On Celery

 A few years back now, I wrote a post 'On Housing' where I declared my hypothesis (probably actually just a notion, lacking the rigor of a testable hypothesis) that the average Australian knew nothing about housing. This is a post where I explore the notion that the average Australian knows nothing about celery.

This is hyperbolic of course, I'm not referring to the subsets of knowledge like: it's a vegetable, country of origin, calories per 100g, soluble vs insoluble fibre ratio, how to make ants-on-a-log. etc. 

I'm talking mainly about how celery functions in our economy. That is where I suspect the average person knows almost nothing, by way of saying the average person has at best a functional knowledge of celery in the economy (money can be exchanged for goods and services) and perhaps an intuitive understanding at best. 

I have somewhat arbitrarily picked celery to make a point about the implicit assumptions of our economic paradigm, and it's all to the point I hope to affect that a bad system can persist (or even a reasonably good system can persist in not improving) due to the immense complexity standing in the way of reform. I hope what I say here can be abstracted out into asking the deeper question of 'what the fuck is it all for?' and it could be regarded as a preamble or supplementary material for a forthcoming post of mine 'It's Not The Economy...stupid'

So let's get into celery.

The cheapest way to get celery I presume is to plant some seeds in soil. Now forgive my ignorance but I'm not much of a gardener, certainly have never cultivated a vegie patch or anything, but packets of seeds for varieties of celery are around $1.25 for 45-300 seeds. Because I'm so ignorant, I am assuming that a pack of 200 seeds would yield somewhat less than 200 celery plants (stalk, root and all) as some seeds will fail to germinate, competition for space between sprouts etc. Something like 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 maybe.

A quick google search says that seeding-harvest is between 130-140 days. I would guess someone with access to soil would have limited space to grow celery, maybe a max of 6 stalks and if they are like me probably consume less than a whole stalk of celery (per person) a year.

So 200 seeds might last a single person with access to a community garden, or a backyard with a veggie patch or planter box somewhere between 20 and 200 years for $1.25 in today's money, and given the forecast that interest rates and inflation are going to stay low or close to 0, today's money is about as good as tomorrows money - meaning there's not much opportunity cost between spending $1.25 today and earning interest on it in a savings account. This is a digression, but I suspect inflation is actually closer to negative (particularly in regards to food) meaning that the primary incentive for saving is that a dollar will buy more stuff in the future, rather than compounding interest... compounding deflation?

Opportunity cost for growing celery is enormously complicated, so I'll just allude to it. A quick google of the median price of a square meter of land in Melbourne has at Nov. 14th 2019, $1,892 per square meter. Celery is a pretty big plant so the land used to grow it carries an opportunity cost of $1,892. That cost is paid by someone, nominally the landlord, I don't know about a community garden. Often a landlord in Melbourne has a negatively geared property, meaning they pay more in their mortgage than they can obtain through rental income, which in Australia is considered an investment strategy so wise and valuable that the difference (losses) can be deducted from the landlord's taxable income exempting them partially or possibly totally from contributing to the upkeep of healthcare, education, law enforcement, the judicial system, infrastructure, public utilities, pensions, unemployment benefits, the NDIS, foreign aid, the arts etc.

Owner occupiers it's all imputed, in that effectively the landlord is the tenant and they are paying rent to themselves to contribute towards paying off the mortgage, but there's no transaction so it doesn't show up, meaning they are neither negatively geared (getting tax deductions under current law) or positively geared (having to report taxable income) because for owner occupiers it needs to be regarded as a saving on the rent they would be paying elsewhere.

Just picking an example suburb Coburg in North Melbourne has a median buying price for a 3 bedroom home of $1.03 million, which translates according to the government moneysmart website to $1,086 per week in Mortgage repayments, compared to the Median rent in the suburb for a 3 bedroom home of $560 per week. So setting aside capital gains from property speculation which is the main incentive for property 'investment' a person would save $526 per week to rent a whole 3 bedroom house in Coburg rather than buy and occupy that same house, for the period of 25 years until the mortgage is paid off. So with owner occupiers, the opportunity cost of growing celery on a square meter of land is born by them, whereas a landlord with sufficient other taxable income to transfer the losses to the community via negative gearing tax exemptions, the opportunity cost is born by the community.

