Counter fact: In our city district, which is the richest and biggest district of our 600k developed city, we decided to turn off the street lights at night on purpose to help with sleeping better. There is no street criminality, people feel safe without street lights. Our city is the richest in our country, which is at the top 5 in the world
Is there an article with more details about the decision and the implementation?
I’m curious if the lights are off completely, or are they dimmed and/or motion activated. Also curious about how it affects the costs (and is there a financial motivation as well).
This happens in many towns and cities in the UK too.
For the UK, important streetlight (motorways, junctions, etc) are kept on. But the quieter streets and away from junctions are shut off.
It’s done for “climate” reasons but I’m pretty use the root cause is actually just another cost cutting measure.
It's good that financial and environmental incentives are aligned in this case.
Climate, not light pollution?
True, in mi city they are replacing old lamps with more directional and dim leds. Above level 1 flat city looks much much more dark, though at street level you can walk without stepping on a dogshit perfectly.
> Counter fact: In our city district, which is the richest and biggest district of our 600k developed city, we decided to turn off the street lights at night on purpose to help with sleeping better.
To me that seems like a really alien solution. What about closing the curtains?
I was in the prep-meeting for that decision. We don't like curtains. We don't like wasting energy. We don't like light pollution. We prefer peaceful nights
Turning the lights on and closing the curtains to block it seems the really alien solution to me.
If you don't want the lights, why not just turn them off?
It's really common in many cities in France too, also in the countryside to reduce disruption for bats in particular.
Where I'm from moonlight on it's own will disrupt my sleep frequently enough that even if my neighbor did not forget his back light on, I would still sleep with my blockout curtains closed.
When it comes to driving, I would definitely prefer they keep the street lights on, for the increased visibility/safety.
Light pollution is probably a good proxy measure for wealth in the local population after a certain point.
> top 5 in the world
By what measure?
> Our city is the richest in our country, which is at the top 5 in the world
Right, so you're saying the country itself is within the top 5 by GDP not that the city within your country is a top 5 city (regardless of country).
Where's that? How do I move there? Sounds like a dream come true.
Blasewitz, Dresden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loschwitz_Bridge
Must be Switzerland I guess...
A top "5 in the world" city is obviously an outlier.
It seems self-evident that simply turning off street lights in the vast majority of cities will not cause them to become world-leading bastions of calm and safety.
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...
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%
Well, how does it compare with published numbers?
Wow, 2017 was a good year
Individual yearly number are unlikely to be useful. Likely you can only predict long term trends with the help of fits.
You can rely on a better source : https://institute.bankofamerica.com/economic-insights/consum...
Sure, but for how much longer before our private institutions succumb to the same intimidation tactics?
The Rich would stage a coup before losing access to accurate economic information
There is no sign that "the Rich" will even be smart enough to understand that you can't placate the orange buffoon over a meaningful period. They keep paying him other people's money and throwing their staff under the bus. I'm sure they'll be angry when he demands their money and chucks them under the bus but that's too late isn't it?
The rich would pay handsomely to tilt the playing field by locking up good information. There is profit in being an insider.
It feels like it is something that could show broad long term accuracy over say a decade but short term the noise level would make it difficult to extract a signal.
Even then I would guess there would be a lot of other leading signals than lighting that would also correlate.
I think in a highly financialised free market like the US the executive is pretty powerless to really hide important economic data like this, even within their own country.
There would be so much alpha in knowing stuff like the true employment rate that private agencies will be extremely well-funded to collect this data (in fact this probably already happens for some data, there might be alpha in having a second opinion even if you think the government data is trustworthy).
I think the worst-case outcome would be that the mass populace doesn't have access to the info because it's paywalled. But to the extent that journalism continues to exist, journalists will know the employment rate, GDP, that kinda stuff.
Light at night would overstate success for the incumbent US population actually. Since (contrary to popular belief) we're significantly less nationalistic than these other countries and have a much larger and more successful migrant population.
Suggest? The only surprise would be dictators actually telling the truth, at any time.
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
I remember reading about how regional Chinese governments measure economic growth, given that the numbers they have are doctored. One proxy was electricity usage.
