The Master Race of Economies

"GDP was growing though"

Doomscroll long enough on any social media’s short-form content algorithm and you’ll eventually find some sort of video that looks like this.

“Save Europe” people are their own can of worms, to be honest. I may release a crappy rehashing of other people’s thoughts on them sometime in the near future (2030).

Putting aside the fact that these accounts are usually managed by someone in Peru or the Philippines, the hashtags on the post display a strange pattern. It seems that with the advent of the Internet, people are now capable of spreading their nationalist views more and more. It doesn’t have to be nonsense like this white patriot bullshit, either. In fact, it’s mostly teenagers who get into arguments in the comment sections of reels about Turkey and the Kurds, squabbling incessantly over the history and events, which ones were undeniable facts and which were fabricated by a treacherous and deceitful high-ranking member of whatever group they are against. It’s like they don’t even understand what they’re trying to say anymore. White dudes from Missouri choose a country in the Balkans and defend its leader with their lives (pick Tito). It seems that the most popular way to talk about international relations on social media is, unsurprisingly, to put other countries down. Moroccans are made fun of for trying to be African and European at the same time. Americans are jeered in comment sections for losing to the Afghans and the Vietnamese. Maybe it’s a bit of fun after all, but the issue is when it spreads into attempts at productive discourse in these spaces.

This is shown a little better, at least towards my point, with more and more content getting pushed out about India and China. Presumably about the border disputes, or about their positions as superpowers in BRICS, but either way, like many Asian countries (South Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam), their citizens are especially on the nationalist side (when it comes to social media arguments, at least). Scarcely can you see a video from a Chinese creator talking about the infrastructure gap between China and India over the past few decades without some word on Kashmir, or a likening of Xi Jinping to a particular cartoon bear. Whatever the validity of these arguments is, one stands out in particular, which is used as an absolute, flawless victory trump card. It preemptively destroys all rebuttals made by its victims and is touted as the Holy Grail of metrics by which to judge a country’s success.

Right up there, in big black letters. G. D. P. This spells death to anyone who wants to start problems with the People’s Republic of China. India, a top 4 superpower? Yeah, right. They don’t produce as much as we do while having the same number of people; their economy is weaker. How can they even compete?

To be honest with you, this is utter drivel. People making a scene online about this country versus that are just plain stupid.¹ Foreign relations are not about that. Xi and Modi don’t show up at summits and compare altitude ceilings of their fighter jets. Foreign relations are always at least masqueraded as deepening a productive and forward-thinking connection with each other, not to argue about China's military capability or India’s. These conversations are so meaningless and make every patriotic person so mad that they forget about the real priorities. A “superpower” status is a worthless title. Measuring competition by the percentage of STEM students produced, or the amount of GDP spent on R&D, is not at all productive. Yes, these categories matter, and many countries do struggle in them, but if you have a platform and are going to produce discussion on this, you shouldn’t be trying to advance an agenda that creates thought in this childish way.

India has multiple pathways open to it to improve its literacy, poverty rate, access to basic utilities, education, and development. If your concern is simply making a country the most powerful nation in the world, you should step into a time machine and go back to the Cold War circa 1968. Book a first-class flight from wherever you are to Saigon, and then head to the village of My Lai. Or, if you’re not feeling like Doc Brown, just go to the US today (again, whole other can of worms). They seem to be a superpower according to 12-year-olds on TikTok. How’s that holding up for them? Don’t come at me for being anti-American or anything, I love Captain America as much as the next 300-pound guy. Just saying that the metrics by which we analyse how “well” a country is doing are not standardised, and they are definitely not dependent on how well people can make edits of their military branches.