All of which is to say, there are very complicated things going on behind the scenes of your vege patch, and as of Nov. 2019 the landlord/community is paying an opportunity cost of $1,869 to grow celery, that price per square meter is based an assumption of the best value use of that land. This is probably going to be subdividing the property to build apartments, which stimulates construction, where all the expenditure on the apartment construction generates income and revenue via wages, purchases, legal fees, compliance costs etc.

In brief, your landlord could sell that land to a developer instead of letting you grow celery and it would probably be to their financial benefit to do so, to the tune of $1,869.

Bringing us in to the domain of most urban people's experience of celery - grow it on much cheaper land, namely a farm or greenhouse and ship it in. 

From the perspective of Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product (GNP/GDP) when you buy a packet of celery seeds for $1.25 and use it to fulfill your celery demands for 20 years that shows up as GNP once when you purchase the seeds for $1.25 plus shipping. It also deprives the economy of the GNP of using that land for construction of high-end apartments and everything that comes with it - GST on everything, Stamp Duty, increased land tax where the basis of determining rates is Capital Improved Value (a lot with an apartment complex on it pays more in land tax than the same lot with the apartment complex demolished) banking services, banking profits etc.

Where, if you buy celery from the supermarket at a rate of 1 stalk per year for 20 years that shows up in GDP growth 20 times for the going rate as of writing of $3.50 per stalk.

So here is the crux, a major point about the economic project we are all engaged in, a large part of why we vote in and out our leaders. A way to achieve significant GDP growth is to get people to stop growing their own celery, and buy it from a supermarket instead.

Buying celery from a supermarket boosts the construction industry, government revenues etc. by generating more transactions and higher value transactions. Arguably it is your patriotic duty and responsibility to your fellow man to not grow your own vegetables and have somebody else grow it for you. Next time your friend tells you excitedly about their new vegie patch, you should spit in their fucken face for what they are doing to GDP.

But, it's not as simple as that. Celery is my grocery nemesis. I use celery mostly in what the Italians call 'sofrito' the French call 'Mirepoix' but the only French dish I cook is French style Lasagna with Béchamel sauce...that and steak, but I don't use celery in steak.

Celery is such a pain in the arse for me to buy for cooking because my options are 'way more than necessary' or 'more than necessary' for my purposes 1 to 2 stalks, roughly the equal volume of a decent carrot is all I actually need in a dish I cook at most once a week, and currently less than once every two months.

So lets start with buying a whole stalk. the same applies for growing your own celery which will come at as a stalk, possibly with a celeriac bulb attached as the root of the plant. I'm going to guess that a whole stalk of celery weighs something like 600g, of which I need about 60g. So 1/10th of $1.25/50 seeds in the case of growing my own in the backyard, or 1/10th of $3.50 as the going price from a retailer. 

This is tremendously good for GDP, because I only need 35c of goods (or a conservative 0.0025c if I grow my own - excluding opportunity cost to the landlord) but I've generated $3.50 for the economy. Bringing us into spoilage.

Waste is fantastic for GDP, because it measures consumption, so if you consume more the economy grows. Furthermore, food waste is a big contributor to Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which currently is what Economists would call an 'externality' meaning someone else has to pick up the bill of climate change (communities effected by climate change, future generations etc.) so economically speaking in the duristiction of Australia, my buying a whole celery stalk, using one tenth of it and throwing the rest out to rot is simply fantastic.

However, on the subject of how I waste it, there's different options still - if I'm to compost it in my back yard then I am circumventing the whole waste management sector of the economy, I am taking away from the demand for things like landfill, collection, etc. the less waste I generate the more I hurt the economy, even from the perspective of paying council rates anyway so I may as well chuck my celery leftovers in the bin and not the garden, over time my reduced demand for waste services is going to effect the rates at which the waste management industry expands. Less land for landfill, less collection runs, less staff employed, slower increases in council rates, wage rises etc.

It's incredibly selfish of me and to the detriment of GDP and subsequently the happiness of all, to simply compost my waste.

Likewise, if I were instead to chop up the stalk into pieces and use what I need in the immediate recipe and then put the rest in a plastic container to preserve it, chuck that in the fridge, I am hurting the economy. It is much better for GDP if I were to buy 10x the amount of celery I desire each and every time I want to put 60g of celery in my pasta sauce, then throw it in the bin.

