How many years before China is No. 1?
POSTED BY: TraineeAlternate
UPDATED: Saturday, September 5, 2026 17:48
VIEWED: 15091
PAGE 5 of 15
Quote:Certain people so bent on controlling the world and it's oil that the understanding of what's good for America in the long term has gotten lost in the shuffle.
Originally posted by Nellie:
If western civilization collapses, it won't be because the Chinese got rich---it will be because of climate change. And who did that, I wonder?
Thanks, Nellie, for the positivity- a rare and wonderful thing on RWE!
So we take our place in between Europe and Australia...poor rich folk in the U.S., they'll have to take one less vacation per year due to the hard times
Chrisisall, rich in spirit (not that he couldn't use a yacht...)
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Quote:Is different from standard of living. GDP does not take into account money distribution. Geezer, you should know better.
gross domestic products
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:I did. Assembly line. It convinced me that I wasn't cut out for that kind of work. But service jobs (of which I've held many) are just as onerous in their own way.
I wonder how many people bemoaning the loss of manufacturing jobs have ever HELD one?
(PS Your description is pretty accurate for the traditional assembly line. Dirty, hot, boring, nasty work. The secret, I found, was not to look at the clock. Once you started looking, you were done for. Then you would look again and go oh man! only five minutes have gone by! this day is gonna be FOREVER And look again, and again .... I have not done clean-room assembly, it may be different.
Service jobs I have held - waiting tables (twice), child-care (once), hospital aide (once), home-cleaning (twice), gas-station attendent (once). Fortunately except for the waiting jobs, my employers were relatively decent. In most service jobs, one works at the whim of arbitrary and demanding bosses.)
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:That was an interesting choice for a base value, which I'm sure you winnowed out b/c it 'proved' your point.
In my experience, people are doing far better today than they were, say in, 1977, when unemployment was around 9% and inflation in double digits.
In reality, over the decades, US poverty rates are up, and inflation-adjusted WAGES (not income, which includes investement returns) are down. Numbers of uninsured - up. Children living in poverty - up.
As for unemployment, the US and other economies count it differently. The US looks at ONLY those currently receiving unemployment benefits. Other countries look at real unemployment. However, if you go far enough down through the info at the US BLS, you will see that it counts REAL unemployment (males only) at ~ 12%.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Yes, it would be truly terrible if the rich actually had to work for a living, rather than get others to do their work for them.
How will they cope, not gettin' a new yacht every year.
Citizen, kickin' bottom or what?
More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
Remember, the ice caps aren't melting, the water is being liberated.
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Quote:This is a discussion I've had with my co-workers. We did a throw-away calcuation which you can reproduce with minimal effort. Take the per-capita GDP of China (in US dollars) and multiply it by the number of Chinese. Do the same for the US. The TOTAL economies of both countries are roughly the same. The difference is that most of the Chinese economy is internal.
I have yet to find ANY analysis that puts the Chinese economy anywhere near the US economy in size in the next 25 years, much less the next 10 or 11.
Speaking of oil, both the Chinese and Japanese are in competition for Russian oil. They are both trying to induce Russia to run the eastern pipeline being built in their direction.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Quote:I somehow lost the ability to edit this post. But I wanted to add that the reason why the BLS looks only at males is b/c they don't quite know how to count female 'homemakers'. They also exclude the disabled and students. So there are all these women who are of age, not disabled and not students, who may or may not be in the labor market. It makes for an uncertain female unemployment number. They dispense with that by simply not counting females.
However, if you go far enough down through the info at the US BLS, you will see that it counts REAL unemployment (males only) at ~ 12%.
They also discuss the uncertainty regarding women and male students are are doing what they are doing (staying at home/ attending school) for the reason thay they couldn't find gainful employment.
They don't discuss underemployment (PT or temp workers who want/need FT permanent jobs). If you have some type of job, you are employed.
They also don't discuss wages in that particular statistic.
When it comes to manufacturing v other work, there is information elsewhere regarding total historical manufacturing v other types of jobs but you have to look pretty hard for that. (Agricultural is another category that is broken out of total employment.)
