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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   20757 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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The strength of the dollar was a lot more than it is presently today. It’s one of the problems with using GDP as a metric. China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP. It already overtook the US several years ago.

China for instance is the leading national economy in the world in terms of PPP.

PPP is absolutely, utterly useless when applied to total GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP). In fact I'm convinced the only reason to use it for total GDP is to be able to make misleading claims like this. There is zero useful information derived from the number because GDP is a measure of the total economic output of a country, while PPP adjusts things for cost of living in a country (which means the amount per capita is essential to getting any useful information from it). In fact, on /pol/ they're regularly called "Poor People Points" because they make shithole countries that have large populations look a bit less shitty. If we look at GDP per capita adjusted by PPP it's a completely different story:

China: $27k

India: $11k

US: $85k

Japan: $51k

South Korea: $52k

Singapore: $150k

Taiwan: $84k

Do we doubt that China is the largest industrial economy - capable of the highest amounts of production of useful items?

What does that have to do with, well, anything? This thread is about cost of living/quality of life in 1959 vs. now, not who manuactures the most. I omly brought up GDP at all because Tretiak was trying to make a point about cost of living in China vs. the US using GDP adjusted for PPP.

PPP is absolutely, utterly useless when applied to total GDP (as opposed to per capita GDP). In fact I'm convinced the only reason to use it for total GDP is to be able to make misleading claims like this.

You said this^

Yes, and if you wanted to compare total manufacturing output of two countries you would do it without adjusting for PPP

If making an identical transmission in the US costs $1000 nominal and in China $500 nominal, why are you proposing you don't ned to adjust for PPP ?

Because when I'm buying a transmission from China I'm not paying the PPP-adjusted price for it, I'm paying in nominal dollars (or RMB or whatever).

This is the same line of thinking that led Eurocrats to think Russia is a military pushover bc the nominal GDP is on par with Italy. Well, we know how that line of thinking ended.

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