It’s my wife’s favorite part about these videos when I put them on in the living room. We’re both really sorry for your loss and I’m sure you gave Macrocat a great life.
There was a similar approach to research carried out by Prosper Australia looking at under reported vacant properties in Melbourne in 2017, but rather tha using lights they looked at water records which revealed many supposedly occupied properties had less water usage than a dripping tap.
@@patrickriarchy1976 Partly as that creates the obvious perverse incentive to hide the fact, but vancancy rates were high in general due to a highly speculative period in Oz RE where buyers will favour liquidity over yields. Not sure how accurate estimate levels of vacancy are or were before that in general but I expect they are generally under estimated in many markets. The perverse incentive doesn't just apply to vacancy tax. Just anecdotally here in London, UK a person 'lived' in the downstairs flat from me from 2012-15 ish, but was actually only there about 3 weekends over the 3 years they owned it. (suited me as no noise) The reason being as it was officially owner occupied it incurred no capital gains tax on sale which would have been pretty substantial. Create an exemption, and some people find ways to qualify for that.
@@sieuwkedevries5211 It's more that they are speculating on the growth house prices, but didn't want to deal with the hassle ir risk of having tenants and wanted to be able to market and sell the house quickly without having to deal with giving notice to the tenant or having to repair the wear and tear caused by people living there.
What I would love to see is some independent studies trying to calculate the same deflation factor using different data sources. Then we could compare their error bars.
Thanks for providing actual quality content while protecting the researchers values AND explaining them to everyone. The world needs more people like you!
But they kept the same economic growth for 50 years which is higher than Taiwan and South Korea. Making it the country with the highest economic growth in the world for 50 years straight seems somewhat suspicious especially when the Soviet Union also lied about its Economic growth.
@@Kalletheswede US lied and is still lying about its gdp. Most economists estimated that US' gdp should be 1/8 of its actual claim as its gdp value is grossly overinflated by blatant overprinting of its currency and grossly over-valued stocks. In real comparison, even the daily food consumption per capita of each Chinese is 10 times better than Americans.
There is a MAJOR flaw in this paper. MOST countries that grow the fastest today are not Western Style Democracies and would be classified as "authoritarians". China, Vietnam, India, even Malaysia and Indonesia would be classified like that. Second, the MAJORITY of he poor countries of the world are to some extent authoritarian, and poor low and middle income countries tend to grow more than high income countries, where the vast majority of the MINORITY of countries that are Western Style democracies on our planet are. Simply because, contrary to what most Westerners think, the MAJORITY of planet Earth is made up by countries that would be considered "non-democratic". When it comes to low and middle income countries, where most likely you'll find a fast growing economy, that percentage is even higher. Which brings the problem of how those countries where determined to be "dictatorships" in the first place as well. In other words, most countries that grow fast would be classified as "dictatorships" (whether it being true or not). And that not because dictatorships are particularly good at making the economy grow (since most authoritarian countries are poor and people don't give a flying s** about them unless they are growing and defying the hegemony of the West) but simply because, again, it needs to be stressed again, MOST countries on planet Earth would be classified as authoritarians. Hence, in simple terms, if we will se a poor country becoming a rich country MOST LIKELY it will be a country classified that way. So the paper ASSUMES that "authoritarian countries" lie because they grow more when in fact countries that grow more in its vast majority are even as authoritarian or, at least, not mature democracies. OF COURSE the mature democracies will grow less. They are the richest countries on Earth.
Another reason (in addition to the one I posted on air quality) for China's night lights not growing as fast as gdp could be that a lot of Chinas economic activity was building "Ghost Cities" and properties that were not inhabited, but instead held as a second home. These would not generate as much light, as only infrastructure surrounding the uninhabited skyscrapers would be lit.
That right, but also can be worse, the ghost cities can qualify as wasted money, second home for vacation or work can be an asset, but those uses aren't realized in China, compounding the fact that many of those house are leases, that in 70 years will be lost money anyways
The problem there is that so many of these secondary homes are rotten tail projects, homes that have not started or completed its construction phase and the original mortgage is essentially stolen into China's Ponzi scheme. Many citizens are being asked to essentially pay a full second mortgage to resume construction, with many of these projects having serious problems, such as concrete of such poor quality that you can break it by hand, not reinforced with rebar, etc. It is not like say here in the US where when you buy a secondary home, you then have the actual home. In China, the "house" is more of a "promise to build a house with substandard construction."
@@MoneyMacro I think it is a flaw to assume that wealth distribution in autocratic countries is similar to democratic countries. A country 1000 people earning 100k$ per annum will cast much much more light than an impoverished country with 10 big shots earning 10M$ per annum even though the wealth is the same. If we look solely based on light emitted it might look like the first country is richer even though the second country is clearly equally rich in terms of money.
@@lakshmanb5604 Did you watch the video? the paper looked at all the factors that could explain the differences, if you disagree with them maybe go read the paper fight?
Couple of issues with this study. First, the relationship with night light and GDP has been shown to depend on the level of urbanization. For example, study by Xaquín S.Pérez-Sindín et al. (2021) found that the relationship between satellite measured night light and GDP was strongest for urban areas (coefficient of 0.71 with an R2 of 0.5 for 500K centers vs.0.57 and an R2 of 0.32 for areas with 20-50K). Although having a large population, China is still less urbanized than the US and most Western European countries. Urbanization in China is ~61% vs. 82% in the US, with the difference being much larger during the 1990 - 2010 period. Additionally, Martinez assumes that the relationship between night light and GDP is linear. There's no reason to assume this as you might expect that increased GDP in highly developed countries might be near a saturation point; at some point this relationship will break down as economic growth is less tied to population growth and increased light generation (just an aside, health expenditure as a fraction of GPD in the US is 19% and has been a major contributor to US GDP growth. How is that tied to light generation?). Further, the R2 values are generally low (~0.3), indicating that there are a host of other factors far greater than night light that account for changes in GDP. Again, linear regression with values this low can't be used to conclude something as specific as China lying about its GDP numbers. Finally, the use of the "Freedom Index" is a little dubious. It seems unlikely that something as simplistic and ideological as a "Freedom Index" will capture any nuance in something as complex as a modern government. Correlation is not causation. In complex systems (especially anything as complex as economies and government) one will always find an endless number of variables that are weakly correlated. However, explaining how these variables relate mechanistically and causally is the hard part, which Martinez fails to do. When coupled with the low R2 values and low correlation there really isn't anything specific one can say about how governments lie about GDP measures. If this was a paper in a prestigious science journal it would have been rejected, not because its methods are wrong, but rather because its conclusion cannot be justified on the basis of the results and analyses presented. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there is a relationship between night light and GDP (with plenty of unexplained variance) and lots of variability between countries, regardless of whether we subjectively classify them as free or not.
Growth in urbanization in China has been dramatic over this period, from 23% in 1990 to close to 64% in 2020, compared with 75%v to 82% in the US. Given what you say above, shouldn't we expect the night life growth to be even faster than GDP growth in China over the same period, rather than less?
@@StevenBerg123 It may very well be a good value for a social science (I'm not in the field of social sciences) but if that is your analysis and value then you have to adjust your conclusions in accordance. You can't make such specific and extraordinary claims (seriously, claiming China is lying and that its economy is 60% less than claimed because it's an autocratic government is a pretty extraordinary and specific conclusion in the field of social sciences) without extraordinary data and more specific results. If someone claimed that the US economy is half of what the government claimed based on, for example, internet usage, nobody would take that seriously without additional data and analyses. Why should we hold any claim about China to a lower standard?
Sure, but it also means that in the early stages of growth, when China's was a more rural society, light measures were a very poor indicator of economic growth. My point was that the level of light and GPD growth will not be linearly related since a country's level of urbanization will change over time, especially a country undergoing rapid development. So, for example, in the early period, when China was more rural and light levels were poorly correlated with GDP, the value would be weighed differently than values when the country was more urbanized. Hence, the relationship between light and GDP will not be linear across time and economic development as assumed by the study. Hence a low value with lots of unexplained variance doesn't really provide any mechanistic insight to reported GDP and light, especially since the definition of what is being compared (autocratic vs. democratic) is so vague and poorly defined. If you read the original study, Martinez also excluded a lot of autocratic countries that don't fit the trend because he claims they don't have any incentive to lie about GDP (mostly West African countries that receive aid and are friendly to Western interests). Why do this if you think autocratic governance is the major motivator for exaggerating GDP numbers. Clearly, things are way more complex than this.
I know I’m late but great vid man I’m sorry for your loss it’s never easy losing a family member who’s been with you for a long time. I’m new to the channel but I love the effort you give to these videos and your cat who was always apart of them. Best wishes and prayers for you and your cat ❤
I love this channel and the information it presents... but i also loved the glimpses of Macrocat. He contributed to the vibe of the channel and did a good job keeping things relaxed and not over-serious. Thank you for mentioning that he did not suffer... but my heart is still in mourning for Henry. RIP Macrocat and rest easy.
Thank you so much for having Henry lighten us up all this time. This wonderful cat brought joy to you and so many others here. I'm know he too is grateful for all the love you gave him. Rest in Peace, dear Macrocat. F
I haven't read the paper, but one variable to look into is population density in cities. Most urban growth in China seems to be "vertical", that is in tall skyscarpers that will emit proportionally less light per unit area than a growth based on sub-urban sprawl.
That makes sense for residential and office space, but they're also rather less relevant than industrial and retail space when it comes to GDP. retail effectively has a limit to how far up you can go (due to the logistics of getting both products and customers in and out), and industrial just doesn't really compress like that unless you start doing rather noteworthy and exotic things. Or at least, such is my understanding.
Sounds logical, but look at the lights on any map of Manhattan, and they are the brightest. For me, to see how China has manipulated data for decades with reporting GDP of 6% one quarter, 6.1% the next, then 6.2% the next. No legitimate country would report numbers in such a steady manner. Look at the democratic countries and they are 4.0% one quarter, 2.5% the next, 3.2 the next. China has their municipalities report that growth to make their numbers stay the course and have steady growth for their "image", not reality. Soon reality will catch up with them. Can you imagine any legitimate country missing out on a GDP report? That's what China has done because they are slowing down and don't want to admit it or not until the CCP party is over.
@@robinsoncrusoeonmars8594 I think you're not quite familiar with the usual grography of chinese cities(spoiler it's totally different from Manhatta) For starters, Manhattan is extremely small and has a population density of over 72,000 people, no city in mainland China is that dense; it has been fully occupied for over 100 years, the only way to buil new stuff is by tearing old stuff down, theres barely a centimeter of undevelopped land in Manhattan. For contrast, cities in china have enormous land area, also being the center of administration of dozens of villages and smaller towns, so the population density is always relatively low; this one might sound a bit astonishing to you if youre from the US, but the average residential building in China is still taller than most buildings in Manhattan(because most of it was built a century ago, when there was no better technology. Also contrary to the popular belief, appartaments in mainland China are actually quite spacious, they only got a bad reputation because of Hong Kong and Macau); if you look on google maps you'll notice that in general urban areas in China are covered by HUGE parks, sometimes built right in the downtown areas, which is probably why it's not as bright as you'd expect. Also, Manhattan has a per capita of over 100,000USD, theres no reason to compare it to anywhere in China anyway.
@Keyboard Emperor To build empty ghost cities and get itself into a major debt crisis. Good job! Btw the US build more aircraft carriers in 10 years than China in 2000 years.
China also has vertical residential facilities, but so do other countries. Since the more vertical, the higher the population density, so this can be verified through population density. According to that, the population density of India is higher than that of China. Many cities, such as Delhi in India, New York in the United States, Shanghai in Egypt, and Seoul in South Korea, have higher population densities than China. Well, yeah. Houses usually turn off the lights for sleep at night. Right? If so, the facilities that shine even at night are probably factories. But factories usually don't build high. The reason is.... The reason has been explained by many others. lol Then, China's GDP statistics should not be different from other countries. Because every country in the world has the same height of factories. +) How did the idea that only China build skyscrapers and live on?
Light surely also depends on things like population density and wealth disparity. The US typically has fairly spread out suburbs compared to the high-rise flats seen in China's cities. Surely this means one model for light intensity can't just be flatly applied to the other country and extrapolated from.
Yeah overall this model just seems too simplistic. A rough estimate is fine, but to present the calculations as anything concrete is a bit irresponsible since it misses out on way too many factors like population density/concentrations, industries involved, how high-rises affect perceived luminosity at night, and not to mention the sample size used in the original study only extends until 2008.
As a chinese, I am aware of how Marco says the GDP number could be fabricated, I know that well my family member told me a lot and I think many Chinese would joke about it too(by exchanging your old shoes with your friends many many times, now you get a high GDP) but I would also doubt the measurements of just using light intensity to measure GDP. And you are right I think it might be due to there are taller buildings which covers up individual light useage There are several possible other reasons I come up with my friends: 1. Chinese people stay up less at night because of culture of longevity than westerners. Westerners can stay up all night partying. Chinese people value sleep cycle more. Although, yes there are many Chinese people who still stay up late playing majiang or clubing but few. 2. electricity is not cheap. 3. retailing and face-to-face buisnesses are less and less popular because the digitalization and e-commerce, most people can stay at home not going out and live a life. So retailers which emit light is less.
While this model is very rough, it makes sense. This is especially so given that China has had the largest transfer of population from rural areas to urban areas in history over the past 2 decades. They should have very intense increases of light at night in and around their urban areas, and if they don't then something is not right. If even the Chinese Premier looks at power consumption levels rather than official economic data to make his judgement on economic growth, then the theory spoken of in this video makes even more sense.
12:08 the conclusion is pretty dramatic, a country with 3 times higher GDP apparently has poorer infrastrcture, less industrial output (like cars, electronics, any type of metal refining, shell production, etc), similar retail consumption, lower literacy rate (elementary education spending), less home owners, etc.
Few MAJOR red flags with this paper: > Data was originally collected by the U.S. Air Force on behalf of the MIC - untrustworthy collector, potential data manipulation > Luminosity measurements recorded during mid-eve period (8:30-10pm) across the year *rather than an early eve period closer to standard working hours* (e.g. 6pm-9pm), measured as averaged pixel intensity measurements - a time period that would correlate more to household electricity use than industrial electricity use > No positive control used as another correlate of GDP (e.g. tax data) > No 'null hypothesis' - the paper opens with the premise that autocratic regimes *do* (rather than *may*) exaggerate GDP once surpassing the GNI per capita threshold for claiming benefits through the International Development Association (IDA) > No negative control used - e.g. the author could, and in my opinion should, have been also using NTL to correlate GNI per capita with household electricity use, for which the mid-eve period he measured would be a better correlate. This is because GNI per capita is the threshold at which regimes may claim financial aid from the GNI, so the incentive for low-income developing countries would be to fudge the statistics for as long as possible to maintain aid - another indicator of regime untrustworthiness. To his credit, the paper's author did rigourously collate and analyse this data, and shows in Table C4 the year at which countries became ineligible for IDA assistance. China became ineligible in 2000, 4 years behind of Indonesia (dictatorship until 1999) but 10 years ahead of democratic India and 13 years ahead of Pakistan (dictatorship in 1999 gradually democratised in the 00's and 10's)
@@oldernu1250 I don't get why western people are scared of China, so what if they have a different government; it clearly works for them. It feels like the western media just wants to see China fail. Why don't we want to help each other succeed?
My biggest concern is the paper's claim to be able to control for confounding variables. Not just are there so many crucial factors to consider but it's easy to see how they might correlate strongly with a countries status of democracy. However, your comparison between India and China seems very interesting. It should be much more doable to examine the reasons for their specific discrepancy in light to gdp growth rates.
India Standard Time is 2.5 hours behind China Standard Time. Meaning if you measure the light intensity of Indian cities at their peak values, ~8:00PM, most Chinese have already gone to bed. This, of course, assumes those images weren't modified. Forget satellite photos, just look at power generation numbers. China generally produces more than 5 times that of India, or about twice as much as the United States.
China is the only developing country to successfully prevent informal settlements, i.e shanty towns, being built. Over 1 million people live in basements in Beijing whereas India has large slums built entirely above ground.
The correlation on the graph he shows for china vs india seems to be incredibly low though. Like, I haven't checked the math, but just look at it, there's no way the data gives strong support for those lines
This kind of real question asking followed by open consideration of both the alternatives and implications of the inquiry is what science, finance, and policy making needs more of today. Great video! Sorry for your loss with Henry's passing, he was great as Macrocat.
One of the reasons may indeed be that ghost cities were counted in GDP but once built turn into a mere deadweight. Another (and more speculative) one is that China may have overstated its population, especially the number of working age people.
@@omega6311 If they did not release their low birthrate, how did you know that their birthrate was low? The fact, you, like so many of the silly classes, will accept anything puts Chian is a negative light. The fact that Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea and Switzerland have lower birthrate than China does not seem to indicate anything negative for those countries. Moreover, the fact that America's birthrate is no better than China's is of even lesser significance. China has raised almost a billion people out of abject poverty, and they have also improved the quality of life for not just their own people, but for many other countries across the world. What America has done in the same period of time is to invaded, occupy, kill and destroy the lives of millions of people across the world. Just look at the facts. They are there for anyone to see.
