I used to lead the front-end development of this site, including all the visualizations. Glad to see it make HN front page. The team building this consists of really great people and it’s a great place to work. Most visualizations were custom built to various degrees.
Fun fact: the tree map was done with vanilla WebGL2 completely from scratch (handwritten custom shaders, no ThreeJS or Babylon) for performance and I think it’s probably the fastest snd smoothest animating tree map you can find on the Internet.
The definition might be not immediately clear. A good one is given in a pop-up:
> Economic complexity expresses the diversity and sophistication of the productive capabilities embedded in the exports of each country [... ⇆] High complexity countries are home to a range of sophisticated, specialized capabilities and are therefore able to produce a highly diversified set of complex products. [...] Information about how many capabilities the country has is contained not only in the absolute number of products that it makes, but also in the ubiquity of those products (the number of countries that export the product) and in the sophistication and diversity of products those other countries make
Stats like these have a certain bias towards smaller countries where it's "easier" to concentrate high levels of complexity. If e.g. California was taken separately, it would likely rank very high. Japan's size and ranking make it look quite exceptional.
I'm not sure California would rank that highly - the index measures diversification AND sophistication. Isn't most of California's economy based around a few big companies in the tech and entertainment sectors?
By contrast, Japan, Switzerland and Czechia make basically a little bit of everything. (For different reasons, I think - Japan is obviously a large country, Switzerland's companies are in a lot of supply chains, and Czechia is centrally located in Europe, so it has specialized manufacturing for which you really only need one factory per continent, like cassette tapes.)
I'm guessing the overall US ratings are depressed by the dominance of some big sectors, like tech and housing?
Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, I just read the definitions and have a newspaper subscription.
EDIT: Actually, you don't have to guess - the site's country profiles explain it pretty well:
> I'm not sure California would rank that highly - the index measures diversification AND sophistication. Isn't most of California's economy based around a few big companies in the tech and entertainment sectors?
CA, just in the Bay Area, has got 11% of world market cap with half of the top 15 public co's. These businesses are very sophisticated (practically no one in the world can replicate) and the rest of the economy is huge in many other areas like agriculture (half of US fruits / nuts, still exports internationally), film and media with Hollywood and Netflix, major ports to some of the world's most valuable trading partners (China and Japan), a top notch robust public university system (23 California State Universities and the 10 premier University of California's that lead the way in cutting research), and other RnD like Lawrence Livermore Lab, JPL, SpaceX, etc.
It’s not an attack on you, or a value judgement about California.
The index ranks the state lower than the rest of the country. I read the definition and I’m speculating why that is. You’re saying “yeah, well, we’re awesome.” Sure? The state is obviously very rich. A technical indicator is not destiny.
First, it didn't sound like California had a separate sub-rank in the index ranking. That's why GP speculated it would be much higher outside of the US, and you also speculated why it wouldn't be very different ("I'm not sure California would rank that highly"). I also provided my reasoning why CA would be higher outside of the US, because it hasn't been pointed out that CA even had an index independent of the US. It wasn't to be "we're awesome." It was to provide the material reasons why I would speculate it's economic complexity would be high in the state level rankings. If the index ranking provided a state-level ranking, I would be interested in seeing that. I'm not able to find it navigating their site.
This is not necessarily bad. Australian mines, as an example, have very advanced automation, IOT sensors, safety features etc., compared to India or China. It’s just that Australia imports the technology, but it’s mines are most productive/efficient and that is it’s moat.
Yeah, I agree that technology in Australian mines is the best in the world.
But you need to think about how the aussie economy is becoming dependent on these minerals, how much longer until some kind of revolution makes the world less dependent on lithium, and then your mines just lose a good chunk of value.
That's the problem with not having a higher economic complexity, you stop being able to pivot should the world scenario change.
To be fair they probably could have said this about gold, then (high quality) coal, then uranium, then iron ore, then massive offshore natural gas...
There's at least some depth to the simplicity, they've survived more than one pivot already by being very effective resource extractors and comparatively very rich in resources.
It's not called "the lucky country" for nothing. But realistically while Australia suffers under the resource curse it is blessed with a large diversity in the resources available for extraction (just look at the pivot from coal to lithium in recent years). I'm pretty sure they aren't going to run out of economical to extract deposits any time in the next century.
As an Australian born engineer who works on cloud computing / ML infrastructure, I had to emigrate abroad to work in my field. Some days I ask if I should have skipped university and instead became an industrial electrician in the mines or something (would have made A LOT more money).
