Technology needs to be put in context. I saw people in Nepal with mobile phones that didn't have access to clean water.
Rather than GDP I'd measure the likelihood to die of disease, famine, war, etc. Technology is a tool. The same cognitive dissonance is seen when discussing evolution.
More importantly: Societies need to be put in context. It's pretty meaningless to compare a materialistic modern society benchmark to, say, that of Sparta (disallowing trade, life goals include dying in battle).
Joules Consumed / Head would be a harder-to-calculate but also much more interesting measure than GDP. It would also make it easier to talk about the uncertainty in the estimates, still capture food, transport and shelter to some degree.
I cannot recommend highly enough Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1994), or the revised edition released just this year, Energy and Civilization. It follows pretty much precisely this metric, which is also, incidentally, far easier to calculate than you'd expect. In fact, you can pretty much plot out human development levels, from hunter-gatherer, to agricultural, to empire, to early industrial, to modern industrial, based on per capita energy consumption and availability, ranging from a low of about 10 GJ/capita to a peak of over 350 GJ/capita in the US (in very rough numbers, I don't have sources in front of me at the moment).
try "without the hot air" by Prof Mackay. From
memory the estimate in his book was measured by 3,000 calories / person per day of output, and so that average brit consumes around 30 "slaves" worth of transport, heating and other energy services.
now imagine how many people in Romans era could have 30 slaves.
> Rather than GDP I'd measure the likelihood to die of disease, famine, war, etc. Technology is a tool.
GDP is a measure of the amount of stuff that a society produced that people in that society found valuable. Things that help avoid death are included, but often people have higher priorities; if they find something else more valuable to them, who are we to tell them they're wrong?
Technology needs to be put in context. I saw people in Nepal with mobile phones that didn't have access to clean water.
Rather than GDP I'd measure the likelihood to die of disease, famine, war, etc. Technology is a tool. The same cognitive dissonance is seen when discussing evolution.