There is one concern with nightlight data that you could mention : saturation. It doesn't mean that the calculation is wrong or anything like that, but rather than a straight line it's likely that the relationship between nightlight growth and GDP growth is concave in GDP (when GDP becomes larger, light intensity is more saturated so it grows slower for the same growth rate of the economy). So my only concern with the paper is that the relationship is overstated because Chinese economic growth is concentrated in rich areas where saturation is more of a thing. It would be cool to check the relationship for different provinces in China as a robustness check if you have the data !
Honestly, it sounds like you've got a chunk of money sitting in China, and this is a rationalization to make yourself feel better rather than any logical conclusion or argument.
@@diegomartinez6100 Nah I'm an academic doing economic research using nightlight as well so I was just pointing out the caveats that we all face when working on this ! What an aggressive tone !
@@abd5596 Apologies if I came off that way, the Chinese economy is like the recent American election, subject to a lot of hype and incorrect numbers because of vested interests. A lot of the analysis regarding China has felt like people rationalizing their beliefs as opposed to anything factual, especially when you take into account the irregularities regarding their economy and population as well, both of which have been inflated by people on the ground that just want more funding for their particular municipality/regional government. Personally, I expect the CCP to spend the next couple of years dealing with threats to it's very existence, akin to '89 and this time furthered by the advent of the internet. People now can see what the other side lives like, and Xi has neither the chutzpah nor the balls to push China back to a pre-Deng Xiaoping sort of society.
I agree with most of the above, but a different approach. In the video the question was: Do you trust China's numbers or this research? I would trust the numbers of almost anybody over the official numbers of China. Most importantly I observed a few years ago how shipping went down and two big shipping companies went bust (around 2015/16 iirc). China's exports faltered but the official gdp growth numbers were +6.5% as forecast. I don't think so. And they fudged the numbers for decades. So yeah, I believe the research 100%.
I worked in both US and China. When I worked in US, we left all lights on for thew whole night even nobody in the office building. In China, we have to turn off lights before leaving. Chinese is very conservative on energy consumption.
Very sorry to hear about Macrocat. He seemed very happy and content. I'm sure you did a good job taking care of him. We too lost our cat Paul unexpectedly this past Easter. It's never easy when you love and care for them.
I am so sorry for the loss of Henry. The Loss of a pet is usually underappreciated by other people, but he was clearly very important to you and the people who watch this channel. I wish you the best.
Hi, great video! One question I have though, is how is it not more noticeable and has no evidence other than the fact it has less lights than expected? I could see how it makes sense for even something like 20%, but more than half of a country’s economy being fictional is bound to make people notice sooner and in more forms, isn’t it?
@@MoneyMacro Truly is! Best macro content. One tiny little tip I wanna give is to improve audio a little. It can sound a little muffled sometimes compared to some other top channels. Maybe just a little eqing in the top end can already do the trick :)
My condolences for your loss. For me Macrocat was one of the highlights of the show, thank you for sharing him with us through your channel. He will be missed.
Goddamn...that ending got me. We are nothing without love, and the only way we can have love in our lives is by accepting it's brutally honest traveling partner, tragedy. RIP Rumi...please show Macrocat a good time.
Just started the video but I'm going to go ahead and agree. Tragedy is the environment that makes love possible. A great deal of people train themselves to not see tragedy and love shallowly as a result. Imo.
How low of you , how pathetic , how cheap, Cant cooperate or stand another nation, You guys are real 3 rd world Dont worry , stay dreaming , well show you how its done
Zoals steeds: zeer professionele video. Interessant onderwerp, goede en duidelijke uitleg. Je weet heel goed de aandacht vast te houden. Heel erg dat Henry naar de overzijde is gegaan. Hij heeft een leven van een prins gehad. We zullen macrokat missen in de volgende filmpjes!!!
Very sorry for the loss of Henry! Thank you for your videos, I show them to my buddies who are finance/politics wonks, they are very high quality and informative. I hope you are doing alright in the wake of this tragedy.
have been researching all this while for a digital asset to invest in and I found the crypto market to be the most profiting of them all, I'm definitely bouncing on it
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
One must also consider the switch to LED street lighting. LED light can be directed down and throws less light into the night sky which could affect the results.
Hey bud, Sorry about Henry. Pets become family and their loss is huge. I know editing the end won't have been easy. Sending my love out champion. We're here for you. Thanks for the video. I've been saying something similar for a few years now.
@@MoneyMacro None of us are permanent, unlike the growth of CCP GDP. Look after yourself please mate. I've lost two brothers to cars. Still miss em dearly but life is for living not being sad. You can do that later.
They are certainly smaller than official reports, but 60% seems too much. I would bet 30-40% compared to official numbers. The metodology also has a vague point, after a certain threshold of development, more electricity and more energy will not just occupy more space, several sweatshops producing clothes in Bangladesh can easily emit the same light Google's headquarters does. Economies speciallize and grow in extremely complex products, not just size and volume. After some point, you Will not just detect more light. Great video as always Joeri.
I agree, to me this paper is using the worst possible estimates to get attention and clout. It seems very unlikely to me that so much of China's economy is basically faked, but I could be wrong.
I agree with your statement except even 30% seems extreme The argument in the paper and yours can only imply intentional and nefarious lying and to successfully dupe the entire globe for so many years jist seems entirely too far fetched. Even 30% of their GDP is such a colossal number that concrete and irrefutable evidence would be had years ago
@@FutureBoyWonder At no point is that statement extreme. It has been a trend all throughout history to exaggerate economic growth to keep people content; it's not nefarious as it is short-sighted for the sake of political stability. There are no barriers to stop such things and thus it becomes far too attractive to not do so. Noticeably, I said exaggerate, not completely make up. As long as people in China FEEL some improvements, then the real economic numbers don't matter all that much and can easily be justified. It doesn't take much to dupe the world when the world takes a country at face value. GDP is not something you can find with evidence, you can only discern it by parsing through the data of an entire country which only said country's government can accomplish. So the end result is; any attempts to disprove said stats can only come from within, which is impossible for China due to government control over media, or be judged through a less accurate but more honest method like the paper made.
China's GDP is certainly smaller than what they claim it to be, however if it was 60% smaller it would have massive implications because you can lie about statistics; but this true to a certain extent due to these "numbers" exposing an economy that it's not true at all. In my country, Spain, if the offical gdp fake was around what France has it wouldn't make sense because the median annual wage is around 25k while France is closer to 35k (maybe a bit more); it is also important to take into account that these 2 countries have different ammount of inhabitants; but still, my point is that you can't present a flawed number if that precise number is showing an opposite reality or very different atleast... and as far as I'm concerned China GINI is 38,2 therefore gdp is moderately distributed and not kept by a small percentage of the population
I'm so sorry to hear about Macrocat. Henry really was wonderful. As much as I hope another feline friend can join you on your journey to bring us economic information in a fun and interesting way, we'll always remember Henry. Rest well, little guy.
Light is one indirect measurement, but I wonder if these findings can be verified using different proxies (energy consumption? emissions? trade balances?)
I understand China used to release lots of other measures that could be used as a proxy for GDP, however one of the first things Xi Jinping did was to reduce the amount of statistics released
The Chinese centralized state already does approximations of energy consumption + emissions + trade balances to adjust the "official regional report" down because the central government wants to know the true growth numbers for their 5 year plans. The regional governments caught on over time and adjusted these other numbers in accordance with their fake growth. However light pollution is a new metric that isn't used so that shows the true growth. However now that this paper has been published I'm sure the central government will use it to adjust local figures down which will result in corrupt local officials doing stupid stuff like forcing new buildings and companies to install brighter lights to fake more growth or something like that. There was the scandal of fake solar and wind installations in shenzhen city a couple of years ago as well.
No they can not... China consumes 60-70% of global production of concrete, for instance... And there are many more metrics lite this. And this "light" metric is absolute and total BS. Also author of video conviniently forgot to say that access to this article costs 30$! That is all you need to know about how Western GDP is generated and calculated.
@@joey199412 They might, but that would require more electricity, which would require more spending and a higher GDP to sustain such a thing. Though they could just do it by making more debt to that would hasten a collapse.
(DON'T COMMENT IN THIS THREAD TO KEEP IT CLEAN) Is there a good reason for much slower night light growth than GDP in China (compared to other countries) that I, or the paper, didn't think about. Let me know in the comment section. The best arguments will be featured in this thread. Free pdf of the published paper can be found here: bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/BFI_WP_2021-78.pdf
China has been pushing people to move into cities. You can see more rural areas dim while the city night lights increase. But I’m not so sure how you can parse more night light growth in cities (filled with light pollution) and gdp growth.
The best argument so far (my opinion) is air pollution. The paper did not check for this!! In the period that the study was done, China had a lot of air pollution. Less than India though. Still, this could have hidden night light growth. However, then the implication is that, if this clears up (it already is), we should start seeing China light up like a Christmas tree. data.oecd.org/air/air-pollution-exposure.htm
you want to flame China or whatnot, its fine, but the data is a joke. Using "Night light growth" as an indicator to show whether China is being honest about their reported GDP is brainless at its finest. 1. using "Night light growth" as EVIDENCE is just plain stupid. For instance, the relationship between age and height. Sure there's an ASSOCIATION between them, but you claim age causes height to increase, which is stupid 2. The data never accounted for the factors such as, "developing countries vs developed countries" (~90% of Autocracies are developing countries) 3. no attempt to provide any statistical analysis, but claim this and that, which is f stupid. you might as well say China reported fake GDP because they're evil. I wrote this comment because I expected some concrete evidence, but instead, you gave me elementary stupidity
There is one yes, Maybe they are just more efficient than you think with energy and there you go, explanation. The time period is interesting, it goes to 2008, this year are before new leadership and still in very corrupt China, at this time light at night for most Chinese still doesn't exist, half of them and that's a lot still light petrol or coal to light there night, and suddenly with Xi, corruption is a death penalty sentence, and new big China rise, High speed rail in all china in less than 10 year ? USA can't do that, digital money, apps for everything, smart cities, WAY better management of electricity, big growth! Now it's like, "oh China is declining a bit, only 5 or 4% growth instead of 6, oh China is bankrupt", They are COMMUNIST !!!! They don't care about bankruptcy, they can do whatever decision they want. It's wrong to measure China the way we measure a Capitalist country. They PLANJ their economy, they do strategy, they are playing GO, we are playing Chess, we let the market solve it's problem by itself, Chinese analyse and react and CAN do whatever' they want, Why would they destroy value in there stock market ? For us, totally incompetent, look the stock market has fallen, the rich guys are not as rich as can be, why do they don't care? Strategy, efficiency, it's so wrong to assume they are dictator, they are wrong they are stupid, no, not at all, they are achieving right now superpower status, but they don't care, it's not enough, the goal is to DOUBLE USA economy, then they are going to finish buying everyone is free country and they win. How can they do that? By not telling the world how big their economy is, so that we don't know and don't care and forget them while they are buying the world, because that's our weakness, capitalist country CAN be bought! Let's measure output and try to compare GDP, how much new ship a year ? How much concrete a year Follow that and understand how already bigger than USA they are. We still don't want to understand and realize that. There success is not logical to us and all economist in the west, they ALL think capitalism is the only way, the only thing that work, so just mange it; it's wrong, they are new and different to the game; China have always been the global superpower in history, and it's coming back, We should all understand that now and maybe learn from them instead of trying to make it a fake story for 20 year and realizing that if there economy change just a little bit, all the world is affected, a lot That is already super global power. data of lights to 2008, sorry not enough, yes the Chicago school would love that there conclusion is right but they didn't try to refute themselves rationally and understand disruption, new concept, etc. We all know the Chicago school of economy will be the last one to really understand China... The question they should have asked is, why is China different, not how china compare to other dictator that are all corrupt, lazy, lying, capitalist, and SMALL ! China is big and has the aberrant population ! China has plenty of characteristic that are unique to them, efficiency in power, and half of china not needing light at night maybe can be the answer, or find different hypothesis, the Chicago school didn't try like this, they compared totally different country and structures with low sample size and outdated 2008 data, the world is totally different now and must be analyzed differently. I will stop there, just trying to understand China...
Wait, if they're economy was like half the size they say it is... Shouldn't that be like blindingly obvious and everyone should agree? Like it's not a small lie.
One trip to China and you'll know it will overtake the US economy. Channels like these are just coping because they cannot accept that very obvious fact. What is not made in China these days? 1.4 billion highly motivated people who work hard to produce products and services will of course overtake a much smaller population, no matter how exceptional the US is, or was.
Yes and No. If certain interest groups, in the West aside from the CCP stand to make a ( financial) killing by pumping up the bubble, and then exit at the right time just before the bubble bursts and the gullible people have deposited all their money into the ( sinking) hole, then they will turn a Nelson's eye.
It’s also believed that china overstated their population size as well. So it’s not surprising the GDP is fake and off the mark. As to why provinces fake their population numbers, love govts can get more salary cheques and farm/school subsidies from faking the numbers. Population growth targets are also assigned to local govts as a KPI of performance It’s very difficult to audit the true number in a dictatorship as any attempt will get you a one way ticket to prison
Sorry if I missed this point but did you discuss if the paper based its figures on the GDP numbers of China when taking into consideration the devaluation of the Yuan? I’m curious to know if the paper considered the relative size of China’s economy using their valuation or our valuation based on what the US believes the size to be if the Yuan were pegged to other currencies. That would theoretically skew the numbers.
the truth is, a coutnry's growth is not mrerely measure by its GDP number. And statement like " Yuan were pegged to other currencies. " has no evidence, it may be a fact, but none to know by US govt or any economists. It's backdoor deal that China and its allies make that others cant be know. which is actually a strength in currency, no data, no analytic , and thus no strategic can be make directly against Yuan.
It's fundamentally tracking growth over time. It's not tracking exact figures. PPP calculations also tend to hold steady over time and include currency exchange rates. In fact, tracking via nominal GDP is why it's more consistent of a value over time than consistently adjusting for exchange rates or PPP. Not to mention PPP is just a multiplier for the initial measurement anyway which means that it's added after, not before. TL;DR It's all tracking for the nominal GDP, and PPP is a multiplier added after
I'm so sorry to hear about Henry. You're doing a great job, Joeri. Thank you very much for making macroeconomics more accessible and doing it in a such elegant, knowledgeable and accessible way!
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
Well, he didn't realize Chinese city residents live in very tall apartments. The light on those tall builds projecting to the space are not proportional to a single-story house.
I wish I had access to the paper, because there's a lot of factors that I'd love to read about, to know how they were accounted for: 1. Density- the USA is incredibly sprawl-y. For example, a huge percentage of land in the USA is devoted to single family homes, and I cannot imagine these look 100x dimmer than a towering residential building since the lower floors will be covered by the upper floors. But even focusing on single family homes though; they're huge in the USA, with huge driveways and lots of road-space in between. I've seen other countries build closer together, with less driveway space. I imagine brightness from space is a function of factors like window-size and the asphalt around a building the light can bounce off, which will be lower for denser countries. Moreover, countries with better rail and public transport will see less lights at night from trucks and trailers. 2. Authoritarianism & data-points- how is this calculated? I don't doubt this hypothesis is probably true for some countries, but in order to show a trend one needs a consistent measure of "authoritarianism" which sounds like it could be subjective. Moreover, is the sample size all countries? Wouldn't the omission of countries be a possibility for counter examples that would muddle the data and erase a clearly-visible trend? 3. Culture- Where I'm from we turn off the lights at night, and one thing that surprised me in the USA is just how laissez-faire it is with electricity. This is also a place that's quite thorough with public lighting, and I can only imagine it has at least partially to do with a cultural looming sense of disaster and distrust for one's neighbors. All streets have public lighting here, even the ones that are not that transited, the huge parking lots of supermarkets (you don't see those in China), etc. Can we assume that other nations will demand the same level of public illumination when they develop? I live in the USA now and have certainly grown more accustomed to "leaving the lights on", but not to the degree of other people here. I can imagine there's a whole generation or two in China who are still very mindful of energy conservation in spite of their increased purchasing power, which could show in residential areas, and if their perception of security is also different, why waste energy? I have to wonder also how points 1 & 3 above correlate with "authoritarianism". Ie, would an "authoritarian" country give a greater sense of security to people, thus reduce their desire for public lighting? Or perhaps state-affiliated energy/development companies simply set up less public lighting since consumer demands matter less? Are denser countries more likely to be "authoritarian" or vice versa? I don't doubt China's numbers are made-up to some degree, though speaking of China's case, a ballpark 3x difference in official vs real economy size sounds crazy, and the correlation between brightness and GDP sounds true but very variable from culture to culture, history to history, city to city.
Same by itself this leaves too many questions I can believe theyd perhaps mess around with it, but him deciding to extrapolate from these numbers is also ill advised since the author certainly had a reason he didn't do so himself. Furthermore I completely agree with your points and wish that while making such a groundbreaking/clickbait claim to expand and find other references aka import/export data, resources, capital flows, standard of living, and various other components and tie that into this since extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and one paper (even a good paper) indicating something might be the case alone is at best a starting point.
I agree with you on #2 and #3, but for #1 don't forget that there are many dense/transit-oriented democratic countries and sprawling/car-dependent authoritarian countries as well.
