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No, there's no need to talk about it urgently. He pulls a sleight of hand by talking about purchasing power parity. But PPP isn't that meaningful for things t
by freddie_mercury 4y ago
No, there's no need to talk about it urgently.
He pulls a sleight of hand by talking about purchasing power parity.
But PPP isn't that meaningful for things that priced globally, which an awful lot of high tech stuff is.
China's PPP is about 4:1 according to
https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...
China's ZTZ-99 main battle tank apparently costs around $2.6 million. A German Leopard 2 is around $5.7 million.
You can see they don't actually get 4:1 savings, so using PPP is misleading.
- civilized 4y agoAh, I think that makes sense? Let me guess at the idea here: is it something like, "just because Chinas' domestically produced rice and wheat (for example) are a lot cheaper than the same in Western countries doesn't mean tanks and computers are, because a lot of the materials for the latter are produced by high-income countries and China pays about the same for them as anyone else" Still, if the analysis is off because it used a 4:1 PPP when it should have used something more like 2:1, that would still suggest a problem? Unless the Chinese goods are inferior.
- cma 4y agoRice and wheat are priced somewhat globally too, the canonical examples are service things like haircuts, childcare, etc. that can only be provided locally.
- yunohn 4y agoHe’s not using the general PPP measure - he’s just using the same concept applied to military tech. He clearly qualified it by saying “to reach the same capability”.