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DaFranker comments on Minor, perspective changing facts - Less Wrong
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Things that have made me sit up:
Japan has a population of 130 million. It is the largest (by population) non-western developed nation. Edit: It is also the second-largest developed nation in the world.
Areas of countries, especially African nations. For example, Mali is larger than France, Germany and Italy combined.
My idea of real-world violence changed dramatically after reading Randall Collins. In short, it is far rarer than you think, everybody involved is extremely fearful of it, nobody is very good at it and it really is nothing like the movies. For example, they are usually very short: O.K. Corral was 30 seconds long.
Chile is in the same time zone as the East Coast of the US.
China is not considered a developed nation? Dang. The things you learn.
(sure, if you look at average well-being including all the people not living in urban areas and average per-capita economic statistics and other similar things, it doesn't look like a major developed power at all... but China has launched manned space missions, has massive high-tech cities, has some pretty darn good scientific projects, and the parts that aren't backwater farms look pretty damn first-world apart from all that oppression-from-the-state business)
At any rate, going by all that's happening over there and all they're doing, I would've expected them to be one by now.
I was thinking more in terms of human development. Nations with large populations and high HDI are important because they support a very large number of people with a very high standard of life.
China has a HDI-rank of 101. Japan has a HDI-rank of 10.
Yeah, that and China's low per-capita everything. I also doubt China has a bigger service sector than its industry and farming.
I was correcting my erroneous assumption based on other correlates of developed nations (space missions, nuclear power, high-tech, lots of science, etc.).
Yes, China included developed and not-yet-developed areas. An interesting question would be how many people live in the developed parts of China -- I'd guess that's in the same ballpark as Japan.
China seems to have an urban population of about 690 million. So much more than Japan. But this doesn't tell us much, as you can live in a city but not necessarily enjoy high standard of living.
The real interesting question is: how many people in China have the same standard of living as the average person in Japan. So Japan has a HDI of 0.912. Based on this list the only regions of China with a comparable HDI are Hong Kong (0.944), Macau (0.944), Shanghai (0.908) and Beijing (0.891). The populations of these cities combined is about 51 million. So, about 40% the population of Japan. Excluding Hong Kong and Macau doesn't change it much: get's it down to about 43 million, about 30% of Japan. But easily comparable to the population European nations. So yes, China definitely has a developed nation 'embedded' in it.
Must be the archaic designation of it as a "second world" country, whereas the developed and developing countries roughly match "first world" and "third world".
Well, the wikipedia articles on human development and developed nations seem to indicate that to be considered a "developed nation" you have to have good per-capita rates, widespread infrastructure (admittedly, while China has first-rate infrastructure, it is only present in urban centers, to hell with rural areas!), and probably the most critical point re China is that you are into a Post-Industrial economy, with a larger service sector than industrial sector.
As far as my readings and knowledge can tell, the above are indeed points where China fails.