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Satellite Data Strongly Suggests That China, Russia and Other Authoritarian Countries Are Fudging Their GDP Reports (washingtonpost.com)
Christopher Ingraham, writing for The Washington Post: China, Russia and other authoritarian countries inflate their official GDP figures by anywhere from 15 to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data. The working paper, by Luis R. Martinez of the University of Chicago, also found that authoritarian regimes are especially likely to artificially boost their gross domestic product numbers in the years before elections, and that the differences in GDP reporting between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries can't be explained by structural factors, such as urbanization, composition of the economy or access to electricity. Martinez's findings are derived from a novel data source: satellite imagery that tracks changes in the level of nighttime lighting within and between countries over time.
If I invented a cheap machine that did all your housework and fixed your car for free, GDP would fall. Despite the fact that everybody's lives would be permanently improved.
Say a person saves his money and lends it to people in another country. He's creating wealth for himself. The other country is getting further into debt. Maybe the money is spent frivolously or invested in a soon-to-collapse bubble. Or it's spent on productive investments. Either way, the effect on GDP is the same. And it goes to the borrowing country, not the one accumulating assets (unless the borrower makes successful investments).
As individuals, trying to maximize our own GDP would mean spending every dollar we get and avoiding investments that could reduce how much we need to spend to live our lives. That's the opposite of our best interests.
Real GDP is the net of domestic output minus price changes, ie inflation. Look into how our inflation measurements have been contorted over the years and you'll see how it's "grossly" under-reported, thus GDP is overstated.
If you really believe China's GDP numbers have been that hilarious 7% growth for the past few years, I have a presidency to sell you.
Sincerely, /sar
Russia
You say that like the US ain't one too.
The US has as well ever since it made financial entity transactions part of GDP, something no other nation does.
Any inconvenient data is probably fudged.
pollution data
military spending
number of people in prison
healthcare quality
surveillance of the general population
election integrity
Whats next.. water is wet? The jews are nazis?
Tell us something we dont know..
I read the introduction of the working paper. As someone with PhD, I have to call this research to be pure bullshit. If modern economists are as what this researcher, then I will call modern economics to be full of bullshit as well.
From the working paper, here is the main methodology..
" I study whether the mapping of night lights to GDP differs systematically by regime type. That is to say, I examine whether the same amount of growth in nighttime light translates into more GDP growth in autocracies than in democracies"
This methodology does not make sense for obvious reasons and non-obvious reasons. GDP is NOT night time light volume. A city with street lights but no people do not produce GDP. On the other hand, a factory that only works in the daytime, like in industrialized countries such as western europe and east China, do not have light volume at night. I cannot believe this bullshit research gets publicized by Bezos' fake news Washington Post. Maybe these news reporters deserve to starve and their newspapers shut down due to their inability to notice fake research?
Washington post...
Its just a hottub!
Unbelievable, countries with regimes that thrive on freedom of information would resort to such propaganda tactics. Satellite imagery was objectively analyzed for detecting WMD in iRaq after all.
North Korea wishes to point out its superiority in cloaking devices.
They only appear to be in the dark.
it's in the apps column.. yikes almighty.. cease fire stand down.. the time is coming when our domestic product will not be gross?
nothing was getting better. That's why we turned to a populist (Trump). Sadly so far I don't think it's turned out the way we'd hoped. Our populist put the same Goldman Sach's folks in charge that have run the show since Reagan and now he support's TPP & increases to guest worker programs. His tax cuts expire on us in 10 years but not on the 1%ers. Oh, and the $1 trillion in debt from those tax cuts is already being used as ammo to shoot down Medicare & Social Security, so we're fucked when we got old.
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Yea, China boosts it's GDP before elections...
Heinlein was calling them on it (although he probably overstated his case) fifty years ago in "Pravda means Truth" (which you can find in Expanded Universe or the earlier The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein)
China, Russia and other authoritarian countries inflate their official GDP figures by anywhere from 15 to 30 percent in a given year, according to a new analysis of a quarter-century of satellite data.
