I spent a lot of time living in China. Nobody believes the government figures. But I'm also skeptical that using artificial light as a proxy for economic growth is rational, particularly when you realise that Chinese people overwhelmingly live in vertical high density buildings and the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced.
Therefore although I am a big fan of the Economist and like the idea, I think the premise of this particular study may be somewhat flawed.
Where the article states "the mismatch between satellite and GDP data did not appear in dictatorships until they were too rich to receive some types of aid" I think what they may be discovering is "when people move in to dense modern housing and shift to white collar work the model breaks down". There are other factors too: more modern lighting is more efficient, people increasingly socialize through phones, and outdoor living spaces are reduced in relatively inhospitable climates, somewhat limiting light pollution.
Thinking back to first principles, the majority of outdoor light pollution is probably from freeways and city centers, and if you proxy that with economic growth it's probably significant as a pre-emption at a certain phase of transition from agricultural/low-development-level economy through highly developed economy, but becomes irrelevant rapidly once those development prerequisites have been achieved.
It doesn't help that this guy is trying to sell a book.
> the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced
Not to mention the automation of heavy industry leading to "dark factories": some Chinese factories are so completely automated now that they don't bother turning on the lights in large chunks of them. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
It would be pretty easy to validate the model, I think: take Eastern Europe, South Korea, Norway, Ireland as examples of countries where the economic growth since 1980 was very obvious, and most of it corresponded to a democratic society. Then take the US, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Sweden as a control group, which was already pretty developed by 1980, and check their trends in light pollution vs GDP, or whatever.
(1980 is an arbitrary date, but before the fall of the USSR and thus the explosive growth of the Eastern Europe, and when shots from orbit likely became easy to obtain.)
I remember reading about how regional Chinese governments measure economic growth, given that the numbers they have are doctored. One proxy was electricity usage.
That's actually mentioned in the article. The information came from a diplomatic cable. It's very damning, although as evidence it does come down to one (important) person's view.
"I'm also skeptical that using artificial light as a proxy for economic growth is rational"
I found myself wondering if it was a lagging indicator. Hopefully the peer review process would have flagged these issues if they were serious. I didn't see the venue mentioned though.
Yeah, I bet it isn’t a simple linear model, at least. But I also wonder if a model that takes the effects you’ve identified into account could be trained. I guess we’d have to have some historical source of the true GDP numbers, though.
The premise of the study is that light is a flawed but easily obtainable metric that correlates with GDP growth. There are no doubt lots of other metrics that go into estimating economic growth when self-reported numbers can't be trusted. But those take money and expertise to collect, and are probably mainly available to intelligence agencies.
I agree with your skepticism of the method and it's good to explicitly list these things. But I think the authors of the research would also probably also agree that the method is far from perfect.
> when people move in to dense modern housing and shift to white collar work the model breaks down....more modern lighting is more efficient
These should apply equally to dictatorships and democracies right? Or at least it shouldn't correlate with the dishonesty of the regime so the model can factor it out.
> people increasingly socialize through phones
You still need light for most forms of economic development. I've been to a few places where it's almost completely dark at night and people communicate on phones. But the economic centers, for example where people congregate for night life, have lights on.
Cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and New York all have high-density living, yet they do not exhibit the same divergence between satellite-observed light and reported GDP. If urban density were the primary cause of the mismatch, it would appear across both democratic and authoritarian countries.
Similarly, gains in energy efficiency, such as widespread LED adoption, are global and not limited to any regime type. The same applies to economic transitions from heavy industry to services and behavioral shifts toward indoor or screen-based activity; these are common across modern economies. However, the study finds that the light/GDP mismatch emerges selectively in authoritarian regimes once they pass the income threshold for certain types of foreign aid.
This pattern suggests that the divergence is not driven by modernization effects alone, but rather by systematic incentives to inflate economic data.
How could they possibly lie? Don’t people just report the facts and then the facts show a bad jobs report and the labor economists who used to write the jobs report gets fired and replaced by a lying stooge and. Wait.
I cant imagine that light is a good proxy for growth, unless there were very good baseline maps that have been properly calibrated for the significant changes in the types of lights used and how they are bieng used......"dictators" lying
should be a simple presumption.......
which historicaly was confirmed by basic spycraft, in that least sexy of industrial chemicals ,hydrochloric acid, is still a very good indicator of total industrial capacity as it is used for all primary industrial production, and is the most used chemical world wide, but is now bulk shipped, instead of bieng produced localy.
Back to light as a proxy and an indicator, the flip side would be to restrict light, and hide industrial locations, as is common in war zones....so....back to spycraft 2025
as to China....they realy REALY are building out there electrical grid , road and rail networks, and no one can doubt that they are not producing massive amounts of everything, andwhile they have an incetive to exagerate there growth, there wester adverseraries have an incentive to lie about the same thing.....
the basic truth is that the world is definitly heading towards manufacturing overcapacity for everything, but that this is perversly bieng treated as a bad thing.....
Given recent news* does that mean light at night could be used to measure US economic growth this year?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-commissioner-of-lab...
You can rely on a better source : https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/consum...
Did it with https://sites.google.com/site/jiaxiongyao16/nighttime-lights...
USA (2013-2023 CAGR: 2.3%) 2014: 6.2% 2015: -5.3% 2016: -1.8% 2017: 15.2% 2018: -4.9% 2019: 4.5% 2020: -5.4% 2021: 6.7% 2022: 14.5% 2023: -3.6%
China (2013-2023 CAGR 7.9%) 2014: -1.7% 2015: -1.2% 2016: -5.1% 2017: 53.3% 2018: -1.0% 2019: 7.5% 2020: 6.5% 2021: 11.4% 2022: 4.2% 2023: 10.8%
Individual yearly number are unlikely to be useful. Likely you can only predict long term trends with the help of fits.
https://archive.md/v5rGj
Yeah more led lit greenhouses growing pot go up.
https://archive.md/8asa5
I spent a lot of time living in China. Nobody believes the government figures. But I'm also skeptical that using artificial light as a proxy for economic growth is rational, particularly when you realise that Chinese people overwhelmingly live in vertical high density buildings and the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced.
