Catherine Dustrude • Chapter 9 • Question 6

Yes! Another reference to Medicine! The specific passage/bunch of pages that stuck out to me were the 'vital signs' of the economy that policymakers would most likely ask about first. This metaphor, calling them vital signs, puts the economic indicators into perspective for me personally, as the 4 vital signs team up to declare a patient healthy or sick, these main or more prominent indicators would say the same about the economy. Besides GDP, Unemployment, Poverty, Income Inequality, Government size, Budget deficit/surplus, and Total National Happiness work together to explain and, if I may, diagnose the Economy as the multifaceted thing that it truly is. That last catagory, National Happiness, makes me laugh, because if there were a workable way to gauge this, it would absolutely be relevant to our Economy's diagnosis. It'd be like asking the patient to rate his or her own pain, if we didn't, how would we know what to fix, how to fix it, or even where to look?

This is a small tangent, but along the lines of achieving true happiness, and VERY applicable to any being,especially high schoolers...  I wanted to quote page 199, which referrences The Economist and says, "in general, the economic arbiters of taste recommend 'experiences' over commodities, pastimes over knick-knacks, doing over having." So true.