8 ms·

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and

by cmehdy 6y ago

China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there. Notwithstanding the fact that the research and academic works coming out of China, while still facing issues in quality on average, have still been rising in quantity and quality. When the combined US+EU market is less than half the amount of people of your own economy, stumbling upon itself with regulations and inner struggles and disagreements, and you are the single most important builder of things in their world.. I'm not sure democracy is a prerequisite to be able to achieve domination eventually. Sure, average quality of life still isn't on par with the EU or the US.. but then again, they've taken 600 million people out of extreme poverty in the last few decades, they're the single biggest current builder of nuclear power plants, they're developing their own space agency at a rapid pace, and are perfectly fine increasingly making major US businesses bend to their will (in tech, in sports, in the industry, and in bending America's cultural influence in the world through things like Hollywood), and they seriously lock down the innovation and profit so that it circulates internally first and foremost. I'm not saying all these things for the fun of it: I'm from the EU and I live in Canada, so I'm both very much wanting the world to go towards the models that the EU and Canada are trying to achieve (as far as democracies strive to improve themselves, ever-so-slowly sometimes), but I'm also pretty keenly aware of how small those players actually can be when compared to a behemoth with a very long history, a critical mass, and willing to make any necessary concessions to dominate. You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place.

gerdesj 6y ago
"China is five times the US in population." etc lol. When do you clock off?
- cmehdy 6y ago
  What's your point? I'm a EU citizen with roots in the Maghreb. I have no interest in singing praises of an economy with which I have major ethical concerns (extended to the issues with the Uyghurs, HK and Taiwan, and I have dear friends in the latter places), and all my personal experiences have had much more to do with countries that are very much not into China's attitude (EU, Canada, Japan, to name a few). If you keep trying to play this bullshit game of astroturfing warfare, you're going to completely miss the real discussions. So please tell me again, when do I clock off of what?
- ahmedalsudani 6y ago
  Can we please stop with those low-effort, snide remarks. It says a lot about you that you regurgitate this nonsense. Reconsider who the “troll” is.
rottingfruit 6y ago
I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?
- coldtea 6y ago
  >Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    > "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order. That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.
mathraki 6y ago
A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days. I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages: - very efficient in redirecting resources as needed - the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently - no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges) HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1]) So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%. In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
- lawrenceyan 6y ago
  Exactly. Monarchies and dictatorships like you say always inevitably implode because no matter how great the current person in power is, there's nothing you can do to guarantee the quality of their successors. And it's precisely because no system of checks and balances exist that ensures once you roll badly on a succession, that whoever ends up gaining control is able to so quickly destroy whatever has previously been built up. The only way to truly ensure long term growth and stability, is to build up a robust system, independent of any individual, that has checks and balances set in place.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  In China, this is called the "bad emperor" problem. They've seen it several times.
divbzero 6y ago
> You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place. Why not have both? China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it. A few things I would personally love to see: – More transparent and consistent application of laws – Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power – Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.
- arrosenberg 6y ago
  One and two are basically hallmarks of western Liberalism, so this seems kind of contradictory. To my knowledge, the only historical Chinese government that we would consider Liberal is the current Taiwanese government, and even then that's a fairly recent development (30-ish years). It's not clear how the current regime could get there without wholesale changes in the power structure.
- nine_k 6y ago
  Careful, this sounds close to a suggestion to change China's leadership. Instead, they recently tightened the Party control over businesses, less Deng Xiaoping style, more Soviet style.
- free_rms 6y ago
  The thing is, your perception of them on these issues is very much colored by the fact that they're not western. It permeates all coverage of them from western sources.
foobarian 6y ago
> China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.
- woah 6y ago
  We don’t allow them in any more
  - wyclif 6y ago
    False. In 2015, 1,051,031 resident visas were issued to foreigners in the USA.
    - raverbashing 6y ago
      So, in 2015, and what was the wait time for those The bar gets higher every day, and it's a hassle a lot of people are not willing to go through
      - wyclif 6y ago
        Classic moving of the goalposts IMO. 2015 was the last year I could get reliable data for. Wait time? What standards are you basing your comments on and what countries are you comparing the USA to? By any reasonable standard, the US is still very pro-immigration and pro-entrepreneur.
        raverbashing 6y ago
        > Wait time? So you don't know how long it takes to get an H1B and you want to talk about "reasonable standards"? That's funny Getting a work visa to pretty much anywhere in the EU or Canada (or maybe even Australia) is quicker than an H1B.
booleandilemma 6y ago
Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning. A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Pyramids and the great wall were pre-fossil fuels, electricity, and internet. Any useful research on sci-hub can be available to a person with half a mind in China. The Chinese space program has made leaps from being the third country in the world with a successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later. Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now. But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned). And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too. Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies. I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though. I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years. I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side. edit: links, sorry about that. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned-nuclear-reactors-in-various-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country [2] https://outline.com/szPNha https://outline.com/szPNha (MIT Sloan Management Review)
AmericanChopper 6y ago
China, in its current form, simply doesn’t have the potential to compete with the US in this way. It is a walled garden of corruption, who’s leaders will go to any lengths to retain total control of. Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.
MrYellowP 6y ago
It's actually 850 million people. "China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China I felt like 250 million people difference in accuracy was worth pointing out, but of course this also covers "600 million in the last decades".
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Thanks for the more precise information. It's indeed very much worth pointing it out when a "slight difference in accuracy" in my statement is a population equivalent to 80%+ of the US(!).
- shynrou 6y ago
  I wouldn't dare to call some one with an income of 60$ per month not poor...
  - MrYellowP 6y ago
    It's a misleading way of measuring poverty. In fact, it is irrelevant how many units of currency you earn, as long as your units of currency cover your basic needs plus a bit. Sixty units of currency are a lot of money when rent costs you ten and bread costs you one. In Bulgaria, most things are half the price. Food and rent are damn cheap for someone who earns money in euros. They earn half as many units of currency compared to people where I live. That's an amount of currency with which I could never live where I live now, but there it would last.