Exactly. I’d like to see the dataset and controls used for analysis. Have they accounted for cultural differences like asian families who have multiple generations in a single household vs nuclear families? Relative safety of the region? Suburban areas vs nightlife zones? There are a lot of controls required that i can’t take this at face value. At worst, this😊 is the perfect example of “correlation does not imply causation”
@@Pasta_Pirate It is very simple. You need to get the real GDP of China, and infer it by looking at the trade volume between China and other countries in the world. It should be the most accurate. Only commodities and trade can truly reflect the GDP of each country.
Thanks for sharing this interesing research paper! However, I have some disagreements.... 1. Until Xi took office in 2012, Beijing took more of a restrained foreign policy approach. 韬光养晦 - is what this approach is called, which was intended to keep China out of the Thucydides trap for as long as possible. China benefits from being underestimated, so they'd be less harsh on international obligations and wouldn't be targeted by U.S. sanctions. Also, instead of manipulating the numbers, they could just talk about GDP adjusted for purchasing power. 2. Economic performance is linked to an innumerable number of third-party variables. Variables that are collected by different institutions at home and abroad. Just as an example, with a GDP of 6 trillion USD China would have a foreign trade GDP ratio of 100% (this figure is also issued by the contracting parties, so it is not in Beijing's making), four times as much as the USA. The argument can be extended at will - a factor of 3 is therefore quite unthinkable. 3. and this is probably the most important point: the highly developed and democratic OECD countries have a completely different economic basis than the autocratic developing countries. Everything from sectoral order to the progress of commodification can be a possible alternative explanation for light pollution growth or its absence. The absolute value, on the other hand, is no good either; for this, one only needs to look at the current world ranking, according to which Iran is three times as productive as Germany (similar number of population). Of course, the Chinese figures should still be viewed critically, but 40% of economic output sounds like Washingtons wishful thinking to me. In this extent, that would have already been followed up long ago. Nevertheless, thanks for the contribution!
I was born in China and moved to the UK with my parents when I was 10, I went back to China every couple of years to visit my grandparents and everything I was astonished by how much the city has changed, and this has been happening in the past 15 years. This could be the fact that my parents are living in the coastal region of China where the trade flourished, whereas the development of the middle and west part of China is lacking behind, but I tend to believe the development at least in my region, is real.
First and second tier cities likely have real development. The other lower tier and more rural places have bad incentives for economic growth like building apartment buildings that nobody lives in and endlessly funding unnecessary construction so they meet central government GDP quotas.
I agree with your subjektive impression. I often visit Ningbo and it is astonishing if you look the New buildings. But as soon as you go into a the company than it is shocking how inneffective the production process is. Better production and less expensive building would convince me more.
Most definitly devolopment is real. China can claim the biggest economic miracle that ever happened. Even in this portrayed scenario China still would be the second largest economy, just not as close to the US as their own released data would make it seem. We will certainly know in 10 years or so :D
Some parts of China definitely experienced development. The research piece is not disputing that. It’s just saying that that development was overstated.
A very intresting point. In order to reaffirm the data, maybe a few more data points should be collected: -infrared radition into space (= Energy consumption) -foreign trade -money spent by Chinese tourists abroad (via credit card and ATM withdrawl) -car traffic -cargo traffic on chinese rivers, railroads and freeways The problem that I see, is that a direct correlation between economic power and light emitted is probably very difficult. The light-emission curve is probably very steep at the beginning when people start to afford electricity, but once people's need for light has been satisfied, I doubt that further GDP-groth will lead to substainial further light emission groth.
Also Chinese cities tend to grow upwards not outwards. As most live in tower apartment blocks and not inefficient sprawling suburbs. This study just sounds like a desperate cope and more fuel for the anti-China train.
@@primeradiant827 the light intensity would show, that's the issue; you can't come here like a 无毛 and call him "anti-共产党" , he's just asking a question that has come to light from a research paper, other developing nations with growing economies also prefer constructing high rises and apartments instead of villas and houses, and you can also see the light intensity growth as their gdp is reported to increase, I lived and worked in China closely with the government as an advisor, and I do know they like to change statistics for their own interests.
Money spent by Chinese tourists is used to purchase luxury brands which they sell back in the mainland since the luxury items are cheaper in the west than China, although illegal; many 阿姨's do this business to sell for profit. Also ypu can't collect that information since Union Pay is chinese and does not allow any organisation besides the chinese financial body to observe transactions in real-time (live), foreign trade is already accounted for , and it has been dropping ever since 2018, since more regulations have increased product and labour cost, many companies are now looking to other developing countries to start manufacturing.
@@EzraMerr Thank for the info. And thanks for responding in an academic matter. Having a civilized academic disscussion on the Internet is really hard... Yes, most of the data points I suggested are probably much harder to collect than light emission. However, I like the approach to collect data that is hard to manipulate. There should at last be data on infra-red radiation that would allow to meassure the energy consumption. The correlation between energy consumption and GDP is pretty reliable.
Trying to reflect a complex and unfamiliar society by creating simple iconic indicators. Is this person naive or lazy? I have a question. The infrared emission of LED bulbs is much lower than that of other bulbs. China has fully used LED bulbs many years ago and banned the sale of tungsten bulbs for lighting. Street lights are also fully LED, so you think your data Will it be correct?
As a scientist I'm naturally a little sceptical about such a correlational study and its enormous interpretation. 2 questions please you didnt address sufficiently imho: 1) Did the author of the paper offer enough and convincing arguments as to why night light intensities would significantly relate to GDP growth in detail? How was he actually able to exclude his many good points why it might not correlate? 2) if it was a highly appreciated study, he nust have offered alternativ and independent other methods of meassuring real GDP growth to compare with. Did he offer such other techniques? Thank you so much!
@@ProgressiveEconomicsSupporter the fact that the growth of consumption falls behind production in China, which is a socialist pedigree, can falsify the night lights as good indicator for real GDP growth.
@The136th likely because the produce a damn lot for the rest of the world, maybe not so much at night. And they might not party so much under extreme night light shows
@@parnamsaini4751 yes china economic is bulit by rockected real estate market instead of real industrialization, the GDP data match more with the m2 increasing if you take a closer look, its a country built itself by debt.
@@marcma42China is commonly referred to as the world's factory because so many companies are outsourcing their production to the country. Something they never would've done if proper infrastructure wasn't in place. When you say "real industrialization", what does that mean exactly?
No he is NOT. There is a MAJOR flaw in this paper. MOST countries that grow the fastest today are not Western Style Democracies and would be classified as "authoritarians". China, Vietnam, India, even Malaysia and Indonesia would be classified like that. Second, the MAJORITY of he poor countries of the world are to some extent authoritarian, and poor low and middle income countries tend to grow more than high income countries, where the vast majority of the MINORITY of countries that are Western Style democracies on our planet are. Simply because, contrary to what most Westerners think, the MAJORITY of planet Earth is made up by countries that would be considered "non-democratic". When it comes to low and middle income countries, where most likely you'll find a fast growing economy, that percentage is even higher. Which brings the problem of how those countries where determined to be "dictatorships" in the first place as well. In other words, most countries that grow fast would be classified as "dictatorships" (whether it being true or not). And that not because dictatorships are particularly good at making the economy grow (since most authoritarian countries are poor and people don't give a flying s** about them unless they are growing and defying the hegemony of the West) but simply because, again, it needs to be stressed again, MOST countries on planet Earth would be classified as authoritarians. Hence, in simple terms, if we will se a poor country becoming a rich country MOST LIKELY it will be a country classified that way. So the paper ASSUMES that "authoritarian countries" lie because they grow more when in fact countries that grow more in its vast majority are even as authoritarian or, at least, not mature democracies. OF COURSE the mature democracies will grow less. They are the richest countries on Earth.
I appreciate that you take non-partisan dives into the evidence and accept criticism. When discussing a question like this, it's very easy for content creators, or even researchers to be heavily biased - like when oil execs pay researchers to understate or outright deny climate change. A lot of China critics work off of faulty evidence, but you took an even deeper dive into a well-renowned paper, supplementing further evidence and including disclaimers. So, thank you. It's really been hard for me to find unbiased news and research.
that doesn't happen, you just don't like contrarian views from people on climate change, sometimes funded by the Oil Boogeyman that you try to demonize........even when the people making contrarian claims have a long, established record of credibility in the field..........and weak diversion attempt from China's GDP lies
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
@@phillip76 There are interest in these estimates because the CCP is an authoritarian government who controls media and censors speech in their country. It is difficult to get accurate information about what is actually happening, like their GDP growth. Please explain why race has anything to do with economics? but sure compare china to Taiwan, Japan etc they have all performed much better economically and present accurate statistics, which is nice
In China, most buildings turn off lights at night. Only street lights are left on. I bet Mr. Martinez will have to write a second paper to adjust his conclusions.
I'm so sorry for your loss (Macrocat). It's the first video I see of yours and I immediately subscribed to your channel. I am certainly not qualified to refute any of the points in the document, and I must admit that I am glad to believe that China is far from imposing itself on the world economic power.
I expected this video to be "China will colapse in 3 days" levels of clickbait. Was met with a reasonable analysis of an academic paper. Great content!
You should keep in mind that of the factors that affects the amount of night light is the population, and in China, with its 1-child and 2-child policy, the population grew much slower than in other states, for example, than in the same India.
That's exactly the point here - count the number of house lights. Peter Zeihan calls it the "checkbook map" because he's old and still uses checks to pay his utilities. But he's right in that every house light is someone who's paid their electricity bill. (Or paid their fuel bill for their generator. Or spent time on their house-powering stationary bicycle.) So if there are 20,000 house lights, but 30,000 households are counted, something is incorrect. Ironically, the CCP developed this metric for internal audits, and now it's being used for external audits of the CCP.
what is your connection between light pollution and population control?? ALSO, now there is a 3-child policy. Further, anyone can have multiple kids, they just have to pay an extra $100 per month.
That's a brilliant point, pun intended. There have been a lot of concern regarding china's GDP figures for at least the last 10 years and I used to talk with my professors about it at University looking for a smoking gun. Nice work and thanks for sharing
Actually if you have not worked in a Chinese company for a long time in China, it is difficult to know some truths.As i see,people usually do a lot of private transactions for tax evasion, and these transactions usually account for 30%-50% of the company's turnover.And there are many tax-free items that are difficult to describe, and the Chinese government does not count them at all.So in fact GDP is underestimated.
@@f0rgetwasure105 No the government already overestimates the economy to account for those things, but mostly the estimates are roughly consistant with metrics such as electricity consumption or trade volume
Another key point is that the Chinese government has been implementing foreign exchange controls to prevent the free convertibility of the currency, which has greatly increased the valuation of the RMB; would be overrated.
It's in the U.S.'s best interest to assume China is a threat regardless of the reality. This is how we are kept on our toes and hopefully out of complacency.
China is beyond ungrateful for retaliating against the US. Don't forget it was the US that made China second in the world. How would you feel if the person you fed betrayed you?....
Exactly underestimating China is the main reason we're here, fentanyl on one hand, Taiwan on the other, Countries ditching dollar and siding with China and Economic collapse as more & more bow and kneel to China
@CrescentPrince Kronos from the start the CCP (共产党) have been calling for the death of Americas for over 70 years now , if you call America an enemy expect America to take your threat seriously
An interesting discussion. A quick internet search brought up a 2013 article from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Kiel Working Paper No. 1888 | December 2013; 'Night Lights and Regional GDP'; Bickenbach et Al.) which concluded that: "The relationship between regional GDP and night lights proves to be unstable, not only where regional GDP data may be unreliable but also where such data are of high quality. This suggests that night lights tend to be a poor proxy of regional economic activity." The article uses some sophisticated-looking statistical analysis (which I have not gone through in detail), but in any case seems quite thorough. Interestingly, this work is not referenced or discussed in Martinez (2018). What do you think?
Good find! I was hoping Joeri might go a bit into some of the robustness checks done by Martinez at the end there cos a lot of the methodologies used in these papers can be a bit dense to go through alone.
笑死我了。 I am chinese,let me explain it.When I was young ,my mom aIways told me to turn off the light if I leave the room and she would get mad if i didn"t do that .They born in the poor days of China in 20th centery.So even we get rich now,we are more willing to turn off the light that we do not need at once.I thought this professor would talk about China's real estate bubble, but I didn't expect him to talk about Nightlight.
@@lovekeqingforever4879 while you might be correct to assume so, you are only looking at habitable properties. Industrial properties also generate light pollution. I would think that China has a greater industrial footprint than other democracies. Maybe this could contradict your statement? Im not discrediting your experience. I think you have something there. Just wish we could have more concrete data we can analyse 😢.
@@lovekeqingforever4879 I don't think this is a discussion about bedroom lights - it's talking about industry and the types of properties that would keep lights on all night.
@@MatthewEverhart Even so that would be subjected to differences in energy policy, industrial policy regarding energy usage, light pollution policy and a bunch of other things that make it iffy as an estimate.
This night light GDP analysis has been going on since 2005 and Martinez's 2018 paper has been peer reviewed but the video did not report on the results of the reviews. Economists said this type of night light GDP analysis falls under bad-faith analysis and often inaccurate. I think there is a 2022 paper from an University in New Zealand that debunked this analysis.
You've got to be kidding me! I can't believe any serious economist would use such ridiculous factors as “night lights” to gauge a country's economy. I don't know about you, but normal people do not engage in production activities at night! More lights at night would, at best, indicate a country has a richer nightlife. For a country like the US, which doesn't have much industrial capacity left and drives its GDP mostly by its services sector, there might be a correlation between night lights and GDP growth. Imagine all those nightclubs with shiny neon lights. However, for an industrial powerhouse like China, the most GDP-creating activities happen during the daytime. In fact, you may use less nightlight to argue that China has a more vibrant economy because most people have to go to bed early to be productive at the workplace during the daytime. Only people who don't need to work the next day would stay up late. If you want to find alternative indicators of a country's economy, why don't you look at energy consumption or import and export data? If you know economics, you'd know it's very hard to manipulate these numbers. I bet that if you study China's import and export data for the past few decades and can be objective, you'd definitely find support for China's officially released GDP data. And the whole “authoritarian” versus “democratic” data trustworthiness is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, which only goes to show your inherent bias. I'll point out one major flaw in your argument. You suggest that the Chinese government fudges its GDP data to deceive the world, citing a report as evidence that claims the Chinese premier publicly stated he doesn't trust the government's GDP data. However, would someone deliberately lying openly admit he’s lying? That would defeat the whole purpose of lying, wouldn’t it? In fact, the Chinese premier never made such a statement; it’s once again a misinterpretation by Western media. Lastly, if China's economy were truly overblown to such an extent, why would the US leadership be so concerned about China potentially surpassing the US? Don’t you think they have access to better data and intelligence than you
It's worth noting that this is also true for population - one academic estimates that China's population may be as much as 200 million lower than it says, and because of population momentum and increasing political pressure to lie about it, the gulf between the actual and official number may continue to get wider. It's such a big gap it's one reason I don't think the human population will ever top 10 billion, despite the 2022 UN population estimates (the UN has to use official numbers)
Yes, depends on which "estimate" we use. The gap is about 100 Mio between current official numbers (1.37) and current independent estimates (1.27). And ist about 200Mio below what many people projected for 2022 5-8 years ago. The past estimates are still relevant as they are "in the heads" of people. People with whom I discuss politics still repeatedly tell me "China has 1.4 or 1.5 billion people. Its the largest country in the world." - Which are both incorrect statements
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
China's cities have some of the worst air pollution problems in the world. Could this obscure some of the night light? (Although I note that India also has poor air quality, and you mentioned that their GDP data didn't seem to be manipulated)
@@PutXi_Whipped The paper says it used light data from 1992-2013 (it also uses some 2014-18 light data, but only for robustness checks). China's air quality was definitely poor in the study's dataset.
I don't believe the Chinese economy is smaller than advertised by the GDP numbers. In fact, it could actually be the opposite, judging by their industrial output, by the raw materials they produce (like food, cement and steel), and the rate of technological innovation. The Chinse economy has most likely already surpassed the USA at this point. Even if it is smaller than the US economy in the terms of dollars, I see no reason to doubt that it has the biggest economy in real terms (good produced, roads and houses built, etc.).
I was just talking to my husband about this that this is a huge claim. There are a few things: 1. If I'm an accountant and I want to know who lie on their tax return. I wouldn't just look at their Halloween props. To be fair, Halloween props may give a clue about their wealth but can only point you further to scrutinize the accounting book. A better way would be to actually look at the accounting book itself. For example, look at export number. I believe since China has been export-led economy, so it accounts for a big percentage of the economy. You'd be able to track export to other countries every year over time. You might not believe China's number, but you certainly can believe US or other Democratic country import-from-China number (since how else can you the source of truth for your GDP deflator curve). So the question is do we see anything fishy in those numbers; and if so, it will lead to other accounting investigations such as how the number will add up, etc. 2. a paper is published doesn't mean it's correct. It just means that the author satisfies the publication criteria. They may publish in order to invite other papers to refutes the claim or refine the methodology.
3. Another thing is if you look at the curve at 4.30 minute. There is one obvious outlier. What happens if you remove that one outlier at the bottom left? Would the two regression line be more parallel? I believe the author is questioned about this outlier every time he gives a talk.
I’m not sure the Halloween prop example is a good one. Unlike Halloween props, light and electricity usage is directly and irrefutably directly proportional to GDP. Meanwhile, Halloween props are not directly proportional because of the myriad of external factors that are more important to the Halloween props than just how much money they have. What matters here is that “directly proportional.” Because the proportionality is direct, you can actually use one to determine the other. Given, approximately, but you can still do it.
