>[1] And city dwellers in China sure as hell aren't living on a dollar a day. They are living nearly-first-world lifestyles. This depends tremendously on the c

>[1] And city dwellers in China sure as hell aren't living on a dollar a day. They are living nearly-first-world lifestyles. This depends tremendously on the city. For Shanghai this may be true-ish, but there's much greater variation between Chinese cities and e.g. US cities. Now take the lifestyle difference between NYC and Mobile, AL, but double it. Then multiply NYC lifestyle (e.g. income) by like ~0.6 (incomes are like ~0.3, but COL is a fraction of NYC excluding housing so the living standard gap is smaller than implied by incomes) to get Shanghai -- so use that as a baseline, but with the variation from the previous sentence. That's imo roughly what Chinese living standards are like (having been to Chinese cities of varying prosperity).