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
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.
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.
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'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.
>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.
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.
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).
Germany is pretty strict about "light pollution". You can have lights at night, but they can't spill onto other people's property or shine up into the sky. Personally I think this should be the case in USA as well - you're welcome to light your own lawn, but I should be the decider of whether my own is lit or not. Let alone security lights that shine directly into neighbors' windows...
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
Your eyes actually adjust to the dark and you can see fine. And many places in the world have no issues with dangerous animals. There's not gonna be many bear attacks in a Dutch city for example.
No animals, but cats and birds. Just the occasional Neonazi group, which is indeed dangerous if you look like a punk or left. But light doesn't help then
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.
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.
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.
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.....
- everybody and their mama knows that they lie not only about economy but also about all other indicators too.
- honestly I don't think that using city lights to demonstrate economic growth might be a little flawed. Especially when people start living in vertical residential complexes.
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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.
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
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.
(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 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.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/720458?utm_sou...
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
To me that seems like a really alien solution. What about closing the curtains?
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.
By what measure?
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-commissioner-of-lab...
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%
Even then I would guess there would be a lot of other leading signals than lighting that would also correlate.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
1. collecting jobs data is a fuzzy thing and guesses are made
2. reporting jobs data is subject to political influence
- everybody and their mama knows that they lie not only about economy but also about all other indicators too.
- honestly I don't think that using city lights to demonstrate economic growth might be a little flawed. Especially when people start living in vertical residential complexes.