Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

China is becoming an absolute economic monster. I mean that with no negative connotations. And we're not talking trailing-edge tech here, but leading-edge.

FTA:

“The institution established after the first major oil crisis in 1973 said 165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply. Solar grew by 50 percent, with almost half new plants built in China.”

See also:

https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publicatio...

“In 2016, China was by far the largest electric car market, accounting for more than 40% of the electric cars sold in the world and more than double the amount sold in the United States”

And:

http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...

“Mainland China has 37 nuclear power reactors in operation, about 20 under construction, and more about to start construction. The reactors under construction include some of the world's most advanced, to give a 70% increase of nuclear capacity to 58 GWe by 2020-21. Plans are for up to 150 GWe by 2030, and much more by 2050.”

Economies by GDP PPP:

http://statisticstimes.com/economy/countries-by-projected-gd...

   China:   23,194.411
   USA:     19,417.144
   India:   9,489.302
   Japan:   5,420.228
   Germany: 4,134.668
   Rest:    meh

(in billions of $ of course)

I'm sure there are lots more examples.

GDP PPP is a near worthless reference for countries like China and India. India has a billion people living in extreme poverty, with the word extreme not doing the context justice. China still has about half a billion people living in that type of poverty as well. Both of those are semi-masked by the fantasy PPP figures.

PPP is a way of pretending that just because you can afford a Starbucks cup of coffee in Beijing, you're economically equivalent to someone earning $60,000 per year in Frankfurt. Back in reality, there are vast objective economic differences of reality that go with comparing China vs highly developed nations on PPP. Can you afford to travel to Paris or Toronto? Can you afford a BMW or Mercedes (cheap Chinese cars are death boxes on wheels)? Can your savings or income get you out of cities with extreme pollution so you can live better? Do you have access to the kind of healthcare available in Finland or Denmark? What kind of social safety net does your nation provide?

Once you get much beyond comparing hamburger prices, the value of the PPP premise collapses when comparing highly developed nations vs eg China.

Every system is flawed. Even within a single nation, a salary of £26,000 is great if you live in Aberystwyth, a struggle if you live in London.

Rubbish. Where are the numbers to prove what you're saying?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/8-facts-about-chinas-...

In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And shrinking each year.

“At the outset of the reforms in 1978, China was poor. It had a GDP per capita level similar to Zambia – lower than half of the Asian average and lower than two thirds of the African average. China experienced an average GDP growth of close to 10% per year until 2014, raising per capita GDP almost 49-fold, from 155 current US Dollars (1978) to 7,590 US Dollars in 2014, lifting 800 million people out of poverty – an unparalleled achievement. In urban centres in China, poverty has been virtually eliminated.”

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At market rates China's economy will be the biggest in the world sometime in the mid-20s. I have never seen anywhere that PPP† is a worthless metric. Point me to a decent source that corroborates your opinion.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

> In 2012 extreme poverty in India was 20%, bit less than 10% in China. And shrinking each year.

Saying that extreme poverty in India is 20%, is grotesquely absurd. As recently as 2014, half of India's population (58%, or ~750 million people) was living on about $3 per day. Pretending that $1.25 is extreme poverty, but $3 per day isn't, is the obvious absurd part. That just demonstrates again how worthless PPP is. $3 per day is objective extreme poverty no matter how one attempts to hide from that fact.

I stated my reasons for why I believe PPP is worthless, numerous times over. Let's see you refute what I said. There are blatant objective economic lines involved in the standard of living gap between China and highly developed nations - which PPP as a fantasy attempts to ignore - and I listed several of them.

Going from $1.25/person/day to $3/person/day might do nothing for you in Manhattan, but in Nairobi it makes the difference between a shack in a shanty town in the first instance, and indoor plumbing, locked doors, and an electricity supply in the second.

Source: I’ve visited a home in Nairobi whose rent was in the order of $1,000 per year including bills, and housing 4 people.

Next line in the 4th paragraph of the Wikipedia article you quoted, “According to the Modified Mixed Reference Period (MMRP) concept proposed by World Bank in 2015, India's poverty rate for period 2011-12 stood at 12.4% of the total population, or about 172 million people; taking the revised poverty line as $1.90.” (And that's already two years out of date and India's economy is growing at ~7% annually.)