Now, let's look at the impact of household size on GDP, before circling back to celery waste. If 4 people live in separate disparate apartments, they are more likely to buy a celery stalk each, generate more waste. If they lived together though, a person could buy celery and in an incredibly anti-social move (from the perspective of GDP) let their housemates use the celery they don't need, fulfilling 4 people's demand for celery with only one transaction.

Let's make it worse (for GDP) and imagine someone in a sharehouse with a backyard has grown a stalk of celery, where they use the leaves and base (normally offcuts thrown away) to make a soup or stock, they divide up the stalks in pieces between them feeding more people with more meals, and refrigerate or freeze the rest.

I can hear you saying, wow, it's all so simple and straight forward. But you may recall earlier that I mentioned two options 'way too much' and 'too much'. Buying a celery stalk is way too much for my needs, and I'm one of these selfish horrible people that resents my patriotic duty to pay $3.50 for something that I only need 35c worth of. Fortunately, I can buy 300g of pre-cut, packaged stalks from the same supermarket for only $4.50. 

Now it might seem strange to you, on an intuitive level, that even excluding the parts of the celery stalk we are supposed to waste like the base and the leaves, that it is more expensive to buy less, almost half the amount of the product.

We could look at it as a kind of philosophical tax on shortchanging GDP. Most likely we think of this as economies of scale, though usually in economies of scale things get cheaper the more we consume of it. For example if a candy bar is $2 or 2 for $3. This is not (and a lot of people miss this because statistical intuitions are generally bad) the equivalent 25% off, while it may seem the same in both cases each bar is $1.50, with the bulk buy special you have to buy 2 candy bars to get the savings where a straight discount means you save money just purchasing one. It's hard to put into prose, but it's the difference between 1 candy bar for $1.50 and 2 candy bars for $2 and $1 respectively.

That's economy of scales in the usual practice. I hear you 'tohm, tohm, everything up to this point was so clear and coherent and easy to follow, but we were talking about celery and now you are talking about candy bars? How do you expect me to follow when you jump around like this!'

It's all to say, that usually economies of scale is 1 for $2 or 2 for $3, not 1 for $2 or 2 for $1. Where the buyer is effectively paying you to sell less. Now there are situations in the economy where one may actually pay for less of something or to avoid a service. I recall being stuck behind a pedestrian on Swanston st who was offering to freestyle rap for a gold coin donation, and fighting down the temptation to say 'you got your business model all wrong homie, you need to ask for a gold coin donation to not freestyle rap.' but I in turn didn't want to get my face punched in. Skip hop is terrible.

But celery is a good not a bad. Why pay a premium for less? From my perspective, I'd rather pay more and waste less. Now I'm sure that no matter how much celery you buy, you are paying as a consumer for waste. Some accountant will have done the sums to figure out how to make the required profit on celery if they only sell x amount of a total n celery purchased, and a bunch of celery winds up in the skip out the back. So the waste gets built into the price of the celery that does get purchased, and if there's a sudden celery craze (say because Kim Kardashian declares it her favorite snack, or Donald Trump says he's hearing from many smart people that it cures Covid) then the supermarket just makes inordinate profits if their wasted celery stock is reduced.

But they are making profits in the normal times when half the celery they purchase doesn't get sold on to end consumers. The point is, I know in my heart of hearts that when I purchase a 300g pack of celery for $4.50 over a whole stalk for $3.50 though I am reducing my household celery waste, part of the premium I'm paying is for a Coles employee to throw the celery stalk I didn't purchase into the supermarket dumpster. You're welcome freegans.

But the price premium is probably more explained by value-added. Or convenience. You may have noticed the same pricing behavior with Coca-Cola where 600ml from 7-Eleven costs substantially more than 1.25l from the Supermarket. The price in part is consistent with the great economic project, not only am I aiding GDP by spending $4.50 instead of $3.50 (and even better for society than growing my own celery than purchasing my own stalk) I'm paying for the low density polymer that wraps the top of the also petrolium based tray, or the low density polymer sealed plastic bag aka the packaging. That's a whole other industry, an extra shipping stop, extra logistics, extra wages fueling extra income. I'm paying more truck drivers and more factory workers, enabling them too to consume more celery and produce more waste.

