Putting Real GDP Per Capita In Perspective

The Philippines is not one of the poorest countries on the planet. But it certainly was a century ago, and it has not grown as well as its neighbors. Currently, its real GDP per capita is about 3K/yr in American Dollars. Ours is about $60K.

What does that get you? Check out this gripe from the comments at Marginal Revolution:

Airspace homogenuity is a 1st World gripe. Here’s some of my 3rd World concerns: do we have any more Philippine spitting cobras in our backyard? (We’ve killed two in the last year, one of them at 10:00 am in the outdoor kitchen, slithering up to somebody; it can shoot their venom up to 10 feet, kills many within 30 minutes, too short to make it to the hospital); are we going to run out of water in this rain forest climate that has no dams, though we just dug a second pressurized well?; does burning plastic (there’s no trash pickup here) cause cancer though we’ve taken precautions to build a big pit and stay upwind? (diesel fuel helps but it’s so rainy here it’s hard to burn anything); did the diseased bat that almost landed on my head carry Ebola or rabies (I have anti-rabies shots, but not Ebola)?; will the volcano erupt again and bury us with pyroclastic flow, like it almost did earlier this year (the magma the size of a football stadium that rolled down the mountainside was spectacular, I saw it when it happened); will our new concrete house get damaged by an earthquake (I think not, we used good concrete not the crumbly stuff they use here to save money), or a typhoon (we have a steel roof; the Philippines gets something like a dozen typhoons a year, and we’re in ‘typhoon alley’); will we have another power cut just when I’m typing this? (the PH regional power plant is geothermal, which sounds good but in fact is prone to breakdowns, a brownout for a few hours every week is common, and more common during rain, a coal-fired plant is actually more reliable and btw electricity costs are about 2-3x more than in the USA, and people here are poor). Why are fruits and vegetables so expensive here ($1 for an ordinary apple; 80 cents for a small fist sized greenish tomato or huge, dirt filled–it’s comical–carrot) and why won’t my next-of-kin eat them? (sad people here eat nothing but sugar, white rice, pork, chicken, and the bony talapia fish, all fried of course since nobody even sells ovens and the one oven I bought, imported, had a gas leak and is inoperative, serves me right for trying to buck custom and buying things knowing everything here is sold from First World county rejected equipment, I kid you not).

It’s both amazing from the perspective of history, but not so amazing from the perspective of the internet that this commenter chimes in rather often on the world’s most popular economics blog.