This is nothing new. When I was getting my graduate degrees (one of which is in business) 15 years ago it was widely understood that China fudged their official numbers as a matter of routine. No real reason to believe this has changed. Economists who study this stuff are well aware that the numbers out of certain countries are unreliable and they make efforts to correct for the problem to the best of their ability.
data suggest
Nullius in verba
It seems counter-intuitive that a regime without free elections would need to lie more at the time immediately preceding elections. Such regimes lie constantly, every evening in the TV news. It's a shame some of those regimes are held up and helped to lie their people by so called democracies, only to further their selfish foreign policy interests and mop up own blunders. It speaks tomes about vulnerability and cost sensitivity of power of allegedly strongest economies of the world. Now that is a scary thought.
... that anyone actually believes these unethical people from the get go. People's biggest failing is letting the rich and powerful cheat them of their lives, liberties and all their hard work. Nothing like living with a despotic tyrant to make all hope go away. IMHO, most people are either too greedy, lazy or stupid and this allows such evil people to continue to destroy this world.
on the wane. It has not yet risen into the Roman Empire or begun its conquest of the rest of the civilized/uncivilized world. Although from its expeditionary actions around the globe, you would be hard pressed to tell.
What a major fail. Data centres produce no visible light in sattelite imagery. Neither do banks, mines, crops (agriculture in general), I suspect larg portions of saudi oil-filled dessert would also be unlit and VERY few factories working 3 shifts have glass roofs. Large portions of german autobahn is unlit. Large portions of belgian is.
Some countries chose to fight light pollution. California was amongst the first to start looking into it. Based on this "research" California would also by lying about their GDP.
Someone needs to review this PhD thesis.
Can someone please downgrade this whole article back to the firehose somehow?
In the 1960s, Robert Heinlein went to the Soviet Union as part of an opening salvo of goodwill between the countries. He looked at the shipping and roads in and out of Moscow and realized there was no way it could support whatever X millions of people they were claiming to he on rough parity with New York.
It's been estimated it required about 50% of Soviet GDP to even maintain a facade of parity with the US military.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So Russia and China have better lampshades. Get over it.
They can all be manipulated.
Crypto-currencies cannot.
Producers of luxury goods would be lost without Chinese travellers: their total annual spend abroad is twice that of Americans.
https://www.economist.com/chin... How are they managing to do this without GDP growing?
Authoritarian regimes lie more than democracies.
This finding explains why the USA has been having 12% annual growth in GDP ever since vivid LED street lamps started to come into widespread use.
GDP is NOT night time light volume.
Of course not. But it is a rough proxy for GDP. Why would it systematically differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries? An obvious answer is data fudging.
A city with street lights but no people do not produce GDP. On the other hand, a factory that only works in the daytime
Why would these differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries?
China is known for "ghost cities", but they were never really that common, many of them are now occupied, and they would lead to under reporting of GDP, not the over reporting actually observed.
Looks to me like they are measuring correlation, which might be a result of people having jobs, money being spent in bars and restaurants, houses being lit up at night, more tax revenue for street lights, etc. Seems mostly valid to me, although there are probably some cultural factors and local preferences that would need to be considered.
The dude apparently got a PHD from Fox News.
Pretty funny they of course leave out countries like India. Wonder how much royal money is backing Wapo now.
If modern economists are as what this researcher, then I will call modern economics to be full of bullshit as well.
You are quite right: modern economics is little more than a huge pile of bullshit. That's mainly because its assertions cannot be tested, so no one knows whether what economists say is true.
That being so,street-smart economists say what the rich and powerful like to hear - and get lucrative professorships, book contracts, government jobs, sponsorship, etc.
If you want to learn something about real economics, read Michael Hudson or Steve Keen. There's still a lot of truth in Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the other original "classical" economists. (Although you have to allow for the huge differences between their world and ours. Smith, for example, pointed out how entrepreneurs could make vast profits by ignoring their own country's interests, but concluded that no one could be so vile as to do so. Sigh).
There's also a lot of truth and valuable ideas in Karl Marx, if you have the mental energy and intestinal fortitude to ignore the unjustified abuse that has been heaped on him - precisely because the rich and powerful would much prefer you not to learn about his thoughts.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
You know that whole "Americans are 14th in reading" thing and all those other allegedly comparable international test score stats? Yeah, because arrogant countries all about self image, especially in Asia, never lie and cheat to inflate those numbers. That tooootally doesn't have any precedent. Other countries lie about everything to make themselves look better. Everyone knows this.
