Children and dollars, or Chads for short

December 14, 2024 2:51 PM

I've finally figured out how to rank which countries are best; here's a preview of the top 3: 1. Israel; 2. Qatar; 3. Faroe Islands ... If you're not upset, you're probably at least confused. But trust the numbers, I arrived at them through the Baby Money Index (BMI). from There's a New Country Ranking and You're Not Going to Like it [Atoms v. Bits]
posted by chavenet (39 comments total)

It’s nice to see economists having fun.
posted by Mr. Excellent at 3:56 PM on December 14 [5 favorites]

OK two obvious problems with this data, firstly using 'GDP per Capita' for this calculation is making the implicit assumption that the GDP is going to be shared more or less equally amongst all the citizens, which is not currently the case in many of these countries.
Secondly they are forgetting that thanks to climate change some of these countries are going to be very unpleasant places to live, e.g. some areas of Israel are expected to regularly see 48-degree temperatures by 2050.
Money isn't everything.
posted by Lanark at 4:00 PM on December 14 [8 favorites]

Crime
An important metric that appears to have no correlation with GDP is crime

Wait, I thought Israel and Qatar were at the top of the list?
posted by eustatic at 4:11 PM on December 14 [8 favorites]

I first thought this was the plan to give babies a little money as an investment ($5000), to cash in as an adult. It was a solution to pay for college and starter homes, or retirement, without a government agency needed. It was last seen in print maybe a generation ago, but of course went nowhere.
posted by Brian B. at 4:21 PM on December 14 [4 favorites]

Doesn’t the Gini Coefficient cover this same territory, but with attention to income inequality? (Actual question; I’m extremely unsure of the answer.)
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:21 PM on December 14 [3 favorites]

However, if you ignore all that math and only look at a single income indicator like GDP per capita,

... meaning if you ignore extreme wealth inequality and human rights.

Income (GNI) x Fertility (TFR)²

This is disgusting. This is a chart of what countries have the greatest wealth inequalities times the square of women having the least agency over their own bodies. Fuck everything about this.
posted by mhoye at 4:35 PM on December 14 [22 favorites]

Combining fertility and gdp per capita makes the data more differentiated than usual lists.
The low fertility figures behaves like a golf handicap on richer countries like my own.

Could he have done a similar exercise with weighted averages; maybe 50% gdp per capita, 25% fertility and 25% environmental sustainability.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 4:39 PM on December 14 [1 favorite]

I also happen to think that fertility matters, because people existing is good.

Funny how the same people always venerating fertility never seem to want immigration? Or even rabidly oppose it.

Like, immigration completely solves the aging population issue, and "people existing is good". Or is that only for White people?
posted by splitpeasoup at 4:45 PM on December 14 [22 favorites]

The author should define what they mean by "per capita". For the top ranked Israel what was used as the denominator for "GDP?" Just Israeli citizens, or everyone living under Israeli control, including refugees? I don't see Palestine listed out separately, but it also doesn't seem like the numbers work out right if you're including all Gazan and West bank refugees in the denominator. How much of Qatar's GDP comes from migrant workers with their passports being held hostage by employers? are they included in the denominator? If not, how is he factoring out their
contributions to the wealth of the country? (similar questions would apply to the US if it was at the top of the list)
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 4:56 PM on December 14 [10 favorites]

This is disgusting. This is a chart of what countries have the greatest wealth inequalities times the square of women having the least agency over their own bodies.

It's mostly that, but the Faroes and Norway are also in there. It's just useless right-wing claptrap that tells you nothing meaningful at all. Not even which countries are rich but hate women.
posted by Dysk at 5:03 PM on December 14 [3 favorites]

The author should define what they mean by "per capita".