I worked for many years compiling national statistics and we would joke all the time about internal inconsistencies in China’s numbers. It is easy to simply report higher top-level GDP. However, to state the obvious, GDP is a combination of data from a variety or sources, and while China has gotten much better at ensuring alignment with the “correct” growth target, we now often see different issues where volatility and consistency seem too perfectly in balance. I don’t know many who would be surprised by the growing discrepancy between real and reported figures. Very sorry to hear about the Macrocat!
another number you can look at for a place like China is... total cell phone subscribers. Especially because you can't do anything without a cell phone and all cell phones are tied to a personal identity. So one source reported that the COVID deaths were seriously under-reported by China because the number of subscribers declined much more rapidly than the official deaths from COVID.
I used to buy financial and economic data for a research database (content acquisition or data licensing) and everyone would caveat the China data. I remember meeting with one startup that had developed a proprietary model to sort of compensate for factors and hence they touted a more accurate dataset.
@@andreasabels589 whoever can fudge the numbers best will be promoted and then it's up to the sucker who is stuck with that job next term to deal with it. The end game is to secure a promotion from the party and scam money from investors who are lured by these glorious numbers
@@andreasabels589 I don't think there is an endgame. It's a case of hot potato. You want to get promoted before the crash. See Great leap forward rice harvest
China produces way more electricty than US though. The energy comsumption is propotional to real GDP, the electricty prodction is far more acurate than some satellite photo.
Great work and entirely plausible. Even if the gap is half of 60%, it's a HUGE frckin deal. Love and Bon Voyage to your buddy Henry...that brought a tear.
But... your channel name suggests you know quite a bit about politics, economics and at least certain parts of Asia. If he can't explain it to you, what chance do the rest of us have? 😉
I like these kinds of studies where the premise sounds ridiculous, but as you read through the process and understand the methodologies, it doesn't seem as far fetched anymore. I get that it's still just an estimate but I think it's way more accurate than any officially reported number
Except this guy is delusional if he thinks china gdp is 60% lower. The average chinese citzen is not less wealthy than a sudan citizen or a third of the wealth of a sri lankan. Both those countries are borderline owned by china and this guy expects us to believe china has a lower gdp per capita?
until you look at trade volume and electricity consumption? Studies like this want to generalize, but societies have cultural differences. If you even been to a Chinese city at night you will quickly realize why the light intensity is so low, bearly anyone keep lights on in their residences, espeacially by 8am. Usually just the kid's room and the main living room.
In the US, you will find streets darker in wealthier suburbs. Look at Evanston, IL next to Chicago, IL. Chicago has bright lights on its streets and even their alleys. Evanston wants a true night time, so they have fewer and dimmer street lights. So, brightness also is subject to the customs and practices of people. I wonder how much variance there is, and whether it could be documented?
The us has a lot of municipal street lights and highway lights. China has a ton of factories with few lights on the outside but massive output on the inside.
Please keep future Macrocats indoors. Indoors live longer, obviously. Great and wonderful, educated guesstimates based off of 'official' reported data and collected data of both related and unrelated sources.
Thank you for your considered, researched and scrutinizable content. Always well received. Also, much love to you on the passing of Henry. I hope the knowledge that his presence in your videos obviously brought a smile to many helps bring a smile to yours when you think of him 🙂
Aside from light activity, I think there has been other metrics used such as food production/consumption, steel usage, and other commodities that people can try to rely on for GDP growth
This is *extremely* interesting. One thing that came to mind is, "Did someone check to see how many new *power plants* China built over the past three decades?" Because the economy is basically an engine, right? GDP is a combination of speed and carrying capacity, and that means the better your economy is, the more energy you consume. That bit at 10:46 where you say they're only consuming 5% more electricity then the last period? That implies that they are *not* consuming as much energy as an economy that's growing as much as they claim.
@@مرواریدمشرقزمین Nobody denies China is growing. But it got fewer nuclear reactors than the USA by half. While claiming to use double energy. It would also have grown by 5.9 percent far higher than the West and India. It would still make a huge difference for Chinese people. But it would mean they are exaggerating to seem powerful in the West. This would not be surprising since the Soviet Union did the same thing. Most people believed the Soviet economy was far stronger than it was.
Three professors from a university from HK also did this study using night time light(and other matrices) as reference and they admitted that the gdp is overstated but not by as much as 60% but like around 20%. This is more believable to me than 60% smaller.
I would find it belivable that it's somewhere inbetween. Point being, I think a lot of people knew and expected this problem already. But it's not a problem until the country actually goes bankrupt.. China is unfortunately facing several difficulties atm, including natural disasters. Which could cause the collapse of a less than perfect foundation. In China they often say something is good enough or close enough, then it's usually not as good as you would want or expect but it's good enough for the entrepreneur to declare a/ the project a success or the sellable and then they move on pretending all is good. The problem is that this attitude can be translated into the whole economic pyramid and all aspects of the chinese economy. It's also similar to the issue of overreporting GDP growth to meet expectation, it's close enough lets say we meet the expectations and move on. The risk is that if some of these cracks creats a collapse it might start a domino effect and take the rest with it. Right now I don't think there is much anyone can do but wait and watch and keep minding their own business. A collapse in China would have an effect on the rest of the world aswell though. Not much you can do about it but keeping an eye on it and being aware of the ways it might affect you would be a good suggestion. If you run a business are you dependent on a delivery of gods or services from China? are there alternate sources? How hard might there be to gain access to those sources? Others might also flock to the worlds remaining sources. Alternate solutions or ways to deal with the situation? Having a plan helps even if most plans don't survive reality, it's better than no plan at all, it points you in the right direction then you have to adapt. Seems like I'm rambling... Anyway, good luck.
@@peterzimmerman1114 I heard many people in Internet talked a lot about China construction quality but I'm yet to see the sample of data that calculate the the rate of building or infrastructure collapse ratio to the numbers of building and infrastructure in China. I'm still yet to see the report of collapse of China massive infrastructures. I'm yet to heard a news that mentioned like 40% of buildings in Shanghai have collapse in a span of a decade for example if quality of construction in China is that bad. What about a buildings or infrastructures that Chinese built outside of China? I'm yet to heard any report about infrastructure collapse in Africa or SEA. So if you worked your writing here based on your imagination and stereotype I suggest for you to delete your comment. I never denied that shoddy constructions and low quality buildings and infrastructures exist in China but people very much overstated the situation.
@Haziq Rosli imagination doesn't work very well in reality m8. World works through data and not imagination. And how is using only the luminosity of a cities in a country can determine their whole gdp growth rate lmao. In 2021 NBE reported that Chinese consumed/spent about USD 6,803 trillions or 40% of gdp. If China current gdp get shrank about 60% or about USD 7 trillion for 2021 then how it's logical for it only big enough to fit the whole value of consumer spending. What about Trade surplus value? What about government investment etc? Where would those go to?
@@浦和-f5y Why should Peter delete his comment? Even if he is wrong, others would find it useful to know how and why he was wrong, which would go away if his comment was deleted. Besides, your comment wouldnt make sense without his.
@@浦和-f5y Evidence is everywhere, just similar to the video said, there are no independent regulators, and that government interests favor speedy construction, poor-quality steel and adulterated cement have been discovered on construction sites across China, contractors will cut corner to make as much money as possible.
I support your conclusion, China is extremely poor in lots areas. Don’t be fool on those numbers, China is not a threat to United state, it is a distraction, because politicians don’t want you to look at what is happening inside.
Have you considered china's GDP is often inflated using infrastructure? A bridge generates a huge amount of GDP per dollar spent but does not generate alot of light...
@@varshard0 They generate gdp by reducing travel times for sending goods and services. When a country has good infrastructure not only do costs go down but it encourages more production. Th building of the bridge itself also gives people jobs who will naturally spend on that money.
I wonder if cultural factors contribute to nighttime light intensity. As a student in Stanford, I often notice the lights in school buildings stay on at night for some reason (maybe safety). However, the lights are turned off at night in China. Nighttime construction lights are also much brighter in the U.S. when compared to the ones in China. This is not a lot of data to go on, but I believe there is definitely a chance for this to be a confounding factor that messes with the weights / coefficients used in the paper.
Also, using fewer features might be helpful to calculate a simple linear model to output gdp prediction, but there are only so many countries (rows of data) in the world, and correlating factors to different economic sectors - industry, service, or agriculture is complicated and many times completely irrelevant. In reality, the simple model will be ‘overtrained’ on a pittance of data. I liked your channel when you corrected EE’s mistakes in previous videos, but It’s disappointing seeing similar sensationalism or even laziness.
@@zzzcatherine The best thing about statistics is that it doesn't need to be opinion-driven. Grab the data-set, build your model and publish the results.
@@ChasmChaos Building a model is not a precondition for pointing out the flaws of an existing model. The flaws of this model is the lack of data, overfitting on multiple features, and lack of reliable labels. There is no model that can be used, and no reliable conclusions can or should be made. Doing so is motivated by sensationalism and shows laziness.
@@zzzcatherine all claims that you could try to prove quantitatively instead of using buzzwords. Publish a critique and have the critique peer reviewed as well. Otherwise don't argue over a UA-cam comment thread about opinions.
@@ChasmChaos if you don’t have the credentials, you don’t deserve a seat at the table. Run the scripts yourself instead of arguing about nonsense and “buzzwords”
My deepest condolences for Henry. I wish you all the best. On a positive note, this video was one of your best (in my humble opinion). I enjoyed learning about the novel theory of measuring GDP growth through satelite images. I also really like how you break-down current academic research on relevant economic topics. Thank you!
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
The report seems to be handpicking things to try to make people believe this is true, and leaving others that can show that this is false. It does not consider how China is the country with the highest energy consumption and energy production in the world (They are lying on that?) If China's economy is 60% smaller then it is around the size of Japan's. How on earth is China's manufacturing exports around 4 times that of Japan's? Both are predominantly manufacturing countries (are they lying or that? why don't trade partners denounce that nobody is buying 3/4ths of China's claimed exports?). China is also the country with the highest food production (How could they lie on that, they have a huge population to feed they'd be importing a ton otherwise) so not only its manufacturing sector is huge. Tourism is huge with around 70 million people arriving to China every year, which would mean that if China's economy is the size of Japan, then around 35% of its economy is just tourism. No one seems to consider China as an economy fueled by tourism. We see China even rising ghost megacities with the objective of them being occupied later, that in itself show the huge economy moved by construction companies. China may be on a bubble in that constructor sector, which may corresond to around 10% of its GDP. Saying 60% of its GDP doesn't exist and it is the size of Japan is simply absurd. You don't see Japan having nearly as much economic impact in the world, you don't see Japan exporting as much, you don't see Japan with projects like the Belt and Road, you don't see Japanese companies purchasing or becoming big multinationals like Volvo, Motorola, Huawei, Tiktok or Xiaomi. Perhaps Japan's economy is also 60% smaller then and thus it is in the ballpark of a developing country (perhaps developing countries are lying too). Whoever is this "researcher" should have his PHD removed and thrown out of academia.
It's weird if some economy researcher try to debunk china real GDP by looking at light from satellite meanwhile they can easily observe china export-imports that more representative to their economy growth And they can also come to china to see it by themselves, which part of china not developed enough and which part that get massive development
Maybe you should bring your findings to the IMF, CIA, World Bank etc because they all seem to report that the Chinese economy measured in PPP terms already overtook the US a few years ago. You should make a video telling us what was the outcome when you approach these institutions with your findings 🤔
I'm so sorry to hear about Macrocat. I've lost cats to being hit by cars before and it's really horrible. Wishing you all the best Joeri.
It’s my wife’s favorite part about these videos when I put them on in the living room. We’re both really sorry for your loss and I’m sure you gave Macrocat a great life.
keep your cats inside there are way less cars in your living room
@@Alex-ee5pl Not every cat is the same. Some are indoor cats but others need time outside.
I lost my cat last month as well. To say it sucks is an understatement.
I also join in the condolences for Henry, hope you recover from this sad event!
There was a similar approach to research carried out by Prosper Australia looking at under reported vacant properties in Melbourne in 2017, but rather tha using lights they looked at water records which revealed many supposedly occupied properties had less water usage than a dripping tap.
Is this because a vacancy tax?
@@patrickriarchy1976 Chinese bought alot of our housing but many don't even live in it, its just a way for them to move money out of China
@@patrickriarchy1976 Partly as that creates the obvious perverse incentive to hide the fact, but vancancy rates were high in general due to a highly speculative period in Oz RE where buyers will favour liquidity over yields. Not sure how accurate estimate levels of vacancy are or were before that in general but I expect they are generally under estimated in many markets.
The perverse incentive doesn't just apply to vacancy tax. Just anecdotally here in London, UK a person 'lived' in the downstairs flat from me from 2012-15 ish, but was actually only there about 3 weekends over the 3 years they owned it. (suited me as no noise)
The reason being as it was officially owner occupied it incurred no capital gains tax on sale which would have been pretty substantial.
Create an exemption, and some people find ways to qualify for that.
@@sieuwkedevries5211 It's more that they are speculating on the growth house prices, but didn't want to deal with the hassle ir risk of having tenants and wanted to be able to market and sell the house quickly without having to deal with giving notice to the tenant or having to repair the wear and tear caused by people living there.
Oh now that's a good metric! Water is used for everything, and the more money you have the more water you will use for bathing, etc
What I would love to see is some independent studies trying to calculate the same deflation factor using different data sources. Then we could compare their error bars.
Completely agree Nin. 👍
Nobody's stopping you from doing it, Nin.
@@TheDavidlloydjones not everyone’s an economist, David
@John Morgan you do it then, John
Love the talk 🗿🍷
Thanks for providing actual quality content while protecting the researchers values AND explaining them to everyone. The world needs more people like you!
How does it help u? Data shows that China's economy is large and this fool telling u otherwise.
Taiwan had an economic growth of 12 percent in the 1960s- 1970s so China's Gdp growth rates may be accurate.
But they kept the same economic growth for 50 years which is higher than Taiwan and South Korea. Making it the country with the highest economic growth in the world for 50 years straight seems somewhat suspicious especially when the Soviet Union also lied about its Economic growth.
@@Kalletheswede US lied and is still lying about its gdp. Most economists estimated that US' gdp should be 1/8 of its actual claim as its gdp value is grossly overinflated by blatant overprinting of its currency and grossly over-valued stocks. In real comparison, even the daily food consumption per capita of each Chinese is 10 times better than Americans.
There is a MAJOR flaw in this paper. MOST countries that grow the fastest today are not Western Style Democracies and would be classified as "authoritarians". China, Vietnam, India, even Malaysia and Indonesia would be classified like that. Second, the MAJORITY of he poor countries of the world are to some extent authoritarian, and poor low and middle income countries tend to grow more than high income countries, where the vast majority of the MINORITY of countries that are Western Style democracies on our planet are. Simply because, contrary to what most Westerners think, the MAJORITY of planet Earth is made up by countries that would be considered "non-democratic". When it comes to low and middle income countries, where most likely you'll find a fast growing economy, that percentage is even higher. Which brings the problem of how those countries where determined to be "dictatorships" in the first place as well. In other words, most countries that grow fast would be classified as "dictatorships" (whether it being true or not). And that not because dictatorships are particularly good at making the economy grow (since most authoritarian countries are poor and people don't give a flying s** about them unless they are growing and defying the hegemony of the West) but simply because, again, it needs to be stressed again, MOST countries on planet Earth would be classified as authoritarians. Hence, in simple terms, if we will se a poor country becoming a rich country MOST LIKELY it will be a country classified that way. So the paper ASSUMES that "authoritarian countries" lie because they grow more when in fact countries that grow more in its vast majority are even as authoritarian or, at least, not mature democracies. OF COURSE the mature democracies will grow less. They are the richest countries on Earth.
Another reason (in addition to the one I posted on air quality) for China's night lights not growing as fast as gdp could be that a lot of Chinas economic activity was building "Ghost Cities" and properties that were not inhabited, but instead held as a second home. These would not generate as much light, as only infrastructure surrounding the uninhabited skyscrapers would be lit.
Ah, yes, the infamous "styrofoam buildings"...
They can also be useful as a tax write off as they are guaranteed to produce negative returns.
That right, but also can be worse, the ghost cities can qualify as wasted money, second home for vacation or work can be an asset, but those uses aren't realized in China, compounding the fact that many of those house are leases, that in 70 years will be lost money anyways
The problem there is that so many of these secondary homes are rotten tail projects, homes that have not started or completed its construction phase and the original mortgage is essentially stolen into China's Ponzi scheme. Many citizens are being asked to essentially pay a full second mortgage to resume construction, with many of these projects having serious problems, such as concrete of such poor quality that you can break it by hand, not reinforced with rebar, etc. It is not like say here in the US where when you buy a secondary home, you then have the actual home. In China, the "house" is more of a "promise to build a house with substandard construction."
Why would lights be on in night in residential area anyway?
If this number is really in the same ballpark, that's remarkable, a 50% smaller economy is quite insane!
Its the magic of compounding growth. Overstating growth by e.g. 2% each year will produce staggering results in the long run
@@MoneyMacro I think it is a flaw to assume that wealth distribution in autocratic countries is similar to democratic countries. A country 1000 people earning 100k$ per annum will cast much much more light than an impoverished country with 10 big shots earning 10M$ per annum even though the wealth is the same. If we look solely based on light emitted it might look like the first country is richer even though the second country is clearly equally rich in terms of money.
