Editing Openai/6931e385-c8b8-800f-922f-cf2202485000 (section)

=== User: here is a description of a proposed economic metric. ===
here is a description of a proposed economic metric. For each 3 year interval from 1970 to now can you look up the prices mentioned and calucualte the metric. plot your findings on a graph.

Measuring changes in well being: the Basic Living Index

Is there any way we can measure well-being numerically?

Creating some sort of “national happiness number” is an impossible task. It will contain all the problems of measuring GDP and then some. It will bury the underlying data and create endless arguments that it is not taking into account x, y, or z.

The best way to measure changes in well being over time is to do the following:

Create an index where you have precisely defined set of goods in the basket that maintain their definition over the time period that you are measuring. For instance, the basket might include:

    100 dozen eggs
    200 pounds of ground beef
    300 pounds of flour
    350 gallons of gasoline
    enough heating gas for a year
    the cheapest car that can legally drive on the highway, cost amortized over its lifetime
    a home of 1,500 square feet, in median-income metro area, 30 minutes commute from downtown

The goods should be weighted by the actual, typical consumption over the course of the year. Then the total cost of buying one year’s worth of the good should be divided by the median wage of a 30 year old male worker. The basic living index now has a precisely defined definition that is true across the entire time period: “The number of hours you must work to meet your basic needs of food, shelter, clothing, heat, and healthcare.”