February 3, 2026
Convergence canceled, debate unleashed
Why poor countries stopped catching up
Economists say “we were wrong” — commenters blame fake GDP, exploitation, and robots
TLDR: Three economists who once declared poor countries were catching up now say that brief surge is over. Commenters are split between “GDP is a bad metric,” “the rich exploit the poor,” and “automation killed outsourcing,” turning a data reversal into a fiery debate about what growth even means and who it really serves.
Economists behind a 2021 “catch-up is happening!” paper just pulled a dramatic U‑turn: they now say poor countries aren’t catching up to rich ones after all. Cue the comment-section royale. The loudest boos? GDP truthers claiming the whole debate is built on a broken scoreboard. One top-voted take blasted GDP as “asset shuffling and hospital billing,” arguing it measures finance games and rent math more than real life. Translation: if the yardstick is warped, who cares about “convergence”?
Then came the greed vs. gravity showdown. A chorus argued the obvious culprit is exploitation—powerful countries extracting resources and paying rock-bottom wages. “This system runs on the weak feeding the strong,” cried one commenter, while another asked if low wages, not “bad institutions,” are the real story. Meanwhile, tech doomers barged in: automation stole the offshored jobs. Outsourcing worked until AI and robots made the factory abroad… a server rack at home. One cynic put it bluntly: global empathy has limits; safety nets now stop at national borders.
Data nerds tried to calm the brawl by pointing at the Latin America chart and begging social scientists to explain the slump. But the meme-of-the-day was ruthless: “Convergence is canceled.” Another zinger: GDP = “Grossly Distorted Picture.” Economists issued a mea culpa; commenters turned it into a roast.
Key Points
- •Three economists (Subramanian, Sandefur, Patel) published a late-2025 essay stating they were wrong about global income convergence.
- •Their 2021 paper had claimed a “new era of unconditional convergence,” beginning around 1995, where poorer countries grew faster than rich ones.
- •The new essay reports that convergence has ended, with poorer countries again growing more slowly than richer countries.
- •The article reviews the Solow-Swan growth model, which predicts convergence due to diminishing marginal returns to capital in richer economies.
- •Historically, observed convergence was absent for much of the postwar period, making SS&P’s earlier findings notable and their reversal consequential.