Clearly what we really want is to be more like China…explosive growth that helps a small percentage of their people and moves the country from crushing dirt poor poverty to merely dirt poor poverty! Where do we collectively sign up?? 
-XT
But xtisme, which would you rather have, a quick growing economy that grows from a per capita income of $4000 to $4400, or a slow growing economy that grows from a per capita income of $40,000 to $41,000? The first economy grew by 10%, the second grew by 2.5%. So since the first economy grew more, we’d be better off being like them. Nevermind that the people in the second economy have ten times the income of the first economy. Growth is all that matters!
10% sounds way better than 2.5%…I’d definitely go with the 10%! Where do we sign up??
-XT
In a thread last year Sam Stone linked to a really cool TED video that uses this graphic tool (recently another poster linked to it again in a different thread and I’ve been playing with it ever since :)). I wanted to link to it with these parameters (hopefully the link will work right…if not, select China and the US as the countries to track and select Total GDP as the Y axis and Income Per Person as the X).
Just to illustrate the point.
-XT
Heh, did you read Aida’s article? It’s pretty straightforward but he makes a pretty compelling case. If those groups don’t improve then of course the US will decline.
Le Jacquelope, you genuinely crack me up.
Please publish a book on economics, I would definitely buy it.
Of course, me buying your book would mean an author in the third world would sell one fewer book, or maybe one job will go from a hard-working american to a heartless machine…I’m sorry, I’m no expert on this stuff…
I’d have to put pretty kindergarten-level pictures in it for it to be comprehended by anyone stupid enough to believe in the economic-religious claptrap idea that offshoring is good for any economy.
Le Jacquelope, the staff has advised you many times about personal insults (like saying posters who disagree with you are stupid). I’m giving you a formal warning here, and if you continue to rack up warnings, your stay here won’t be very long.
It doesn’t make a compelling case. It doesn’t make a case at all. It just says “blacks and Hispanics are going to ruin this country.”
It doesn’t even make sense.
Japanese intellectuals? Why are they relevant? Who cares what they think of the US?
Oh, and it was written in 1991. Why are you citing op-eds from 1991 as evidence of anything?
I wanted to post this in one of these threads, so I guess this one will do. It’s a comparison of GDP verse percentage of workers in the work force, over time, for the Agricultural, Industry (manufacturing) and Service job types.
What I find interesting is that the same trends in the US are happening in China as well. And check out this one of the long term unemployment rate verse time (unfortunately it only goes up to 2007). I’ve been playing with this tool for days now, off and on, and every way I look at the data shows the US monumentally ahead of places like China…and that far from the US being in decline, that our rate of growth is merely slowing…mainly due to the fact that we are practically off the charts. Check out this one showing total GDP graphed against income per person over time and using China, the US, Japan, France and Germany.
Seriously, for those of you in this thread who don’t have me on ignore and who think that the US is in decline, how do you reconcile your believe with the data? Granted, we are in a recession RIGHT NOW, but unless you think that this recession is some sort of long term (i.e. decades) decline, it just doesn’t seem to match the trends shown in the graphs above.
-XT
Note that the GDP per capita axis on this graph is in log scale, not linear. So as we’ve been saying throughout this thread, even though China’s per capita GDP is about halfway along the scale on the graph, that means it’s about $4000 compared to about $30-40,000 for the US, Japan, Germany and France.
China will have to double its GDP before it catches up to prosperous Mexico in GDP per capita.
Yes, exactly.
-XT