I'm not arguing with you any more because you use phrases and terms like "grotesquely absurd", "near worthless", and "fantasy" which are all both hyperbolic and uncharitable. I'm not arguing that there isn't poverty in India and China, I'm arguing that though there is poverty, and some of it extreme, both countries are raising millions out of poverty annually. Only this month India announced the world's largest electrification scheme† to electrify the remaining population. And GDP PPP is a way to measure that change, economists agree on this to the best of my knowledge. I'm not taking your word for it, show me a source that disagrees.

† http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41397022

For many location-dependent services, which are a major part of modern economies, PPP GDP is a more appropriate measure than nominal GDP. Thai food in a decent restaurant in Thailand costs less than a comparable meal, Thai or another cuisine, in the States. Basic healthcare in many developing countries costs a fraction of the same services in the US with similar quality.

GDP is a near worthless reference for comparing things as well [1]. The PPP doesn't really matter that much in correcting for its deficiencies.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/gdp/

You're bringing in quality of life issues, which it's true are very different between the developing and developed countries today, and not accounted for in PPP.

But that being said, it's a huge exaggeration to say 1 billion are living in extreme poverty in India, much as it would be inaccurate to say that the 30% of the Indian population categorized as the middle class has the same quality of life standards as their analogues in the developed world.

During the time of the greatest industrial development in the US, working class people had to cope with very extreme environmental hazards that diminished their quality of life, i.e. in Gary, Indiana:

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/638.html https://www.amazon.com/Environmental-Inequalities-Industrial...

To your point RE: the electric car market: It is noteworthy that the GM announcement this past week - that they will be focusing on an "All electric" future - seems to have been a strategic decision made largely because China is pushing the entire auto-market in that direction.

Indeed, they all seem to have made it a priority to meet China's aggressive push for EVs:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/china-to-...

Regulated capitalism does work. Who knew?!

Funny..

The market only exists because of the rule of law, we just argue about the detail.

GM sells more cars in China than the US.

https://www.wired.com/story/general-motors-electric-cars-pla...

I remember reading an article several years ago about China's economic leadership. At that time it said that it's not quite clear whether or not China leads the U.S., but even if it led it, it probably wouldn't make a big deal out of it, because it doesn't want to have that responsibility of being the most powerful nation on Earth (at least economically).

I think China is starting to become ready to take that leadership role, especially when the U.S. government seems to run around like a headless chicken, arguing about the role of science, or whether or not coal has a future, or that climate change is real, having schizophrenic and increasingly more bully-like foreign policies, and so on.

I'm not particularly looking forward to China becoming the world's leader, because just like the US had a positive influence on other democracies in the past decades, I expect China to have a mainly negative influence on other democracies in terms of human rights and other stuff like that. I'm just saying that this is going to happen, while the U.S. decays.

It also helps that China has 4x the population of U.S., so it's almost as if it's only a matter of time before China has a stronger economy. Well, unless AI does steal everyone's jobs, and then I suppose China would have a bigger problem on its hands than anyone else...

China isn't close to having a larger economy than the US. The US is ~60% larger and is growing its economy as fast as China in dollar terms.

2014 to 2015, the US added roughly $650b to its economy, China added $580b. 2015 to 2016, the US added $530b, China added $140 billion (due to the dollar's return to being strong).

And if we're talking coal, China is the king of coal. They have no plans what-so-ever to do away with it any time soon. They're not reducing their use of coal, in fact they're expanding their coal use, while simultaneously adding a lot of renewable energy. Meanwhile the US has reduced its coal use by about 1/3 in a decade. This chart says it all:

https://i.imgur.com/hcPeoAB.png

> having schizophrenic and increasingly more bully-like foreign policies

Uh, you mean like using military aggression to annex a massive area of six other nation's territories in the South China Sea? Or did you mean the constant military threat to use force to invade and annex the independent nation of Taiwan?

When was the last time the US annexed territory like that or the last time official US policy was to annex another nation when a convenient opportunity presents? Imagine, tomorrow the US decides to annex all of Mexico's gulf water territory, and then some more territory in the Caribbean Sea from six or seven other nations. The next day, the US declares that Toronto and Vancouver belong to the US, and that it has the right to invade at any time to force that outcome. That would be almost equivalent to what China is doing right now.

Economic growth is usually measured in percentage terms. There are good reasons for that. If they can keep the growth rate, the Chinese economy will be larger than the US in about 10 or 15 years.

China's is still a developing economy and they have a lot of ways to increase productivity compared to the US. They are also at a leading edge in many technologies of the future so they do not need to spend as much as other developing countries to purchase them from abroad.