And the fact that I have spared myself something like 5-10 minutes of knife work, by having the stalk pre-cut into pieces for me is another crucial point about GDP. A major point. Doing things for yourself is bad for GDP. With one important caveat, that I will flag now but come to at check out (hint hint).

Even better than a punnet of celery sticks wrapped in plastic is a plastic cup of diced celery. Why they might even be able to charge me $5.50 for 150g of diced celery, over $4.50 for 300g of sticks of celery.

I know in some places, specifically a supermarket Chef John of Foodwishes went to in San Francisco USA he could purchase a sealed cup of diced celery, onion and carrot. Now that is convenience, and the fundamental underpinning of why GDP is used as a proxy for consumption and a proxy for wellbeing. The richer we get, the less tears we have to shed over onions. We can pay someone else to chop our onions for us, and isn't that what happiness is all about?

Let's go further, because I am being incredibly anti-social by walking to the shops and buying the goods. I am effectively paying myself to be a grocery delivery boy. It is so much better for the economy if somebody gets paid a wage to deliver the groceries to me. If you care about the economy, a better way to volunteer would be to stand on the footpath of supermarkets with billy-clubs and tell anyone who tries to walk into the store to go home and order online.

Walking is the worst (from GDP perspective) driving is better, you are consuming petrol, also depreciation, insurance, registration etc. Even better than that is having someone else drive to the shops and back to get your groceries, because it's all of the above + paying them a wage...

I need to put a pin in that thought, because stupid, stupid, stupid. Why are you cooking for yourself at all? We are all much better off (from GDP perspective) if we get our meals from restaurants. Why am I making bolognese? Where do I get the FUCKING nerve, to not buy an instant Bolognese or Lasagna packed meal for $4.00 for 300g. I mean the price says it all, I could spend $4.50 to buy 300g of celery, $7 for 500g of mince, 50c for a carrot, same for an onion, $1 for a garlic bulb, $3 for tomato paste, $1 for tinned tomatoes, $2 for a pack of spaghetti... when I could buy a frozen meal and cook it in my microwave for $4.

Of course, with all the separate ingredients I could feed four people or myself 4 portions, so it's like $20 worth of ingredients vs $16 for 4 meals. It's still like the economy is trying to tell me, somehow incentivise me to not cook for myself.

And indeed, cooking for myself is wrong, what you may not expect is that buying pre-prepared meals from the supermarket is also wrong. We should be buying our meals from restaurants, that is our patriotic duty to bolster GDP.

Before I go to restaurants though, I just want to finish off the outstanding business of the extra people I employ by buying a packet of celery sticks over a whole stalk. You may have seen petitions to stop the 'excessive' packaging of vegetables at Coles and Woolworths (the two major players in Australia).

What this fails to consider is that without single use plastic, there would a) be less plastic consumed which hurts the plastics manufacturing industry, the oil industry etc. and b) without plastic in the ocean then we wouldn't have all the GDP consumption of the clean up process, extraction etc. which would also hurt GDP if there was no pollution to clean up. You might remember Gary Oldman's speech from 'The Fifth Element' where for some reason, he is portrayed as a bad guy.

A third c) that the petition fails to consider is... who get's the income. The income generated by consumption of celery and it's packaging. In recent years Supermarkets in Australia have implemented self-serve checkouts. Now I don't have access to the numbers on these, but here we see an apparent contradicition - if GDP doesn't want us doing things for ourselves, why are we checking out our own groceries?

Well because it saves on what were known sexistly and colloquially in Australia as 'checkout chicks' one employee paid say... $20 serving one customer every 5 minutes is less productive and profitable than one employee standing in the self-serve bay serving 8 customers every 5 minutes. Time is literally money, and one thing that gums up the works, is people dithering and dicking around trying to look up fresh produce codes. It could generate a situation where one person at a traditional checkout who has memorized most of the codes of fresh produce could be 10x faster than an octogenerian at a touch screen trying to figure out if shallots are under 'O' for Onions or 'S' for Shallots. But you can solve this by wrapping the vegetable in plastic and sticking a bar code on it. 

When I look up a piece of fruit and weigh it at a self serve check in, as opposed to scanning the bar-code on the tiny sticker, I'm slowing down the throughput of check out, customers behind me are waiting longer, increasing the temptation that they might opt for non-self serve and driving up the cost of labor on a per-hourly basis by having to roster on more staff to cope with peak traffic.

