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asr comments on [Link] FreakoStats and CEV - Less Wrong
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I would be interested to know how you measure GDP in a place that didn't have a market economy. Any Soviet economic figures from 1950 would be in Rubles. The official exchange rate was a bureaucratic fiction not tied to any market assessment of value. So how do you compare Rubles to dollars?
The linked-to data tables don't have a lot of notes about their sources.
There are many clever ways to try to get a grip on a GDP; one method used these days in Africa and for North Korea (as well as to estimate corruption in official figures) is to measure energy usage or if that is too hard to estimate, simple night light emission via satellite. I believe the CIA used many different metrics in its various estimation.
Apparently, it's hard.
I don't know where Angus Maddison got his data either, but he was apparently the leading expert on this sort of thing...