China's growth rate may slow down but it will continue to be faster than the US rate for many years.

US Dollar is the world's reserve currency. If US dollar becomes less strong in the future, the size of US economy may not be as large in relative term anymore. The petrodollar system may not be as powerful when renewables are more important. Perhaps China also considers this when they push so hard for renewables.

> They have no plans what-so-ever to do away with it any time soon. They're not reducing their use of coal, in fact they're expanding their coal use,

That's not in fact true any more. China's coal consumption peaked in 2013, and has been falling for 3-4 years.

That's why your parent's graph went only to 2012. There's no point in arguing with adventured, they're obviously only interested in using skewed stats to bolster their world view.

The very first hit on Google for "Chinese" "Coal" "Consumption" is a January 2017 article from the World Resources Institute whose title reads, “China’s Decline in Coal Consumption Drives Global Slowdown in Emissions”

http://www.wri.org/blog/2017/01/china%E2%80%99s-decline-coal...

Who knows what the future may hold?

Very hard to predict geopolitical outcomes.

Humans need more humility in the face of future uncertainties. Let us make our decisions based on what players do, not what we think they might do. Considering that China does not as far as we know engage in unilateral drone strikes, extraordinary rendition, and extra-legal imprisonment one could argue that (internal political freedoms aside) China may be a better global steward than the current US/Nato crew.

As you say, Given that China has 4x the pop., eventually it should have 4x the economic might, all other things being equal (which of course they are not!).

Please, when making comparison, don't use PPP - it's misleading for most people.

Please explain.

PPP is inherently tied to the basket of goods, but the baskets aren't standard. Even if they had the same products in it (they don't), products themselves can vary a lot. Some yogurt can be made from real milk made in a clean factory or can be a fake based on palm oil mixed in a dirty garage with rats and no health controls.

It also includes the cost of housing, so you end up comparing building-controlled and highly regulated areas like Bay Area with who knows what in India.

Macro economics aside - the demand for renewables and EV in China is outsized due to how polluted it's become:

https://youtu.be/2nFZaSbkf0U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwOBRH56Ic0

Doesn't that make it more acute rather than outsized?

Is anyone rational committed to long-term/indefinite use of fossil fuels?

If not, isn't this simply a matter of switching over?

China has 100 cities with a population greater than 1 million. And they are planning to build another 100 cities with 1 million+ people in the next 10 year.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/mar/20/china-100-cit...

To put that into perspective, europe has 33.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_cities_by_pop...

We have 10.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

There has been a correlation between cities and civilization. The rise of cities and economic growth/production. And the rise of cities and power.

It happened with ancient civilizations. It happened with europe. It happened with the US. The question is whether this will hold for china and what it will mean for the world.

They are building a university every week.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-35776555

This is similar to what we did in the US in the 1800s as our economy grew by leaps and bounds. Most of our top universities from stanford to MIT were founded in the 1800s.

Will the european and american model of the past 500 years hold for china? How will they maneuver through the current international order to get the resources they need for their cities and to gain access to markets?

If the model holds, then we are looking at an explosion of science, culture, innovation and growth. But the worrisome part is that europe and american also expanded, stole land, resources and conquered territories.

Again, more proof if one needed it. And fascinating links that you provide that shows the societal changes are massive in terms of urbanisation and education.

I think the difference this time is that there is nowhere to expand to that is way "behind". The world has already globalised to a great degree.

You raise interesting questions and I'm glad you put your thoughts as questions rather than the usual "this will happen" or "that will happen" when the truth is it'll only be obvious through hindsight or unless we get far better societal predictive tools.

> China has 100 cities with a population greater than 1 million.

Correction: China has 102 (specifically) urban areas over 1 million people. The same report lists 42 for the US (I didn't bother to count Europe, but I think it's larger).

"City" is an arbitrary and unreliable unit of measure. For example, there are over 6 million people in South Florida, but no city over 500,000 people and only two over 200,000.

that might be the case; but many economists worry about China over-investing in infrastructure at the moment. ..

The USA also over invested in infrastructure at various points. During the transcontinental railroad boom companies built way more tracks than were actually needed at the time. Some companies when bankrupt, but eventually demand caught up with supply and those tracks delivered major benefits for long-term economic growth. The same thing happened with backbone fiber optic lines during the first Internet boom.

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