
New Global Growth Projections Predict the Decade of India - romsson
http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/rankings/growth-predictions/
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roymurdock
Helpful to keep in mind that India recently changed the way it calculates GDP
by updating its base year and moving from a cost-of-input calculation to an
expenditure calculation. This will give it a nominal boost as many currently
non-market activities (cooking, cleaning, child rearing) enter the realm of
the market as paid-for services, and are thus counted in the GDP calculation.

More on that in this previous article and discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10649925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10649925)

One thing that high growth inevitably brings is the negative externality of
pollution, as we've observed in China. GDP figures still do not account for
this hugely important factor that degrades the quality of living of those in
the affected area, as well as the spillover to the oceans and the atmosphere
from improper disposal of waste (burning, dumping). It will be interesting to
see how bad the pollution gets as manufacturing continues to ramp up,
according to the higher "economic complexity" (read: diversified basket of
exports) per Harvard's analysis.

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dangerpowpow
GDP should be depreciated.

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headsupftw
Deprecated?

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silphe
The ranking puts German growth prediction to be almost zero while Japan's to
be 2.8? I call this rubbish. Both countries were in the last years
demographically pretty similar.

Both countries are however diverging pretty swiftly. While productivity in
Japan was falling it was increasing in Germany. Moreover the recent
development showed that Germany was making gains in demographics with higher
birth rate and net migrations. Japan on the other hand was falling in
recession several times in the last 5 years alone. Even without extrapolating
the current trend, it is obvious that Japan would not do much with regard to
its demographics while Germany's demographics is actually changing very
quickly (and rather favorably).

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chimeracoder
> Moreover the recent development showed that Germany was making gains in
> demographics with higher birth rate and net migrations... Germany's
> demographics is actually changing very quickly (and rather favorably).

First, higher birth rate and net migrations are usually a (short-term) _drag_
on GDP, not a boost.

Secondly, you can't look at Germany outside the context of being a member of
the EU and Eurozone (and currently a very important _creditor_ in the
Eurozone). That has a huge impact on Germany's economy.

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chongli
_you can 't look at Germany outside the context of being a member of the EU
and Eurozone (and currently a very important creditor in the Eurozone)_

This is exactly right. If a few of Germany's key debtors end up defaulting and
exiting the Eurozone, a prospect not so far out of the realm of possibility
given the leftward political trend in those countries, then Germany could fall
on hard times very quickly.

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sremani
German export oriented economy needs EU and South Europe cannot devalue their
currency and pose threat to German export economy. If they move out of EU and
devalue their currencies, Germany is in big big trouble. Disintegration of
Europe is delayed but very likely narrative of the decade.

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dvcc
Economic Complexity is a bit weird as it only considers actual goods. For
instance in the US, around 80% of the US works in a service providing job, and
therefore are not considered as adding to economic complexity (that's most of
us).

I don't really know how this ever gets wound back in, and would love if
someone had an article on how it does. Just something to keep in mind though.

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bhouston
According to the chart, it will also be the decade of Africa -- which is sort
of a nice change. :)

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littletimmy
It is sort of horrible, once you think about it. Africa is the last continent
on earth to have abundant wildlife. Development in Africa would mean we lose a
large portion of wildlife on earth, forever.

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bhouston
You value African wildlife more than improved living standards for the 100s of
millions of Africans? I think we should preserve the wildlife as best as we
can but I think we should also value increased standards of living for 100s of
millions of people....

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littletimmy
I understand your point. But don't you think the wildlife are equally
important?

There are 7 BILLION people on earth... but there are just 5000 rhinos, for
example. That's 1.5 MILLION people to a rhino. This is one of the most
magnificent species to have ever walked earth - why shouldn't we prioritize
preserving it over human comfort? Why do you value increase in living
standards over a sentient species that all things considered, is a form of
life just like humans?

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pc86
> _But don 't you think the wildlife are equally important?_

The implicit end of that sentence is "equally important to the hundreds of
millions of Africans living there." And to that, emphatically no.

People are more important. Full stop. I am no anti-environmental activist. I
want to see renewable energy take over fossil fuels, I want to see
conscientious business taking environmental factors into account at all steps
of production. But given the 100% false dichotomy of "African development" or
"animals" I am going to pick the one that helps one of the most impoverished,
war-torn regions on the planet every time.