Also, GDP as an indicator of how well the economy is doing seems a bit unfair in favour of "advanced” market economies. Activities that are part of an informal market will never be recorded and accounted for in the GDP. For instance, if a Chinese rice farmer commercialises his activities, hulling and polishing thousands of pounds of rice, and selling it off to supermarkets across the country, this operation is recorded and reflected in the country’s end-of-year GDP statistics. If an Indian family of subsistence farmers (55% of Indians are involved in farming and contribute 15% of GDP, implying that most of them are subsistence) grows, harvests, and processes the same amount of rice to eat for themselves in a year, or to sell in an informal, cash-based marketplace, these transactions are not recorded in GDP and so the Chinese agriculture industry seems more advanced. Similarly, the metric for poverty, measured in income per day, doesn’t account for this either. Food and living costs, arguably the most important expenses, are not officially recorded as transactions. This is why many people say that an increase in GDP also results in a reduction of poverty - it doesn’t, it simply causes more people to interact with the market economy. By this logic, before the great powerful Force of supply and demand came along, everybody everywhere was living in abject, horrific poverty. GDP must have been low back then. You wonder how people argued about which lord they served was better.

There are a great deal of complaints about why the Indian farming industry is so “inefficient,” draining GDP through subsidies, freebies, and tax breaks, while running small operations with no land holding size. Surely, siphoning this money to train farmers to use irrigation and better equipment would be far more beneficial to our GDP. Sounds good. Is this just classism rooted in constant thoughts of more, more, more, though? Progress should be advocated for to improve the quality of life for those involved, not simply for progress’s sake. What is to say, also, that the fruitful experiences of the middle class and their wonderful quality of life cannot also be experienced by subsistence farmers? They could just as easily farm as they do now with iPhones in their hands, plumbing and electricity in their house, sending their children to school on paved roads. They could even have Dubai chocolate 24 karat gold matcha Squid Game Labubus from the dollar store near their farm, all the while putting their own food on the table. After all, suburban folks with 2 square meters of backyard space absolutely rave about growing gardens these days. Did you know you can actually grow lemons, on trees or whatever? No need to go to the supermarket.

Maybe I’m thinking too far into what, ultimately, are just a bunch of random nationalistic people arguing it out as usual. This has always happened with citizens of rival countries, in chess pawns attack each other viciously, but the players are usually good friends, etc, etc, etc, usually leading to something about the Bilderberg Group. But for some reason, everyone else loves these wellbeing metrics too. They fund their think tanks, go to summits, make talks about why a country is failing, and bring up the stereotypically more “academically inclined” cousin to compare to. International organizations all use these metrics, as well as trade, to gauge the state of foreign relations and situations in countries at a glance. I’m not saying that there’s something inherently wrong with these standards. But if they’re used instead to dismiss a country instantly as being wholly this or that, that’s just not thoughtful and not productive.

I also realise that the whole subsistence farming GDP argument works best in tandem with an anti-capitalist tirade. Otherwise, I’d just get called an idiot for suggesting that we should stick to subsistence farming instead of getting with the modern program, like medieval peasants. I should double down and say that this is all the fault of Adam Smith, and indicate that we are heading towards a one-state technocracy where Mark Zuckerberg harvests tokens from our VR labour for bubble parties in Saint-Tropez.

But my point isn’t to say that these two should be treated with equal merit. Rather, I don’t think they should be compared at all. My point is that the metrics by which we judge how well off countries are are flawed at best and spread harmful narratives at worst. How can there be any one, two, or ten end-all-be-all criteria on a checklist that we tick to define the happiness of a nation’s inhabitants? Do we have the right to tell people that the way they are living is wrong and holding back “progress” and “growth”? Should we really be comparing countries like football teams, arguing over the ratings on their trading cards? Not to say that metrics like literacy rate, education rate, equality of gender and race are irrelevant, but you’re not helping anyone by spewing wild conjecture about this or that country of yours compared to theirs online, either.

These types of arguments seem to win the day, while real priorities get trampled over in favour of finding YouTube footage of the Indian Special Forces not applying consistent trigger discipline. Maybe we should stop thinking about countries through standards that we don’t even apply to ourselves, and start listening to what fulfilment and well-being mean to them. Only then can we make actual progress.

This image is meant for someone in particular. You will know it when you see it.

1. Don’t worry I didn’t forget the nuance I know humans all have inherent worth and we shouldn’t judge them solely on their faults when we don’t know them nor treat them as objects and that we should never be able to justify attempting to know “what is good” for them even at the risk of their own happiness bla bla bla (I read 3 pages of Kant performatively on the metro)