There’s been noise and worry about deflation lately. The fear deflation sparks has always seemed strange to me, with the industry I know best — electronics — being both very energetic and highly deflationary. I’m familiar with the theory of how a deflationary spiral saps economic growth, with Japan’s economy being the prime example.

But looking closer at Japan’s economy: It was “stagnant”, by which economists mean its production was steady, and that steady production was actually quite high. If it weren’t economics, meeting an objective well and steadily would be considered very good, but the norm for economics is growth, so steady first-world level production is considered a failure. (Coming out of a deep recession, a steady production level doesn’t sound that bad after all.)

How much production do we want? Is this even the right question? I’m remembering Dijkstra’s complaint that programmers were proud of how large a program they had written, when instead they should have been ashamed at needing so much code to accomplish their goal. Is GDP as faulty a metric as LOC? Instead of being proud that we produce $47,000 while Japan only manages $33,000, should we instead be looking at why it takes us $47,000 to have a full and fulfilling life while Japan only needs $33,000? Are we really full and fulfilled with our lives, and getting a better life out of that $47,000 than Japan is out of its $33,000? Is increasing that number to $50,000 the best way to improve our lives? Or is there a better measurement that we should be looking at? Certainly more GDP helps immensely, it gives us more resources to spend on our goals, but I worry that treating GDP itself as the goal, we foolishly sacrifice “life value” for GDP, instead of spending our GDP to improve our lives.