There's no objective way to measure technological advancement and it varies by field.
Idk about that. There are definitely some basic measures of advancement predicated on universal human needs.
So, for instance, find the total agricultural production divided by the number of agricultural man hours. The variance between historical and modern civilizations will differ markedly.
Or look at the number of lumens produced by a unit-standard light source divided by man hours to produce those lumens. You'll notice a huge difference between torch, candle, lightbulb, and LED rates.
You could go to the GINI index and consider the life expectancy and infant mortality rates, which track well with advances in medical science and attendant infrastructure.
You could look at the energy consumption per capita, which scales with advances in fuel and energy storage technology.
You could even just measure the size of buildings, as everything from steel to concrete to modern motor technology and cooling technology (elevators and A/C and heating) scale with these advances.
They're all imperfect to some degree, and I'm sure you can find exceptions. But as a broad measure, its undeniable that the Chinese economy has made advances in the last 40 years that brought them up to speed with modern Americans. And there are some edge cases - mass transit, agriculture output, energy production/usage, medical technology - where you could feasibly make the argument that the Chinese economy is edging ahead.
You can also point to instances in which a country - say, the UK, which just surrendered its last working primary steel mill or Ukraine/Gaza which are quite literally being bombed back into the stone age - are falling behind their historical high water marks.
These aren't perfect measures, but they're functional broad estimates and gauges for a nation's scientific and industrial outputs relative to one another.
Idk about that. There are definitely some basic measures of advancement predicated on universal human needs.
So, for instance, find the total agricultural production divided by the number of agricultural man hours. The variance between historical and modern civilizations will differ markedly.
Or look at the number of lumens produced by a unit-standard light source divided by man hours to produce those lumens. You'll notice a huge difference between torch, candle, lightbulb, and LED rates.
You could go to the GINI index and consider the life expectancy and infant mortality rates, which track well with advances in medical science and attendant infrastructure.
You could look at the energy consumption per capita, which scales with advances in fuel and energy storage technology.
You could even just measure the size of buildings, as everything from steel to concrete to modern motor technology and cooling technology (elevators and A/C and heating) scale with these advances.
They're all imperfect to some degree, and I'm sure you can find exceptions. But as a broad measure, its undeniable that the Chinese economy has made advances in the last 40 years that brought them up to speed with modern Americans. And there are some edge cases - mass transit, agriculture output, energy production/usage, medical technology - where you could feasibly make the argument that the Chinese economy is edging ahead.
You can also point to instances in which a country - say, the UK, which just surrendered its last working primary steel mill or Ukraine/Gaza which are quite literally being bombed back into the stone age - are falling behind their historical high water marks.
These aren't perfect measures, but they're functional broad estimates and gauges for a nation's scientific and industrial outputs relative to one another.