Thread by @Noahpinion

Just for fun, here's a thread of responses to a tweet I wrote comparing West Virginia's per capita GDP (PPP) with Shanghai's.

Some people argued that GDP isn't the only measure of quality of life.

They're right, of course, but they generally failed to mention any factors that might make Shanghai more annoying of a place to live!

Some people responded with instinctive contempt for West Virginia.

Others tried to find fault in the statistics themselves, but failed. (The numbers were already per capita and PPP.)

Some argued that instead of comparing living standards, we should compare growth rates. The implication being, I suppose, that Shanghai will soon be richer than West Virginia. (That may or may not come to pass.)

Many people came up with odd theories for why one would compare West Virginia to Shanghai, but one of the oddest was this one:

Some felt that the comparison was a dunk on Shanghai, and felt the need to invoke historical narratives of oppression to excuse Shanghai's supposed underperformance relative to West Virginia...

A few communists weighed in, often to make fun of poor people West Virginia.

Which I guess shows you how much communists care.

Not all of the responses were coherent. I find that a lot of people sort of think *at* things rather than *about* them.

One of the funnier classes of responses was people who think comparing WV to Shanghai is about comparing neoliberalism to (whatever they imagine China's model to be), and concluding that China's model wins because it has big buildings

And there's always that one guy who shows up to say "this is racist"

One interesting class of response was "Who would want to live in WV over Shanghai?"

Which was funny because if you opened up the border between the two, what do you actually think would happen

I don't even know what this response meant, but I'm not gonna red out Nilo's name because he's an interesting guy and you should check him out on Twitter!

I was indeed being sneaky (i.e., absentmindedly stupid) by using Shanghai, because the richest city in China is actually either HK or Macau. But the comparison would have been the same for Beijing or Shenzhen vs. West Virginia.

Anyway, these are just the responses that challenged or downplayed the comparison. Lots of responses were just "🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸" or "China is overrated", which is an equally simplistic and impressionistic response!

To sum up, lots of people think about these comparisons as being a sort of head-to-head test of civilizations, national governments, or economic policy paradigms...instead of just a way to help get a better perspective about comparative living standards around the world.

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