What is the Difference between exchange rate GDP and Purchasing Power Parity GDP?
This is a question that I could hear everyone thinking during our IMF visit last week. I meant to post on it sooner, but I got distracted. I hope it's still helpful.
I know that everyone is in ECON-100 (if that), so I will try to make this an easily accesible explanation!
There are various ways of calculating Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is the total amount of goods and services produced in an economy. GDP is always calculated in some type of currency unit, and in order to compare GDP across countries the unit needs to be the same. Generally, the US Dollar is used for these transactions. However, this poses a problem because most countries have their own national currency, so the price of goods in their country is not measured in dollars. This means that the price must be converted into dollars. The two principal ways to do this are using exchange rate and purchasing power parity (PPP).
With exchange rate calculations, the value of a country's GDP is calculated using the nominal exchange rate on the currency markets. With PPP calculations, the conversion is based on how much one could buy with a given currency.
An example, because I know that was confusing:
We have two countries, A and B. 1 Country A dollar = 2 Country B pesos. The GDP of Country A is 100billion dollars and the GDP of Country B is 100 billion pesos. We would like to know the GDP of Country B in Country A dollars.
100 billion pesos x (1 dollar/2 pesos) = 50 billion pesos
However, if I tell you that a typical good that costs 1 dollar in Country A costs 1 peso in Country B, what is the GDP using PPP?
Purchasing power of 1 Country A dollar = 1 Country B peso
100 billion pesos x (1 dollar/1 peso) = 100 billion pesos
Even if you didn't follow all that, you can see that the GDP of Country B appears much larger with PPP calculations than exchange rate calculations, while Country A GDP appears much larger with exchange rate calculations. This is basically the same thing that happens in the real world and is the reason that different countries (i.e. US and India) support different ways of calculating GDP!
Some last thoughts on the class
Wow, this is really hard. I'm just sitting here, staring at the screen, wondering how to summarize all my thoughts about our class. I guess I'll blog a little about my final project, because, to me, that is a culmination of the entire class...
I'm writing about the role of identity, particularly minority identity in people's lives. Part of the project is looking at the role these groups play in social science and science fiction. However, I'm also doing some interviews to try to find out a bit about how people from minority groups feel about how their identity affects their role in society.
I am not done with my project yet, but I've conducted a few interviews. What I've found amazing so far is the degree of difference between how different people feel, and what they think that the future of minority roles in the United States. I've found a general concensus that knowing your heritage helps to build your sense of identity. However, visions of the future are quite different. On the one hand, some believe that the creation of a more unified society will make the heritage of individual groups less important, while on the other, there is a sentiment that society will become more unified when people understand the heritage of other groups better.
How does this have to do with science fiction? Take The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for example: The people on Earth, who still see racial difference, disapprove of mixing races, perhaps even of understanding them. The priority is on separation and purity. Simultaneously, the moon has created a society in which racial differences and ethnic heritage do not create barriers between people. Instead, people come together across divisions to make one society.
Time Jumps
The only thing that bothered me about Ian Banks' spectacular book was his tendency to thrust you into situations with absolutely no explanation or description. The ironic thing was that he had spectacular descriptions, but the generally didn't appear until after you had already drawn much of the same conclusion for yourself. I understand that he was trying to create an authentic experience of the events in the novel by revealing things only as they occurred to the characters. Unfortunately, the characters had the advantage of living in the world and already having seen/learned about what was going on. I am not opposed to Banks' technique on principle. I think that it can be very effective. In particular, the slow revelation of Quilan's mission as he himself remembers it is very good. However, I think Banks overuses the technique. As soon as the reader thinks they have a grasp of what is going on, they are thrust unexpectedly into a new situation where they are confused again. It is extremely difficult to get a hold of the timeline until about halfway through.
The other....
"Kill the Buggers! Kill the Bugs! Kill the Arachnids! Kill the Aliens! Kill the Piggies! Kill the Indians! Kill, kill, kill, kill..."
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of all this killing? Over and over in science fiction, there is a repeated emphasis on wiping out the different ones. I know we've talked about it over and over, but still....
