Fair question. I just did the lazy move of looking up world GDP figures. In fact I don’t think that my observers would measure GDP the same way we do. But it would be a measurement of some kind of fundamental sense of “capacity for output (of various important types)”. And I’m not sure whether that has been growing faster or slower than real GDP, so the GDP figures seem a not-terrible proxy.
Important seems to be doing most of the work here. Since even within any given society there is no broad agreement as to what falls into this category.
It’s better to use a more agreed upon measure such as total energy production / consumption such as what the Kardashev scale uses.
Fair question. I just did the lazy move of looking up world GDP figures. In fact I don’t think that my observers would measure GDP the same way we do. But it would be a measurement of some kind of fundamental sense of “capacity for output (of various important types)”. And I’m not sure whether that has been growing faster or slower than real GDP, so the GDP figures seem a not-terrible proxy.
Important seems to be doing most of the work here. Since even within any given society there is no broad agreement as to what falls into this category.
It’s better to use a more agreed upon measure such as total energy production / consumption such as what the Kardashev scale uses.