GDP as a Measure of National Welfare essays

GDP as a Measure of National Welfare essays GDP per capita is often used as an indicator of welfare in an economy. While this approach has advantages, there are also many criticisms on GDP as an indicator of standard of living or welfare. The major advantages to using GDP per capita as an indicator of standard of living are that it is measured frequently, widely and consistently. Another advantage is that it is used in all countries which allow crude comparisons of the standard of living in different countries. The major disadvantage of using GDP as an indicator of standard of living is that it is not, strictly speaking, a measure of standard of living or welfare. GDP is intended to be a measure of particular types of economic activity within a country. For instance, in an extreme example, a country which exported 100 per cent of its production would still have a high GDP, but a very poor standard of living. There are many negative points raised against GDP as a measure of welfare of a country. Firstly, GDP attempts to remove value judgments on spending. All transactions are neutral; neither good nor bad. The costs of a major natural or ecological disaster cause an increase in GDP. So do the costs involved in a car accident or aggravated burglary health bills; cost of replacing property; police work; counseling. Both of these examples are obviously bad for our well-being, but GDP counts the results of them as positives. GDP also counts the shorter life span of products as a positive, since more would be sold. Secondly, many items are left out of the accounting that makes up GDP, mostly because they are hard to put values on. But leaving out domestic work, voluntary work, the underground economy, etc means that they are ignored in much government policy. Resource depletion and environmental damage also do not appear within GDP except with the costs of clean-ups. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the broadest quantitative measure of a nation's total economic activity...

Pterodactylus Facts and Figures

Pterodactylus Facts and Figures Name: Pterodactylus (Greek for wing finger); pronounced TEH-roe-DACK-till-us; sometimes called pterodactyl Habitat: Shores of Europe and South Africa Historical Period: Late Jurassic (150-144 million years ago) Size and Weight: Wingspan of three feet and two to 10 pounds Diet: Insects, meat and fish Distinguishing Characteristics: Long beak and neck; short tail; wings of skin attached to three-fingered hands About Pterodactylus Pterodactylus is a case study in how confusing it can be to classify 150-million-year-old animals. The first specimen of this pterosaur was discovered way back in 1784, in Germanys Solnhofen fossil beds, decades before before naturalists had any conception of the theory of evolution (which wouldnt be scientifically formulated, by Charles Darwin, until about 70 years later) or, indeed, any grasp of the possibility that animals could go extinct. Fortunately, in retrospect, Pterodactylus was named by one of the first academics to grapple with these issues, the Frenchman Georges Cuvier. (See a gallery of Pterodactylus and Pteranodon pictures and 10 facts about pterodactyls.) Because it was discovered so early in the history of paleontology, Pterodactylus suffered the same fate as other before-their-time dinosaurs of the 19th century like Megalosaurus and Iguanodon: any fossil that remotely resembled the type specimen was assumed to belong to a separate Pterodactylus species or a genus that later wound up being synonymized with Pterodactylus, so at one point there were no less than two dozen named varieties! Paleontologists have since sorted out most of the confusion; the remaining two Pterodactylus species, P. antiquus and P. kochi, are pretty much beyond reproach, and other species have since been assigned to related genera like Germanodactylus, Aerodactylus, and Ctenochasma. Now that weve sorted all that out, exactly what kind of creature was Pterodactylus? This late Jurassic pterosaur was characterized by its relatively small size (a wingspan of only about three feet and a weight of ten pounds, max), its long, narrow beak, and its short tail, the classic body plan of a pterodactyloid, as opposed to a rhamphorhynchoid, pterosaur. (During the later Mesozoic Era, some pterodactyloid pterosaurs would grow to truly enormous sizes, as witness the small-plane-sized Quetzalcoatlus.)Â  Pterodactylus is often depicted as flying low over the coastlines of western Europe and northern Africa (much like a modern seagull) and plucking small fish out of the water, though it may also have subsisted on insects (or even the occasional small dinosaur) as well. On a related note, because it has been in the public eye for well over two centuries, Pterodactylus (in the abbreviated form pterodactyl) has become pretty much synonymous with flying reptile, and is often used to refer to the entirely different pterosaur Pteranodon. Also, for the record, Pterodactylus was only remotely related to the first prehistoric birds, which descended instead from the small, terrestrial, feathered dinosaurs of the later Mesozoic Era. (Confusingly, the type specimen of Pterodactylus was recovered from the same Solnhofen deposits as the contemporaneous Archaeopteryx; its important to bear in mind that the former was a pterosaur, while the latter was a theropod dinosaur, and thus occupied an entirely different branch of the evolutionary tree.)