But surely that's good for GDP? Isn't that job creation? Well to throw a spanner in the works, our law is unambiguous. There are more than one kind of income, depending on the factor of production. Labor earns wages through salary, (not to be confused with celery, I'm sorry) Capital from dividends, and Land from rents. 

What we need to keep in mind is that income = consumption. Now two sources of income are in opposition, the staff at the supermarket and the investors who own the supermarket. The law is unambiguous, companies are to be run in the interests of the owners, not the staff. The Supermarket is legally obliged to maximize profits for it's shareholders or face serious penalties. If it can save $20 an hour by increasing staff productivity and reducing total staff then that saving can be passed onto either - the consumers through price cuts, that they may consume more and produce more waste, or to the shareholders, the owners who can use it to buy their own pre-packed celery.

So just as a recap, better than growing your own celery and using it all in multiple meals to feed multiple people that you prepared yourself without paying a wage to yourself, is to go to the shops and buy celery for multiple meals for multiple people without paying a wage to yourself, better than that is to buy celery from the shops for a single person for multiple meals < (less than/not as good as) single person, single meal < to get celery delivered for single meal, single person < to get packaged celery delivered for single person, single meal < get a pre-prepaired instant meal in package delivered for single person, single meal <  get a restaurant meal delivered for a single person for a single meal.

The curve ball I've thrown is that income going to Capital is legally enshrined as better than income going to workers. So incorporating this better than having a family restaurant with a Nonna in the kitchen consuming celery in the preperation of the Ragu that will feed me and 100 other bachelors when put in a plastic sealed container and handed to an uber driver or deliveroo cyclist to bring to my door is a meal I purchase at the same price prepared by a robot and delivered by a drone. Similarly, better if my celery is diced up by a machine in a plant than by a person on a line. This is the great project of the economy and the bright future of celery should all be working towards if we wish to be happy.

And to think, there are arseholes out there who grow their own wild celery in their backyard and use it from root to tip to feed themselves and family and neighbors multiple meals and are so fucking deluded that they feel good about that...

This is a disaster for the great project of Economic growth. Australia's bright and shining future where we are all happier thanks to increased consumption, requires us to live in expensive apartments by ourselves, throwing out as much celery as possible.

I hope by now, I've pushed your brain to saturation and now let me place the final straw on the camels back. (or stick of celery).

The reason we want to save on wages and maximize profits in return for Capital is because the asset owning class are more likely to invest their income not in mere consumption but in more assets that grow the economy.

I'm just guessing here as to what the big picture is, but say I save $10,000 a year in growing my own food and preparing it myself, that saving is non consumption of goods and services that become income for others. I'm unlikely to do anything but sit on that $10,000. Worse, and this is where I'm a truly horrible person, I might use my savings to buy a foreign currency and live for a year in Mexico because I can consume more there than I can here, betraying my nation by contributing to the GDP of Mexico and not the GDP of Australia.

I might tell myself that when I purchase Mexican Pesos with Australian dollars I put upward pressure on Mexican Pesos and downward pressure on AUDs, which helps the celery farmers of Australia compete with the celery farmers of Mexico in exporting celery... and after all if the celery is imported from overseas then that's better for GDP because the transport costs of exporting internationally are greater than those of domestic consumption...

But the shareholders of Coles, or the owners of Restaurants, what they would do with the $10,000 if I spent it on getting robot prepared and delivered meals shipped to my door is leverage it. They would go to the bank and say 'I have $100,010,000 in cash assets, how much money can I borrow?' and the banks would probably say 'A bajillion dollars at 0% interest! what are you going to do with it?'

And they would say 'I'm going to buy up the land currently used for vegie patches and community gardens and build studio apartment blocks that I will sell off the plan.'

To which the banker would say 'Wow, not only will that fuel consumption and borrowing in the construction industry, build consumer confidence, increase consumer debt, put upward pressure on housing and rents, increase the cleanup costs of climate change thus increasing GDP growth into the future... but it will increase celery consumption... it's beautiful. You sir, are a great Australian, yes I will lend you a bajillion dollars at 0% on the basis that you have so much money you could just spend without borrowing anything kind of like Apple and Google in the US who have vast stockpiles of cash they don't know how to invest but borrow money at 0% from the Federal Reserve and purchase their own stocks, because everyone will be happier if they would just waste more celery and have less job security.'