There are standard definitions for this. There’s world bank indices as well, those definitions are very well documented. It’s not really subjective on the part of the researcher.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 5:17 PM on December 14 [2 favorites]

oh god is it that rule where you think it's satire but the OP is entirely serious !?
posted by the antecedent of that pronoun at 5:18 PM on December 14 [4 favorites]

Israel is certainly number 1 at killing Palestinian babies and inflicting such psychological damage on Palestinian children that nearly half wish to die.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 5:31 PM on December 14 [11 favorites]

I never heard of this site, but clearly it's just another Elon Musk front for bloviation about breeding and making him more rich, isn't it?
posted by symbioid at 6:15 PM on December 14 [4 favorites]

Also - at least the headline was correct, I don't like it. Does this count as ragebait since the asshole KNOWS we won't like it?
posted by symbioid at 6:16 PM on December 14 [1 favorite]

Surely even this guy, in his “just asking questions!” posture, could recognize that there is some optimal fertility rate, that more isn’t automatically better (better squared). We can argue about what that number is; I’d say it is a tiny bit below replacement. But then you could recalculate his babymoney index using proximity to that ideal rather than straight fertility.
posted by adamrice at 6:17 PM on December 14 [6 favorites]

It’s kinda getting to the point where anyone that talks about fertility is probably a fascist.

…like, Christ, we’ve done this whole bit before guys, and it didn’t work out so well.
posted by aramaic at 7:05 PM on December 14 [5 favorites]

other posts on this blog:

- congressional UFO testimony, to "get information into the congressional record, and publicize the issue"
- a biography of UFC heavyweight champ Francis Ngannou
- a book review of [Napoleon Chagnon’s 1968 Yąnomamö: The Fierce People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomamö:_The_Fierce_People#Controversy_and_criticism)
posted by pwnguin at 7:47 PM on December 14 [2 favorites]

This is a chart of what countries have the greatest wealth inequalities times the square of women having the least agency over their own bodies

Excepting Norway?

I dunno I think it’s literally just nonsense.
posted by atoxyl at 8:08 PM on December 14 [3 favorites]

"To explain why this index is best, let's first talk about other attempts at rating national success."

No. Fuck you. At least give me a brief overview up front so I can determine if it's relevant to my interests. If it's not then I will have read an entire article and I will hate you even more.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 9:09 PM on December 14 [1 favorite]

Has there been an influx of folks pushing far right ideology into metafilter? I keep seeing articles like this popping up on the front page.
posted by constraint at 11:47 PM on December 14 [3 favorites]

I'm saying this in jest but I guess every day that goes by it seems increasingly likely - an LLM that generates and publishes content for MeFi posts.
posted by phigmov at 12:02 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Has there been an influx of folks pushing far right ideology into metafilter

Sometimes posts seem sourced as crossposts from HN, but surprisingly, this got about the same reception there. The first half of the post seemed reasonable ("almost everything correlates with GDP per capita, even HDI"), but then their replacement was not a joke, and if it was, didn't even fall flat, but boomeranged around and hit the author in the back of the head.

Attempting to keep the criticism constructive: outcomes tend to be more random as populations get smaller, which often puts small populations at the top and bottom of lists. Any metric intended for comparison should probably be factoring in some kind of confidence metric to allow for "probably equal" as an option.
posted by pwnguin at 1:04 AM on December 15 [4 favorites]

Has there been an influx of folks pushing far right ideology into metafilter? I keep seeing articles like this popping up on the front page.

You know you can click on the names. This one is from a prolific longtime poster who just casts a wide net, I think.
posted by atoxyl at 3:36 AM on December 15 [6 favorites]

It’s kinda getting to the point where anyone that talks about fertility is probably a fascist

I absolutely know what you mean but I don’t think that’s actually true - it’s a pretty mainstream concern for wannabe technocrats at this point because it turns out nobody knows how to run an economy with a shrinking population.

(yes immigration but the number of countries above replacement globally is dwindling - which shouldn’t be a bad thing except see above)
posted by atoxyl at 3:58 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

Everything correlating with GDP seems like a valid criticism until you stop to think about what is getting measured. It's not surprising that well-being, development, and quality of life correlate with wealth. Finding a measure that doesn't, just for the sake of it, doesn't actually measure anything useful. If the data shows that all the stuff we care about correlates to varying degrees with societal wealth then that isn't a failing, but just a fact. It doesn't make the other measures useless - looking at the ways and places that it doesn't correlate 100% is useful, but also yeah, you need some wealth to have a good life, film at 11.
posted by Dysk at 4:03 AM on December 15 [3 favorites]

it turns out nobody knows how to run an economy with a shrinking population.

