alt Hacker NewsI am not 100% convinced by this. The matchup between their painting-based economic index (it's the first component from a PCA analysis, the data for each painting being a vector of pixel-counts for colours in each of 108 bins based on HSV) and GDP growth is pretty dubious, and in places where the two vary together the painting-based metric frequently changes several years before the allegedly-corresponding change in GDP growth.
They have ad hoc explanations for the divergences and try to make lemonade out of the lemons by claiming that their index reveals "higher-frequency fluctuations that traditional series smooth over" but I am willing to bet that if they had had to predict the divergences before doing the calculations they wouldn't have been able to.
I think this is probably mostly pareidolia.
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Also, color pigments might age differently.
Is the image we see today really what was initially drawn?
E.g. the famous night watch picture, which was larger and brighter.
I'm 0% convinced. You can tell from a color palate whether some wallpaper was from the 70's or 80's, but that tells you nothing about the economic conditions and everything about what colors were in style.
The argument is not that the color index is a perfect replica of GDP, but that it is an independent, higher-frequency proxy for economic activity that captures dimensions missed by traditional reconstructions.
The value of the index lies precisely where it converges with broad historical trends and where it diverges, suggesting new information. The observation that the color index frequently changes before GDP is a sign of its validity, not a weakness - e.g. shifting consumer demand/sentiment or supply chain shocks and a leading indicator of GDP