[FundThrowaway]

I always find the use of per capita GDP as measure of development as a rather strange measure of development. You could have a country with massive oil reserves or similar natural resource wealth that would have a very high per capita GDP but that doesn't necessarily mean that the average person sees any of it. I always thought a better figure is the median wealth per adult, perhaps I'm confused between quality of life and development.

[skrebbel]

Yep! A nice example is Equatorial Guinea, which has a GDP per capita comparable to Croatia's, and yet, "the UN says that less than half of the population has access to clean drinking water and that 20% of children die before reaching the age of five" [0]

There's few trickle down effects because the ruling family spends it all on stuff like shopping trips to Paris.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_Guinea

[ThrowAway19233]

Means are one of the more powerful weapons in a statisticians toolbox, in a previous life I often used means to show prove points that weren't actually true, the average person is shockingly unaware of the power of outliers and how easy it is to show almost whatever you want with the right tools.

[hutzlibu]

Thats why the average persons actually do not really trust statistics (anymore).

Negative sideeffect of your precious profession also shows with climate change disbelieve etc.

[moorhosj]

Any evidence of these claims? From my view, people have plenty of trust in statistics, they just make sure the stats reinforce their pre-existing bias first.

[emptyfile]

I just searched for GDP per capita on wikipedia, and as a citizen of Croatia I find it astonishing that Russia's GDP per capita is exactly the same as these two countries! And that's in PPP, in nominal its actually lower!

Even with its vast resource extraction industry which contributes to GDP, their worker productivity is on par with Greece!

[ido]

I was surprised for the opposite reason - I was recently in Croatia and from the outside it seems ("developmentally") indistinguishable from any nearby rich country such as Italy or Germany. We live in Germany and used to live in Austria and the main visible difference was that it seems Croatians don't mind littering their archaeological sites (which is more cultural than economic I guess).

Maybe Russia is as well these days, and my perception of it as a bit of an industrial/economic shit-hole is due to now-outdated western propaganda.

[alanwong]

That's true, and a big reason why coal-producing Inner Mongolia is the only non-coastal regions in China that has GDP per capita greater than 10,000USD. (as illustrated in a map in the article)

[baybal2]

Yes, quite a number of officials say that it is certainly not a bad province to have a post in, for as long as one ready to endure the weather and boredom.

[lozenge]

Is that boredom due to the low population density or disinterest in socialising with the Mongolian minority population?

[baybal2]

I think both. One go there to run their projects with plump provincial funds. Kangbashi ghost town is the perfect example of what local officials do while having nothing to do.

[sytelus]

Also currency conversions really distorts things. You can have a country where currency is 1/100th of US dollar but folks can buy mordern stuff from TVs to refrigerators at scaled down prices. Only imports from Western countries would be super expensive.

[varjag]

Technology artefacts have commodity prices as baseline and those are global now. There are no countries where a TV or a fridge are at 1/100th of what it costs in the USA.

[jernfrost]

Agree, GDP is a terrible metric. However it is useful if you combine it with other measures. Like when you look at GDP and visit a country, you see there is a strong correlation.

One thing I’ve found difficult is comparing the US to e.g. European countries. Houses are much bigger in the US but that is in large part due to much cheaper land and often entirely different build quality. Yet a bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life. Yet it is not an entirely fair indicator of economic strength.

Sometimes it could be downright deceptive. There was some right wing economists who deemed Mississippi more wealthty/developed than Sweden by looking as such metrics as house size, car ownerships, microwaves and TVs. Yet it did not caputure well that a lot of these people lived in houses bigger than in Sweden but in terrible condition, poor interior and could not afford important basic stuff like health care.

[arethuza]

"bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life"

I used to live in the centre of a city in a flat and I could walk to work, my wife could walk to work and our son could walk to school.

We now live in a house with a nice garden in a rural area where we pretty much have to drive or use the train most days.

I'm not sure you can simply map properties from size to "quality of life" - I'd say my quality of life is about the same - just different.

[sidstling]

We actually have some internal problems with those measures in Scandinavia. I live in Denmark and politically we’re made up of 98 municipalities, some are urban, some are rural. Because we share the economic task of welfare, richer municipalities send some of their money to poorer municipalities.

A part of the calculation for this process is build around the size of your bourse, which made good sense 15-20 years ago before urbanization really took off, but makes very little sense today.

It used to be that a country manor was much more expensive than a small downtown apartment. In fact most urban areas with small apartments used to house the lower working class, while country manors used to belong to the upper class.

Today that has switched around. Poor people can literally not afford to live in our largest cities while the most rural manors are now so inexpensive that my three room apartment in our second largest city could by me two-three country manors in the cheapest parts.

We’re changing the way we calculate “citizen net worth”, but in a democracy such a thing takes a long time, so it’ll probably be a few years, and we’ve already been at it for four. And that’s in a country of 5.6 million people, just imagine how slow it’d be in the WTO.

[lozenge]

"a bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life"

Only holding all else equal, which is impossible. Higher density neighbourhoods provide many benefits in transport, health, culture. Which is why demand far outstrips supply for accommodation in those neighbourhoods in the US.

[rsynnott]

> Yet a bigger house and yard naturally translates to a higher quality of life.

_Does_ it? I live in a 65sqm terraced house within walking distance of Dublin City Centre. For the same money I could probably get a 2-300sqm house in the middle of nowhere, but I'd have a far lower quality of life (at least subjectively; people who value space more than commute times might disagree, I suppose...)

Smaller houses in European countries vs the US is to some extent a function of differences in urban design. Though it's not like small expensive urban housing doesn't exist in the US; I'm sure many people who live in small apartments in New York think their quality of life is just fine.

[ionised]

How does a yard translate to higher quality of life?

[bassman9000]

IHDI/HDI is better, but GDP is a pretty decent indicator given its simplicity, even with the outliers.