Oh, and what about our moral hypocryse (and lack of spelling ability) regarding geno/xeno cide. When it was Ender wiping out the Buggers, we were all saying "Yeah, let's go get the fuckers!" but when we were reading Todorov, everyone was saying "Well, there is no question it was morally reprehensible..." Mightn't we be in a bit of a Speaker for the Dead situation? In retrospect, "shit, that was a bad idea". Shouldn't we try to understand what was going on at the time? I know that the Native Americans were not the threat that the Buggers appeared to be, but they might have been as much of a threat as the Buggers genuinely were. After all, the Buggers weren't coming back to get Earth and the Native Americans weren't coming back to get the Europeans.
dimensions of personality
In the midst of reading The Conquest of America, a few sentences brought to mind the real similarities between social science and science fiction, reality and fantasy...
Communication is "the interaction of individual with individual, the interaction that occurs between the person and his social group, the person and the natural world, the person and the religious universe," Todorov postulates (69). This definition seemed quite accurate to me, because the concept of communicating with the world is obviously distinct from the concept of communicating with a specific person, and, as a result, takes on different characteristics when put into practice.
However, this passage also reminded me of an explanation Card makes in the introduction to Speaker for the Dead: "Our whole demeanor changes, our mannerisms, our figures of speech, when we move from one context to another." As a result, it is difficult to write a book with many important characters because, in order for them to be fully developed, the writer has to explore their relationship with each other character, and different combinations of multiple characters.
It seems to me that the concepts of these two passages are quite similar, although one addresses issues of communication in a real historical situation, and the other characterization of fictional persons thousands of years in the future. Nevertheless, the underlying concept is that people change substantially depending on their surroundings and what they hope to accomplish in terms of communication and interaction. I think the two ideas could be applied to each situation. Communication differs not only when it is addressed to the world rather than an individual, but also depending on which individual it is addressed to. Likewise, people change depending on whether they are concentrating on their relationships with another individual, a group of individuals, or the world.
Humane Treatment
I was fascinated by the discussion of vegetarianism and vegetarian principles that we had during class Tuesday. I personally don't eat red meat, but I do eat fish and chickens, and it has nothing to do with my sense of sympathy for the animals. Instead, I disapprove of the environmentally detrimental practices used to raise many meat animals and the fact that, by raising more grain and less meat we might feed the world's entire population. Furthermore, I think that, in the question of eggs, we blew too quickly by the point that Pooja shouted out: U.S. eggs are not fertilized. By eating eggs, American vegetarians are not destroying some potential chicken life, they're destroying some potential garbage...
I also wanted to make a point about the idea of "humane" treatment of animals. Someone said that they thought all animals should be treated according to their "humane" standards, even though they might be varelse and not ramen. Ironically, that is what the piggies think they're doing when they murder Pipo and Libo. They believe that they are bestowing honor on their friends and allowing them to move on to the next stage of life, while the humans see their actions as cruel. Not, of course, that I think we should try planting pigs, but we might want to consider that what we believe is "cruel" does not necessarily translate into the animal kingdom...
The Question of Relativity
OK, so I read Speaker for the Dead, and I enjoyed it, mostly, but I couldn't help but get weirded out by the idea of a romantic relationship between Ender and Ivanova. He is 3,000 years older than her!!!!!! I know that he looks and feels like he is 35, but we all know the truth. He was born on Earth thousands of years before the Starways Confederation was even a dot on some treaty. He grew up with the reality of the Bugger War and he was the Ender who perpetrated the despicable "Xenocide". And, of course, the original Speaker for the Dead.
I can't really believe that he is the true equivalent of 35. I believe that at some atomic or subatomic level, he must experience all of the time that passes while he is in space travel. Afterall, the Hive Queen experiences every second of their travel because of her greater telepathic abilities. Since the atoms in the Hive Queen are the same as the ones in Ender, and throughout the universe, those atoms must have experienced every second that has passed in the real world.
There is also the element of experience. Although he may not have lived through everything conciously, Ender has experienced firsthand all of the transformations of public opinion and society that have occurred during that time. He has experienced first-hand both the hatred and love of the Buggers and every degree of feeling in between. He has seen the fall of the IF and the formation of the SC. He has spoken first-hand with people dead for thousands of years. And, most disturbing, he was a man of great experience when Ivanova was still a child. He fell in love with her even before she began her twenty year affair with Libo.
Yes, Ivanova has experienced more pain in her forty years than most people have. Yes, starship travel has kept Ender young outwardly. But, nevertheless, Ender's experiences and the literal age of his atoms mean that he is 3,000 years older than her.