The observation that most of us can scarcely imagine the end of capitalism comes to mind
posted by ginger.beef at 7:25 AM on December 15 [5 favorites]

I had thought it was a long way to get to the final joke that America is leading the developed world in BMI, as in Body Mass Index.
posted by mikelieman at 9:42 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Has there been an influx of folks pushing far right ideology into metafilter? I keep seeing articles like this popping up on the front page.

Has there been an influx of folks commenting in a drive-by fashion on metafilter? I keep seeing comments like this popping up on...
posted by storybored at 10:36 AM on December 15 [4 favorites]

I'm choosing to read this as tongue-firmly-in-cheek because otherwise I will get cranky.

Fertility rates go down when women have more education and more access to contraception. This is not a controversial statement. This suggests to me that the key thing keeping fertility rates up (where they are up) is a lack of agency on the part of the women.

I know the population contraction is going to make life meaningfully harder for a lot of people within my lifetime, and I'm not thrilled about that, but given that the alternative is to make people have children when they don't want to, I kind of have to be okay with it. I'm choosing not to have kids because that sounds like hell and I'd rather do research; I can't in good conscience say 'well it's okay, some woman who doesn't have the options I have will just have 4.2 children she doesn't necessarily want, so I don't need to have 2.1 children I don't want'.

The maths in this article was a little too convoluted for me to follow on mobile but I can't shake the creeping feeling that there's something very wrong with it.
posted by ngaiotonga at 11:15 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

This suggests to me that the key thing keeping fertility rates up (where they are up) is a lack of agency on the part of the women.

That explains the difference between 4+ kids and 2 but I’m not sure it’s so straightforward between, say, Iceland = Iran = USA > Hungary = Russia > Italy > South Korea.

Like, the very extent to which these rankings don’t show a pattern that makes much sense suggests that talking like GDP per capita only represents inequality or like TFR only represents repression of women is also a little facile.
posted by atoxyl at 11:48 AM on December 15 [2 favorites]

“these rankings” meaning the ones in the OP
posted by atoxyl at 11:57 AM on December 15 [1 favorite]

but then everything about the OP methodology is pretty arbitrary - the square because why not - so in the end it’s just troll-y nonsense
posted by atoxyl at 12:00 PM on December 15 [4 favorites]

given that the alternative is to make people have children when they don't want to

or, to make them want to have children.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:24 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

I had thought it was a long way to get to the final joke that America is leading the developed world in BMI, as in Body Mass Index.

Maybe, but the link goes to a special America specific issue of The Economist, who famously came up with a Big Mac Index, which the author even references in footnote 1.
posted by pwnguin at 12:54 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

I honestly thought this was a joke considering the blog title and “chads” as a unit of measure. Is it not a joke? People here seem to be mad at it … I never know anymore.
posted by caviar2d2 at 3:32 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

In another post with the "economics" label there is an 'argument' that the economic displacement theory explains/justifies* why homeopathic medicine is the ideal solution to displace more hazardous forms of non empirical treatments. Saying things like "this solves peoples apparent innate desire for garbage"* is exactly how economics actually think - a just-so story.

There must be some academic jargon for taking the piss.


*(not actual quote)
posted by zenon at 8:11 PM on December 15 [2 favorites]

I honestly thought this was a joke considering the blog title and “chads” as a unit of measure. Is it not a joke?

It’s definitely a little bit in jest, but the blogger seems like the type also to want to say - but don’t you think that’s interesting?
posted by atoxyl at 8:54 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]

Saying things like "this solves peoples apparent innate desire for garbage"* is exactly how economics actually think - a just-so story.

And then he waves past the obvious objection to the harmlessness of homeopathy in a footnote:

Yes, some people are going to pursue homeopathy instead of an empirically effective treatment. If it weren’t homeopathy though, it would likely be something worse or more expensive.

It’s a clever take, but not altogether a convincing one. Incidentally, since they are in the category of unregulated supplements, there are actually a lot of cases of homeopathic products being contaminated with ingredients that are active and bad.

I’m less allergic to this kind of intellectual bullshitting than a lot of people here appear to be - it’s a better substrate for discussion than pure rage bait - but that seems to be a lot of what’s on offer from this blog.
posted by atoxyl at 9:10 PM on December 15 [1 favorite]