It's obviously not a perfect measure of GDP, but actually people have done the research and shown a strong link between the two. If, as you claim, you have a PhD (and it's in a relevant field: sorry, an English PhD gives you zero qualifications here), you're not only free, but should have the capability to put out your own research disproving this work. Of course, given the quality of logic in your post, I suspect you don't have that capability. For example:
A city with street lights but no people do not produce GDP.
The entire point of both a city and street lights is to have people. It's true that China has been building "ghost cities, but all that does is suggest that in fact the light-based estimate overestimates economic activity, which just makes the point in TFA that much stronger.
On the other hand, a factory that only works in the daytime, like in industrialized countries such as western europe and east China, do not have light volume at night.
Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night? Most of them absolutely put out light at night (they're usually glittering beacons of light, in fact). In fact if they have smokestacks or chimneys they're required to or they're a huge safety risk to aircraft. Also lots (most?) factories in most climates run in mornings and evenings before/after sunrise, and it's not uncommon for them to run overnight: downtime is a huge waste of money when you have an expensive factory. In fact, factories not running overnight would be an indicator of economic weakness, such as happened to the US auto industry in the 2000s.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
A really wealthy, civilized culture would shed virtually no light upwards at night time. It's wasteful and stops you seeing the stars - which, to a civilized person, is far more important than gold-plated taps or a 28-cylinder car.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
On measure of whether a country is authoritarian is whether it kills other people to get what it wants.
... maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad... Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined."
Where in the World Is the U.S. Military? Quote: "... the United States
Book: Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World
Another way to measure authoritarian control: Is the U.S. truly a democracy? Or is most government control hidden from voters? Most U.S. citizens have little or no knowledge of how much taxpayer money the U.S. military spends.
GDP is NOT night time light volume.
Of course not. But it is a rough proxy for GDP. Why would it systematically differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries? An obvious answer is data fudging.
Some other possibilities:
* Risk of theft and cost of security guards leads factory manager to make different choices about how late the lights are on.
* Differences in housing and urban planning cause people to live in housing with differing densities. If everyone lives in apartments, then there will be less area to cover with street lights.
* The cost of electricity to the person making the decision to keep the lights on.
* The industries the countries have changes land use patterns.
Why would these differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries?
There are hundreds of ways countries vary that could influence light emissions. There are less than 300 countries in the world. The only way to extract a result from the sample of countries on earth is to make assumptions about what properties of a country influence light emissions. Those assumptions can't be validated in the real world.
My muscles are bigger than yours, therefore I am superior to you!
I am taller than you, therefore I am superior to you!
I can run faster, therefore I am superior to you!
My penis is larger and harder, therefore I am superior to you!
I am superior to you, therefore more females prefer to mate with me more frequently than with you!
Our GDP is larger, therefore we are superior to you!
Our species is still painfully young, not much more evolved than the rest of the animals. We just have better toys.
Co-operation is more important than competition
We might just survive long enough to reach that point.
This should come as no surprise to anyone. All governments lie about how well things are going under their skilled manipulation of the economy. Their respective Ministries of Truth want to ensure that the populace continues to support their enlightened leadership. As a small example -- we keep hearing how great the US economy is doing using the declining unemployment numbers as the indicator. What doesn't get mentioned is the declining workforce participation numbers -- fewer people in the workforce and actively looking for work. Similar cherry-picking can be found in pretty much every published prosperity statistic. My favorite is consumer price metrics -- where the basket of goods and services chosen exclude services like gasoline and power. And with this number being used to index pensions one can be assured that changes will lag behind reality.
The actual paper is an interesting bit of speculation, probably BS, but then it is not hard to find flaws with most economic analysis of this type. The 'real' numbers are unavailable so reading tea leaves has to suffice. And it becomes faith in fortune tellers -- like trickle down economics.
Finance 501 taught me that GDP is the money supply times the velocity of money
Your education is incomplete. There are multiple ways to calculate GDP and they use several of them for official numbers to ensure some amount of consistency. In principle each method should give (roughly) equal results though in practice it isn't always so easy. The Economist has a decent article on how it generally is calculated.
This seems like legitimate, though not novel, research.
The interesting bit is not that China and Russia lie about their GDP - everyone knows that. I talk to investment bankers all the time, and when the conversation turns to these states, it's not about whether they lie, but what external variables can be used to estimate by how much they lie.
