Introduction:
instead of soon becoming the largest economy in the world, China’s economy is only about a third of the size of the mighty U.S. economy.
having much lower GDP also means that China’s debt levels are actually much higher, relative to the size of its economy, meaning that its debt-fueled property bubble is much more dangerous than we thought.
Method:
Martinez looked at 184 countries between 1992 to 2008 and compared the growth of lights at night in each country to the growth of GDP that each country reported.
Autocratic countries typically reported a whopping 35% higher GDP growth numbers compared to night-time lights growth.
China’s GDP growth between 1992 and 2008 was likely 4.9% per year, rather than its average reported growth of 6.3%.
This is literally the dumbest measurement I’ve ever heard of.
If China were overestimating its GDP by 60%, then surely it would be no problem to prove it based on some more objective measure like imports and exports. Wonder why they didn't do that :thonk:
Autocratic countries are known to take oppressive measures like mandating that businesses turn off most of their lights at night to save energy. Compliance is far from total but there is an effect of ~35%.
Authoritarian China genocides rights of business owners to light empty offices at 3 AM
Reminds me of "actually millions died at Wuhan from Covid, just look at disappearing phone numbers and abnormal air quality"
... compared the growth of lights at night in each country to the growth of GDP that each country reported.
HAH... didn't know they made calipers for the lighting of a country.
Installing megawatt projectors into the night to raise my gdp rn :sicko-luna:
economic success is when I can't see Mars in the sky at night
By this measure every town that turns off it's street lights after a certain time has no economic activity.
Li Keqiang index or Keqiang index (Chinese: 克强指数) is an economic measurement index created by The Economist to measure China's economy using three indicators, as reportedly preferred by Li Keqiang, formerly the Premier of the People's Republic of China, as better economic indicator than official numbers of GDP.[1]
According to a State Department memo (released by WikiLeaks), Li Keqiang (then the Chinese Communist Party Committee Secretary of Liaoning) told a US ambassador in 2007 that the GDP figures in Liaoning were unreliable and that he himself used three other indicators: the railway cargo volume, electricity consumption and loans disbursed by banks.[1]
imma bank on that more than light tbh lmao
Li Keqiang is China's Gorbachev and that's why the US and the International Community have been pushing hard for him. Also funny how they like Wikileaks when it can make their adversaries look bad.
Didn't his Communist Youth League faction just get savaged when Xi had Hu kicked out of the Party Congress in front of all those cameras?
Look if you aren’t wasting lots of electricity all night long then it’s clear your economy is a sad smol bean and you’re lying about it.
Also, they compare China to India in this blog post, talking as if India isn’t fucking known (under Modi at least) for being authoritarian and spoofing their GDP. Sheer anti-China brain worms.
Well, there you have it. The over/under on how much the US economy is going to contract next year is 60%.
Also: if a country can juice its GDP numbers simply by asking more businesses to leave their lights on at night, well, that sounds a bit moral-hazard-y.
GDP is already juiced by banks loaning each other money, which is almost as stupid.
That fake image of NK isn’t a scientific method
That image isn't real? It's literally the only thing you can find when you google it. Can you point me to a better source?
Ok, China GDP numbers is fake, is way smaller than we though. So can the yank stop being paranoid and lift all the restriction? Stop a cold war from becoming a hot one?
in capitalist countries dumbfuck businesses leave the lights on all night because 'crime' or open 24 hours bs, and boomers leave their lights on for similar stupid reasons
There’s a fedex near me and you can see inside because the lights are on all night lol. I feel like that’s gonna incentivize more people to rob it because they can have a better view to plan the crime
Not sure what I'm going to rob from a FedEx that's worth the trouble of planning a heist
Idk, man. That sounds like a lot of risk for a very unclear reward
If you don't have sprawling suburbs you aren't developed
:brainworms:
The legitimate way to do this is to normalize over population density, but to liberals and capitalists, land is more important than people.
Or ruining nature reserves with light pollution, or commodifing everyone's brains with flashy all night advertising billboards, or...
I mean, Chinese cities love to do flashy adverts and neon lightshows and crazy fountains. Most large Chinese cities look like Las Vegas strip downtown. But they are smart enough to hyperconcentrate this in downtown heavy urban areas
Ahh yes. Night time is famously when factories and other industries work the hardest and create the most GDP.
Even by this dipshit method, in one of the later graphs near the end where the "authoritarian" countries are overlayed with the """democratic""" countries, you can see that China is nowhere near the top of the spread for "authoritatians" and is actually in-line with several of the """democracies""".
compared the growth of lights at night in each country to the growth of GDP that each country reported.
motherfucker did the light pollution index holy shit
