Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aleyan | Hacker News Reader

> In fact, Kazakhstan has become an example of how even a vast and still-developing nation like this Central Asian country can achieve a remarkable public health success.

> Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.

> All of them — Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrghzstan — saw their economies break down with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Yes, Kazakhstan is a developing country according to the IMF and those who have seen Borat. Using it as an example of the public health success going on in Central Asia is disingenuous however because Kazakhstan is remarkably wealthy compared to its neighbors[0]. It's GDP PPP per capita at $25,263 is only a little behind the digital darling Estonia's at $29,364. Kazakhstan's neighbors like Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have theirs at $3,551 and $2,980 respectively.

A lay western reader not knowing is particularities of Central Asia could easily make assumptions and walk away from this article with erroneous ideas. The article, in my reading and without the context, suggests a iodine->health->wealth causality. In Kazakhstan's case oil->wealth->health would be more apt.

[0] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

>In neighboring Turkmenistan, President Saparmurat Niyazov — a despot who requires all clocks to bear his likeness and renamed the days of the week after his family — solved the problem by simply declaring plain salt illegal in 1996 and ordering shops to give each citizen 11 pounds of iodized salt a year at state expense

It appears that Turkmenistan is growing at the same rate according to your Charts, does not have the GDP of Kazakhstan and yet had a higher Iodized Salt Intake. It started at 75% Iodized Salt Consumption where as Kazakhstan started at 29% circa 2000. This is the Health Success they are referring to. Even though Kazakhstan was wealthier and flush with money, their Ionized Salt intake was lower than their poorer neighbors.

https://knoema.com/WBWDIGDF2017Sep/world-development-indicat...

Not to take away from your point about those other nations, but GDP per capita isn't always great for this kind of thing due to the marginal utility of money.

Median income (though income isn't exactly GDP) often differs heavily from mean income. There's purchasing power parity too, but I don't know how much it would impact this stuff with salt.

The PPP in his comment means Purchasing Power Parity.

GDP per capital is a terrible measure of average wealth. Qatar's GDP Per Capital is $59,330 per person, and alternates between oil billionares and people who live on $10 a day.

> GDP per capital is a terrible measure of average wealth.

Suggest you google "average" and "median".

Suggest you google it and observe that “average” has several meanings, including “typical” and “median.”

PPP is a laughably bad approach to measuring the economics and well-being of a nation.

If you go by PPP, you'll be falsely led to believe Iraq is on par with Iran and just a little behind Turkey. Iraq is a barely functioning, destroyed nation, in the midst of a full rebuild.

According to PPP, in 2016 Puerto Rico was just barely behind Japan. New Zealand is below Puerto Rico.

According to PPP, Equatorial Guinea is approximately on par with Finland, France, Canada, Japan, UK, Belgium.

Oman and Saudi Arabia are above Belgium. Saudi is above the Netherlands and Sweden. Is PPP aware of the actual living conditions in Saudi Arabia at the median? What the median income is in Saudi Arabia? Nope.

Like I said, it's laughable.

PPP purports to enable a better comparison stick. It fails entirely in all cases. Belgium & Denmark are below Saudi? The only proper response to that is: bullshit.

PPP is not only universally wildly inaccurate, it leaves out dozens of critical economic factors that are derived from objective economic capability rather than what the price of a hamburger is from one nation to the next.

PPP is a subjective measurement, and a particularly bad one. Who is on the ground doing the perfectly objective comparisons in every nation simultaneously, living there for a decade to really get a sense of things across the whole economic landscape? Nobody. PPP leads to mediocre guess-work, which gets you to New Zealand being below Puerto Rico.

What is your military capable of defense wise? Try basing that on subjective economic relativism, see how it works out for you in a war.

What kind of medical technology can your nation afford? What's the level of medical technology that your people have access to at the median? That collapses under PPP, because the best and latest medical equipment is expensive.

Can you buy a BMW or a $4,000 poorly made car that is guaranteed to fall apart and have far more problems than eg a Lexus? While simultaneously, who would confuse the standard of living impact of driving an extraordinarily mediocre $4,000 vehicle vs a Mercedes or BMW?

If your GDP per capita (non-PPP) is eg $35,000, then I can stack you right up against Japan or New Zealand and immediately have a good idea of what your national income potential is far more often than not, and I can tell a lot more about your nation's real capabilities at the median.

The medtech & car examples are representative concepts, they apply to pretty much everything else that defines standard of living. PPP is a dumb (its simplistic nature ignores almost everything that's actually important to the standard of living of actual humans) economic concept in the best of cases; in most cases, it's entirely worthless.

You raise some good points. What's a better measure, in your opinion?

The foundational problem of PPP, is contained in that it attempts to do something remarkable and then doesn't actually do it at all.

Is it a really great idea to have an accurate comparison of the standard of living and economic capabilities (both have a high correlation to non-PPP GDP), on a relative basis, between nations? Yes! Ten times over, yes. Do the annually published PPP numbers actually do anything like that? No, not even close. PPP is a nice idea, that's all it is unless you want to expend extraordinary sums of money and labor to be on the ground, with extremely objective and well trained experts doing the comparisons in an extremely scientific manner (rather than a clown at the IMF throwing darts based on hamburger prices).

What's a better measure? This is where the laziness of common PPP numbers comes into play. The better measure is to get into the mud and get really dirty, in volumes of accurate data, tracking, observation, experience. In reality we don't even have mediocre access to accurate, detailed economic data for the majority of the 195 nations. On that single fact, PPP collapses as it is.

How accurate is the economic data that we have for eg Brazil (207 million people), and how intricate can we get while maintaining that accuracy? In this case, Brazil is reasonably representative of the global median. We have low quality vague guesses at best. Below Brazil, it just gets that much worse.

