4 ms·

Thanks for your detailed analysis. Do the numbers change when using PPP GDP instead?

• adventured 4y ago
  It's unfortunately far more difficult to find long-term historical PPP figures. The bigger question is whether you put much stock into PPP. I personally don't, I consider it a very weak economic metric, poorly constructed and poorly tracked. There are is no economist army traversing the globe every year and actually accurately tracking PPP nation by nation (every nation and to the great depth required); nobody does that, they slap giant guesses on it year after year, trying to extrapolate from a small basket of signals in a given country, and starting from the base GDP figures. PPP pretends that Puerto Rico is above Portugal (and nearly on par with Spain or Estonia), Russia is on par with Greece, and China is on par with Botswana. It's a bad, unreliable joke. I think in place of PPP, it's almost always better to do a deep dive on a given country on its various quality of life metrics, even though those are also at times difficult to compare nation to nation (due to variances in how each country measures). For example, I don't think it's difficult to show that Finland has a comparable or higher quality of life than the US (I believe it's solidly higher personally, particularly at the median or lower), despite the $20k GDP per capita gap. The US is typically used as the base for PPP, so starting at $76k for the US, you then have Canada and Finland at $58k and $57k on PPP - do I really believe there is such a gap between the US and those two on PPP? I'd be very skeptical, it's another case where PPP doesn't do a very good job.