Very unusual economic environment that's for sure.
For the edification of any not familiar with the phrase:
The Lucky Country (1964) Donald Horne
Horne's intent in writing the book was to portray Australia's climb to power and wealth based almost entirely on luck rather than the strength of its political or economic system, which Horne believed was "second rate".
In addition to political and economic weaknesses, he also lamented on the lack of innovation and ambition, as well as a philistinism in the absence of art, among the Australian population, viewed by Horne as being complacent and indifferent to intellectual matters.
He also commented on matters relating to Australian puritanism, as well as conservatism, particularly in relation to censorship and politics.
To be fair a lot of Australians were saying smilar things in the 1960s and note was taken.
That was the era of exodus to England and Aussies (Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Robert Hughes, Clive James, et al) making fun of their own country.
Australia is likely much better today for all that harsh self reflection (hopefully).
I think there was always a lot of hyperbole in the statement and it really downplays Australia's strength and culture (not a surprise given the colonial undertones involved). Also I think "the lucky country" often gets causality reversed.
But I don't think its a hot take to suggest that readily available resource income has hampered the development of economic complexity over the years. It has also led to a significant amount of apathy in the population. Easy money corrupts.
I'm kind of a bullish on Australia's potential for tech innovation as I believe there is a tremendous amount of underutilized talent that's just itching for an opportunity to apply themselves.
This complexity is a major challenge for sustainability. If a product or service depends on a supply chain that spreads across half the planet it is difficult to attribute, e.g its environmental impact to any particular economic beneficiary.
Tools like this atlas will increasingly be required to understand where policy changes might have most leverage.
If I had to guess, the fact that the US is increasingly a service/knowledge based economy. Their complexity metric only seems to look at physical products.
I am very sceptical regarding the "complexity" benchmark used by the Atlas. I would like to illustrate what I mean with my home country, Germany.
It does not make sense to directly compare states of such different magnitutes as USA and Liechtenstein. Or given the highly integrated EU, it would make far more sense to compare the USA with the EU directly. Or regarding the complex economic situtation in Germany after the reunification, it would make more sense to compare Germany with USA+Mexico as a whole (West Germany to East Germany in 1990 in terms of population and GDP is aprox. USA to Mexico today -- of course, the time gap does not make it ideal, but it is playing with numbers anyway). Then there are countries whose export economy is dominated by just a few regions while other, typically small states are quite uniform.[1]
As far as I can see, the Atlas does not use the domestic economy at all for its complexity model. It would also be hard to compare objectively, because money might not be the best benchmark for this (for example, cheap health protection is typically better than expensive disease treatment). From anecdotal observations, I would argue that a lot of complexity growth in Germany in the last two decades occured in domestic services, such as child care and care for the elderly.
My final objection is that the measurement of complexity might depend on the exact division of sectors. The Atlas destinguishes between "motor vehicles for transporting goods" and "cars". But why stop there? Why not further subdivide "cars" into "microcars", "city cars", "small family car", "large family cars", "compact executive cars", "executive cars", "luxury cars", "sports cars", "leisure activity vehicle", ...? Only then can one see that the German car industry, for example, is much more diversified than many other car industries. But it would also automatically increase the overall complexity rating of Germany. In contrast, a further subdivision of sections in which Germany is weak (e.g. in tourism) would automatically lead to Germany losing complexity in comparison.
I think that only a holistic approach can lead to a reasonable evaluation of the economic situation of a country. The data provided by the Atlas may contribute to this, but the derivation of a "future dynamic" with a growth rate accuracy in the per mille range is just something like astrology in disguise.
[1] Here are, for example, the latest figures for Germany (preliminary for 2022): https://www.statistik-bw.de/HandelDienstl/Aussenhandel/AH-XP... (in German). The data shows the still very large gap between West and East Germany: only the per capita export of Saxony (Sachsen) with 36.0% is above the German average (according to the "country sum" (Ländervergleich) in the table); Berlin is the worst of all with only 9.1%.
Thank you for the thoughtful post. I must concur. Using sweeping economic averages will give you some country insight but barely represents the experiences of ordinary individuals living day to day. There are a million children living below the poverty line in the UK, one could not assume such from the numbers, so beautifully displayed.
Fun fact: the tree map was done with vanilla WebGL2 completely from scratch (handwritten custom shaders, no ThreeJS or Babylon) for performance and I think it’s probably the fastest snd smoothest animating tree map you can find on the Internet.