s GDP per capita is declining?
It’s the most widely recognized proxy for the health of an economy. If it’s shrinking then so is the capacity of the state to fund programs, etc.
This thread continues to deliver a steady stream of utter nonsense, with a heavy dose of sanctimony.
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GDP per capita has a bunch of drawbacks though. It’s used a lot because it’s easy, but we quite often see this as a comparison with the US and those issues shine through. Things like inequality distort the figure. So you have massive companies in the US dragging everything higher, but you also have a significant gap between the rich and poor which gets papered over with GDP per capita. Economies that are resource rich also look better than others for a similar reason.
People pull this out for political reasons, and here we see it to try to suggest that Canada is crashing hard, and it’s the fault of the government. Well the GDP has grown, albeit slower than the population. Could things be better? Absolutely, and I don’t deny that. But it’s not the doom and gloom that people are trying push. And using Alberta and Saskatchewan to say “look those conservatives in power are amazing because GDP per capita is so good!” is just misleading.