Purchasing power parity is a theory that says prices of goods between countries should equalize over time. Formula, how to use, and examples.
After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency’s pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today’s PPP. ❧
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:29PM
Why We Don’t Live in a PPP World
PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same.
That’s not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.
A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can’t be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.
A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can’t compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers.
A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports. ❧
Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.
More about this programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l
I really love the visualizations here! There’s so much to pull apart and analyze. I do wish I had a more focused view on some of the time lapse. There are some countries moving around in interesting ways and I’d love to be able to watch what they’re doing and match them up with various historical events. Watching Japan, for example is fascinating. The near-global dip for large portions of the connected world in 1918 was particularly interesting to see as well.
Read sections 1.0-1.3. I’m loving the graphs, charts, videos, and supplementary interactive material they’re including in the book. It’s completely fascinating and quite a different reading experience on a computer versus either paper or e-reader.
Having immediate access to data like this make for a more interesting Economics experience.
Annotations from Unit 1 Capitalism and democracy: Affluence, inequality, and the environment
But some have taller skyscrapers at the back, meaning a greater disparity between the top 10% and the rest of the population, whereas others have a less steep profile. ❧
It might be more interesting if the top decile in each country were broken into tenths to show the even more severe disparities. I suspect that some of the height differences would be even more drastic if we could see the top 1% or even the top 0.1% on these graphs.
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:36PM
A thousand years ago, the world was flat, economically speaking. ❧
I don’t think we have to go back even this far. If I recall correctly, even 150 years ago the vast majority of the world’s population were subsistence farmers. It’s only been since the 20th century and the increasing spread of the industrial revolution that the situation has changed:
Even England remained primarily an agrarian country like all tributary societies for the previous 4,000 years, with ca. 50 percent of its population employed in agriculture as late as 1759.
–David Christian, Maps of Time (pp 401) quoting from Crafts, British Economic Growth, pp. 13–14. (See also Fig 13.1 Global Industrial Potential from the same, for a graphical indicator.
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 01:03PM
If you have never seen an ice-hockey stick (or experienced ice hockey) this shape is why we call these figures ‘hockey-stick curves’. ❧
I’m glad they’ve included an image of a hockey stick to provide the context here, but I’ve always thought of it rotated so that the blade was on the ground and the sharp angle of the handle itself indicated the exponential growth curve!
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 01:18PM
I’ve been teaching for more than 27 years, but it is just in the last five that I stopped grading traditionally, and so I am what some may call an “un-grader”. But the thing is, if you work in an institution where your job is to assign final grades at the end of the semester like I do, then you are still a grader.
We are delighted to announce the full line up of featured speakers for our 2020 OER Conference. Joining The Zemos Collective and sava saveli singh who were announced at the end of 2019, we have now completed the line up with Joe Deville and Janneke Adema.
Directed by Max Mayer. President Bartlet's plan to attend his daughter Ellie's White House wedding is jeopardized when Russia and China mobilize troops over growing chaos in Kazakhstan. The Santos campaign has gained ground on Vinick over the last few weeks, but with less than two months until the election it's not clear that the gap can be closed. As Josh obsesses over the electoral math, tracking polls, and decisions...
Directed by Paul McCrane. With Alan Alda, Kristin Chenoweth, Allison Janney, Joshua Malina. Leo's preparation for the Vice Presidential debate is going badly; Santos makes his last trip home before the election; Will and Kate continue to flirt.
Forcing webmentions for conversations on websites that don’t support Webmention
Within the IndieWeb community there is a process called backfeed which is the process of syndicating interactions on your syndicated (POSSE) copies back (AKA reverse syndicating) to your original posts. As it’s commonly practiced, often with the ever helpful Brid.gy service, it is almost exclusively done with social media silos like Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, Github, and Mastodon. This is what allows replies to my content that I’ve syndicated to Twitter, for example, to come back and live here on my website.
Why not practice this with other personal websites? This may become increasingly important in an ever growing and revitalizing blogosphere as people increasingly eschew corporate social sites and their dark patterns of tracking, manipulative algorithmic feeds, and surveillance capitalism. It’s also useful for sites whose owners may not have the inclination, time, effort, energy or expertise to support the requisite technology.
I’ve done the following general reply pattern using what one might call manual backfeed quite a few times now (and I’m sure a few others likely have too), but I don’t think I’ve seen it documented anywhere as a common IndieWeb practice. As a point of fact, my method outlined below is really only half-manual because I’m cleverly leveraging incoming webmentions to reduce some of the work.
Manually syndicating my replies
Sometimes when using my own website to reply to another that doesn’t support the W3C’s Webmention spec, I’ll manually syndicate (a fancy way of saying cut-and-paste) my response to the website I’m responding to. In these cases I’ll either put the URL of my response into the body of my reply, or in sites like WordPress that ask for my website URL, I’ll use that field instead. Either way, my response appears on their site with my reply URL in it (sometimes I may have to wait for my comment to be moderated if the receiving site does that).
