Country and Product Complexity Rankings | Hacker News Reader

Country and Product Complexity Rankings

atlas.cid.harvard.edu

I think I must be looking at this wrong, how are "Photographic plates and film, exposed and developed, other than motion-picture film" the most complex product? Surely CPUs are harder to make than that? Maybe it is old categories and there is where new things like CPUs are found?

It gets worse. “Metal chain” is more complex (1.47) than “nuclear reactors” (1.41). “Stainless steel wire” is more complex (1.21) than “aircraft launching gear” (0.5), and so on.

It’s just a poorly defined metric. “Product complexity” is computed by looking at the countries which export the product. A product is “more complex” if its exporters make a lot of different products, and those things are commonly exported by other countries too.

So photographic equipment is only made in a small number of countries (germany, japan) which are very integrated in the world economy. Processors probably fare worse because Taiwan makes them and is “insufficiently” complex.

Indeed the definition is somewhat of an extrapolation. Product complexity defined in this way probably misses on intricate supply chain dependencies too. E.g., EUV lithography is essential for modern chips, but it is produced by ASML in NL - which is otherwise in steady economic complexity decline for decades (from rank 15 in 1995 to rank 26 in 2021). Small country specialization might not be normalized adequately.

Eyeballing the rankings the methodology is probably biased towards manufacturing materials supply chain complexity rather than "knowledge economy" complexity.

Nevertheless its probably directionally correct at more aggregate levels.

You answered your question.

Making a CPU requires exactly "photographic plates and film, exposed and developed, other than motion-picture film", i.e lithography and more and more extreme wavelengths.

A neat idea, but peeling back into the computations, one has to worry. The details of calculations are suspiciously “mathy” - they are embarrassingly simple, but dressed up in fancier language that seems intended to impress and confuse.

For example, take the computation for (product) “Diversity”: https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/glossary

“Imagine a matrix, M_c,p, in which rows represent different countries and columns represent different products. An element of the matrix is equal to 1 if country C produces product P (with RCA greater than 1), and 0 otherwise. We can measure diversity (and ubiquity) simply by summing over the rows (or columns) of that matrix. Formally,

Diversity = k_c,0 = ∑_p (M_cp)”

This is an abstruse way of just saying “diversity is the number of unique products a country exports”. Which is fine! But why not say that?

This is a common thing in economics, and it should raise our suspicion that the systems are far less sophisticated, and just supposed to bamboozle us to see past the underlying poor assumptions.

You are in for a surprise, most fields have the exact same kind of people in academia.

Computer science is probably the worst as it is actually close to mathematics.

Mathematics too is the same, when you break some of the more recent papers down, you will notice most of it looks like some kind of cover up for what could be explained in few simple sentences.

I wish there was a rule in publishing to including a section called "explained like you are 5"

I notice a pattern, good papers have very little mathiness to them. The more research paper mill'ey they get, the more mathier they become.

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