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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Singapore produces lots of useful goods. Key exports include refined petroleum, integrated circuits, computers, electronics and telecommunications equipment, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals. They also have a large financial sector. It's not necessarily bad to have a large financial sector but it doesn't contribute so much to wealth as industrial production.

Industry of any kind accounts for just 25% of Singaporean GDP. 75% comes from services. Singapore is a country that is prosperous from providing services, not exports.

Trading firms make profits via high speed trading. Those profits then move out into the rest of the economy via wages, dividends, investment. Therefore high speed trading is effectively part of GDP, despite not being very productive.

This is a sleight of hand. You say HST is part of GDP despite not being productive. But buying and selling stocks does not contribute to GDP.

An HST firm makes a profit on a trade and pays an employee his salary. The employee gets a haircut and pays the barber. What part of this story is included in GDP? It's the haircut, not the trade.

GDP doesn't just measure goods and services produced in an area, it measures imaginary fabrications as well, without regard for the desirability and quality of the activity in question.

Is imputed rent the only such "imaginary fabrication" in your view? Seems easy enough to just take it out of the equation.

GDP is just particularly flawed.

Compared to what?

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