by cmehdy 6y ago

gerdesj 6y ago

"China is five times the US in population." etc lol. When do you clock off?

cmehdy 6y ago
What's your point? I'm a EU citizen with roots in the Maghreb. I have no interest in singing praises of an economy with which I have major ethical concerns (extended to the issues with the Uyghurs, HK and Taiwan, and I have dear friends in the latter places), and all my personal experiences have had much more to do with countries that are very much not into China's attitude (EU, Canada, Japan, to name a few). If you keep trying to play this bullshit game of astroturfing warfare, you're going to completely miss the real discussions. So please tell me again, when do I clock off of what?
ahmedalsudani 6y ago
Can we please stop with those low-effort, snide remarks. It says a lot about you that you regurgitate this nonsense. Reconsider who the “troll” is.

rottingfruit 6y ago

I don’t know I hear things like with ___s population they can just throw people at the problem. Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place?

coldtea 6y ago
>Has that historically been true though? Why then have China and India not always led the way as super powers in the first place? Yes. Who said they hadn't? For the biggest part of history, until Europe got forward after kickstarting the industrial revolution (along with the help of colonization and the exploiting of the New World), China was the #1 economy worldwide, and quite more advanced in many ways than the rest of the world. E.g. in the Song dynasty (900-1200 A.D): "These [policies] made China a global leader, leading some historians to call this an "early modern" economy many centuries before Western Europe made its breakthrough". 1500 A.D.: In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed closely by India, both with estimated GDP's of approximately $100 billion. France was a distant third at approximately 18 billion, followed closely by Italy and Germany. What is now the United Kingdom ranked 10th, at barely one quarter the output of France (Figure 1). Heck, China was prosperous all the way back to 20-100 B.C ("Technological innovations, such as the wheelbarrow, paper and a seismograph, were invented during this period") "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp https://i.insider.com/586e8834ee14b6507e8b5b45?width=1000&fo... https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1200-2017-2017-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-chinese-economy-1...
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  > "China's economy led its European counterpart by leaps and bounds at the start of the Renaissance. China was so far ahead, in fact, that economic historian Eric L. Jones once argued that the Chinese empire "came within a hair's breadth of industrializing in the fourteenth century."" China had an iron industry earlier than that - 12th century, IIRC. It was all starting - more iron resulting in iron tools all over the place, process improvements, and so on. But then some bureaucrats (mandarins, which I think is the same thing) noticed that some of the "wrong" people were getting rich in all this, and the government forcibly shut it all down in the name of preserving social order. That's one of the strengths of America - more than anywhere else in the world, if you have the right idea, it doesn't matter if you're the "wrong" person.

