Gabe Lipton is the Associate Editor of Signal responsible for editorial execution of GZERO Media's written newsletter content. He holds degrees in Government and Economics from Wesleyan University, where he was a member of the international economic honors society, and is studying German in his spare time. At the age of 11, the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe) confirmed (in person) his take on an important political question of the day, forever sealing his fate as a close observer of global politics. His Spidey powers leave much to be desired.
Today marks forty years since Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms that would turn the relatively poor, agrarian People's Republic into what, by some measures, is the world's largest economy. To understand just how remarkable that transformation has been, compare the growth in China's per capita GDP (a rough measure of individual income that divides the size of the economy by the size of the population) with that of half a dozen other major developed and emerging economies during the same period.