{"id":12194,"date":"2011-11-24T09:27:10","date_gmt":"2011-11-24T13:27:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=12194"},"modified":"2011-11-24T11:43:33","modified_gmt":"2011-11-24T15:43:33","slug":"us-to-be-crushed-by-oriental-economic-juggernaut-film-at-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/11\/24\/us-to-be-crushed-by-oriental-economic-juggernaut-film-at-11\/","title":{"rendered":"US to be crushed by Oriental economic juggernaut, film at 11"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Do any of these statements sound familiar?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I don\u2019t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;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.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 <em>keiretsu<\/em>, Japan&#8217;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&#8217;t follow economic history, it didn&#8217;t happen.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the economic bogeyman is <a href=\"http:\/\/reason.com\/archives\/2011\/11\/24\/china-derangement-syndrome\" target=\"_blank\">China<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWe are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,\u201d wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of <em>The American Prospect<\/em>, earlier this year at <em>The Huffington Post<\/em>. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, \u201cThe age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world\u2019s reserve currency within two decades.\u201d 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, \u201cSo now they work for us.\u201d The class chuckles knowingly. <\/p>\n<p>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 \u201ca stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe U.S. could lose its status as the world\u2019s biggest economic power within five years,\u201d reported <em>The Daily Mail<\/em> in April. The <em>Mail<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n<p>Can that be? Let\u2019s do the math: China\u2019s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;s not to say that it&#8217;s impossible &mdash; the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline &mdash; but China has <a href=\"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?s=china+economy\" target=\"_blank\">economic problems a-plenty<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do any of these statements sound familiar? &#8220;I don\u2019t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history&#8221; &#8220;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,25,24,28],"tags":[484,409,363,727],"class_list":["post-12194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-economics","category-japan","category-media","tag-competition","tag-corporations","tag-corruption","tag-cronycapitalism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3aG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12195,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12194\/revisions\/12195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}