Click here to read the article from Economist.
Some inportant notes:
America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off?
How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job.
In recent years economists have therefore been looking at other measures of well-being—even “happiness”, a notion that it once seemed absurd to quantify.
It takes no account of the depreciation of capital goods, and so overstates the value of production.
In 2005, the commission found, France’s real GDP per person was 73% of America’s. But once government services, household production and leisure are added in, the gap narrows: French households had 87% of the adjusted income of their American counterparts.
