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PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is something of very little use. The price we pay for food in developed countries include the additional food safety they don't g
by dtquad 2y ago
PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is something of very little use. The price we pay for food in developed countries include the additional food safety
they don't get in India. The price we pay for housing include the additional quality of housing and location they don't get in Russia.
On the less serious parts of the Internet it's only Indian and Russian nationalists who bring up GDP adjusted by PPP to cope. Less serious people reply by calling it "Poor People's Points".
- nicktikhonov 2y ago[flagged]
- ajmurmann 2y agoPPP IMO is very useful when comparing quality of life for example when considering moving. However, in that case you also want look at median PPP income, not even PPP GDP per capita and especially not total PPP GDP.
- dartharva 2y agoWhy the inflammatory jibe? PPP as a concept wasn't necessarily created by or for poor countries' nationalists.
- protomolecule 2y ago[flagged]
- golergka 2y agoCan confirm. I lived for a substantial amount of time in Russia, Israel and Argentina, and in a lot of other countries for about a month. Food price comparisons at sites like Numbeo don't take quality into account at all. May be they can be used to compare heavily pre-processed foods like Doritos, but “block of Parmesan”, “a cheap bottle of local dry white wine” or “1kg of beef” can mean radically different things I'm practice.
- FooBarBizBazz 2y agoAnd, to elaborate, it's those pre-processed foods like Doritos whose prices don't scale with "cost of living". They're expensive imports, luxuries. There's an entire genre of YouTube video in which expats go to grocery stores, and it's instructive. If you want to live cheap, you need to eat like a local, not like a Westerner. (The good news is, that "foreign" diet probably has more whole foods and is probably healthier, so long as you can avoid pathogens.)
- golergka 2y agoOf course it does. Most of these processed foods are produced locally by a license. Do you think Coca-Cola ships the bottles from US all over the world?
- YZF 2y agoReminds me of the "Milky protests" in Israel when people were outraged that a Milky (some sort of processed whipped cream/chocolate milk product) in Germany was cheaper than in Israel (presumably exported from Israel to Germany but cheaper to buy in Germany).
- mytailorisrich 2y agoIf you're the CIA, the Pentagon, or the government I think ot does tell you something about other countries' capacity for production and procurement. Perhaps it costs x billions to build so many missiles in the US so you might think that, say, India can't afford that. But on the other hand it is much cheaper for them to build a missile so all in all they might be able to build as many as the US.
- okasaki 2y agoFood safety? How do you measure the effect of that? Chinese life expectancy is higher and their burden of disease is lower than the US.
- lm28469 2y agoThe US is still a third world country in some aspects
- refurb 2y agoAre you arguing life expectancy is a direct measure of food safety? That no other factors affect it?
- okasaki 2y agoWhat are you trying to say?
- refurb 2y agoThe comment said life expectancy is higher. So the question is - can you measure food safety from life expectancy? Logically it seems not considering how many other factors affect life expectancy.
- okasaki 2y agoMy comment is literally asks "how do you measure that?" and then I put out two statistics that you would assume would be correlated with food safety (along with maybe IQ, which China also does better in)
- refurb 2y agoThat’s what I’m getting at - how correlated with life expectancy do you think food safety is? And can you think of the measurement of life expectancy might differ between countries making comparison challenging?
- skybrian 2y agoI was wondering how to interpret the statistic for Russia. My guess is that Russia produces a lot of oil and gas, but it trades at a heavy discount. PPP is a way of ignoring the reasons for the discount. So maybe it’s saying that if the reasons for that discount were fixed (say, Russia makes peace) then they would get much better trade terms. But that’s a hypothetical scenario. In the real world, the geopolitical situation matters. For China, I believe the government controls the exchange rate, which results in intentionally selling Chinese goods at a discount? Hypothetically, if they let the currency rise then they’d have higher GDP, measured using actual exchange rates.
- ponector 2y agoPrice you pay for housing is mostly for location only. For example with 500k euro in Paris Saint Germain you can afford to buy 25 square meters of poor quality apartment.
- refurb 2y agoThis is true and one of the known limitations of PPP. Having lived in 6+ countries (rich and poor) there is no “equivalent” across many countries. “Shelter costs” in say the US and Laos have no equivalent. The shelter in the US is unobtainable in Laos, so saying “$30,000 spent in the US is equivalent to $1,000 spent is in Laos” is not possible.