Here’s the important part: Because my URL appears on the receiving site (sometimes wrapped as a link on either my name or the date/time stamp depending on the site’s user interface choices), I can now use it to force future replies on that site back to my original via webmention! My site will look for a URL pointing back to it to verify an incoming webmention on my site.
Replies from a site that doesn’t support sending Webmentions
Once my comment appears on the receiving site, and anyone responds to it, I can take the URL (with fragment) for those responses, and manually input them into my original post’s URL reply box. This will allow me to manually force a webmention to my post that will show up at minimum as a vanilla mention on my website.
(Note, if your site doesn’t have a native box like this for forcing manual webmentions, you might try external tools like Aaron Parecki’s Telegraph or Kevin Mark’s Mention.Tech, which are almost as easy. For those who are more technical, cURL is an option as well.)
Depending on the microformats mark up of the external site, the mention may or may not have an appropriate portion for the response and/or an avatar/name. I can then massage those on my own site (one of the many benefits of ownership!) so that the appropriate data shows, and I can change the response type from a “mention” to a “reply” (or other sub-types as appropriate). Et voilà, with minimal effort, I’ve got a native looking reply back on my site from a site that does not support Webmention! This is one of the beautiful things of even the smallest building-blocks within the independent web or as a refrain some may wish to sing–“small pieces, loosely joined”!
This method works incredibly well with WordPress websites in particular. In almost all cases the comments on them will have permalink URLs (with fragments) to target the individual pieces, often they’ve got reasonable microformats for specifying the correct h-card details, and, best of all, they have functionality that will send me an email notification when others reply to my portion of the conversation, so I’m actually reminded to force the webmentions manually.
An Illustrative Example
As an example, I posted on my website that I’d read an article on Matt Maldre’s site along with a short comment. Since Matt (currently) doesn’t support either incoming or outgoing webmentions, I manually cut-and-pasted my reply to the comment section on his post. I did the same thing again later with an additional comment on my site to his (after all, why start a new separate conversation thread when I can send webmentions from my comments section and keep the context?).
Matt later approved my comments and posted his replies on his own website. Because his site is built on WordPresss, I got email notifications about his replies, and I was able to use the following URLs with the appropriate fragments of his comments in my manual webmention box:
After a quick “massage” to change them from “mentions” into “replies” and add his gravatar, they now live on my site where I expect them and in just the way I’d expect them to look if he had Webmention support on his website.
I’ll mention that, all of this could be done in a very manual cut-and-paste manner–even for two sites, neither of which have webmention support. But having support for incoming webmentions on one’s site cuts back significantly on that manual pain.
For those who’d like to give it a spin, I’ll also mention that I’ve similarly used the incredibly old refbacks concept in the past as a means of notification from other websites (this can take a while) and then forced manual webmentions to get better data out of them than the refback method allows.
Directed by Andrew Bernstein. Danny tells C.J. some important news about the President's son-in-law over dinner; C.J. attempts to broker an international deal to stop genocide in Darfur; Josh twists C.J.'s arm to get her to help the Santos campaign.
Directed by Christopher Misiano. A nuclear accident in California sends the White House and both campaigns into overdrive. Meanwhile, China and Russia appear headed for a showdown over elections and oil in Kazakhstan.
Directed by Laura Innes. Both candidates face vital choices about which states to campaign in; Vinick tries to put the nuclear issue behind him; Bruno finds Santos's briefcase.
Biography: Yipeng Zhao is a Managing Partner at Embark Ventures, a Los-Angeles based venture capital firm focused on early-stage companies. Embark Ventures particularly interested in Frontier/Deep Tech companies such as cyber-security, AI/ML, Robotics and Data Analytics. Yipeng co-founded Embark Ventures in 2017 where he manages Embark Ventures’ new investments and portfolio companies. Since founded Embark Ventures, Yipeng lead 8 investments and is on the board of directors of multiple venture-backed companies. Prior joining Embark Ventures, Yipeng serviced as Executive Vice President of ZMXY Global Investment, Inc., a China-based private equity investor where he has been actively involved in equity investment in both China and US. Some cases including the equity investment of YangQuan City Commercial Bank and a mixed-use REITs portfolio in Taiyuan, China. Yipeng also helped ZMXY Global Investment set up their venture investment arm (ArcheMatrix Investment Group, LLC) in Los Angeles as a part of the global strategy. Yipeng also worked at UCSD as research statistician focused on Nonparametric and Semiparametric estimation and inference problem in Econometrics. While at UCSD he spent time on the application of big data in customer behavior research and game-theoretical econometrics approach to customer behavior research. Yipeng also has extensive research experience in financial risk management and time series data Analysis.
Patzer is such a great word. I’ve only heard it in context in the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher.
Most of the others I’ve heard as well, though many are rarer. Throttlebottom is a solid one that I wasn’t aware of before, but seems very fitting. I’m half-tempted to change the tagline of my website to Philologaster now.