It's extremeley difficult and expensive to do a nation to nation comparison which is then adjusted subjectively to measure relative condition. So many things would inherently come into play that can't be easily measured. It would require immense on the ground effort and measurement, on a constant basis, along with ideally at least semi-accurate wider economic figures from the national/regional/local government structures inside a given nation (only a few dozen nations have anything like that).

A better measure is the straight GDP/capita. Here's the numbers for the 3 countries mentioned, to which I added the US, China and Estonia (source World Bank [1]):

US: $57.6k Estonia: $17.6k China: $8.1k Khazakhstan: $7.5k Kyrgystan: $1.1k Tajikistan: $0.8k

GP's argument stands with the straight GDP/capita, except for the comparison to Estonia, which was a side remark anyway.

[1] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&...

Part of the problem is that once you get rich you spend a lot on diminishing returns.

How much better off is your outlook if you're currently 40 years old and expected to live to 78 instead of 76. Not much. If you could time travel you'd arrange that the resources that you would have devoted to extending your life those last two years be instead devoted to more time with your children while they were young, more time at the beach, more time preparing food and hanging out with family or having sex.

And we can talk about $4000 poorly made cars and laugh, but the difference between a $12k Toyota and a $60k BMW is marginal or even negative if you prioritize things like reliability or maintenance. They are better only if you are richer and can afford the maintenance.

The life of someone in Costa Rica is, on average, worse than someone in Canada, but not by the 4x difference in PPP adjusted GDP, and certainly not by the 5x+ difference in raw GDP numbers.

But you're right, I wouldn't use PPP to build a military. Raw numbers work better there, so you get both an upvote and a generally dissenting comment.

We're not talking about a $12,000 Toyota. That's the kind of car that is purchased at the median in Estonia, which can't be purchased at the median in Kazakhstan, which is exactly my point.

The median income in Kazhakstan is a few hundred dollars per month. A median person in Kazakhstan couldn't pay for a $12,000 Toyota in a decade.

There is an extremely large list of standard of living concepts that come into play, that collapse under PPP and are entirely ignored, which is what I was alluding to in saying that my examples were represenative concepts.

Here's another one: can you afford to travel? A person making $300 per month in Kazakhstan, do they have the same global travel capabilities of someone making $1,100 per month in Estonia? No they do not.

PPP adjusting makes sense when you compare countries in similar stages of development. As an example, Switzerland (in which I used to live) has a GDP per capita of $79,292 according to IMF. The US (where I live) has $57,436. Do people in Switzerland really live that much better than Americans? Not really - and certainly not the almost %40 better those numbers imply. Everyday stuff costs almost double in Switzerland than the US. As a PPP adjusted GDP, $59,561 for Switzerland looks about right to me.

I don’t know either country well, but a quick read suggests Switzerland offers far more to those who have little - social welfare, healthcare, education and support etc. Is it possible that this gets hidden with the PPP? I know GDP per person doesn’t show it either, but seeing the huge difference between the two immediately got me looking for what goes on there.

Isn't the trick with Switzerland that citizens have a LOT more benefits than non-citizens, but a lot of the overall population (25%) is non-citizen? (California, the most foreign-heavy US state, is about half that, IIRC, and the US overall around 7%.) I'd be wondering about potential gaps hidden in there.

Healthcare, though, is interesting in Switzerland for other reasons. Switzerland is a generally wealthy country that generally spends a lot on health care in a rather private manner, similar to the US in many ways. But the US system is a mess of corruption, bloated government and corporate programs, and inefficiencies. Switzerland is what a sensible free-market attempt to remake the US insurance markets might look like, instead of the "healthy people just shouldn't have to buy insurance" nonsense dogma of the current American right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Switzerland

"The whole healthcare system is geared toward the general goals of keeping the system competitive across cantonal lines, promoting general public health and reducing costs while encouraging individual responsibility."

They seem to get the same best parts of the US system (short wait times (if you choose the right places here), up-to-date treatment options, flexibility of making your own financial priority choices around different procedures, without a bunch of our downsides.

> Do people in Switzerland really live that much better than Americans?

I actually expect the answer to be a resounding "yes", especially for people away from coasts. Switzerland doesn't even have coasts and it's pleasant to all its citizens!

Oh yes. Those poor folks in flyover country. Why, they can live in homes - the poor bastards. Maybe they are even forced to live on a lake, or God-forbid near a mountain. The horror! You need to get out more, my man

I'm pretty sure that Switzerland has a considerable amount of homes, lakes, mountains and all that.

I also think it has much smaller occurrence of people on welfare selling and buying coke, drive-by shootings, rusty factories and young-earth theorists in schools. Much much smaller occurrence. Of all that kinds of stuff.

I mean, no. That fancy restaurant is really "almost twice" as good as your McDrive. The latter does have its uses, but it's laughable to compare. It's Swiss for god's sake.

  smaller occurrence of people 
  on welfare selling and buying 
  coke, drive-by shootings, rusty 
  factories and young-earth 
  theorists in schools

Woah, woah, woah, better watch out for the class warfare and racism cards. You’re on thin ice, my friend.

Switzerland just has peace treaty instead of class warfare, that's why it is better.

PPP should be use wisely and proper context, just like COLA does when comparing life in a particular country (say, CA vs TX in US). Its not end all and be all, but adds another dimension to understanding "value" proposition.

Lexus is a bit of an odd choice, considering their relative reliability rankings as compared to BMW.

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...

What's the average income of a Kazakh? I suspect that GDP figure appears inflated because a lot of oil wealth is generated and goes to only a small portion of the society

The Borat village scene was actually filmed in Romania, not even Kazakhstan

Shhh, don't tell them!

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