The really interesting bit is how quickly the trolls jumped on this story, especially on the original WaPo article (somewhat less so here, but I would think that at least a few of the comments here are also trolls). Clearly, the Russian state wants to discredit this story, because doing so would be much cheaper than cheating on light emissions - that would take billions of dollars, annually.
Original article is inaccessible without registration. Is there an alternate source?
You are quite right: modern economics is little more than a huge pile of bullshit.
I'm sure you really believe that too even though that statement makes it clear you haven't actually studied economics and are substituting ideology for evidence.
That's mainly because its assertions cannot be tested, so no one knows whether what economists say is true.
That is not even remotely true for a wide array of economic research. They have testable models which are used all the time. Heck there is money to be made by making testable models - do you really think all the investment banks would spend so much money on quantitative analysis if it didn't provide actual results?
There's also a lot of truth and valuable ideas in Karl Marx,
Yeah you just shot yourself in the foot there if you think Marx is any sort of a refutation of modern economic research.
* Risk of theft and cost of security guards leads factory manager to make different choices about how late the lights are on.
If you have stuff worth stealing, you mean?
* The cost of electricity to the person making the decision to keep the lights on.
So whether they can afford to keep the lights on and make their place safer?
It's not trivial, but it's apparently highly studied, and some of your arguments don't make sense.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GDP is NOT night time light volume.
Of course not. But it is a rough proxy for GDP. Why would it systematically differ between authoritarian and non-authoritarian countries? An obvious answer is data fudging.
Data fudging, maybe. Cultural differences, developmental differences, and about 100 other factors are probably better proxies. The light pollution methodology IS bullshit. Especially when we are talking about small changes in GDP like 3-7% growth.
Just as one example, in the US a substantial source of light pollution is car sales lots, which are lit up like daytime 365 nights a year. Countries in Europe don't generally have as many lots- they often order their cars from the factory. In Japan, theft is rare and land is expensive so the lots are much smaller and aren't well lit at night. Similarly, the US is heavilly car-dependent and we have huge parking lots of department stores, malls, and grocery stores, many of which are lit up at night. Most other countries have more concentrated population centers and less suburban sprawl.
Additionally, many places are actively trying to reduce light pollution, and in some countries it is normal to shutter most businesses in the evening. Plus, in many developing countries the GDP growth may be concentrated in the top of the economic ladder, which is not very noticable from light pollution.
Unless the study corrected for factors like this (and they didn't) the correlation between GDP and light pollution is completely baloney.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night? Most of them absolutely put out light at night (they're usually glittering beacons of light, in fact). In fact if they have smokestacks or chimneys they're required to or they're a huge safety risk to aircraft. Also lots (most?) factories in most climates run in mornings and evenings before/after sunrise, and it's not uncommon for them to run overnight: downtime is a huge waste of money when you have an expensive factory. In fact, factories not running overnight would be an indicator of economic weakness, such as happened to the US auto industry in the 2000s.
Not necessarily. Our manufacturing facility has about a dozen CNC machines. We load the machines up in the afternoon and let them run all night until they either complete the part or run into some kind of fault. Everybody leaves by 4:30PM. Not all manufacturing businesses are like this, but there are plenty of them, and likely more in 1st world countries than in 3rd world ones.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
it's called "Justice Democrats". It's basically the Bernie Wing of the Democratic party. But it's not so much an uphill battle as it's more a "Vertical Line" battle.
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My explanation is that authoritarian governance creates ample opportunities for corruption, and a consequence of corruption is the fudging of reports and studies at all levels. Which is a known failure of führerprinzip as practiced in Hitler's Germany, WW2 Italy, Franco's Spain, tin-pot Latin America and SEA, the list goes on.
All governments lie, just about different things.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Look into how our inflation measurements have been contorted over the years and you'll see how it's "grossly" under-reported, thus GDP is overstated.
Ugh, what a lame, empty conspiracy-theory line. How about instead of hand-waving about the most important part of your thesis you at least bother to describe how these contortions were done. Even better provide a link to a full-fledged description that lays out this clearly obvious manipulation, even better a link to full-fledged description from a reliable source and not some infowars/.zerohedge conspiracy site with zero credibility.
Until then, shame on all the suckers with mod points who got fooled into treating your intellectually empty post as insightful.
Satellite data also 'strongly suggests' that there is a climate change going on, but nobody cares.
But if somebody exaggerates his own wealth, it's a problem?
