Frank Jacobs at Big Think:
Don’t believe the Kremlin. It claims that from 2020 to 2024, the Russian economy grew by 13%. Instead, believe the lights Russians leave on at night. They reveal the country’s GDP actually shrank by 8% over that period. So says Sweden’s foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard in a New York Times op-ed.
Stenergard wasn’t entirely guessing. Sweden’s intelligence services arrived at that figure by measuring nighttime luminosity, an increasingly mature and rigorous branch of economic geography.
Because unlike the Kremlin, night lights don’t lie. Artificial light at night (ALAN) provides strangely honest data on GDP, poverty, war, and many other things governments would rather scientists didn’t measure. Recent analyses of NASA satellite data have made the field even more relevant, revealing the night side of the planet to be a subtle fact-checker of misinformation.
More here.
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