Back to News
Advertisement
Advertisement

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

67% Positive

Analyzed from 317 words in the discussion.

Trending Topics

#nominal#prc#numbers#consumption#spending#education#higher#bother#draw#conclusion

Discussion (5 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jsiepkesabout 3 hours ago
That's a pretty bold claim. Seemingly by adding some numbers without explanation. Since you didn't bother to explain why you think you can draw that conclusion from those numbers, I won't bother to do the opposite.

Sufficient to say: You can't draw that conclusion from those metrics.

jjmarrabout 3 hours ago
If you add together the sizes of the EU + Chinese markets in nominal dollars it's less than the American one.

I used nominal dollars over PPP because that is what determines where multinationals choose to sell products. If one sells something for $5 in China and $10 in the USA, the PPP adjustment doesn't result in one receiving $17.

I'm not sure what other mechanisms I'd use to measure the size of the consumer market. Physical volume or mass?

maxglute33 minutes ago
>Physical volume or mass?

X items per 100k then normalize #s for population. Or actual consumptions of atoms, i.e. electricity, metals, resources.

Depends on what you want to measure, real economic activity or spreadsheet value. Nominal good rough indicator, but countries calculate consumption differently, i.e. PRC lowballs imputed rent, doesn't include social transfers in kind (basically gov expenditure that US bundles into private / household spending). Same with EU welfare state math. These numbers aren't derived from same formula (US formula distorts up).

There's also considerations like value vs extraction... i.e. huge % of US consumption is high rent health care and education. PRC generates magnitude more tertiary with fraction of education spending, we don't say they consume less education. Or American spends 40k on tertiary + healthcare vs Europoor spending 10k. US simply overpaying vs others good for nominal but not actual consumption #s. Or US healthcare spend is ~8% higher than OCED average for comparable / worse outcomes. That's ~2T per year right there, for reference entire PRC HSR network is 1T.

Now spreadsheet $$$ is also "real" in the sense it buys stuff / certain advantages / capture market demand, but it can't buy everything... i.e. a PRC industrial base. On paper it should, but in reality having massive $$$ circulating due to overly extractive consumer economy encourages other easy extractive (service) business models. Service dutch disease. So higher nominal = both strategic and detrimental. Hyper optimized for quarterly profits at expense of overall political economy.

trompabout 3 hours ago
According to that table, it's larger than the EU and China and India combined (with the leftover enough to include Belgium as well).
_Microftabout 3 hours ago
Nominally. Corrected for purchasing power, it’s only approximately 50% higher than either of them.