Su-57 Fighter Jet Crashed During Factory Trials In Russia’s Far East. Pilot Survived

Spoken like someone who has never been to Russia and can’t account for why Russia is building tremendous new housing around her major cities, new atomic power plants, new roads, rail and bridges at an astonishing pace. GDP is simply the value people are willing to pay for things and the U.S. market is sexy and ginned up. A bubble. Russia’s growth has challenges but is more stable..

Russia is an economic mouse compared to China and the US. Get real.

Only in the false reality limited to GDP comparisons. For example, to try and support Russia’s economy and using money from a legal settlement I got this year I’ve been planning a trip to Russia. I booked a two bedroom apartment in St. Petersburg next fall for eight days. It’s in a high rise called the Skandi Klubb apartments but is run as a hotel. Total costs for eight days? The Russian rouble equivalent of $365. That’s not for a night, it’s for the whole week. I was shocked. I checked it twice. The whole week. In NYC, a building like that with space like that would be $1500 for eight days. At least. Both buildings have floors and glass and steel. They both have pipes and running water and WiFi. The total GDP difference accumulated by all the guests for eight days would make the Russian building an economic mouse by your reasoning and yet that’s just accounting. On paper, using currency valuations. The rouble buys more in Russia than the dollar does in the USA, that’s purchasing power parity. The Russian economy is smaller than the U.S. but it’s not a mouse to anyone. The real ratio isn’t 22-2 by GDP but in fact something close to 17-6 in purchasing power parity. In real production, manufacturing and actually building physical objects Russia is out producing the United States today. The U.S. has moved much of it’s manufacturing overseas while Russia still produces much of what her population consumes.

Good Lord ….

GDP and PPP are just two different measures of an economy. The first being the total value of the goods produced the other how much one can purchase in an economy. The relater to the SIZE of an economy not whether zucchinis or avionics are produced.

As far as what I think is your argument …. it’s hard to tell exactly what your argument is ….. comparing what California produces with what Russia produces is in fact making the argument that Russia’s economy is technologically deeper than Californias. Russia is like a vertically integrated company that builds an entire product themselves while California is like a shell company that subs out 90% of what they build and marks up everyone elses work.

Going back to your zucchini / avionics argument Russia has been economically isolated from the west since 1917. They produce their own food, mine their own minerals, produce their own energy, make their own drugs, aircraft, nuclear submarines, machine tools, heavy equipment ….. they’re basically self sufficient whereas California and indeed the USA depend on imported metals, imported electronic components, imported machine tools.

Unlike the 1940’s the USA now depends on worldwide supply chains which is also why you need to spend so much on a navy because without one the US economy would grind to a halt.

I couldn’t sup it better myself, thanks for the thorough, efficient, wide-encompassing response Wayne. GDP has always been the stalwart, staple sexy PR economic indicator that successive western and even more so American governments and their useful idiots such as the couple goons above feel the obsessive need to relentlessly push ahead on the public space like candy and literally shove down struggling US-taxpayers’ throats, in order to enforce the lasting idea of a continued American dream and miracle they should believe and be proud of no matter the fall of their disposal income and purchasing power in general. They totally miss the raw and less-than-relevant nature of its applicable parameters, as you quite eloquently reminded.If we compare GDP and global economic size Vs true industrial output + homegrown, and independent national production chain from end-to-end together with the basic elements such as advanced machine-tools, we find exactly… nothing. No correlation or analytical value of any kind translates into the real balance of power, it’s beyond apple and oranges. California + Texas even cobbled somehow together cannot possibly hope to come with Russian let alone US global consumer demands, heck the entire country cannot do this anymore. And aside from all of the above, one can find that Saudi Arabia’s Forex + Military budget massively dwarf that of Iran’s and on paper, by such limited, monolithical, one-dimensional logic, their army and technological prowess should be in the leagues of the top-5 powers in the world. They don’t come even close, have less than 5% non-petroleum related output and economic returns, 75% of their armed forces high-end material are manned by foreign entities and namely US personnel, no national tech powerhouses in any field with proven ability to operate without foreign firms and/or individual and investor, whereas Iran by contrast basically produces every kind of high-end asset by itself within the Petrochemical scope, military scope (for now in smaller number and lower-grade than their western or Russian/Chinese counterpart but short of fighter-planes pretty much boast 750+ military factories around main cities, allowing them to do R&D and produces their own IADS network with proven success, ballistic and cruise missile arsenal with proven accuracy, a growing light to medium-sized submarine and surface ship force with CIWS , Anti-Ship and Anti-air defense and attack means again with proven ability such as the 2006 quasi-sinking of an Israeli corvette the INS Hanit, its own T-90 derivation of tanks, APCs, Small-arms, Helicopters with FLIR and Helmet-mounted sights and controls, you name it), their civilian nanotechnology sector is right after South-Korea, it builds it own supergiant tankers, dams, gas turbines for petrochemical plants (no more than 6 or 7 countries in the world have that ability that comes close to handling the tech for fighter engines), they own excavators for building an underground metro and train network, their own optical industry with world-class lenses, to name only few.

As usual, you don’t know what you are spouting about. To help educate you, GDP is the measure of the economy. There is real or nominal GDP which is most important in terms of a country’s power in relation to other countries. And then there is zucchini GDP otherwise known as PPP GDP. It is an estimate of the relative value of mostly domestic items like food. First, it is an estimate and not based on anything particularly real. And second, it indicates little about the relative strength of one country compared to another. However, if you like zucchini economics, you also have to compare not some arbitrary estimate of the value of an item but what percentage it represents of a typical person’s disposable income. On these real terms, even zucchini and often even potatoes are cheaper in the US than in Russia. Of course, more important things like high tech items like iPhones are cheaper in the US whether looked at by real GDP, zucchini GDP or affordability to the typical person.

There are a lot of “if’s” in the world. Without world trade which the US dominates, our economy would falter. But we have a highly developed domestic market. Our global military is the cop that tries to keep the global economy going, not just the US economy. (But then again, a very large part of the global economy is the US economy.) If the US kicked Russia out of the US dominated and controlled world financial, trade and currency institutions and markets, which Russia begged to be part of, Russia would go bankrupt in short order or the typical Russian would live like the typical North Korean.

Your delightfully quaint “understanding” of the subject may make you an intellectual around the cracker barrel in Butthole Arkansas or wherever the fuck you are from but this isn’t the USA ….. people in the rest of the world leave school with an education.