|
Also, I forgot, it's a disingenuous comparison if you know anything about how life, subsistence, marginal savings rate & co work, which I assume you do if we're discussing these kinds of topics. The scale of "GDP per capita and how people are living" is roughly this: At a "GDP of literally zero" you're DEAD. At a GDP of 1k, you can afford a cheap bicycle. At a GDP of 10k, you can afford small, old, beat up and unsafe cars. At a GDP of 30k, you can afford almost all modern amenities, they'll just be smaller, older, have fewer features. At a GDP of 80k you can do whatever the hell you want if real estate expenses aren't killing you. So no, you can't freely compare a country at 10k with one at 80k and try to bail out the comparison with PPP. And the difference between 1 billion and 1 billion 30k is 1 billion. Percentages matter, thresholds matter. The person having 1 billion 30k doesn't have a materially different life to the person having 1 billion. The person having 30k is reasonably well off, the person having 0 is dead. The person having 40k is also reasonably well off while the person having 10k is poor (and NOT US poor, world standards poor; which BTW, is about the global average, which makes the average person in the world poor by modern development standards). Compare like with like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country#Comparative_... |