With THIS Administration?
Different land-use patterns. In a country where most people live in apartment buildings, and it's not common to live in a single-family home, people don't have any practical way to produce more outside light. Even if my real income is rising 10% a year, it's not very practical for me to "consume" more artificial light outdoors. Whereas if I live in the US or another country where most well-off people live in a single-family home, I may want to bathe my house in lighting, put in a pool with lights, or just run the lights I already have more.
In short, the whole hypothesis ignores differences in culture and regulation.
But do you leave the lights on? Most industrial facilities I have been in are lit up when in operation regardless of the work schedule, so if someone has to show up in the middle of the night they can instantly assess what is going on.
Literally nothing redeemable in terms of economic thought from Marx. The labor theory of value is complete bullshit.
Here's what you should know: many economic models can be tested. Additionally, the increasing amount of data available is allowing for easier "natural" experiments to be used for research.
Stop being a moron and spouting bullshit.
That being so,street-smart economists say what the rich and powerful like to hear - and get lucrative professorships, book contracts, government jobs, sponsorship, etc.
I'm not sure all of economics is untestable, but it's occasionally hard not to see some aspects of it as a variation on confirmation bias, justifying the outcomes of the economic elite through a quasi-scientific basis.
Surely the economists who create theories and rationales which justify capitalists' economic behaviors wind up with more and better employment opportunities than those who would criticize them. It also doesn't help that economists like to reflexively claim a non-ideological/non-judgemental position on a lot of issues. If something like high-frequency trading, globalism, etc, leads to greater profits it's seen as a good economic outcome even when it causes huge externalities.
Shipping jobs to China has always found legions of economists who support the practice for various reasons and who hand-wave side effects like large-scale regional unemployment as something to be cured with "job training in new industries".
I think there is a lot of economics that can be reasonably modeled and explained through mathematics, but it's not a completely scientific endeavor and seems willing to engage in willing ignorance of some/many outcomes if something like profit/wealth increases.
Privet, drug, kak dela?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I cannot believe this bullshit research gets publicized by Bezos' fake news Washington Post.
Why would that surprise you? WaPo is just shy of publishing Bat Boy stories. Random word generators are more likely to be true.
What if healthcare was not a part of GDP like the mentioned countries... since including non-value contributing industries in GDP seems to be a US thing.
And that is the major flaw with this study, your buy more CNC so that means the your bussiness has grown but the satellite keep seeing the same ligths meanwhile electricty comsuption has increased in your factory something that the satellite cant measure.
Because Washington Post is indepented media which never lies and always reports true and balanced stories.
Good thing the US has indepented press.
Otherwise we would start asking questions about who payed to have whay piblished.
because the current game in the U.S. is to create debt out of thin air to inflate the economy, which is much worse and more urgent to discuss.
Did you even read the summary? The study is not claiming that the magnitude of light pollution is a metric for total GDP. What they suggest is that *increase* of light pollution is a metric for *increase* in GDP. So as the US economy rises, the US builds more car sales lots and malls. When Germany's economy rises, Germany builds more of whatever causes light pollution over there - factories, ports, whatever corresponds to economic activity. The individual countries' methods of producing light pollution don't matter. And apparently there is a very good correlation between reported GDP rise and light pollution increase in countries that are likely truthful in their reporting (Such as US, Japan and most of Europe) so what you're saying falls flat on its face.
There's also a lot of truth and valuable ideas in Karl Marx, if you have the mental energy and intestinal fortitude to ignore the unjustified abuse that has been heaped on him - precisely because the rich and powerful would much prefer you not to learn about his thoughts.
Not only the rich and powerful, I guess that the 200 million dead and further 2 billion driven into dreadful poverty by his "brilliant" ideas would also have preferred that noone learned them, I suppose, but that's just me. I'm betting you think that all (or at least most) of those 200 million were rich and powerful bastards. Yeah, right.
It should be noted that Russia is technically a democracy. It is not the old Soviet Union anymore. We only like to call them authoritarian because we don't like them. What definition of authoritarian did the researchers use?
"Duh" seems the most appropriate response.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
North Korea is a special case.
As I understand it, since the Korean "police action" (a.k.a. "Korean War"), North Korea has had continuous WW II-style, nighttime blackouts (for fear of bombing and/or to keep the population propagandized about external threats.)
