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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2375 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I mean, to start with East Asian countries underperform their IQ numbers. Japan is poorer than Italy, after all. China also has multiple bubbles propping up their economy.

But secondly, China has a population pyramid that makes Europe’s look good and a rigidly inflexible totalitarian government that has not managed to find solutions to historical Chinese weaknesses. Sheer number of people will make China a top global economic power for the foreseeable future, but ‘dominant by a wide margin’ seems unlikely just due to those.

Japan is poorer than Italy, after all.

According to what metric? GDP per capita? I'd consider that stronger evidence for the proposition that GDP does not measure anything useful than that Japan actually underperforms according to any sensible measure of performance. It is more surprising that people still have this blind faith in economic metrics considering how official inflation figures have gone viral for being comically disconnected from easily observable real price changes in recent years.

It's a blatant exploit, which seems designed to inflate the score of systems implementing a particular economic culture, that GDP includes the "market value" of illiquid and socially constructed line items which can be created out of thin air at no material cost. If the US were reduced to an irradiated reservation occupying half of Wyoming after a future war against China, its economists would probably still find a way to award themselves the superior GDP medal by having the two surviving lawyers on the territory mutually bill each other a few hundred trillions for consultations.

Japan is poorer than Italy,

On a per capita basis, sure, but in absolute terms the Japanese economy is substantially larger (approx $4tn vs $2.3tn). China could in theory be a lot poorer than the US per capita and still dominate it as an overall economic unit.

I accept the rest of your points.

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