But since China has a lot of so called "ghost-cities", wouldn't that have implications in the rate at which night lights in China grow?
@@lakshmanb5604 Did you watch the video? the paper looked at all the factors that could explain the differences, if you disagree with them maybe go read the paper fight?
No GDP data is 100% accurate. Just by looking at how big the middle class is, chinas economy has indeed exploded
Couple of issues with this study. First, the relationship with night light and GDP has been shown to depend on the level of urbanization. For example, study by Xaquín S.Pérez-Sindín et al. (2021) found that the relationship between satellite measured night light and GDP was strongest for urban areas (coefficient of 0.71 with an R2 of 0.5 for 500K centers vs.0.57 and an R2 of 0.32 for areas with 20-50K). Although having a large population, China is still less urbanized than the US and most Western European countries. Urbanization in China is ~61% vs. 82% in the US, with the difference being much larger during the 1990 - 2010 period.
Additionally, Martinez assumes that the relationship between night light and GDP is linear. There's no reason to assume this as you might expect that increased GDP in highly developed countries might be near a saturation point; at some point this relationship will break down as economic growth is less tied to population growth and increased light generation (just an aside, health expenditure as a fraction of GPD in the US is 19% and has been a major contributor to US GDP growth. How is that tied to light generation?).
Further, the R2 values are generally low (~0.3), indicating that there are a host of other factors far greater than night light that account for changes in GDP. Again, linear regression with values this low can't be used to conclude something as specific as China lying about its GDP numbers. Finally, the use of the "Freedom Index" is a little dubious. It seems unlikely that something as simplistic and ideological as a "Freedom Index" will capture any nuance in something as complex as a modern government. Correlation is not causation. In complex systems (especially anything as complex as economies and government) one will always find an endless number of variables that are weakly correlated. However, explaining how these variables relate mechanistically and causally is the hard part, which Martinez fails to do.
When coupled with the low R2 values and low correlation there really isn't anything specific one can say about how governments lie about GDP measures. If this was a paper in a prestigious science journal it would have been rejected, not because its methods are wrong, but rather because its conclusion cannot be justified on the basis of the results and analyses presented. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there is a relationship between night light and GDP (with plenty of unexplained variance) and lots of variability between countries, regardless of whether we subjectively classify them as free or not.
Nice counter-comment. Thanks.
thanks for the counter argument, very thorough. but isn't an R2 of 0.3 quite good for a social science?
Growth in urbanization in China has been dramatic over this period, from 23% in 1990 to close to 64% in 2020, compared with 75%v to 82% in the US. Given what you say above, shouldn't we expect the night life growth to be even faster than GDP growth in China over the same period, rather than less?
@@StevenBerg123 It may very well be a good value for a social science (I'm not in the field of social sciences) but if that is your analysis and value then you have to adjust your conclusions in accordance. You can't make such specific and extraordinary claims (seriously, claiming China is lying and that its economy is 60% less than claimed because it's an autocratic government is a pretty extraordinary and specific conclusion in the field of social sciences) without extraordinary data and more specific results. If someone claimed that the US economy is half of what the government claimed based on, for example, internet usage, nobody would take that seriously without additional data and analyses. Why should we hold any claim about China to a lower standard?
Sure, but it also means that in the early stages of growth, when China's was a more rural society, light measures were a very poor indicator of economic growth. My point was that the level of light and GPD growth will not be linearly related since a country's level of urbanization will change over time, especially a country undergoing rapid development. So, for example, in the early period, when China was more rural and light levels were poorly correlated with GDP, the value would be weighed differently than values when the country was more urbanized. Hence, the relationship between light and GDP will not be linear across time and economic development as assumed by the study. Hence a low value with lots of unexplained variance doesn't really provide any mechanistic insight to reported GDP and light, especially since the definition of what is being compared (autocratic vs. democratic) is so vague and poorly defined. If you read the original study, Martinez also excluded a lot of autocratic countries that don't fit the trend because he claims they don't have any incentive to lie about GDP (mostly West African countries that receive aid and are friendly to Western interests). Why do this if you think autocratic governance is the major motivator for exaggerating GDP numbers. Clearly, things are way more complex than this.
I know I’m late but great vid man I’m sorry for your loss it’s never easy losing a family member who’s been with you for a long time. I’m new to the channel but I love the effort you give to these videos and your cat who was always apart of them. Best wishes and prayers for you and your cat ❤
I love this channel and the information it presents... but i also loved the glimpses of Macrocat. He contributed to the vibe of the channel and did a good job keeping things relaxed and not over-serious. Thank you for mentioning that he did not suffer... but my heart is still in mourning for Henry. RIP Macrocat and rest easy.
Thank you so much for having Henry lighten us up all this time. This wonderful cat brought joy to you and so many others here. I'm know he too is grateful for all the love you gave him.
Rest in Peace, dear Macrocat.
F
Great video Joeri. Very sorry to hear about your cat. I hope you are doing well.
@Patrick - I always watch your channel. Great to see you here!!!
Hey man, sad for your loss! Remember the good work that you are doing for us millions of people and that will give you strength to carry on
Rest in peace, Henry. It's tough to lose your friends, especially before their time, so wishing you the absolute best
I haven't read the paper, but one variable to look into is population density in cities. Most urban growth in China seems to be "vertical", that is in tall skyscarpers that will emit proportionally less light per unit area than a growth based on sub-urban sprawl.
That makes sense for residential and office space, but they're also rather less relevant than industrial and retail space when it comes to GDP. retail effectively has a limit to how far up you can go (due to the logistics of getting both products and customers in and out), and industrial just doesn't really compress like that unless you start doing rather noteworthy and exotic things. Or at least, such is my understanding.
Sounds logical, but look at the lights on any map of Manhattan, and they are the brightest. For me, to see how China has manipulated data for decades with reporting GDP of 6% one quarter, 6.1% the next, then 6.2% the next. No legitimate country would report numbers in such a steady manner. Look at the democratic countries and they are 4.0% one quarter, 2.5% the next, 3.2 the next. China has their municipalities report that growth to make their numbers stay the course and have steady growth for their "image", not reality. Soon reality will catch up with them. Can you imagine any legitimate country missing out on a GDP report? That's what China has done because they are slowing down and don't want to admit it or not until the CCP party is over.
@@robinsoncrusoeonmars8594 I think you're not quite familiar with the usual grography of chinese cities(spoiler it's totally different from Manhatta)
For starters, Manhattan is extremely small and has a population density of over 72,000 people, no city in mainland China is that dense; it has been fully occupied for over 100 years, the only way to buil new stuff is by tearing old stuff down, theres barely a centimeter of undevelopped land in Manhattan.
For contrast, cities in china have enormous land area, also being the center of administration of dozens of villages and smaller towns, so the population density is always relatively low; this one might sound a bit astonishing to you if youre from the US, but the average residential building in China is still taller than most buildings in Manhattan(because most of it was built a century ago, when there was no better technology. Also contrary to the popular belief, appartaments in mainland China are actually quite spacious, they only got a bad reputation because of Hong Kong and Macau); if you look on google maps you'll notice that in general urban areas in China are covered by HUGE parks, sometimes built right in the downtown areas, which is probably why it's not as bright as you'd expect.
Also, Manhattan has a per capita of over 100,000USD, theres no reason to compare it to anywhere in China anyway.
@Keyboard Emperor To build empty ghost cities and get itself into a major debt crisis. Good job! Btw the US build more aircraft carriers in 10 years than China in 2000 years.
China also has vertical residential facilities, but so do other countries.
Since the more vertical, the higher the population density, so this can be verified through population density.
According to that, the population density of India is higher than that of China.
Many cities, such as Delhi in India, New York in the United States, Shanghai in Egypt, and Seoul in South Korea, have higher population densities than China.
Well, yeah. Houses usually turn off the lights for sleep at night. Right?
If so, the facilities that shine even at night are probably factories.
But factories usually don't build high. The reason is.... The reason has been explained by many others. lol
Then, China's GDP statistics should not be different from other countries.
Because every country in the world has the same height of factories.
+)
How did the idea that only China build skyscrapers and live on?
Light surely also depends on things like population density and wealth disparity. The US typically has fairly spread out suburbs compared to the high-rise flats seen in China's cities. Surely this means one model for light intensity can't just be flatly applied to the other country and extrapolated from.
Yeah overall this model just seems too simplistic. A rough estimate is fine, but to present the calculations as anything concrete is a bit irresponsible since it misses out on way too many factors like population density/concentrations, industries involved, how high-rises affect perceived luminosity at night, and not to mention the sample size used in the original study only extends until 2008.
@@o-654 did you read the paper? or are you just assuming that the people who peer-reviewed were not aware of such basic things?
As a chinese, I am aware of how Marco says the GDP number could be fabricated, I know that well my family member told me a lot and I think many Chinese would joke about it too(by exchanging your old shoes with your friends many many times, now you get a high GDP) but I would also doubt the measurements of just using light intensity to measure GDP. And you are right I think it might be due to there are taller buildings which covers up individual light useage
There are several possible other reasons I come up with my friends: 1. Chinese people stay up less at night because of culture of longevity than westerners. Westerners can stay up all night partying. Chinese people value sleep cycle more. Although, yes there are many Chinese people who still stay up late playing majiang or clubing but few. 2. electricity is not cheap. 3. retailing and face-to-face buisnesses are less and less popular because the digitalization and e-commerce, most people can stay at home not going out and live a life. So retailers which emit light is less.
While this model is very rough, it makes sense. This is especially so given that China has had the largest transfer of population from rural areas to urban areas in history over the past 2 decades. They should have very intense increases of light at night in and around their urban areas, and if they don't then something is not right. If even the Chinese Premier looks at power consumption levels rather than official economic data to make his judgement on economic growth, then the theory spoken of in this video makes even more sense.
Your misconception is that use think in absolute light transmission, while you have to think in relative changes.
12:08 the conclusion is pretty dramatic, a country with 3 times higher GDP apparently has poorer infrastrcture, less industrial output (like cars, electronics, any type of metal refining, shell production, etc), similar retail consumption, lower literacy rate (elementary education spending), less home owners, etc.
Few MAJOR red flags with this paper:
> Data was originally collected by the U.S. Air Force on behalf of the MIC - untrustworthy collector, potential data manipulation
> Luminosity measurements recorded during mid-eve period (8:30-10pm) across the year *rather than an early eve period closer to standard working hours* (e.g. 6pm-9pm), measured as averaged pixel intensity measurements - a time period that would correlate more to household electricity use than industrial electricity use
> No positive control used as another correlate of GDP (e.g. tax data)
> No 'null hypothesis' - the paper opens with the premise that autocratic regimes *do* (rather than *may*) exaggerate GDP once surpassing the GNI per capita threshold for claiming benefits through the International Development Association (IDA)
> No negative control used - e.g. the author could, and in my opinion should, have been also using NTL to correlate GNI per capita with household electricity use, for which the mid-eve period he measured would be a better correlate.
This is because GNI per capita is the threshold at which regimes may claim financial aid from the GNI, so the incentive for low-income developing countries would be to fudge the statistics for as long as possible to maintain aid - another indicator of regime untrustworthiness.
To his credit, the paper's author did rigourously collate and analyse this data, and shows in Table C4 the year at which countries became ineligible for IDA assistance. China became ineligible in 2000, 4 years behind of Indonesia (dictatorship until 1999) but 10 years ahead of democratic India and 13 years ahead of Pakistan (dictatorship in 1999 gradually democratised in the 00's and 10's)
Bet you have investments in China and talk your book. Bulletin: all Chinese stats are bull.
@@oldernu1250 As the old saying goes: there are lies, damned lies, and statistics :D
@@oldernu1250 I don't get why western people are scared of China, so what if they have a different government; it clearly works for them. It feels like the western media just wants to see China fail. Why don't we want to help each other succeed?
@@oldernu1250 That sounds like someone who has investments in the US or EU
@@oldernu1250 And just like the paper, your opinion is hardly something I'd call unbiased
My biggest concern is the paper's claim to be able to control for confounding variables. Not just are there so many crucial factors to consider but it's easy to see how they might correlate strongly with a countries status of democracy. However, your comparison between India and China seems very interesting. It should be much more doable to examine the reasons for their specific discrepancy in light to gdp growth rates.
India has plain sight brothels open at night, China hasn’t, it’s all hidden…
India Standard Time is 2.5 hours behind China Standard Time. Meaning if you measure the light intensity of Indian cities at their peak values, ~8:00PM, most Chinese have already gone to bed. This, of course, assumes those images weren't modified.
Forget satellite photos, just look at power generation numbers. China generally produces more than 5 times that of India, or about twice as much as the United States.
@@qgyunyc yes and thats why streetlights must've been closed too. Makes sense only if its sarcasm.
China is the only developing country to successfully prevent informal settlements, i.e shanty towns, being built. Over 1 million people live in basements in Beijing whereas India has large slums built entirely above ground.
The correlation on the graph he shows for china vs india seems to be incredibly low though. Like, I haven't checked the math, but just look at it, there's no way the data gives strong support for those lines
This kind of real question asking followed by open consideration of both the alternatives and implications of the inquiry is what science, finance, and policy making needs more of today. Great video! Sorry for your loss with Henry's passing, he was great as Macrocat.
Exactly! I was skeptical after the first few minutes. Still somewhat skeptical but far less when many of the nuances were covered
One of the reasons may indeed be that ghost cities were counted in GDP but once built turn into a mere deadweight. Another (and more speculative) one is that China may have overstated its population, especially the number of working age people.
Do you know your own name?
China's population might not be false as they wont release their low birth rate and consequence of the one child policy otherwise
@@omega6311 If they did not release their low birthrate, how did you know that their birthrate was low? The fact, you, like so many of the silly classes, will accept anything puts Chian is a negative light.
The fact that Japan, Italy, Germany, South Korea and Switzerland have lower birthrate than China does not seem to indicate anything negative for those countries. Moreover, the fact that America's birthrate is no better than China's is of even lesser significance.
China has raised almost a billion people out of abject poverty, and they have also improved the quality of life for not just their own people, but for many other countries across the world.
What America has done in the same period of time is to invaded, occupy, kill and destroy the lives of millions of people across the world. Just look at the facts. They are there for anyone to see.
China has its own satellite pictures of night lights
There is one concern with nightlight data that you could mention : saturation. It doesn't mean that the calculation is wrong or anything like that, but rather than a straight line it's likely that the relationship between nightlight growth and GDP growth is concave in GDP (when GDP becomes larger, light intensity is more saturated so it grows slower for the same growth rate of the economy). So my only concern with the paper is that the relationship is overstated because Chinese economic growth is concentrated in rich areas where saturation is more of a thing. It would be cool to check the relationship for different provinces in China as a robustness check if you have the data !
Honestly, it sounds like you've got a chunk of money sitting in China, and this is a rationalization to make yourself feel better rather than any logical conclusion or argument.
@@diegomartinez6100 Nah I'm an academic doing economic research using nightlight as well so I was just pointing out the caveats that we all face when working on this !
What an aggressive tone !
@@abd5596 Apologies if I came off that way, the Chinese economy is like the recent American election, subject to a lot of hype and incorrect numbers because of vested interests. A lot of the analysis regarding China has felt like people rationalizing their beliefs as opposed to anything factual, especially when you take into account the irregularities regarding their economy and population as well, both of which have been inflated by people on the ground that just want more funding for their particular municipality/regional government. Personally, I expect the CCP to spend the next couple of years dealing with threats to it's very existence, akin to '89 and this time furthered by the advent of the internet. People now can see what the other side lives like, and Xi has neither the chutzpah nor the balls to push China back to a pre-Deng Xiaoping sort of society.
I agree with most of the above, but a different approach. In the video the question was: Do you trust China's numbers or this research? I would trust the numbers of almost anybody over the official numbers of China. Most importantly I observed a few years ago how shipping went down and two big shipping companies went bust (around 2015/16 iirc). China's exports faltered but the official gdp growth numbers were +6.5% as forecast. I don't think so. And they fudged the numbers for decades. So yeah, I believe the research 100%.
I worked in both US and China. When I worked in US, we left all lights on for thew whole night even nobody in the office building. In China, we have to turn off lights before leaving. Chinese is very conservative on energy consumption.
Very sorry to hear about Macrocat. He seemed very happy and content. I'm sure you did a good job taking care of him. We too lost our cat Paul unexpectedly this past Easter. It's never easy when you love and care for them.
I am so sorry for the loss of Henry. The Loss of a pet is usually underappreciated by other people, but he was clearly very important to you and the people who watch this channel. I wish you the best.
Hi, great video! One question I have though, is how is it not more noticeable and has no evidence other than the fact it has less lights than expected? I could see how it makes sense for even something like 20%, but more than half of a country’s economy being fictional is bound to make people notice sooner and in more forms, isn’t it?
This channel deserves millions of subscribers, top quality.
Thanks Tijl!
Shitty resources and information collecting, more like deserves much less subscribers
@@MoneyMacro Truly is! Best macro content. One tiny little tip I wanna give is to improve audio a little.
It can sound a little muffled sometimes compared to some other top channels. Maybe just a little eqing in the top end can already do the trick :)
My condolences for your loss. For me Macrocat was one of the highlights of the show, thank you for sharing him with us through your channel. He will be missed.