So, though they may actually have a low GDP, it may not be a horribly low as the "night lighing => GDP" measure would make it seem.
(I recall, a few years back, the publication of satellite imagery of the Korea-halves, with North Korea almost as dark as an uninhabited wasteland. The caption/story also suggested that this was a sign of how "benighted" the North Korean economy had become. So that was in the back of my mind when, recently, the newsies mentioned that the North was doing blackouts. "AHA!" sez I. "That light thing is probably a bogus overstatement." So here it comes around again.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
He's an authoritarian personality type, which is why he loves dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Why is Snark Required?
I still remember when Washington Post tried to pass that fake news story about Russia hacking the Vermont power grid.
what they're doing with all the Falun Gong practitioners they rounded up and who haven't been seen in over a decade!
why they have more organs available per capita for donation than any other country on Earth, even though there is no system in place to collect organs after automobile accidents, and the number of prisoners executed is too low to account for the supply
I agree their reasoning was flawed, but there is still the concern that in authoritarian countries the government might be scheduling the lighting more of the time, and simply not micro-managing it to the same level that would be happening when each business chooses when to turn lights on and off. It may be that in authoritarian countries, there are lots of people who wished they were allowed to use more lighting, especially when they had lots of work and were working late and would have preferred to install flood lights in the yard instead of having to use portable lights.
That said, I find a lot more value in this than most of the commentors, but it is clearly an early result that is made almost entirely of salt.
Smith assumed that the government and their peers would smack them down, and that nobody would be so vile as to act against their own interests in such a stupid-greedy way.
It was like pointing out that people don't stick their bare hand into the beehive to get a taste of honey.
It turns out, not all governments are capable of self-interest. This was a surprise result. But it changes little of his analysis; it just changes the wording of some things.
Marx starts from quoting Smith's presentation of the basic problem in trade, (self-interest and collusion) but then totally ignores all of Smith's answers and just runs off the rails asserting that the answers have to be as he says, without even considering what if Smith's answer to his setup was legit? People pointing at Marx and claiming it has a bunch of value usually either didn't read it, or didn't bother reading Adam Smith first. You have to read Smith first, because Marx points at Smith's words and mangles the claimed implications.
Have you seen a factory at night before? Or even seen a factory in a movie at night?
You obviously don't know about Chinese factories. In the US, if you look at an office building and a factory side-by-side, they look totally different.
In China, an office building and a factory are not different buildings. The corporate headquarters is not in a fancy building. It is in the same building as the factory. And it looks like a rundown office building in a poor city in the US! 6 floors, all the same height, with exactly the same rows of windows on every floor. You can't really even tell from the outside which floors are offices, and which floors are factory production.
Just go on banggood and start clicking on shit, you can almost always see a picture of the factory that makes a widget. If they work all night, or they're closed for the day, it will produce about the same amount of light when viewed from above. Very little of the light pollution is coming out of windows; most of it is coming from outdoor lights!
In the US, having the exterior of the building lit up at night helps make the superintendent feel important. In China, the factory owner is also the superintendent, and so doesn't gain value from the building looking important; he gains a feeling of value by making money, same as the owner here. Also, in China having exterior lights pointed at the building would look arrogant and wasteful, and their society has local officials who could punish you for looking arrogant and wasteful. In the US there is nobody to do that; if people complained, it would just be some hippies and the business would laugh at them and add more lights. In China they would perceive looking arrogant as a dangerous and anti-social thing to do, with unclear but real consequences.
China is 2nd world, so comparing 1st or 3rd is perhaps mistaken.
The level of democracy for countries is obtained from Freedom House, It has nice maps where Tibet is distinct from China. I know some people advocate for that, but it is the first time I see it on a map.
I wonder what US people would think is some organization featured a map with Indian reserves as distinct countries.
India supposedly shines brighter at night when observed by satellite, yet I think it's pretty far fetch to think that India is supposedly richer than China in terms of GDP.
Sincerely, /sar
Russia
In Soviet Russia, sarcasm flags you.
Then we compared the prices of a market basket of goods that we were able to find past prices for. I am just going to say that the results were "discomforting."
For those incapable of reading between the lines, the inflation rate we found was very different from the official inflation rate.
First wrong assumption: that China is calculating inflation using the CPI method.
Second wrong assumption: that inflation rate is similar over various product groups.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
This doesn't compute.