mathraki 6y ago

A tradeoff that I find fascinating is that of democracy vs authoritarian gov't. It's the question of our days. I've come to the conclusion that a well functioning authoritarian government (like China's) has many short term advantages: - very efficient in redirecting resources as needed - the top concerns of the state (e.g. beat COVID, create a domestic semiconductor industry out of thin air) are addressed very efficently - no politics or stupid "check and balances" to stall momentum (e.g compare to how many of Trump's orders, even for Tiktok, were at least temporarily halted by federal judges) HOWEVER- to have a well functioning authoritarian government you need a strongman at the top (Xi, Putin etc). This is my own anecdotal estimate, but I'd say there is at least a 25% change you get someone that wants to hold on to power and willing to sacrifice their people's well being in order to do that (e.g. see China's Great Leap forward and resulting famine [1]) So you get 1, 2 3 leadership successions that work out and prosperity keeps growing... but how far will your luck take you? Even if 3/4 leaders are 'good' chances of having 5 leaders all good are 23%, and to have 10 successful successions your chances are .75^10=5%. In the long run, the authoritarian regime will collapse under its own weight. In the short term it's kicking ass. Your call which one you want to pick. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

lawrenceyan 6y ago
Exactly. Monarchies and dictatorships like you say always inevitably implode because no matter how great the current person in power is, there's nothing you can do to guarantee the quality of their successors. And it's precisely because no system of checks and balances exist that ensures once you roll badly on a succession, that whoever ends up gaining control is able to so quickly destroy whatever has previously been built up. The only way to truly ensure long term growth and stability, is to build up a robust system, independent of any individual, that has checks and balances set in place.
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
In China, this is called the "bad emperor" problem. They've seen it several times.

divbzero 6y ago

> You don't really need 750 million people when you have 1.6 billion in the first place. Why not have both? China should in no way have to be “Western” to be trusted internationally. But they could embrace the opportunity to be even more open and generous of a society than they have been in the recent past. They’re certainly strong enough for it. A few things I would personally love to see: – More transparent and consistent application of laws – Celebrate and protect all Chinese of all diversities, not just the majority who hold the most power – Avoid taking nationalism to an extreme The second and third especially are serious mistakes other nations (e.g. Britain, Japan, America) have made in recent history. It would be a gift to see China avoid the same.

arrosenberg 6y ago
One and two are basically hallmarks of western Liberalism, so this seems kind of contradictory. To my knowledge, the only historical Chinese government that we would consider Liberal is the current Taiwanese government, and even then that's a fairly recent development (30-ish years). It's not clear how the current regime could get there without wholesale changes in the power structure.
nine_k 6y ago
Careful, this sounds close to a suggestion to change China's leadership. Instead, they recently tightened the Party control over businesses, less Deng Xiaoping style, more Soviet style.
free_rms 6y ago
The thing is, your perception of them on these issues is very much colored by the fact that they're not western. It permeates all coverage of them from western sources.

foobarian 6y ago

> China is five times the US in population. Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there I feel that for at least the last century, you need to think of the US population for the purposes of talent pool sizing as more or less the entire world because of its focus on liberty and opportunity. Consider how many accomplished scientists and inventors came from other countries (including China) for this reason. The US has enjoyed a very privileged position of being able to skim the cream of the crop in this way.

woah 6y ago
We don’t allow them in any more
- wyclif 6y ago
  False. In 2015, 1,051,031 resident visas were issued to foreigners in the USA.
  - raverbashing 6y ago
    So, in 2015, and what was the wait time for those The bar gets higher every day, and it's a hassle a lot of people are not willing to go through
    - wyclif 6y ago
      Classic moving of the goalposts IMO. 2015 was the last year I could get reliable data for. Wait time? What standards are you basing your comments on and what countries are you comparing the USA to? By any reasonable standard, the US is still very pro-immigration and pro-entrepreneur.
      - raverbashing 6y ago
        > Wait time? So you don't know how long it takes to get an H1B and you want to talk about "reasonable standards"? That's funny Getting a work visa to pretty much anywhere in the EU or Canada (or maybe even Australia) is quicker than an H1B.