Goddamn...that ending got me. We are nothing without love, and the only way we can have love in our lives is by accepting it's brutally honest traveling partner, tragedy. RIP Rumi...please show Macrocat a good time.
Just started the video but I'm going to go ahead and agree. Tragedy is the environment that makes love possible. A great deal of people train themselves to not see tragedy and love shallowly as a result. Imo.
So no China Threat right? Yeah! Let's get back to enjoy our lives!
How low of you , how pathetic , how cheap,
Cant cooperate or stand another nation,
You guys are real 3 rd world
Dont worry , stay dreaming , well show you how its done
Zoals steeds: zeer professionele video. Interessant onderwerp, goede en duidelijke uitleg. Je weet heel goed de aandacht vast te houden. Heel erg dat Henry naar de overzijde is gegaan. Hij heeft een leven van een prins gehad. We zullen macrokat missen in de volgende filmpjes!!!
Wie is Henry?
@@johnwt7333 de kat.
Very sorry for the loss of Henry! Thank you for your videos, I show them to my buddies who are finance/politics wonks, they are very high quality and informative. I hope you are doing alright in the wake of this tragedy.
中华人民共和国万岁，习近平总书记是全世界最伟大的人，他带领全世界人民走向光明
have been researching all this while for a digital asset to invest in and I found the crypto market to be the most profiting of them all, I'm definitely bouncing on it
Wow, Her scores are
everywhere😮
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
Rest in peace, Henry. This was my first ever video I've seen from this channel and Henry brought joy to my heart.
x2
One must also consider the switch to LED street lighting. LED light can be directed down and throws less light into the night sky which could affect the results.
Hey bud,
Sorry about Henry. Pets become family and their loss is huge. I know editing the end won't have been easy.
Sending my love out champion. We're here for you.
Thanks for the video. I've been saying something similar for a few years now.
Thank you. It wasn't an easy edit for sure. But, in the end, I felt blessed to have the opportunity to do something like this for him.
@@MoneyMacro None of us are permanent, unlike the growth of CCP GDP. Look after yourself please mate.
I've lost two brothers to cars. Still miss em dearly but life is for living not being sad. You can do that later.
They are certainly smaller than official reports, but 60% seems too much. I would bet 30-40% compared to official numbers.
The metodology also has a vague point, after a certain threshold of development, more electricity and more energy will not just occupy more space, several sweatshops producing clothes in Bangladesh can easily emit the same light Google's headquarters does. Economies speciallize and grow in extremely complex products, not just size and volume. After some point, you Will not just detect more light.
Great video as always Joeri.
I agree, to me this paper is using the worst possible estimates to get attention and clout. It seems very unlikely to me that so much of China's economy is basically faked, but I could be wrong.
I agree with your statement except even 30% seems extreme
The argument in the paper and yours can only imply intentional and nefarious lying and to successfully dupe the entire globe for so many years jist seems entirely too far fetched. Even 30% of their GDP is such a colossal number that concrete and irrefutable evidence would be had years ago
@@FutureBoyWonder At no point is that statement extreme. It has been a trend all throughout history to exaggerate economic growth to keep people content; it's not nefarious as it is short-sighted for the sake of political stability. There are no barriers to stop such things and thus it becomes far too attractive to not do so.
Noticeably, I said exaggerate, not completely make up. As long as people in China FEEL some improvements, then the real economic numbers don't matter all that much and can easily be justified. It doesn't take much to dupe the world when the world takes a country at face value. GDP is not something you can find with evidence, you can only discern it by parsing through the data of an entire country which only said country's government can accomplish. So the end result is; any attempts to disprove said stats can only come from within, which is impossible for China due to government control over media, or be judged through a less accurate but more honest method like the paper made.
He said 60% of the size of current AKA 40% smaller. 30-40% of the size of current would be 60-70% smaller.
China's GDP is certainly smaller than what they claim it to be, however if it was 60% smaller it would have massive implications because you can lie about statistics; but this true to a certain extent due to these "numbers" exposing an economy that it's not true at all.
In my country, Spain, if the offical gdp fake was around what France has it wouldn't make sense because the median annual wage is around 25k while France is closer to 35k (maybe a bit more); it is also important to take into account that these 2 countries have different ammount of inhabitants; but still, my point is that you can't present a flawed number if that precise number is showing an opposite reality or very different atleast... and as far as I'm concerned China GINI is 38,2 therefore gdp is moderately distributed and not kept by a small percentage of the population
I'm so sorry to hear about Macrocat. Henry really was wonderful. As much as I hope another feline friend can join you on your journey to bring us economic information in a fun and interesting way, we'll always remember Henry.
Rest well, little guy.
A road to nowhere is GDP. An empty apartment building is GDP. Do they really add to the economy?
Light is one indirect measurement, but I wonder if these findings can be verified using different proxies (energy consumption? emissions? trade balances?)
I understand China used to release lots of other measures that could be used as a proxy for GDP, however one of the first things Xi Jinping did was to reduce the amount of statistics released
The Chinese centralized state already does approximations of energy consumption + emissions + trade balances to adjust the "official regional report" down because the central government wants to know the true growth numbers for their 5 year plans. The regional governments caught on over time and adjusted these other numbers in accordance with their fake growth. However light pollution is a new metric that isn't used so that shows the true growth. However now that this paper has been published I'm sure the central government will use it to adjust local figures down which will result in corrupt local officials doing stupid stuff like forcing new buildings and companies to install brighter lights to fake more growth or something like that. There was the scandal of fake solar and wind installations in shenzhen city a couple of years ago as well.
Fire/heat maps can also be used for this exact measure.
No they can not... China consumes 60-70% of global production of concrete, for instance... And there are many more metrics lite this. And this "light" metric is absolute and total BS. Also author of video conviniently forgot to say that access to this article costs 30$! That is all you need to know about how Western GDP is generated and calculated.
@@joey199412 They might, but that would require more electricity, which would require more spending and a higher GDP to sustain such a thing. Though they could just do it by making more debt to that would hasten a collapse.
(DON'T COMMENT IN THIS THREAD TO KEEP IT CLEAN)
Is there a good reason for much slower night light growth than GDP in China (compared to other countries) that I, or the paper, didn't think about. Let me know in the comment section. The best arguments will be featured in this thread.
Free pdf of the published paper can be found here: bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/BFI_WP_2021-78.pdf
China has been pushing people to move into cities. You can see more rural areas dim while the city night lights increase. But I’m not so sure how you can parse more night light growth in cities (filled with light pollution) and gdp growth.
The best argument so far (my opinion) is air pollution. The paper did not check for this!! In the period that the study was done, China had a lot of air pollution. Less than India though. Still, this could have hidden night light growth. However, then the implication is that, if this clears up (it already is), we should start seeing China light up like a Christmas tree.
data.oecd.org/air/air-pollution-exposure.htm
you want to flame China or whatnot, its fine, but the data is a joke. Using "Night light growth" as an indicator to show whether China is being honest about their reported GDP is brainless at its finest.
1. using "Night light growth" as EVIDENCE is just plain stupid. For instance, the relationship between age and height. Sure there's an ASSOCIATION between them, but you claim age causes height to increase, which is stupid
2. The data never accounted for the factors such as, "developing countries vs developed countries" (~90% of Autocracies are developing countries)
3. no attempt to provide any statistical analysis, but claim this and that, which is f stupid. you might as well say China reported fake GDP because they're evil.
I wrote this comment because I expected some concrete evidence, but instead, you gave me elementary stupidity
There is one yes,
Maybe they are just more efficient than you think with energy and there you go, explanation.
The time period is interesting, it goes to 2008, this year are before new leadership and still in very corrupt China, at this time light at night for most Chinese still doesn't exist, half of them and that's a lot still light petrol or coal to light there night, and suddenly with Xi, corruption is a death penalty sentence, and new big China rise, High speed rail in all china in less than 10 year ?
USA can't do that, digital money, apps for everything, smart cities,
WAY better management of electricity, big growth!
Now it's like, "oh China is declining a bit, only 5 or 4% growth instead of 6, oh China is bankrupt",
They are COMMUNIST !!!! They don't care about bankruptcy, they can do whatever decision they want. It's wrong to measure China the way we measure a Capitalist country.
They PLANJ their economy, they do strategy, they are playing GO, we are playing Chess, we let the market solve it's problem by itself, Chinese analyse and react and CAN do whatever' they want, Why would they destroy value in there stock market ?
For us, totally incompetent, look the stock market has fallen, the rich guys are not as rich as can be,
why do they don't care?
Strategy, efficiency, it's so wrong to assume they are dictator, they are wrong they are stupid,
no, not at all, they are achieving right now superpower status, but they don't care, it's not enough, the goal is to DOUBLE USA economy, then they are going to finish buying everyone is free country and they win.
How can they do that? By not telling the world how big their economy is, so that we don't know and don't care and forget them while they are buying the world, because that's our weakness, capitalist country CAN be bought!
Let's measure output and try to compare GDP, how much new ship a year ?
How much concrete a year
Follow that and understand how already bigger than USA they are.
We still don't want to understand and realize that.
There success is not logical to us and all economist in the west, they ALL think capitalism is the only way, the only thing that work, so just mange it; it's wrong, they are new and different to the game;
China have always been the global superpower in history, and it's coming back,
We should all understand that now and maybe learn from them instead of trying to make it a fake story for 20 year and realizing that if there economy change just a little bit, all the world is affected, a lot
That is already super global power.
data of lights to 2008, sorry not enough, yes the Chicago school would love that there conclusion is right but they didn't try to refute themselves rationally and understand disruption, new concept, etc. We all know the Chicago school of economy will be the last one to really understand China...
The question they should have asked is, why is China different, not how china compare to other dictator that are all corrupt, lazy, lying, capitalist, and SMALL !
China is big and has the aberrant population !
China has plenty of characteristic that are unique to them, efficiency in power, and half of china not needing light at night maybe can be the answer, or find different hypothesis, the Chicago school didn't try like this, they compared totally different country and structures with low sample size and outdated 2008 data, the world is totally different now and must be analyzed differently.
I will stop there, just trying to understand China...
It makes sense to me. China lies all the time about everything. They just do it with a Panda Smile.
Wait, if they're economy was like half the size they say it is... Shouldn't that be like blindingly obvious and everyone should agree? Like it's not a small lie.
I am thinking about that too, if it’s that different, then people wouldn’t consider it a threat
One trip to China and you'll know it will overtake the US economy. Channels like these are just coping because they cannot accept that very obvious fact. What is not made in China these days? 1.4 billion highly motivated people who work hard to produce products and services will of course overtake a much smaller population, no matter how exceptional the US is, or was.
His method is very unreliable. In hard sciences it would have never passed review
Yes and No.
If certain interest groups, in the West aside from the CCP stand to make a ( financial) killing by pumping up the bubble, and then exit at the right time just before the bubble bursts and the gullible people have deposited all their money into the ( sinking) hole, then they will turn a Nelson's eye.
It’s also believed that china overstated their population size as well. So it’s not surprising the GDP is fake and off the mark.
As to why provinces fake their population numbers, love govts can get more salary cheques and farm/school subsidies from faking the numbers. Population growth targets are also assigned to local govts as a KPI of performance
It’s very difficult to audit the true number in a dictatorship as any attempt will get you a one way ticket to prison
Sorry if I missed this point but did you discuss if the paper based its figures on the GDP numbers of China when taking into consideration the devaluation of the Yuan? I’m curious to know if the paper considered the relative size of China’s economy using their valuation or our valuation based on what the US believes the size to be if the Yuan were pegged to other currencies. That would theoretically skew the numbers.
the truth is, a coutnry's growth is not mrerely measure by its GDP number. And statement like " Yuan were pegged to other currencies. " has no evidence, it may be a fact, but none to know by US govt or any economists. It's backdoor deal that China and its allies make that others cant be know. which is actually a strength in currency, no data, no analytic , and thus no strategic can be make directly against Yuan.
It's fundamentally tracking growth over time. It's not tracking exact figures. PPP calculations also tend to hold steady over time and include currency exchange rates. In fact, tracking via nominal GDP is why it's more consistent of a value over time than consistently adjusting for exchange rates or PPP. Not to mention PPP is just a multiplier for the initial measurement anyway which means that it's added after, not before.
TL;DR It's all tracking for the nominal GDP, and PPP is a multiplier added after
I'm so sorry to hear about Henry. You're doing a great job, Joeri. Thank you very much for making macroeconomics more accessible and doing it in a such elegant, knowledgeable and accessible way!
WTF is wrong with you, folks‽ Here's a serious topic being discussed, and you whine about a cat?
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
Well, he didn't realize Chinese city residents live in very tall apartments. The light on those tall builds projecting to the space are not proportional to a single-story house.
I wish I had access to the paper, because there's a lot of factors that I'd love to read about, to know how they were accounted for:
1. Density- the USA is incredibly sprawl-y. For example, a huge percentage of land in the USA is devoted to single family homes, and I cannot imagine these look 100x dimmer than a towering residential building since the lower floors will be covered by the upper floors. But even focusing on single family homes though; they're huge in the USA, with huge driveways and lots of road-space in between. I've seen other countries build closer together, with less driveway space. I imagine brightness from space is a function of factors like window-size and the asphalt around a building the light can bounce off, which will be lower for denser countries. Moreover, countries with better rail and public transport will see less lights at night from trucks and trailers.
2. Authoritarianism & data-points- how is this calculated? I don't doubt this hypothesis is probably true for some countries, but in order to show a trend one needs a consistent measure of "authoritarianism" which sounds like it could be subjective. Moreover, is the sample size all countries? Wouldn't the omission of countries be a possibility for counter examples that would muddle the data and erase a clearly-visible trend?
3. Culture- Where I'm from we turn off the lights at night, and one thing that surprised me in the USA is just how laissez-faire it is with electricity. This is also a place that's quite thorough with public lighting, and I can only imagine it has at least partially to do with a cultural looming sense of disaster and distrust for one's neighbors. All streets have public lighting here, even the ones that are not that transited, the huge parking lots of supermarkets (you don't see those in China), etc. Can we assume that other nations will demand the same level of public illumination when they develop? I live in the USA now and have certainly grown more accustomed to "leaving the lights on", but not to the degree of other people here. I can imagine there's a whole generation or two in China who are still very mindful of energy conservation in spite of their increased purchasing power, which could show in residential areas, and if their perception of security is also different, why waste energy?
I have to wonder also how points 1 & 3 above correlate with "authoritarianism". Ie, would an "authoritarian" country give a greater sense of security to people, thus reduce their desire for public lighting? Or perhaps state-affiliated energy/development companies simply set up less public lighting since consumer demands matter less? Are denser countries more likely to be "authoritarian" or vice versa?
I don't doubt China's numbers are made-up to some degree, though speaking of China's case, a ballpark 3x difference in official vs real economy size sounds crazy, and the correlation between brightness and GDP sounds true but very variable from culture to culture, history to history, city to city.
Same by itself this leaves too many questions I can believe theyd perhaps mess around with it, but him deciding to extrapolate from these numbers is also ill advised since the author certainly had a reason he didn't do so himself.
Furthermore I completely agree with your points and wish that while making such a groundbreaking/clickbait claim to expand and find other references aka import/export data, resources, capital flows, standard of living, and various other components and tie that into this since extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and one paper (even a good paper) indicating something might be the case alone is at best a starting point.
I agree with you on #2 and #3, but for #1 don't forget that there are many dense/transit-oriented democratic countries and sprawling/car-dependent authoritarian countries as well.
Exactly. I’d like to see the dataset and controls used for analysis. Have they accounted for cultural differences like asian families who have multiple generations in a single household vs nuclear families? Relative safety of the region? Suburban areas vs nightlife zones?
There are a lot of controls required that i can’t take this at face value. At worst, this😊 is the perfect example of “correlation does not imply causation”
bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/BFI_WP_2021-78.pdf
@@Pasta_Pirate It is very simple. You need to get the real GDP of China, and infer it by looking at the trade volume between China and other countries in the world. It should be the most accurate. Only commodities and trade can truly reflect the GDP of each country.
Thanks for sharing this interesing research paper! However, I have some disagreements....
1. Until Xi took office in 2012, Beijing took more of a restrained foreign policy approach. 韬光养晦 - is what this approach is called, which was intended to keep China out of the Thucydides trap for as long as possible. China benefits from being underestimated, so they'd be less harsh on international obligations and wouldn't be targeted by U.S. sanctions. Also, instead of manipulating the numbers, they could just talk about GDP adjusted for purchasing power.
2. Economic performance is linked to an innumerable number of third-party variables. Variables that are collected by different institutions at home and abroad. Just as an example, with a GDP of 6 trillion USD China would have a foreign trade GDP ratio of 100% (this figure is also issued by the contracting parties, so it is not in Beijing's making), four times as much as the USA. The argument can be extended at will - a factor of 3 is therefore quite unthinkable.
3. and this is probably the most important point: the highly developed and democratic OECD countries have a completely different economic basis than the autocratic developing countries. Everything from sectoral order to the progress of commodification can be a possible alternative explanation for light pollution growth or its absence. The absolute value, on the other hand, is no good either; for this, one only needs to look at the current world ranking, according to which Iran is three times as productive as Germany (similar number of population).
