Chinese GDP: from making actual goods and services

US GDP: check out this spreadsheet that lets us charge rental fees on a toaster

Two accountants were walking through a park one day, when they came across a pile of dog shit.
"I will pay you 50$ to eat that." one said to the other.
And thusly the continued on, until they came across another pile of dog shit.
"I will pay you 50$ to eat that." said the accountant who still had the taste of dog shit in his mouth.
And on they went.
"Hey." said the other and stopped walking. "I feel like we both just ate dog shit and got nothing out of it."
The other accountant turned sharply towards his collague.

"Nonsense! The national GDP rose by 100 dollars!"

meaningless metric

Some peak comments

The difference between democracy and dictatorship is like a ceiling light versus a flashlight. The ceiling light won't shine evenly everywhere in a crowded room, some places might get less light and some places might be too obstructed to get any light at all, but all in all the room is brighter. Whereas with a flashlight you can point it at any part of the room you want and illuminate it, but the room as a whole isn't as bright.

I can feel my political understanding get better already. In taking this analogy seriously, I have come to understand that democracies ... uh ... huh. What is even the point here?

In particular, democratic republics are more stable due to having transitions of power happen peacefully, regularly, and frequently, which helps reduce corruption and, ideally, prevents leaders from being too disconnected from the people they govern.

Bro you live in the United States.

Yes, but a lot of China's troubles were going to happen. China stressed short-term GDP gains as opposed to playing the long game following 2008's crash. This was while Hu Jintao was in charge. So, while a ton of funds got thrown at infrastructure projects, a lot of them were for little more than vanity, if even that. China built an extensive high-speed rail network. But it consistently loses money.

Divine comedy.

GDP is bullshit anyway, if a storm hits a city causing 200B of damage the repairs get counted to GDP but the destruction does not.

It's just a totally phony propaganda number with mutable definitions

Reddit style comment on news like this:

I'm using "Rich Guy" metrics to interpret the economy from my position of "Not A Rich Guy" in a country with 40+ years of growing socioeconomic stratification that doesn't actually make anything except guns

The modern concept of GDP was first developed by Simon Kuznets for a 1934 U.S. Congress report, where he warned against its use as a measure of welfare

Hilarious because I'm reading "The Long Twentieth Century" which basically argues that there is a cycle of which power leads the capitalist world before being replaced by another capitalist power. Each power (Genoa, Netherlands, Great Britain, USA) began with an expansion of commercial and commodity production, which then reaches the limit of profits, before turning all excess capital towards financial expansion. Each financial expansion makes the capitalist class incredibly rich and prolongs their dominance, but sews the seeds for their end. It's during this financial expansion that the next capitalist power starts their commercial expansion and becomes "the world's factory."

The author shows that America's financial turn was during the late 70s and especially 80s. He doesn't draw this conclusion, but it's clear to me that China is the current capitalist power that's taken over the commercial role in shipping and manufacturing. Even though I think China is an AES, they still have a capitalist economy.

We always joke that the commies in China do capitalism better than capitalists, but it's demonstrably true. America has dominance right now due to financial networks, but that arrangement won't last much longer with the material dominance of the Chinese economy.

"Nominal" is so stupid, it depends on exchange rate and not actual purchasing power.

Yeah, Im sure that basing trends off of a couple years of economic data as opposed to a literal decade of trends has never backfired.

As well, yeah, they have stopped building so many houses, but as others have said, GDP is a bullshit number anyways.

Why's the tick label for 2000 missing? It's annoying me.

China's GDP PPP is something like $24 trillion and the US is like $18 trillion.. something along those lines I heard recently

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