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This is an extremely good point that I think a lot of people fail to respect or notice.
That said, if you're looking for a statistical metric that's harder to game, I find that energy/electricity usage per capita is a really good indicator.
Out of curiosity, did proof-of-work crypto show up on such metrics?
I would hope that its electric waste would be dwarfed by industrial processes like aluminum smelting, but I don’t really have an intuition for it.
The chart I'm using is https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab=chart&facet=entity&country=~USA - it has Y-Combinator and Oxford at the bottom so I'm assuming this data hasn't just been pulled entirely out of someone's ass and is actually from the EIA.
But to answer your question - no. When you look at the chart the US economy suffered a big hit in 2007 and has not actually gotten back to that point. Something happened in 2020 that made energy usage per person go down a lot (gee, I wonder what that could be? cough cough) but the overall trend is that the US economy never actually recovered from the 2007 GFC in any real way - which is consistent with the hypothesis that the "recovery" was both unevenly distributed and in some part consisted of statistical chicanery.
Interesting--thanks!
I'm not sure what to think about the metric. It makes sense that more energy spent = more industrial output = more material prosperity. Some parts track pretty well: sustained growth through the 90s. Dips after the OPEC crisis, dot-com bubble, Recession, and COVID.
But...did the end of the 70s really collapse harder than all of those combined? By this chart, American quality of life peaked during either the OPEC crisis or the Carter years. I'm not sure I know anyone who voted in that election and feels the same way.
Conversely, where's the Nixon Shock? "Stagflation" dates back to 1970, which according to this plot, is barely a delay in skyrocketing prosperity.
This metric is much harder to game, but I don't find it very easy to interpret.
The 70s was when the US hit peak domestic conventional oil production. Petroleum is the lifeblood of modern industrial economies, and when you can no longer produce enough of it domestically you're forced to go elsewhere. Throw in the oil embargo of the 1970s and you've got a recipe for a truly brutal economic contraction. While the Petrodollar system implemented afterwards did actually provide a lot more cheap energy, the costs associated with it are substantially higher(the US enforces the petrodollar militarily, and last I checked the US military was very expensive), and as energy is the basis for effectively all economic activity, increases in the price of energy ripple through the entirety of society.
While you're totally right that it doesn't track quality of life perfectly, part of that is due to the distribution of the pain - and part of it is thanks to the massive outsourcing project that the US embarked on. The US used substantially less energy per person because a lot of consumer goods were being manufactured in a variety of developing world sweatshops with brutal labour practices and no pesky environmental protection regulations, as opposed to local manufacture. If you live in the privileged classes of the USA (to borrow someone else's classification, if you earn a salary rather than a wage), you would have seen your quality of life actually improve - products made in China are much cheaper than ones made in the USA after all. Of course, if you're someone who lives in small-town, flyover America you didn't see any recovery from the 1970s. Instead, you saw the factories which gave your town stable employment get shipped off to China and replaced with malign neglect of local infrastructure and fentanyl addictions - I'd argue that those parts of the country most definitely did not recover from the 1970s depression in any real way.
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