Now obsolete Le KeQiang Index (LKI): power, rail freight volume, bank loans which were harder to manipulate. But this was like pre 2005s when Li was in charge of Liaoning before became premiere. Western analysists picked up on it form wikileaks and started using it as proxy - relevancy dropped when heavy industry era ended in mid 2010s. It's 2025, PRC heavily digitalized in last 20 years, frankly it's pretty absurd to believe central gov has significant problems with local gov metric opacity these days. As in local govs will still try to game, but central gov / NBS or relevant stats bureau has been adjusting down accordingly because they have access to stupid amount of proxy data now.
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 wonder how Bitcoin mining impacted that metric. And if that's why China kept cracking down on Bitcoin.
>using artificial light as a proxy for economic growth is [irrational]
it's interesting you pick on this detail. I'm of a mind that "not free" govts control information so carefully and lie about their statistics so thoroughly that we can use that discrepancy to establish proper weights for our measured lighting scale.
"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...
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.)
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.
Your rationale doesn't explain Japan, which, due to scarcity of land, has some of the most vertically dense cities in the world and yet its major cities are some of the brightest.
Japanese cities aren't particularly tall, especially when compared to Chinese cities. Even the busiest parts of Tokyo often have buildings that are just a few floors tall and single family homes are everywhere throughout the city.
And once you're in other big cities, this becomes even more true. It's common to see single floor businesses and buildings right in the busiest parts of town.
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.
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?
Yes the “good hitler years” were a lie and so are all the “effective dictators”
And the fact that no one just assumes that is weird. In general, let’s imagine you had a politician who took power of a country that was recovering, and then by the time they left power their country was a literal pile of rubble and they shot themselves and their family in the head in order to avoid the consequences of their own actions… you’d assume that any positive story about them is probably bullshit. But for some reason the moment it’s Hitler everyone’s got an excuse.
And if someone accidentally killed 6 million of their own citizens we’d naturally all recognize them as one of the worst politicians in human history, but for some reason when they kill 6 million of their own citizens on purpose it’s not a raucous failure that deserves endless ridicule.
Lee Kuan Yew (whom the late polymath and Berkshire vice chairman Charlie Munger greatly admired) and Park Chung Hee are two examples that quickly come to mind. I distrust technocrats and dislike dictators, but pretending every dictatorship has been a disaster for its people is short-sighted.
Does China today qualify as dictatorship?
I think that’s an interesting question with probably no simple correct answer.
> Does China today qualify as dictatorship?
It has many of the aspects of one, like authoritarianism and centralized control, which arguably could, in the right hands, yield superior outcomes. For example, being able to undertake and complete large infrastructures projects in an ambitious timeframe that would be strangled by political opposition (like NIMBYism or environmental objections) and bureaucratic red tape in the west. Munger was, unsurprisingly, also a fan of China's system.
Again, I'm not a fan of these systems, but pretending they always yield inferior outcomes is dangerous for western democracies, as it could lead to an underestimation of our rivals.
Also: originally, “dictator" was a magistrate appointed to hold sole power for a limited time during emergencies. This original, Roman sense of the word did not carry the negative connotations it has today.
The Greek Tyrannis is often fitting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant
> A tyrant (from Ancient Greek τύραννος (túrannos) 'absolute ruler'), in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means.[1][2] The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right
Search for "90s in Russia." [1] 20+ years under Putin's control brought it from that back to an undisputed superpower. Benevolent and effective dictatorship is probably the most effective form of government in terms of producing results. The problem is that when you end up with self centered, incompetent, or malicious dictators (all which somehow often go together at all at once) it's also the most effective form of government in terms of collapsing countries.
The same is true all the way back to the Ancient Empires which were also usually ruled by dictators. The era of Marcus Aurelius was an absolute Golden Age in Rome. Yet the era of his son all but ensured the collapse of Rome. Of course the same is becoming increasingly true of democracies where political messaging has become effective enough to regularly make people vote in highly irrational ways.
