4. Give two reasons why GDP is often not seen as the best measure of living standards.

Different factors account to it.

Explanation:

Because many factors that contribute to people's happiness are not bought and sold, GDP is a limited tool for measuring standard of living. To understand it's limitations better, let's take a look at several factors that are not accounted for in GDP.

GDP does not account for leisure time. The US GDP per capita is larger than the GDP per capita of Germany, but does this prove that the standard of living in the United States is higher? Not necessarily since it is also true that the average US worker works several hundred hours more per year more than the average German worker. The calculation of GDP does not take German workers extra weeks of vacation into account.

GDP includes what is spent on environmental protection, healthcare, and education, but it does not include actual levels of environmental cleanliness, health, and learning. GDP includes the cost of buying pollution-control equipment, but it does not address whether the air and water are actually cleaner or dirtier. GDP includes spending on medical care, but it does not address whether life expectancy or infant mortality have risen or fallen. Similarly, GDP counts spending on education, but it does not address directly how much of the population can read, write, or do basic mathematics.