I strongly dislike arguments like this. Because you can apply them to basically any metric and I find that they are generally used to cheaply discredit a potentially interesting fact about the world without actually providing an argument that the metric in question is not a useful one to consider.
In all other contexts would you also say gdp per capita is a metric not worth considering? If not then I humbly question the value of your statement.
I'm not trying to discredit GDP; I don't think it is a useless metric. Lawmakers around the world—some that are paid handsomely—care about it and obviously quite a bit can be inferred from it, but in this case we would be better served utilising a multi-dimensional lens, so to say, in these tangential topics. I'm just against hearing about it as the most important economic metric of a country. It's very often used as a single data point to come to all kinds of conclusions. There are some top-comments in this thread where people are almost forecasting Japan's doom, which is of course a ridiculous view. That's the general direction my comment was aimed at.
At the risk of being out of my depth: You only need a few seconds to look at the per-capita list before finding yourself asking "wait, why is THAT country so high up?". Again, useful info can be inferred, but it doesn't put the country above others in other important lists, which is what people usually imply and use it for, on topics not strictly related to economy statistics.
Thanks for clarifying, that's definitely a more well thought through perspective than I gave you credit for before.
I guess I would avoid updating my beliefs too strongly when a measurement I generally find quite useful (in this case gdp per capita) does not perfectly map onto a more nuanced view of the world! As you say, it's only a single data point.