booleandilemma 6y ago

Given enough time, it can just throw people at problems and get there I don’t think it works that way. We’re not talking about building pyramids, or a great wall. It’s not a simple labor issue or China and India would already be winning. A corrupt authoritarian country can’t innovate at the speed of a free and democratic one.

cmehdy 6y ago
Pyramids and the great wall were pre-fossil fuels, electricity, and internet. Any useful research on sci-hub can be available to a person with half a mind in China. The Chinese space program has made leaps from being the third country in the world with a successful crewed space program in only 2003, and now on their trajectory to have a permanent space station in 2022 - only 19 years later. Progress is heavily non-linear, particularly so in the last few hundred years, and very unevenly distributed due to various factors (geography, wars, resources, population sizes, etc). The way European and even North American powers developed even 70 years back is not a direct match to how countries develop now. But you're right that it's not just a labour issue: it's also an energy issue, for power (which enabled hundred-fold ROIs compared to human work, even slave work) and materials construction (which already occurs in the countries you mentioned). And on that note, the planned construction of nuclear power plants in China is enormous[0] (including new technologies like EPR which work well already there while they're lagging behind in my home country of France) and by the end of that their total nuclear throughput will be higher than France[1]. And renewables are also rising at a fantastic pace there too. Now there's the current (and soon to be dated) GDP/added-value definition of "winning" from the west. Well, even there it's a steady improvement for China (more so than for India, that's for sure): over two-thirds of foreign executives were already saying Chinese companies were as innovative or more than their companies by 2014[2] and the time to market on their internal market is very different from the rest of the world due in part to entirely different approaches to strict internal processes, which leads to a very different approach to what's "new". As noted in the same article and in my previous comment, while the quality of things isn't quite on par with what the US or the EU are accustomed to, it's good enough for a market that is more than twice the population of the two aforementioned. And by sticking to that metric, one can easily say that what WeChat does in China is the wet dream of basically most of the biggest US tech companies. I do have many doubts about what will happen to the country and its population as the middle class grows and starts asking questions and wanting a better quality of life and, you know, perhaps want no more autocratic regimes and less corruption. Perhaps that's more a hope of mine rather than a pragmatic prediction though. I'm not sure what definitions of "winning" and "innovate" you are using, and I am curious to hear about the places where the country completely fails to innovate or "win" (this is not a sarcastic comment, I'm genuinely curious), because it's getting the world handed to it on a platter these last few years. I don't wish for the EU to emulate in any way some of the terrible things occurring in China, and I hope that the ideals of the Schengen space and practical EU protections (that I very much cherish) will be one of those things that spread to the world eventually, but I'm not seeing a fantastic amount of "winning" happening in our democratic countries lately, from one side of the Atlantic (Brexit, rise of extremes, EU issues in Poland or Hungary, lack of collective weight on major decisions, etc) or on the other side. edit: links, sorry about that. [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned-nuclear-reactors-in-various-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/268154/number-of-planned... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country [2] https://outline.com/szPNha https://outline.com/szPNha (MIT Sloan Management Review)

AmericanChopper 6y ago

China, in its current form, simply doesn’t have the potential to compete with the US in this way. It is a walled garden of corruption, who’s leaders will go to any lengths to retain total control of. Indian on the other hand, given enough time, could come to challenge the US’s economic domination.

MrYellowP 6y ago

It's actually 850 million people. "China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 0.7 percent in 2015" Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China I felt like 250 million people difference in accuracy was worth pointing out, but of course this also covers "600 million in the last decades".

cmehdy 6y ago
Thanks for the more precise information. It's indeed very much worth pointing it out when a "slight difference in accuracy" in my statement is a population equivalent to 80%+ of the US(!).
shynrou 6y ago
I wouldn't dare to call some one with an income of 60$ per month not poor...
- MrYellowP 6y ago
  It's a misleading way of measuring poverty. In fact, it is irrelevant how many units of currency you earn, as long as your units of currency cover your basic needs plus a bit. Sixty units of currency are a lot of money when rent costs you ten and bread costs you one. In Bulgaria, most things are half the price. Food and rent are damn cheap for someone who earns money in euros. They earn half as many units of currency compared to people where I live. That's an amount of currency with which I could never live where I live now, but there it would last.