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littletimmy
Why is the life of a Zimbabwean citizen more important than the life of a
Zimbabwean lion?

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hodwik
Because one of them is sentient.

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dragonwriter
Both lions and humans (like most, or all, animals) are sentient.

You may be referring to some concept of intelligent self-awareness, but you
need to be more clear as to what it is to evaluate whether its a real
difference between humans and lions; lots of animals have demonstrable self-
awareness of various forms.

I agree that the human condition is more important, but I don't think your
explanation of _why_ holds up.

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hodwik
One of them we know to be sentient. We can't be so sure about lions.

I'm not talking about higher-order intelligence, I'm talking about sentience
-- the ability to experience.

It is rather simple now to find a program that would defeat the original
formulation for a Turing test, but no one would describe them as having
consciousness.

However, I believe it very possible that humans are doing much the same thing
with a sort of sentience Turing test that we project onto animals. They _seem_
to have experience, because they react to stimuli. But the same is true of the
computer.

We know that creatures with basically nothing in the way of a brain, take
earthworms or severed octopus tentacles, will react to pain, hide from it.

We also know that pain has two parts -- a conscious experience, and an animal
aversion. This is made clear by the existence of Pain asymbolia, where a
person gets damage to the insular cortex (a lower part of the brain), and is
no longer averse to pain, despite reporting that they still experience the
pain just as they did before the injury.

I believe it quite likely that consciousness exists in the human brain alone,
and is of very recent evolutionary vintage, evolving in conjunction with
language. That when humans project sentience on their pets they are basically
falling in love with a biological automaton, no different from a person
falling in love with a chat-bot.

Unless we find a reason to believe that mere programming couldn't account for
the behavior of animals (which seems increasingly unlikely, as our own rather
rudimentary robots advance), it seems much more likely that evolution would
have evolved the simple instinct system first -- only adding consciousness
later on when it became an evolutionary necessity, as could have been the case
for complex communication about qualia.

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littletimmy
I don't think sentience should be a criteria for value of life. Even if a lion
isn't sentient, so what?

This speciest emphasis on human-like features as criterion for value shouldn't
be dominant in the first place.

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hodwik
If sentience isn't the requirement, where do we draw the line on AI? Do we
have to treat dead things nicely?

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littletimmy
We can take a global macro view when it comes to animals. Why should their
lives be as important as people's?

Ability to feel pain?

Scarcity? [In the sense that there are 7 billion people and only 5000 tigers,
so we should focus on saving the tiger?]

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vox_mollis
Are long-term GDP growth predictions ever anything other than completely wrong
guesses?

Why do we take any of this seriously? Even the Federal Reserve and the BEA
estimates going out a single year are usually little better than noise.

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fauigerzigerk
Making a prediction for one year may be more difficult than making a
prediction over 10 years. Over 10 years, structural factors will dominate, but
in any single year something like inventory fluctuations or commodity price
jumps/slumps can make a prediction look very incorrect.

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hodwik
Right, this is the same principle as weather vs. climate predictions.

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rodionos
The economic complexity chart is interesting. It basically says that all oil
producing nations experienced a decade of rapid simplification. That's not
what I think happened with the Gulf/Middle East nations with their forays into
real-estate, transportation, and tourism.

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xiaoma
And it completely leaves out Taiwan. It's a developed, democratic country with
both a population and PPP GDP on par with Australia.

Whatever the political motivations, this is just shoddy scholarship.

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melted
India has no way to go but up, IMO. Half the country is illiterate, fer
chrissakes. Get that number down and growth is more or less inevitable. Social
unrest is inevitable as well, though.

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jt2190

      > Helpful to keep in mind that 
      > India recently changed the way it calculates GDP...
    

The researchers are doing their own calculation, not using the government's.

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scythe
I'm curious why they're so down on South America. Growth has been high there
and stability is the best in a century.

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sremani
South American economies are tied to commodities, given the slow down in
Commodities it makes sense.

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ramgorur
quite an interesting analysis, after india, there comes uganda.