Of course, the Chinese figures should still be viewed critically, but 40% of economic output sounds like Washingtons wishful thinking to me. In this extent, that would have already been followed up long ago. Nevertheless, thanks for the contribution!
I was born in China and moved to the UK with my parents when I was 10, I went back to China every couple of years to visit my grandparents and everything I was astonished by how much the city has changed, and this has been happening in the past 15 years. This could be the fact that my parents are living in the coastal region of China where the trade flourished, whereas the development of the middle and west part of China is lacking behind, but I tend to believe the development at least in my region, is real.
First and second tier cities likely have real development. The other lower tier and more rural places have bad incentives for economic growth like building apartment buildings that nobody lives in and endlessly funding unnecessary construction so they meet central government GDP quotas.
I believe the development to be very real too; however, not as rapid as is presented by official data
I agree with your subjektive impression. I often visit Ningbo and it is astonishing if you look the New buildings. But as soon as you go into a the company than it is shocking how inneffective the production process is. Better production and less expensive building would convince me more.
Most definitly devolopment is real. China can claim the biggest economic miracle that ever happened. Even in this portrayed scenario China still would be the second largest economy, just not as close to the US as their own released data would make it seem. We will certainly know in 10 years or so :D
Some parts of China definitely experienced development. The research piece is not disputing that. It’s just saying that that development was overstated.
A very intresting point. In order to reaffirm the data, maybe a few more data points should be collected:
-infrared radition into space (= Energy consumption)
-foreign trade
-money spent by Chinese tourists abroad (via credit card and ATM withdrawl)
-car traffic
-cargo traffic on chinese rivers, railroads and freeways
The problem that I see, is that a direct correlation between economic power and light emitted is probably very difficult. The light-emission curve is probably very steep at the beginning when people start to afford electricity, but once people's need for light has been satisfied, I doubt that further GDP-groth will lead to substainial further light emission groth.
Also Chinese cities tend to grow upwards not outwards. As most live in tower apartment blocks and not inefficient sprawling suburbs. This study just sounds like a desperate cope and more fuel for the anti-China train.
@@primeradiant827 the light intensity would show, that's the issue; you can't come here like a 无毛 and call him "anti-共产党" , he's just asking a question that has come to light from a research paper, other developing nations with growing economies also prefer constructing high rises and apartments instead of villas and houses, and you can also see the light intensity growth as their gdp is reported to increase, I lived and worked in China closely with the government as an advisor, and I do know they like to change statistics for their own interests.
Money spent by Chinese tourists is used to purchase luxury brands which they sell back in the mainland since the luxury items are cheaper in the west than China, although illegal; many 阿姨's do this business to sell for profit. Also ypu can't collect that information since Union Pay is chinese and does not allow any organisation besides the chinese financial body to observe transactions in real-time (live), foreign trade is already accounted for , and it has been dropping ever since 2018, since more regulations have increased product and labour cost, many companies are now looking to other developing countries to start manufacturing.
@@EzraMerr Thank for the info. And thanks for responding in an academic matter. Having a civilized academic disscussion on the Internet is really hard...
Yes, most of the data points I suggested are probably much harder to collect than light emission.
However, I like the approach to collect data that is hard to manipulate. There should at last be data on infra-red radiation that would allow to meassure the energy consumption.
The correlation between energy consumption and GDP is pretty reliable.
Trying to reflect a complex and unfamiliar society by creating simple iconic indicators. Is this person naive or lazy? I have a question. The infrared emission of LED bulbs is much lower than that of other bulbs. China has fully used LED bulbs many years ago and banned the sale of tungsten bulbs for lighting. Street lights are also fully LED, so you think your data Will it be correct?
Thank you for your analysis, as always, and I am so so sorry about Henry. May the little guy rest in peace 😿.
As a scientist I'm naturally a little sceptical about such a correlational study and its enormous interpretation.
2 questions please you didnt address sufficiently imho:
1) Did the author of the paper offer enough and convincing arguments as to why night light intensities would significantly relate to GDP growth in detail?
How was he actually able to exclude his many good points why it might not correlate?
2) if it was a highly appreciated study, he nust have offered alternativ and independent other methods of meassuring real GDP growth to compare with.
Did he offer such other techniques?
Thank you so much!
if China's economy is really that small they will need to explain why China consume x2 the amount of electricity and 160% more energy than the USA.
@@The136th yes that would be interesting. This would be a better meass6re than night lights.
Maybe the Chinese just better value their good sleep 🤔😅
@@ProgressiveEconomicsSupporter the fact that the growth of consumption falls behind production in China, which is a socialist pedigree, can falsify the night lights as good indicator for real GDP growth.
@oldlamp1982 probably not if the export a significant portion of what they produce - or am I wrong?
@The136th likely because the produce a damn lot for the rest of the world, maybe not so much at night.
And they might not party so much under extreme night light shows
Yes, you are right. Please convince the US government to believe it.
They have been lying all this while you mean??
@@parnamsaini4751 China's GDP is actually only 10% true, I am Chinese, I know it, please don't be too afraid of us surpassing the United States.
@@parnamsaini4751 yes china economic is bulit by rockected real estate market instead of real industrialization, the GDP data match more with the m2 increasing if you take a closer look, its a country built itself by debt.
@@marcma42China is commonly referred to as the world's factory because so many companies are outsourcing their production to the country. Something they never would've done if proper infrastructure wasn't in place.
When you say "real industrialization", what does that mean exactly?
No he is NOT.
There is a MAJOR flaw in this paper. MOST countries that grow the fastest today are not Western Style Democracies and would be classified as "authoritarians". China, Vietnam, India, even Malaysia and Indonesia would be classified like that. Second, the MAJORITY of he poor countries of the world are to some extent authoritarian, and poor low and middle income countries tend to grow more than high income countries, where the vast majority of the MINORITY of countries that are Western Style democracies on our planet are. Simply because, contrary to what most Westerners think, the MAJORITY of planet Earth is made up by countries that would be considered "non-democratic". When it comes to low and middle income countries, where most likely you'll find a fast growing economy, that percentage is even higher. Which brings the problem of how those countries where determined to be "dictatorships" in the first place as well. In other words, most countries that grow fast would be classified as "dictatorships" (whether it being true or not). And that not because dictatorships are particularly good at making the economy grow (since most authoritarian countries are poor and people don't give a flying s** about them unless they are growing and defying the hegemony of the West) but simply because, again, it needs to be stressed again, MOST countries on planet Earth would be classified as authoritarians. Hence, in simple terms, if we will se a poor country becoming a rich country MOST LIKELY it will be a country classified that way. So the paper ASSUMES that "authoritarian countries" lie because they grow more when in fact countries that grow more in its vast majority are even as authoritarian or, at least, not mature democracies. OF COURSE the mature democracies will grow less. They are the richest countries on Earth.
I appreciate that you take non-partisan dives into the evidence and accept criticism. When discussing a question like this, it's very easy for content creators, or even researchers to be heavily biased - like when oil execs pay researchers to understate or outright deny climate change. A lot of China critics work off of faulty evidence, but you took an even deeper dive into a well-renowned paper, supplementing further evidence and including disclaimers. So, thank you. It's really been hard for me to find unbiased news and research.
that doesn't happen, you just don't like contrarian views from people on climate change, sometimes funded by the Oil Boogeyman that you try to demonize........even when the people making contrarian claims have a long, established record of credibility in the field..........and weak diversion attempt from China's GDP lies
Or when environmentalist get funding from solar and electric lobbyists and outright lie about biomass and biofuel, same thing
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
@@phillip76 There are interest in these estimates because the CCP is an authoritarian government who controls media and censors speech in their country. It is difficult to get accurate information about what is actually happening, like their GDP growth.
Please explain why race has anything to do with economics? but sure compare china to Taiwan, Japan etc they have all performed much better economically and present accurate statistics, which is nice
When I first moved to Canada in 2010, I was so shocked at my high school not turning off lights at night.
Canadians are proud it and are contributing more to Global warming ?
Not only the school, almost all the company don't.
In China, most buildings turn off lights at night. Only street lights are left on. I bet Mr. Martinez will have to write a second paper to adjust his conclusions.
do china's high shcool students study at night with candle?
@@kzmino4923 是的中国很落后的，都是用蜡烛有的时候还要用木头点起篝火来学习。
Sorry about the lost of Henry, it is hard to loss a family member. Wishing you the best Joeri.
So sorry of your great loss. Rest in peace, Henry. You’ll be missed.
I'm so sorry for your loss (Macrocat). It's the first video I see of yours and I immediately subscribed to your channel. I am certainly not qualified to refute any of the points in the document, and I must admit that I am glad to believe that China is far from imposing itself on the world economic power.
I expected this video to be "China will colapse in 3 days" levels of clickbait. Was met with a reasonable analysis of an academic paper. Great content!
You should keep in mind that of the factors that affects the amount of night light is the population, and in China, with its 1-child and 2-child policy, the population grew much slower than in other states, for example, than in the same India.
That's just more evidence the GDP numbers are fake.
That's exactly the point here - count the number of house lights. Peter Zeihan calls it the "checkbook map" because he's old and still uses checks to pay his utilities. But he's right in that every house light is someone who's paid their electricity bill. (Or paid their fuel bill for their generator. Or spent time on their house-powering stationary bicycle.) So if there are 20,000 house lights, but 30,000 households are counted, something is incorrect. Ironically, the CCP developed this metric for internal audits, and now it's being used for external audits of the CCP.
This has literally been analysed in the research paper and found to not cause significant deviation. Maybe you should read the paper.
guess what is also affected by population? GDP.
what is your connection between light pollution and population control?? ALSO, now there is a 3-child policy. Further, anyone can have multiple kids, they just have to pay an extra $100 per month.
Condolences 😢.
Thank you
I'm so sorry for the cat
I’m really curious, have you ever step foot into china??!?
That's a brilliant point, pun intended. There have been a lot of concern regarding china's GDP figures for at least the last 10 years and I used to talk with my professors about it at University looking for a smoking gun. Nice work and thanks for sharing
Actually if you have not worked in a Chinese company for a long time in China, it is difficult to know some truths.As i see,people usually do a lot of private transactions for tax evasion, and these transactions usually account for 30%-50% of the company's turnover.And there are many tax-free items that are difficult to describe, and the Chinese government does not count them at all.So in fact GDP is underestimated.
@@f0rgetwasure105 No the government already overestimates the economy to account for those things, but mostly the estimates are roughly consistant with metrics such as electricity consumption or trade volume
Another key point is that the Chinese government has been implementing foreign exchange controls to prevent the free convertibility of the currency, which has greatly increased the valuation of the RMB; would be overrated.
RMB is both overvalued and undervalued, there are already enough videos on the topic.
It's in the U.S.'s best interest to assume China is a threat regardless of the reality. This is how we are kept on our toes and hopefully out of complacency.
China is beyond ungrateful for retaliating against the US. Don't forget it was the US that made China second in the world. How would you feel if the person you fed betrayed you?....
Because humans will fight humans? Always the same
Exactly underestimating China is the main reason we're here, fentanyl on one hand, Taiwan on the other, Countries ditching dollar and siding with China and Economic collapse as more & more bow and kneel to China
Never underestimate your enemy
@CrescentPrince Kronos from the start the CCP (共产党) have been calling for the death of Americas for over 70 years now , if you call America an enemy expect America to take your threat seriously
An interesting discussion. A quick internet search brought up a 2013 article from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (Kiel Working Paper No. 1888 | December 2013; 'Night Lights and Regional GDP'; Bickenbach et Al.) which concluded that: "The relationship between regional GDP and night lights proves to be unstable, not only where regional GDP data may be unreliable but also where such data are of high quality. This suggests that night lights tend to be a poor proxy of regional economic activity." The article uses some sophisticated-looking statistical analysis (which I have not gone through in detail), but in any case seems quite thorough. Interestingly, this work is not referenced or discussed in Martinez (2018). What do you think?
Good find! I was hoping Joeri might go a bit into some of the robustness checks done by Martinez at the end there cos a lot of the methodologies used in these papers can be a bit dense to go through alone.
笑死我了。 I am chinese,let me explain it.When I was young ,my mom aIways told me to turn off the light if I leave the room and she would get mad if i didn"t do that .They born in the poor days of China in 20th centery.So even we get rich now,we are more willing to turn off the light that we do not need at once.I thought this professor would talk about China's real estate bubble, but I didn't expect him to talk about Nightlight.
@@lovekeqingforever4879 while you might be correct to assume so, you are only looking at habitable properties. Industrial properties also generate light pollution. I would think that China has a greater industrial footprint than other democracies. Maybe this could contradict your statement? Im not discrediting your experience. I think you have something there. Just wish we could have more concrete data we can analyse 😢.
@@lovekeqingforever4879 I don't think this is a discussion about bedroom lights - it's talking about industry and the types of properties that would keep lights on all night.
@@MatthewEverhart Even so that would be subjected to differences in energy policy, industrial policy regarding energy usage, light pollution policy and a bunch of other things that make it iffy as an estimate.
I heard about this study and had some questions about the methodology. I appreciate that you covered a lot of the details of the study.
This night light GDP analysis has been going on since 2005 and Martinez's 2018 paper has been peer reviewed but the video did not report on the results of the reviews. Economists said this type of night light GDP analysis falls under bad-faith analysis and often inaccurate. I think there is a 2022 paper from an University in New Zealand that debunked this analysis.
You've got to be kidding me! I can't believe any serious economist would use such ridiculous factors as “night lights” to gauge a country's economy. I don't know about you, but normal people do not engage in production activities at night! More lights at night would, at best, indicate a country has a richer nightlife. For a country like the US, which doesn't have much industrial capacity left and drives its GDP mostly by its services sector, there might be a correlation between night lights and GDP growth. Imagine all those nightclubs with shiny neon lights. However, for an industrial powerhouse like China, the most GDP-creating activities happen during the daytime. In fact, you may use less nightlight to argue that China has a more vibrant economy because most people have to go to bed early to be productive at the workplace during the daytime. Only people who don't need to work the next day would stay up late. If you want to find alternative indicators of a country's economy, why don't you look at energy consumption or import and export data? If you know economics, you'd know it's very hard to manipulate these numbers. I bet that if you study China's import and export data for the past few decades and can be objective, you'd definitely find support for China's officially released GDP data. And the whole “authoritarian” versus “democratic” data trustworthiness is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo, which only goes to show your inherent bias. I'll point out one major flaw in your argument. You suggest that the Chinese government fudges its GDP data to deceive the world, citing a report as evidence that claims the Chinese premier publicly stated he doesn't trust the government's GDP data. However, would someone deliberately lying openly admit he’s lying? That would defeat the whole purpose of lying, wouldn’t it? In fact, the Chinese premier never made such a statement; it’s once again a misinterpretation by Western media. Lastly, if China's economy were truly overblown to such an extent, why would the US leadership be so concerned about China potentially surpassing the US? Don’t you think they have access to better data and intelligence than you
It's worth noting that this is also true for population - one academic estimates that China's population may be as much as 200 million lower than it says, and because of population momentum and increasing political pressure to lie about it, the gulf between the actual and official number may continue to get wider. It's such a big gap it's one reason I don't think the human population will ever top 10 billion, despite the 2022 UN population estimates (the UN has to use official numbers)
Yes, depends on which "estimate" we use. The gap is about 100 Mio between current official numbers (1.37) and current independent estimates (1.27). And ist about 200Mio below what many people projected for 2022 5-8 years ago.
The past estimates are still relevant as they are "in the heads" of people. People with whom I discuss politics still repeatedly tell me "China has 1.4 or 1.5 billion people. Its the largest country in the world." - Which are both incorrect statements
Other than for India and Central Africa, world population has peaked.
Very sad news to hear of the loss of Henry, I always enjoyed seeing him in your videos. My condolences to you, Joeri, he will be missed. RIP ❤
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
@@indiasuperclean6969 Okay bot.
China's cities have some of the worst air pollution problems in the world. Could this obscure some of the night light? (Although I note that India also has poor air quality, and you mentioned that their GDP data didn't seem to be manipulated)
Not true anymore, China has effectively moved pollution away from major urban centers in the past decade.
@@PutXi_Whipped The paper says it used light data from 1992-2013 (it also uses some 2014-18 light data, but only for robustness checks). China's air quality was definitely poor in the study's dataset.
But then how would you account for a more accurate number from India? I am quite certain they don't have good air quality there.
Well I could tell you that air quality has improved dramatically recently and I don’t feel any difference now
@@ericjiang7986 See my firs reply to my comment.
I don't believe the Chinese economy is smaller than advertised by the GDP numbers. In fact, it could actually be the opposite, judging by their industrial output, by the raw materials they produce (like food, cement and steel), and the rate of technological innovation. The Chinse economy has most likely already surpassed the USA at this point.
Even if it is smaller than the US economy in the terms of dollars, I see no reason to doubt that it has the biggest economy in real terms (good produced, roads and houses built, etc.).
What you referred to is GDP measured by PPP Purchasing Power Parity, and yes, China has already become the largest economy in PPP since 2014.
Rest In Peace macrocat, you were loved by your owner and thousands around the world 😢
💖
So sorry to hear about Macrocat, rest in peace and hunt many mice in heaven.
@macrocat.
Dear Henry, you are now in a better place without all the worldly nonsenses... take care..
When people talk about you all the time, you know you are significant to them.
