50% of lost GDP is indeed "half-destroyed", thank you for proving my point for me!
No. 50 of lost GDP means 50% less produced stuff in year B than in year A
Half destroyed is - half of buildings turned into a rubble. Same for roads, bridges, ports and all other infrastructure. Do you want to say that 1914-1924 decade caused anything like this?
Let's just say that you have a different definition of "half-destroyed" from what I have.
No, the two of your were definitely saying different things.
Russia...half-destroyed
That's sorta vague, but I'd parse it the way UR did, in the sense of roughly half of Russia's infrastructure/industry/financial sector/&c. being in ruins.
50% of lost GDP is 50% of the completed goods and services in Russia during whatever time period you're delineating being lost. Very different--if the infrastructure, industry, and institutions are still intact and you're only losing production, that's a short-term economic downturn (albeit a very harsh one). Losing half of everything used to
produce, transport, and manage food, war material, consumer goods, &c. is much more dire, because it means that you've lost
capacity, which requires the reconstruction of vast amounts of infrastructure just to reach old levels of productivity.
As an analogy, take an RTS game. It's the difference between losing half of your base buildings versus losing half of your current units.
I'm not going to put my foot in the rest of that argument, though.