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Comment by ternaryoperator | Hacker News Reader

For comparison, using the more traditional measure of an economy's size, nominal GDP, the US economy is about 2x the size of China's. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

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Having moved between developing and developed countries recently, I was reminded of what GDP in PPP misses. It's even cruder than how inflation is measured through CPI or RPI. In one country it might be cheaper to get services that depend on a lot of labour, like restaurant meals, cleaning and tailoring, but in another country you can walk or take public transport to the restaurant or tailor without the fear of being the victim of a crime. You can buy ketchup for cheaper, but it is not necessarily as safe or hygienic, it won't have seals under the cap in the store, you won't have as many options to choose from, etc. I think in a globalised world and especially when you look at commodidity prices, PPP is good to measure if people have 'enough' to live on in a particular location but for comparison between countries it's pretty meaningless.

yeah, and if china balanced to the US in real terms, all that industry they sucked up would flee thus dropping them right back down

>but in another country you can walk or take public transport to the restaurant or tailor without the fear of being the victim of a crime

That's unrelated to the prices. 3 relatively poor countries are in fact much safer than the US [0], and all safer ones are poorer than US.

>PPP is good to measure if people have 'enough' to live on in a particular location but for comparison between countries it's pretty meaningless.

The overwhelming majority of living costs are local (especially food production), so PPP is a very good measurement. Prices of electronics and oil aren't that important for day-to-day living.

You seem to ignore the fact that, even in PPP, the average Chinese is really poor. It's just that their standard of living is $12k poor, not $7k poor.

[0] http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/topics/safety/

... and the EU is number one!

This exact story was submitted a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8700954

Weird, must have flowed through too quickly at lunch time, or the original article's title was not good.

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