As for recent job additions to the US economy, I have not personally taken the time to see if figures are available for the types are jobs added v the types of jobs lost.
Based on overall trends, my guess is that most jobs gained are service.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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I guess that depends on whether we are looking at total output, living standards, military might, regional influence, economic growth rate, environmental impact, or toothbrushes per capita.
Quote:The reason why DC, Luxembourg, Delaware and Connecticut are so high on the scale is because they have large flows of capital pouring through them, not because of high production or good living standards: Connecticut is the haven of insurance companies, Delaware -unlike other states- allows off-shore incorporation, DC has lobbying firms connected with Washington, and Luxembourg is a tax haven. Large money changes hands there. Yet few would argue that New Haven and Washington DC have a high standard of living. The stats by themselves point out the problem of using per capita GDP as a measure of living standards: it doesn't account for money flowing into (and out of) the boundary.
All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)
After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.
And as Rue pointed out there is the problem of distribution. If you have three ballplayers sitting on the bench with an average salary of $700,000 you figure they must be pretty wealthy and have no cause to complain. But if two are making $50,000 and the third is making $2,000,000 that creates a whole different picture. Using averages is fallacious and misleading when you are dealing with unbounded values.
I know someone who has been to China several times. It has a vast and varied economic landscape. In the cities, no matter which direction you turn you will see six or seven construction cranes. In the outskirts you will see relatively modern building with primitve toilets and no AC. On the one hand, there is a mag-lev train under construction. On the other hand, road repairs are done entirely by hand and five people will wait on you in the stores because of underemployment.
China's most significant bar to becoming THE biggest per capita economy is energy (not just oil) and the next biggest is water. Unless they can solve those significant factors they will be numerically bigger than the USA in just five years or so, but per capita they will still have a long way to go. But to the other nations in the region (Japan, Koreas, Indonesia etc) China alread IS the largest economy.
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Please don't think they give a shit.
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"As for unemployment, the US and other economies count it differently. The US looks at ONLY those currently receiving unemployment benefits. Other countries look at real unemployment"
Actually, this is quite wrong. The methods for determining unemployment, as reported by magazines such as The Economist and Time, are roughly equal, with a margin of error of about +/- 1.0%. I'm sorry to have to call you out on this, but you are apreading false information.
As to wage growth, you sort of undermined your own argument by pointing out that wage statistics do NOT count investment income (and about 50% of the middle class in the US owns some sort of equity in investments). Wage stats also do not take into account the appreciation in real property, which historically outpaces inflation (and incidentally, home ownership % in the US is at an ALL-TIME high). And finally, wage stats do not take into account purchasing-power parity.
I think a basic econ course is in order for you. I always love it when people parade out wage statistics to support their negativity on the US economy - it's a predictable argument and easily shot down.
"Unless they can solve those significant factors they will be numerically bigger than the USA in just five years or so"
Again, this is so wrong that it hardly even bears mentioning again. Honestly, look up the statistics on total output of the US and Chinese economies. Please, do it so that you stop giving out false information.
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Quote:How do YOU measure total output? GDP is a misleading figure because it includes all sorts of money transactions that have little to do with production, productivity, or living standards. In terms of output (tons of agricultural produce, tons of concrete, etc) it is a well-known and commonly accepted fact that China is numerically ahead of us on many fronts.
Again, this is so wrong that it hardly even bears mentioning again. Honestly, look up the statistics on total output of the US and Chinese economies. Please, do it so that you stop giving out false information.
steel www.aiis.org/speeches/speech92.html
grain: China approx 4.3 Mtons, USA approx 2.5 Mtons
cement: China approx 630 Mtons USA approx 90 Mtons www.nrcan.gc.ca/mms/cmy/content/2002/17.pdf
Cotton: China approx 5 Mtons USA approx 4 Mtons http://r0.unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/cotton/market.htm
So... what are YOUR stats?
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Please don't think they give a shit.
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