I was just talking to my husband about this that this is a huge claim. There are a few things:
1. If I'm an accountant and I want to know who lie on their tax return. I wouldn't just look at their Halloween props. To be fair, Halloween props may give a clue about their wealth but can only point you further to scrutinize the accounting book.
A better way would be to actually look at the accounting book itself. For example, look at export number. I believe since China has been export-led economy, so it accounts for a big percentage of the economy. You'd be able to track export to other countries every year over time.
You might not believe China's number, but you certainly can believe US or other Democratic country import-from-China number (since how else can you the source of truth for your GDP deflator curve).
So the question is do we see anything fishy in those numbers; and if so, it will lead to other accounting investigations such as how the number will add up, etc.
2. a paper is published doesn't mean it's correct. It just means that the author satisfies the publication criteria. They may publish in order to invite other papers to refutes the claim or refine the methodology.
3. Another thing is if you look at the curve at 4.30 minute. There is one obvious outlier. What happens if you remove that one outlier at the bottom left? Would the two regression line be more parallel?
I believe the author is questioned about this outlier every time he gives a talk.
I’m not sure the Halloween prop example is a good one. Unlike Halloween props, light and electricity usage is directly and irrefutably directly proportional to GDP. Meanwhile, Halloween props are not directly proportional because of the myriad of external factors that are more important to the Halloween props than just how much money they have.
What matters here is that “directly proportional.” Because the proportionality is direct, you can actually use one to determine the other. Given, approximately, but you can still do it.
I worked for many years compiling national statistics and we would joke all the time about internal inconsistencies in China’s numbers. It is easy to simply report higher top-level GDP. However, to state the obvious, GDP is a combination of data from a variety or sources, and while China has gotten much better at ensuring alignment with the “correct” growth target, we now often see different issues where volatility and consistency seem too perfectly in balance. I don’t know many who would be surprised by the growing discrepancy between real and reported figures.
Very sorry to hear about the Macrocat!
another number you can look at for a place like China is... total cell phone subscribers. Especially because you can't do anything without a cell phone and all cell phones are tied to a personal identity. So one source reported that the COVID deaths were seriously under-reported by China because the number of subscribers declined much more rapidly than the official deaths from COVID.
I used to buy financial and economic data for a research database (content acquisition or data licensing) and everyone would caveat the China data. I remember meeting with one startup that had developed a proprietary model to sort of compensate for factors and hence they touted a more accurate dataset.
But shouldn't the numbers get harder and harder to fudge every year? What is the endgame?!?
@@andreasabels589 whoever can fudge the numbers best will be promoted and then it's up to the sucker who is stuck with that job next term to deal with it. The end game is to secure a promotion from the party and scam money from investors who are lured by these glorious numbers
@@andreasabels589 I don't think there is an endgame. It's a case of hot potato. You want to get promoted before the crash. See Great leap forward rice harvest
The pain of losing a cat is absurd, but the joys of having lived with them are way bigger
rip macrocat
I totally agree. Sadness. But, no regrets.
....n US super economy is booming and all Americans having a good time..
@@MoneyMacro would you be willing to do a interview on my channel
@@MoneyMacro
Hello Joeri, when is the Warren Mosler interview going to be posted?
@@pebblepod30 when I get the timestamps. You can already watch it here if you want: ua-cam.com/video/LCUPBpSiISU/v-deo.html
China produces way more electricty than US though. The energy comsumption is propotional to real GDP, the electricty prodction is far more acurate than some satellite photo.
Great work and entirely plausible. Even if the gap is half of 60%, it's a HUGE frckin deal. Love and Bon Voyage to your buddy Henry...that brought a tear.
That you can explain this to someone like me and have me understand is a reflection of your great explanation and presentation skills.
He’s a professor of economics at University after all.
But... your channel name suggests you know quite a bit about politics, economics and at least certain parts of Asia. If he can't explain it to you, what chance do the rest of us have? 😉
@@Snowshowslow My name is just an aspiration. this guy is the real deal.
@@patrickriarchy1976 I remember my economics professor. Thus my comment
I like these kinds of studies where the premise sounds ridiculous, but as you read through the process and understand the methodologies, it doesn't seem as far fetched anymore. I get that it's still just an estimate but I think it's way more accurate than any officially reported number
You'd likely enjoy the Freakonomics books and podcast.
Except this guy is delusional if he thinks china gdp is 60% lower. The average chinese citzen is not less wealthy than a sudan citizen or a third of the wealth of a sri lankan. Both those countries are borderline owned by china and this guy expects us to believe china has a lower gdp per capita?
until you look at trade volume and electricity consumption? Studies like this want to generalize, but societies have cultural differences. If you even been to a Chinese city at night you will quickly realize why the light intensity is so low, bearly anyone keep lights on in their residences, espeacially by 8am. Usually just the kid's room and the main living room.
In the US, you will find streets darker in wealthier suburbs.
Look at Evanston, IL next to Chicago, IL.
Chicago has bright lights on its streets and even their alleys.
Evanston wants a true night time, so they have fewer and dimmer street lights.
So, brightness also is subject to the customs and practices of people.
I wonder how much variance there is, and whether it could be documented?
The us has a lot of municipal street lights and highway lights. China has a ton of factories with few lights on the outside but massive output on the inside.
Henry is in cat heaven where he has access to perfectly accurate economic data and he's waiting to share it with you some day.
🤣
Please keep future Macrocats indoors. Indoors live longer, obviously. Great and wonderful, educated guesstimates based off of 'official' reported data and collected data of both related and unrelated sources.
Thank you for your considered, researched and scrutinizable content. Always well received. Also, much love to you on the passing of Henry. I hope the knowledge that his presence in your videos obviously brought a smile to many helps bring a smile to yours when you think of him 🙂
Oh my man I am so sorry about macrocat! Great video as always but we will miss him in the future ones :(
Thanks mate!!
"how authoritarian a country is" sure sounds like an objective and simple to quantify metric.
Also, as always: Correlation does not imply causation
Economists want to be scientists so bad but in truth, they're more like the race scientists of science.
Aside from light activity, I think there has been other metrics used such as food production/consumption, steel usage, and other commodities that people can try to rely on for GDP growth
This is *extremely* interesting. One thing that came to mind is, "Did someone check to see how many new *power plants* China built over the past three decades?" Because the economy is basically an engine, right? GDP is a combination of speed and carrying capacity, and that means the better your economy is, the more energy you consume. That bit at 10:46 where you say they're only consuming 5% more electricity then the last period? That implies that they are *not* consuming as much energy as an economy that's growing as much as they claim.
China uses significantly more energy and electricity than the US..
In the last few years, China has a lot of wind power, hydropower, solar energy, and it is a huge increase
@@مرواریدمشرقزمین Nobody denies China is growing. But it got fewer nuclear reactors than the USA by half. While claiming to use double energy. It would also have grown by 5.9 percent far higher than the West and India. It would still make a huge difference for Chinese people. But it would mean they are exaggerating to seem powerful in the West. This would not be surprising since the Soviet Union did the same thing. Most people believed the Soviet economy was far stronger than it was.
Three professors from a university from HK also did this study using night time light(and other matrices) as reference and they admitted that the gdp is overstated but not by as much as 60% but like around 20%. This is more believable to me than 60% smaller.
I would find it belivable that it's somewhere inbetween. Point being, I think a lot of people knew and expected this problem already. But it's not a problem until the country actually goes bankrupt.. China is unfortunately facing several difficulties atm, including natural disasters. Which could cause the collapse of a less than perfect foundation. In China they often say something is good enough or close enough, then it's usually not as good as you would want or expect but it's good enough for the entrepreneur to declare a/ the project a success or the sellable and then they move on pretending all is good. The problem is that this attitude can be translated into the whole economic pyramid and all aspects of the chinese economy. It's also similar to the issue of overreporting GDP growth to meet expectation, it's close enough lets say we meet the expectations and move on. The risk is that if some of these cracks creats a collapse it might start a domino effect and take the rest with it. Right now I don't think there is much anyone can do but wait and watch and keep minding their own business. A collapse in China would have an effect on the rest of the world aswell though. Not much you can do about it but keeping an eye on it and being aware of the ways it might affect you would be a good suggestion.
If you run a business are you dependent on a delivery of gods or services from China? are there alternate sources? How hard might there be to gain access to those sources? Others might also flock to the worlds remaining sources. Alternate solutions or ways to deal with the situation? Having a plan helps even if most plans don't survive reality, it's better than no plan at all, it points you in the right direction then you have to adapt. Seems like I'm rambling... Anyway, good luck.
@@peterzimmerman1114 I heard many people in Internet talked a lot about China construction quality but I'm yet to see the sample of data that calculate the the rate of building or infrastructure collapse ratio to the numbers of building and infrastructure in China. I'm still yet to see the report of collapse of China massive infrastructures. I'm yet to heard a news that mentioned like 40% of buildings in Shanghai have collapse in a span of a decade for example if quality of construction in China is that bad. What about a buildings or infrastructures that Chinese built outside of China? I'm yet to heard any report about infrastructure collapse in Africa or SEA. So if you worked your writing here based on your imagination and stereotype I suggest for you to delete your comment. I never denied that shoddy constructions and low quality buildings and infrastructures exist in China but people very much overstated the situation.
@Haziq Rosli imagination doesn't work very well in reality m8. World works through data and not imagination. And how is using only the luminosity of a cities in a country can determine their whole gdp growth rate lmao. In 2021 NBE reported that Chinese consumed/spent about USD 6,803 trillions or 40% of gdp. If China current gdp get shrank about 60% or about USD 7 trillion for 2021 then how it's logical for it only big enough to fit the whole value of consumer spending. What about Trade surplus value? What about government investment etc? Where would those go to?
@@浦和-f5y Why should Peter delete his comment? Even if he is wrong, others would find it useful to know how and why he was wrong, which would go away if his comment was deleted. Besides, your comment wouldnt make sense without his.
@@浦和-f5y Evidence is everywhere, just similar to the video said, there are no independent regulators, and that government interests favor speedy construction, poor-quality steel and adulterated cement have been discovered on construction sites across China, contractors will cut corner to make as much money as possible.
The end of the video brought a tear to my eye. Thanks for letting us know.
I support your conclusion, China is extremely poor in lots areas. Don’t be fool on those numbers, China is not a threat to United state, it is a distraction, because politicians don’t want you to look at what is happening inside.
Have you considered china's GDP is often inflated using infrastructure? A bridge generates a huge amount of GDP per dollar spent but does not generate alot of light...
Genuinely curious. How do bridges generate GDP and would street light on these bridges be more visible than from houses, since they don't have roofs?
@@varshard0 They generate gdp by reducing travel times for sending goods and services. When a country has good infrastructure not only do costs go down but it encourages more production. Th building of the bridge itself also gives people jobs who will naturally spend on that money.
Infrastructure they don’t actually need is a huge part of China’s GDP.
@@NoMustang273 most people are actually take infrastructure for granted, without a good infrastructure a country economy cannot function properly
You are trying to explain the silliness that you have heard, right?
I wonder if cultural factors contribute to nighttime light intensity. As a student in Stanford, I often notice the lights in school buildings stay on at night for some reason (maybe safety). However, the lights are turned off at night in China. Nighttime construction lights are also much brighter in the U.S. when compared to the ones in China. This is not a lot of data to go on, but I believe there is definitely a chance for this to be a confounding factor that messes with the weights / coefficients used in the paper.
Also, using fewer features might be helpful to calculate a simple linear model to output gdp prediction, but there are only so many countries (rows of data) in the world, and correlating factors to different economic sectors - industry, service, or agriculture is complicated and many times completely irrelevant. In reality, the simple model will be ‘overtrained’ on a pittance of data. I liked your channel when you corrected EE’s mistakes in previous videos, but It’s disappointing seeing similar sensationalism or even laziness.
@@zzzcatherine The best thing about statistics is that it doesn't need to be opinion-driven. Grab the data-set, build your model and publish the results.
@@ChasmChaos Building a model is not a precondition for pointing out the flaws of an existing model. The flaws of this model is the lack of data, overfitting on multiple features, and lack of reliable labels. There is no model that can be used, and no reliable conclusions can or should be made. Doing so is motivated by sensationalism and shows laziness.
@@zzzcatherine all claims that you could try to prove quantitatively instead of using buzzwords. Publish a critique and have the critique peer reviewed as well. Otherwise don't argue over a UA-cam comment thread about opinions.
@@ChasmChaos if you don’t have the credentials, you don’t deserve a seat at the table. Run the scripts yourself instead of arguing about nonsense and “buzzwords”
My deepest condolences for Henry. I wish you all the best. On a positive note, this video was one of your best (in my humble opinion). I enjoyed learning about the novel theory of measuring GDP growth through satelite images. I also really like how you break-down current academic research on relevant economic topics. Thank you!
I imagine folks don 't like china, and that is why there is popularity with these estimates. The underlying assumption is pretty stupid tho. We can't compare china with other countries. More accurately, we should compare countries next to china, and with similar bloodline and culture as China: Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and Singapore etc.. China is exceptional because it got an exceptional population. Secondly, the correlation between gdp growth and light intensity isn't linar. It is linear up to a point, but diminish in return as a approximation of national output.
WOW SIRR VERY DANGEROUS !!😠😠😠 BUT THIS WHY IM SO LUCKY LIVE IN SUPER INDIA 🤗🇮🇳 THE CLEANEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD , WE NEVER DO SCAM AND WE GIVE RESPECT TO ALL WOMEN THEY CAN WALK SAFELY ALONE AT NIGHT AND WE HAVE CLEAN FOOD AND TOILET EVERYWHERE 🇮🇳🤗🚽, I KNOW MANY POOR PEOPLE JEALOUS WITH SUPER RICH INDIA 🤗🇮🇳🤗🇮🇳🤗
@@indiasuperclean6969 says a son of prostitute
We always remember to turn off the lights when left the office and never get a bulk stack of napkins from McDonald's when we just order a happy meal.
The report seems to be handpicking things to try to make people believe this is true, and leaving others that can show that this is false. It does not consider how China is the country with the highest energy consumption and energy production in the world (They are lying on that?) If China's economy is 60% smaller then it is around the size of Japan's. How on earth is China's manufacturing exports around 4 times that of Japan's? Both are predominantly manufacturing countries (are they lying or that? why don't trade partners denounce that nobody is buying 3/4ths of China's claimed exports?). China is also the country with the highest food production (How could they lie on that, they have a huge population to feed they'd be importing a ton otherwise) so not only its manufacturing sector is huge. Tourism is huge with around 70 million people arriving to China every year, which would mean that if China's economy is the size of Japan, then around 35% of its economy is just tourism. No one seems to consider China as an economy fueled by tourism. We see China even rising ghost megacities with the objective of them being occupied later, that in itself show the huge economy moved by construction companies.
China may be on a bubble in that constructor sector, which may corresond to around 10% of its GDP. Saying 60% of its GDP doesn't exist and it is the size of Japan is simply absurd. You don't see Japan having nearly as much economic impact in the world, you don't see Japan exporting as much, you don't see Japan with projects like the Belt and Road, you don't see Japanese companies purchasing or becoming big multinationals like Volvo, Motorola, Huawei, Tiktok or Xiaomi. Perhaps Japan's economy is also 60% smaller then and thus it is in the ballpark of a developing country (perhaps developing countries are lying too). Whoever is this "researcher" should have his PHD removed and thrown out of academia.
Said everything I wanted to say
Great video Joeri, as always!
And I'm very sorry for what happened to Henry. He was a great co-host and will be missed!
作为一个中国人，我比较同意你前面的一些说法🤔，但是当你讲到用卫星拍摄的夜间灯光图来判断的话，我是觉得有很大问题存在的，一个很重要的问题就是创造中国绝大多数gdp的绝大多数中国的城镇人口都居住在30多层的公寓楼里的，这些楼要比美国的住宅楼要高十几倍，所以在卫星图像里有1户美国家庭4个美国人的空间可能居住着200户中国家庭和1000个中国人，但是光亮程度可能是一样的。
用这个逻辑，看看印度为什么比中国亮，原因很简单，因为印度处在城市化的早期，城市里主要还是以4到5层的住宅为主，因此，中印两国有着差不多的人口和实际居住面积，但可能在绝大多数夜间城市亮光图中有着200户中国家庭1000个中国人的地方有可能只居住着30户印度家庭和200个印度人，但光亮程度却是一样，再加上中国印度人口差不多的条件，印度的城市就会明显比中国要更大了，光亮也自然就更亮
哈哈哈，那个图明显就是印度人PS出来意淫用的。拉萨乌鲁木齐这些城市都挂满了LED灯，在他的图上却漆黑一片。亮度和居住方式没有关系，因为这个图根本就是假的😁
还有就是中国人特别是老人家，太省电费了，估计3户人的光亮程度才等于一户美国人
It's weird if some economy researcher try to debunk china real GDP by looking at light from satellite meanwhile they can easily observe china export-imports that more representative to their economy growth
And they can also come to china to see it by themselves, which part of china not developed enough and which part that get massive development
because they really want to cherry picking the data lol.
Maybe you should bring your findings to the IMF, CIA, World Bank etc because they all seem to report that the Chinese economy measured in PPP terms already overtook the US a few years ago.
You should make a video telling us what was the outcome when you approach these institutions with your findings 🤔
Rest in peace Macrocat. You will be missed.