Measuring GDP adjusted by purchasing power parity, but not per capita, seems like an odd metric.
PPP-adjusted GDP per-capita gives an indication of the level of goods/services affordable by an individual citizen. Total GDP, unadjusted, is an indicator of a country's economic power. What does PPP-adjusted total GDP indicate?
Yeah, take something proportional to how big (population) AND rich a country is. Divide this by a metric that grows with how rich a country is. This way poorer but bigger countries score better. But that doesn't tell much.
The US is a country with rich people in it, it’s not a rich country.
( I live in New Orleans, 35% of kids don’t have enough calories per days to have a proper brain development. And New Orleans is fine compared to the rest or Louisiana )
> in New Orleans, 35% of kids don’t have enough calories per days to have a proper brain development
Source? I find that hard to believe, considering how cheap and plentiful calories are and how numerous the various public assistance programs exist relating to feeding the poor.
I know it’s intense. Those people must be stupid. Or it’s their fault and they deserve it. ( :s ! )
My bad for the figure, I had a third in mind. It’s less. Can’t find a general population figure in the short amount of time. 20 ish % of black kids is enough or it’s fine ?
What was eye opening to me was volonteering in a random school. And noticing how the breakfast was a important and respected steps. Like.. not everyone had dinner last night.
Been to new orleans. Didn't see anyone with 'caloric deficit' issues.
And you have it backwards. Louisiana has a problem with an overabundance of calories, not a lack of calories. Louisiana is one of most obese states in the country after all.
Or “no kid hungry Louisiana”, that the one I noticed here. Giving breakfast out in school. My first reaction was to wonder why. Digging I realized that a fair amount of kids were coming to school on a empty belly.
That’s it.
Also “been to New Orleans” is a funny statement! Congratulations on seeing Jackson square and the French quarter. It’s a city, not 10 historical blocks.
I find it utterly bizarre that this kind of ignorant hand-wringing is so pervasive. The US median household income is ~6x the global median. The average US household in the bottom income quintile has an income above global median before accounting for 10s of thousands of dollars in in-kind transfers (i.e. welfare).
> 35% of kids don’t have enough calories per days to have a proper brain development.
The article says nothing about children lacking the calories required for brain development. It says 23% of black households self-reported "not having enough food in the past week". Which is weird, because when I go looking for objective data that might support the assertion that a significant percentage of the population isn't getting enough calories, I don't find anything. I did find an article that obtained weight data on both whites and blacks nationwide, and broke them down in Underweight, Normal, Overweight, and Obese categories... but the number of underweight individuals was so low that it rolled them into the 'Normal' category, and didn't even report the Underweight category. It's almost like everyone is getting more than enough to eat!
Neither your anecdata on "visible poverty" nor the US Gini index contradict the obvious fact that the USA is, by any serious measure, a rich country.
So everything is fine and my experience is anecdotal.
It truly makes me feel better.
I should do the same exercise you did with Swiss data.
That what come to my personal mind when I think of “rich country” not the lower 9th ward, or New Orleans East.
But since the US is rich like demonstrated.
I should actively start to reframe those place into “rich”. And look more at all those fat people in the street.
One area it can come up is the country's ability to self-supply things.
To take a example that is currently of interest, Russia's ability to manufacture weapons is far greater than that if a country with the same nominal GDP but is closer to its PPP GDP (plus the effects of being more self sufficient than most countries other than the big two).
I liked a russian hacker's story of building an IR camera by repurposing an old scanner: at one point he tries to source a detector from China but is unable to order it because of (he says) US export rules; then he remembers he's from a country that builds its own air-to-air missiles, and finds a Russian supplier who sends him the part...
I believe the rationale here is that if you can source some gadget from China, it's going to be ten times cheaper than any alternative, since there's an enormous stock of those there used to to make other gadgets, therefore low margins and high turnover.
Yep, maybe GDP is not a great measure if one country can produce a box of cookies for $1 while another $4. Turns out physical output is important (bushels of wheat, pounds of steel, # of cars, etc).
As we're seeing now, it's an even bigger problem when a country produces an advanced military gadget for $1 and the other country can't match it in terms of production for even $50.
> Measuring GDP adjusted by purchasing power parity, but not per capita, seems like an odd metric.
Depends on what you want to compare.
If you want to understand the "heft" of the country in terms of the sheer size of the economy (adjusted for exchange rates) then you do country GDP on PPP basis.
If you want to understand the size taking into account currency rates then you do plain GDP.
If you want to understand how well off a citizen is THEN you do per-capita GDP.
When countries play on the world stage for influence, their overall heft i.e. total GDP (whether on a PPP basis or not) is essentially the main determinant.
"Heft" is how much weight a country can throw around to affect other countries. Stuff like fighter jets & aircraft carriers, aid deals, trade deals, purchasing assets in other countries, et cetera. Most of that is in trade currency, so no PPP adjustment. Building fighter jets is cheaper in low-PPP countries, but only partially. So, no I don't think you should PPP adjust if you want to measure heft.
> Building fighter jets is cheaper in low-PPP countries, but only partially.
Even that holds only true if all other things are equal. But low PPP countries are strongly correlated with less industrialization, less educated workforce etc. That's why most (low-PPP) countries, even large ones, don't produce their own jets - it's cheaper to buy them.
> Most of that is in trade currency, so no PPP adjustment.
It's non-trivial to make that cut. I'd say things PPP for stuff like food doesn't count, but PPP for even rather basic industrial products already does.
PPP-adjusted total GDP indicates ability or capacity to work on commodity-industries industries, like construction, or furniture, where establishing new industries doesn't need as much new research.
PPP-adjusted GDP is an indicator of the level of goods/services affordable by all citizens together.
The treemap shows how global total purchasing power is divided between countries.
A treemap of GDP PPP per capita would show the breakdown of purchasing power if you put one citizen of each country in a single room. I think a bar chart would be a better choice in that case.
If you plot the US' nominal GDP over time in terms of USD, it looks pretty smooth, while other countries bounce around a lot more.[0] That's because other countries' USD nominal GDPs are affected by exchange-rate fluctuations.
If you plot in terms of PPP GDP, other counties suddenly appear much smoother.[1]
Refrigerators and automobiles usually cost the same. Rich countries may be buying fancier ones, while mid-tier countries may sometimes have significant tariffs on cars.
But eating out, getting education, child care costs and foremost real estate, are all deeply PPP corrected.
PPP-adjusted GDP per-capita gives an indication of the level of goods/services affordable by an individual citizen. Total GDP, unadjusted, is an indicator of a country's economic power. What does PPP-adjusted total GDP indicate?