This data doesn’t match what is on the IMF’s site. they claim US and Russia both had around 2.2% growth in 2023. But also that’s 2.2% of $1.8 trillion vs $27 trillion. So while relative growth US probably similar absolute numbers there’s more than an order of magnitude difference (even counting for population differences, it’s like $36K per capita vs $83K per capita)
What the war in Ukraine showed is that GDP alone isn’t a terribly useful metric. Western leaders assumed that Russian couldn’t keep up with the west militarily using the same premise you’re making. Russian economy was dismissed as being the size of Italy, and everybody thought that the west would swiftly defeat Russia because of that.
Furthermore, we can look at steel production volumes to get an idea of the size of the productive industry in US. According to official data, US produced 6.8 million metric tons of steel in June last year https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/us-steel-executive-summary
And it’s important to keep in mind that Russia has a much smaller population, so per capita productivity is actually higher than in US.
So, while overall GDP in US looks really high, much of it doesn’t translate into anything meaningful. In fact, a lot of this GDP comes from stuff like health insurance industry that’s a net negative for society.
While you can say that US and Russia have similar growth projections, the key difference is in which industries this growth is happening in.
Oh i 100% agree gdp is an absolute crap measure all the way around. I just wanted to call out that the data in the original post didn’t seem accurate to me and when I checked the IMF’s website it wasn’t.
If I’m reading that part correctly, I think the IMF data on the site is the current state of things, and FT is talking about the projections going into 2024 though right?
This data doesn’t match what is on the IMF’s site. they claim US and Russia both had around 2.2% growth in 2023. But also that’s 2.2% of $1.8 trillion vs $27 trillion. So while relative growth US probably similar absolute numbers there’s more than an order of magnitude difference (even counting for population differences, it’s like $36K per capita vs $83K per capita)
What the war in Ukraine showed is that GDP alone isn’t a terribly useful metric. Western leaders assumed that Russian couldn’t keep up with the west militarily using the same premise you’re making. Russian economy was dismissed as being the size of Italy, and everybody thought that the west would swiftly defeat Russia because of that.
Turns out, what actually matters is the industrial base and productive capacity. Manufacturing accounts for only around 11% of the GDP in US https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-to-the-us-gdp-by-industry/
Furthermore, we can look at steel production volumes to get an idea of the size of the productive industry in US. According to official data, US produced 6.8 million metric tons of steel in June last year https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/us-steel-executive-summary
This is comparable to Russia, which produced 5.8 million metric tons https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079878/russia-steel-production-volume/
And it’s important to keep in mind that Russia has a much smaller population, so per capita productivity is actually higher than in US.
So, while overall GDP in US looks really high, much of it doesn’t translate into anything meaningful. In fact, a lot of this GDP comes from stuff like health insurance industry that’s a net negative for society.
While you can say that US and Russia have similar growth projections, the key difference is in which industries this growth is happening in.
Oh i 100% agree gdp is an absolute crap measure all the way around. I just wanted to call out that the data in the original post didn’t seem accurate to me and when I checked the IMF’s website it wasn’t.
If I’m reading that part correctly, I think the IMF data on the site is the current state of things, and FT is talking about the projections going into 2024 though right?