"Undisputed superpower"? That seems like a stretch for a description of modern Russia. Outside of having a stockpile of nukes, does anyone actually think that modern Russia is a superpower, with a failed space program, a flailing military, and rather questionable economy? It's not exactly a bastion of political power, either, beyond a rallying point for "nations who hate the US/west" or "nations who can take advantage of its power economic position to their own advantage and don't care about US opinions" (India), neither of which are really an indication of innate power for Russia.
Honestly, regression to the mean is a stronger explanation here than "benevolent and effective dictatorship".
It is ridiculous to state that Putin made Russia great again. Russia, by all economic metrics, is moribund. By social metrics, the birth rate is one of the worst in the world and they don't even have the privilege of dealing with the problems of massive immigration because no one wants to move there. By military metrics, it can't even fucking beat its weaker neighbour without devolving to outdated meat-grinder tactics with drones sprinkled on top. Putin does that because he's collectively punishing the military for failing the initial invasion. Russia can't even have a functioning civil society because everyone is too scared to do anything for fear of upsetting the regime.
I'm flabbergasted that you look at 2025 Russia and consider the word undisputed apt. How ... narrow-minded.
> By social metrics, the birth rate is one of the worst in the world
1.44 for Russia is sadly in line with the west. Better than many European countries (Italy/'Spain 1.2), only a bit worse than US (1.6).
Which economic metrics do you mean? Here [1] is a large series of economic metrics on Russia. I linked to real wage growth because it's one of the most important, and it's been sharply increasing for decades, like most economic metrics. I completely agree on the fertility rate issue. That will be their primary challenge over the coming decades, though I am curious what it would be if we exclude the 'missed decades' generations from the 90s and early 00s. A quick search turned up little. In any case this will also be the main challenge for most of the developed world over the coming decades.
And I think Ukraine is obviously going to be a major turning point in history. Ukraine created an absolutely massive army by combining massive scale forced conscription alongside preventing men of "fighting age" (18-60) from leaving the country, and they're similarly being armed with hundreds of billions of dollars in Western arms - far more than we even supported the USSR with during WW2. And yet Russia, a country that could barely hold itself together in the 90s, and is under severe sanctions, is winning. We're looking at the absolute end of any concept of a unipolar world, and I think that's a great thing for everybody.
> And yet Russia, a country that could barely hold itself together in the 90s, and is under severe sanctions, is winning.
I am not aware of any group, other than internet trolls and the gullible people who fall for them, claiming that Russia is winning. Territorially, Russia holds far less of Ukraine in the fourth year of the war than it did in the first month: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/3qbcv/16/?wmode=opaque Russia still hasn't even recovered from the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2022.
The huge Soviet-era stockpiles have been depleted. Yesterday, the loss of one Russian tank was reported. The day before that: zero. The day before that: also zero. The shortage of vehicles and other equipment has forced Russians to fight using dirt bikes and minivans, leading to record losses that continue to climb month after month: https://i.imgur.com/PrPvQd8.png
Russian losses in fighting for just 1/10 of Ukraine have long surpassed German losses during their World War II offensive in Ukraine. They are now on track to exceed Soviet losses during their own offensive, with very little to show for it. One of the main axes of fighting is Pokrovsk, which lies just 25 miles outside Donetsk, a city Russia already held in 2022. After four years, Russian forces have still not reached Pokrovsk.
Is this what victory is supposed to look like? Is this what you call an "undisputed superpower"? For Russia, this is not just a defeat: it is one of the greatest military disasters in their entire history.
>they don't even have the privilege of dealing with the problems of massive immigration because no one wants to move there
"11,640,559 of international immigrants live in Russian Federation, which represents 8% of Russian Federation's population"[0]
I'd recommend to critically examine your sources of information about Russia.
[0] https://seeecadata.iom.int/msite/seeecadata/country/russian-...
Is that including the hundreds of thousands of kids that Putin kidnapped? They may be immigrants, but it's hardly fair to say that they wanted to move to Russia.
Are these the same russians that tow their aircraft carrier around.
They have a very shit time projecting power across their border, let alone across the ocean.
