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1. The blog states that the relationship between economic growth and initial wealth doesn't show a trend that had been expected from theory. It uses per capita GDP and per capita GDP growth as proxies for wealth and growth. Its analysis does not control for any pet theories, because the theory claims to be general. (Indeed, it refers to literature that does control for other factors and explains why they are unsatisfying: because if the other factors are more important than the economic ones, then the theory isn't worth much)

2. OP, roughly, objects that GDP (and its growth rate) is sensitive to a fairly specific fact of the modern global economy, namely uneven financialization, and hints at an argument for why GDP would obscure the relevant trends in wealth and growth of wealth. They claim that the dynamics of various health proxies are better representative of economic status and growth than GDP is. They do not claim that these are not correlated. Effectively, their claim is that the portion of the variation of GDP that is not explained by its correlation with health outcomes is enough to obscure the relationship between economic status and growth.

3. You comment tersely that they are correlated, which was never denied in OP, and does not address in any way the relevance of the particular confounding factor that OP proposed. In followups try to rescue that correlation by controlling for your pet "extra factors" that (1) objected to for how they weaken the relevance of the economic theory, and that are irrelevant to the point that OP was trying to make.

To be clear, I have no strong evidence that financialization explains the way that GDP (and its derivative) differs from a linear function of other development metrics (and their derivatives), and if OP has evidence, they don't provide it in their brief HN comment. All I'm saying is, saying there's a correlation has very little bearing on OP's claim, and controlling for more irrelevant pet factors is not going to make it more relevant.





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