knb comments on The Importance of Goodhart's Law - Less Wrong

75 Post author: blogospheroid 13 March 2010 08:19AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (112)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: knb 13 March 2010 08:22:06PM *  10 points [-]

The Soviet Union's GDP was approximately half military spending. In other words, at least half of Soviet GDP was an almost complete dead-weight loss to the citizens. GDP is just an aggregation of total spending, if money is spent on pure dross, it still shows up as an improvement in GDP.