Not that Hitler is an example of one but there is actually a long history of good dictators. Remember the original dictatorships in Rome were time boxed (among other things) to overcome crises. England had a similar idea in the form of its protectorates. I don't like everything Cromwell did for example but he absolutely was a dictator in all but name.
What things that Cromwell did do you like?
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.
Nobody lies about the number st the end but also almost nobody understands the math behind it. The input are fuzzy numbers which later may be known more accurately (e.g. state data coming in later). They are weighted by historical importance that may drift. They may be computed indirectly from other statistics. and last but not least there seems also some tendency whether cultural or political to be optimistic.
The size of the negative surprise this time is worrying raising the distinct possibility that the part of the model which is extrapolating from the past is insufficient and reality shifted a lot more.
Under the Biden administration, the jobs reports were usually rosy, and then a few months later would be revised downwards. This suggests one of:
1. collecting jobs data is a fuzzy thing and guesses are made
2. reporting jobs data is subject to political influence
Yeah more led lit greenhouses growing pot go up.
> uhm, light pollution is akshually good now, mmkay?
While satellite data can’t be fudged, how are they determining which country is free and which is not?
For example, one “free country” has been arresting people for Facebook posts, and praying silently outside clinics.
By one set of measures [0]:
US is country #57 (about 25th percentile, from the top) with a score of 84/100 for its general "Freedom of the World" score.
And number #13 (roughly 7% percentile, from the top) with 76/100 for Internet freedom.
Freedom House is funded by the US govt, USAID and the OSF (Soros) et al, so pardon me for not having any faith in their data.
Which comes back to my point: how do you really determine who is “free” and who is not.
Looking at the state of the UK, Europe with people being arrested for social media posts, and the US with deportations for speeches, it appears to be a useless criteria.
Downvoted immediately, as expected.
Can’t question western “democracies.”
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.....
The Economist is really tackling the hard topics here :)
The frequency of Martinez Democracy vs Autocracy study reposts, especially in western MSM, borders the PRC collapse retardation news cycle.
Nvm it got dismantled by various people who use nightlight metrics for living. NBER also did a sophisticated night lights study of PRC in 2017 - same year as OG Martinez study using naive methodology as Henderson original work from early 2010s - and found PRC's reported GDP was actually _underestimated_ using night light data. But useful idiots will gobble up authoritarian gov inflate narrative.
For obvious reasons this study by multiple staff economists at the FED doesn't get any attention in western MSM, but one by an assistant prof of public policy somehow does. Also note scope, multiple staff economics focusing on PRC, versus assist prof who managed to collate data for every country. Almost as if it's good self marketing considering Martinez keeps updating study with same rudimentary methodology every few years to get clicks.
E: I'm guessing this is now going to make rounds with the Shih/Elkobi's 1/3 of PRC local gov spending all their revenue on debt repayment wank graph being popularized recently that's comparably retarded.
Fewer abbreviations would make this easier to read, understand, and perhaps take seriously.
What's there to elaborate. First version of Martinez study (when researcher was an assistant prof in public policy) has methodology criticized to death way back in 2017 by experts who specialize in satellite imagery, remote sensing etc. The same year NBER, National Bureau of Economic Research aka... one of the preeminent eco analysis think tanks US gov draws from had 3 credentialled staff economist ran a more sophisticated light study and alleged PRC (China) underreports economic activity.
Yet every year since 2017 the Martinez study gets play in mainstream media (MSM) because autocracy incompetent vs democracy plays well. In 2022 Martinez updated the study (I think also 2019, 2024 i.e. milked forever), with same methodology issue said insisted trend continues. Cycle repeats usually synced to some other retarded reporting to PRC economy going to explode (will also be milked forever).
In this case I'm assuming the chart making it's way around reddit and now socials on Shih/Elkobi study that inflate PRC subnational debt situation by conflating principle+interest (tldr bad methodology using non-standard metric to exaggerate debt risk), which like Martinez has been called out back in 2022 after publication. Customary in these discussions of unserious providence is bringing up the unserious Martinez study, which useful idiots continue to take seriously.