Now the camels back is broken, let's keep piling on some more celery.

The uber driver delivering your uber eats might be under the impression that they are making money, because they haven't factored in the depreciation costs of their vehicle, the insurance costs, rego, etc. they may be classed as a private contractor rather than an employee, even though as their own business they have no right to refuse business etc. and subsequently are not provisioning for tax, leave or superannuation. They may, depending on prices be going financially backwards, robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak. Earning $200 from their pet Elephant who eats $400 worth of celery. The driver delivering your meals may be paying you for the privilege of delivering your spag bol. Which again is still fantastic for consumption, it's just a complexity about how the income derived from celery might be distributed.

 Also on income, there's dicing your own celery versus having someone else, or a robot do it. On this point I myself must confess I am confused, and this is my point of confusion. Say I earn $20,000 per year, and someone else earns $200,000 a year. Their time, is at market rates worth 10x mine. So in a workplace, like a restaurant, I the kitchen hand should absolutely be dicing the celery whereas the accountant should absolutely be balancing the books or whatever. George Calombaris' restaurant business didn't go under because of celery dicing, it went under because of book-keeping. So that's why at work the accountants get the big bucks and the kitchen hands get the small potatoes (another vegetable I'm sorry, I swear that's the last one).

Where I'm confused is when you aren't at work. As I was taught, labor markets particularly participation is constrained by a tradeoff between income and leisure. So in theory this says that you might be able to work 38 hours a week for $20 an hour, because that leaves you enough leisure time to feel happy and balanced, but to work 50 hours a week, you would need to be paid far more than the additional $20 for each of the additional 12 hours. In theory it might require some kind of 'penalty' rate to work that 'overtime' like 1.5 times the hourly wage, because leisure time gets more valuable the less of it there is. 

To quote the great Yogi Berra 'In theory, theory works in practice, in practice, it doesn't.'

It is well documented for example that people in salaried positions work a lot of voluntary overtime. Also in my experience, people in casual positions are rarely able to be like 'I'm only going to work 16 hours this week, 17 hours next week, I'll do a 3 hour shift today and a 4 hour shift tomorrow, and maybe 2 hours the day after that.' Which is to say, people in Australia at least are rarely in a position to do this calculus of a tradeoff between an hours leisure or an hours work. People rarely can set their own hours, and thanks to things like having rent and mortgages and living expenses that exceed the social security payments they could receive if unemployed, workers tend to have really weak bargaining positions such that employers can say 'we need you to work a minimum of 20 hours a week or forget about it.' or 'you have to do at least one mandatory 8 hour weekend shift.' etc. 

So given that very few people have a choice between work and leisure by the hour so much as employment or unemployment, I'm genuinely unsure if an accountant's leisure time is worth more than a kitchen hands leisure time since the option may not exist to actually convert that into wages. Nobody will pay the accountant an extra $200 because his salary is his salary, to stay behind at work an extra hour, and order a meal delivered and the shift simply isn't available for the kitchen hand to work an extra hour for an extra $20.

Presumably one of the reasons for employing robots instead of people, is that robots don't want to play videogames and watch pornography instead of dicing celery. So the living expenses of our leisure time are probably priced into the wages market. 

At either rate, I don't know if a poor person needs to feel less bad about cutting up their own celery. The opportunity cost is smaller compared to a rich person. What is undeniable is that rich people consume more and thus are better for GDP. That's why we should give them more free stuff, tax exemptions, lower interest rates, subsidies, perks and benefits so they'll be even richer to consume even more and thus make us all happier because income = spending = consumption = happiness under the GDP paradigm.

So I've hit my limit, I'm exhausted. I'm sure I haven't fully explored the economic complexities of celery. The point is not to point out how little you know about celery, but probably how little you know about GDP, and why GDP growth is good, and why we should get angry that the economy is hurting, or vote out politicians. 

I could have written a much simpler post about how it's great if a bushfire destroys your house and all the memories contained, because it's better for GDP to build two houses than one. Curiously though, our regulators don't encourage us to build the most expensive, least durable, most flamable houses to improve our wellbeing via greater consumption of housing.

Almost like, GDP growth is, if not an outright terrible proxy for wellbeing, at the very least a woefully inadequate one.