Therefore although I am a big fan of the Economist and like the idea, I think the premise of this particular study may be somewhat flawed.
Where the article states "the mismatch between satellite and GDP data did not appear in dictatorships until they were too rich to receive some types of aid" I think what they may be discovering is "when people move in to dense modern housing and shift to white collar work the model breaks down". There are other factors too: more modern lighting is more efficient, people increasingly socialize through phones, and outdoor living spaces are reduced in relatively inhospitable climates, somewhat limiting light pollution.
Thinking back to first principles, the majority of outdoor light pollution is probably from freeways and city centers, and if you proxy that with economic growth it's probably significant as a pre-emption at a certain phase of transition from agricultural/low-development-level economy through highly developed economy, but becomes irrelevant rapidly once those development prerequisites have been achieved.
It doesn't help that this guy is trying to sell a book.
> the amount of light used when moving from last-gen 'heavy industry' to next-gen 'value add'/'light industry'/'design work'/whatever is going to be reduced
Not to mention the automation of heavy industry leading to "dark factories": some Chinese factories are so completely automated now that they don't bother turning on the lights in large chunks of them. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCBdcNA_FsI
It would be pretty easy to validate the model, I think: take Eastern Europe, South Korea, Norway, Ireland as examples of countries where the economic growth since 1980 was very obvious, and most of it corresponded to a democratic society. Then take the US, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Sweden as a control group, which was already pretty developed by 1980, and check their trends in light pollution vs GDP, or whatever.
(1980 is an arbitrary date, but before the fall of the USSR and thus the explosive growth of the Eastern Europe, and when shots from orbit likely became easy to obtain.)
I remember reading about how regional Chinese governments measure economic growth, given that the numbers they have are doctored. One proxy was electricity usage.
That's actually mentioned in the article. The information came from a diplomatic cable. It's very damning, although as evidence it does come down to one (important) person's view.
Li Keqiang also made those comments over a decade ago at this point. The Chinese economy has changed a lot in that time.
"I'm also skeptical that using artificial light as a proxy for economic growth is rational"
I found myself wondering if it was a lagging indicator. Hopefully the peer review process would have flagged these issues if they were serious. I didn't see the venue mentioned though.
Its use for the purposes of statistical comparison seems to have held up:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720458?utm_sou...
Yeah, I bet it isn’t a simple linear model, at least. But I also wonder if a model that takes the effects you’ve identified into account could be trained. I guess we’d have to have some historical source of the true GDP numbers, though.
The premise of the study is that light is a flawed but easily obtainable metric that correlates with GDP growth. There are no doubt lots of other metrics that go into estimating economic growth when self-reported numbers can't be trusted. But those take money and expertise to collect, and are probably mainly available to intelligence agencies.
I agree with your skepticism of the method and it's good to explicitly list these things. But I think the authors of the research would also probably also agree that the method is far from perfect.
> when people move in to dense modern housing and shift to white collar work the model breaks down....more modern lighting is more efficient
These should apply equally to dictatorships and democracies right? Or at least it shouldn't correlate with the dishonesty of the regime so the model can factor it out.
> people increasingly socialize through phones
You still need light for most forms of economic development. I've been to a few places where it's almost completely dark at night and people communicate on phones. But the economic centers, for example where people congregate for night life, have lights on.
Cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, and New York all have high-density living, yet they do not exhibit the same divergence between satellite-observed light and reported GDP. If urban density were the primary cause of the mismatch, it would appear across both democratic and authoritarian countries.
Similarly, gains in energy efficiency, such as widespread LED adoption, are global and not limited to any regime type. The same applies to economic transitions from heavy industry to services and behavioral shifts toward indoor or screen-based activity; these are common across modern economies. However, the study finds that the light/GDP mismatch emerges selectively in authoritarian regimes once they pass the income threshold for certain types of foreign aid.
This pattern suggests that the divergence is not driven by modernization effects alone, but rather by systematic incentives to inflate economic data.
How could they possibly lie? Don’t people just report the facts and then the facts show a bad jobs report and the labor economists who used to write the jobs report gets fired and replaced by a lying stooge and. Wait.
I cant imagine that light is a good proxy for growth, unless there were very good baseline maps that have been properly calibrated for the significant changes in the types of lights used and how they are bieng used......"dictators" lying should be a simple presumption....... which historicaly was confirmed by basic spycraft, in that least sexy of industrial chemicals ,hydrochloric acid, is still a very good indicator of total industrial capacity as it is used for all primary industrial production, and is the most used chemical world wide, but is now bulk shipped, instead of bieng produced localy. Back to light as a proxy and an indicator, the flip side would be to restrict light, and hide industrial locations, as is common in war zones....so....back to spycraft 2025 as to China....they realy REALY are building out there electrical grid , road and rail networks, and no one can doubt that they are not producing massive amounts of everything, andwhile they have an incetive to exagerate there growth, there wester adverseraries have an incentive to lie about the same thing..... the basic truth is that the world is definitly heading towards manufacturing overcapacity for everything, but that this is perversly bieng treated as a bad thing.....
Yes, instead of being a mere 6.5x less productive per capita in nominal terms than the US, China is 15x less productive!
Who should people believe, nighttime light data or their lying eyes?