Comment by redserk

GDP per-capita only works if you're comparing places with similar costs to live and costs to produce.

It's nearly meaningless to use it as a measure of individual quality-of-life without correlating it to the price it costs to produce/consume goods.

This is why the military spending arguments are so weird comparing the US and China. Even omitting the weird bookkeeping that keeps their defense budget supposedly low, it costs much less to produce military goods/services than here.