Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2011

US to be crushed by Oriental economic juggernaut, film at 11

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

  • “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history”
  • “The power behind the [. . .] juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for [it] has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

This kind of statement can be found in all the prestigious newspapers, opinion journals, and magazines . . . in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The economic juggernaut of the day was Japan. It was poised to crush the feeble remnants of American capitalism with the all-powerful keiretsu, Japan’s corporate conglomerate organizations. The strong would smash the weak, leaving America (and the rest of the Anglosphere) in the dust. Just in case you didn’t follow economic history, it didn’t happen.

Today, the economic bogeyman is China:

“We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible — the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline — but China has economic problems a-plenty.

Nigel Farage on “German-dominated Europe”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

NFL week 12 early predictions

Filed under: Football — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:37

Our American friends are late in celebrating Thanksgiving, which is why your favourite US websites are full of turkey jokes and pumpkin pie photos. Because they know they have a captive audience who may well be desperate to get away from their distant (or not-distant-enough) relatives, the NFL schedules three games on Thursday:

    Green Bay vs @Detroit (6.0) 12:30pm
    @Dallas vs Miami (7.0) 4:15pm
    @Baltimore vs San Francisco (3.5) 8:20pm

Last week: 9-5 (5-9 against the spread)
Season to date 96-64

The shot that started the First Interplanetary War?

Filed under: Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:25

Yes, it may not happen for a few more decades, but we were the instigators of what might be the most long-distance war in human history:

The new habitability study has involved the collaborating scientists devising two different indexes for rating worlds, in proper scientifiction style*. We now have the Earth Similarity Index (ESI), showing how much like Earth a body is, on which Earth is 1, Mars is 0.7 and our Moon is 0.56.

The scientists have also worked out a Planet Habitability Index (PHI), based on such things as planetary magnetic fields, atmosphere, likely local temperatures etc. Titan, icy natural-gas slush moon of Saturn, scores high on this at 0.64.

But, very worryingly, the planets of the dim, red M-class star Gliese 581 — lying just 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra — score high up the listings in both systems. Under ESI, the exoplanets Gliese 581g, d and c are the next three most habitable known worlds after Earth: and they are also well up under PHI.

Normally this would not be cause for alarm, but — as regular readers of Reg exoplanet coverage will know — should there be intelligent aliens at Gliese 581 they will soon have an intense and well-justified grievance against us.

It was a deliberate and evil provocation we gave, and our fate may already be sealed.

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