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Comment by ihsw2 | Hacker News Reader

Using per person GDP when discussing China is a cruel joke. Like most usages of per person GDP in any country, it glosses over regional disparities and (more importantly) economic equality measures like Gini coefficient.

Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.

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==Taking Gini coefficient into consideration, China still has a long way to go.==

So does the US [1]: The top 1 percent of earners in America now take home about 20 percent of the country’s pretax national income, compared with less than 12 percent in 1978, according to the research the economists published at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Over the same time in China, the top 1 percent doubled their share of income, rising from about 6 percent to 12 percent.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usa-china-income-inequality-eco...

Gini implicitly assumes a flat distribution is desirable. Ask North Korea and Cuba how that works out.

PPP GDP per capita is okay, but the PPP portion is rife with assumptions, some untenable. For instance, you really really don't want to live in a heavy industrial area in China, the air is like soup -- sometimes it pegs the AQI needle at 999. US hasn't ever had air that bad, even before the Clean Air Act.

The point was that even based on GDP per capita, China still has a long way to go.

But the scale of China population is so that if they double their GDP per capita, they will have an upper and middle class population bigger than most if not all individual countries in the world (EDIT: except India).

At least China's Gini coefficient is going in the correct direction. The US's Gini has been getting worse all while we still have third-world conditions festering for far too long.

China’s official GINI coefficient doesn’t include grey income (e.g. that official making 10k RMB/month yet driving a black Audi A9). Well, they stopped reporting it in the early part of this decade when it started getting really bad.

There are always reporting problems, especially tracking the wealth of the extreme rich. Estimates of hidden income and wealth are in the trillions. Gini in both China and the US are likely worse in actuality. But when you're in the middle of the process of converting your economy from rural to modern then it's much easier to swing the Gini change in the more equal direction.

But because it's a different situation and harder to change in the US, doesn't mean we shouldn't be strongly aware of the implications of its worsening in the US.

They stopped reporting their gini coefficient number altogether. There are no numbers after 2012.

I lived in a Chinese first tier city for 10 years. Income inequality was much more obvious there than I ever saw in the states (even in the boonies of Mississippi). A lot of that was related to china’s caste/hukou system that basically denies social services to migrant workers.

Yes, the USA has first world income inequality problems. But China has third world ones.

The joke goes: the USA has so many homeless people, they are just everywhere! China has no homeless people, because the police beat them pretty harshly so they are either dead or really good at hiding.

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