China incline USA decline?

[Haunted]

Thanks to St. Lukes for addressing most of the key points from that post. I have a little bit of information to add.

The largest building in the world is no longer in the USA but in Dubai. It is going to be hard on the USA, adjusting to being just another nation, just as it was hard on the British when they lost their Empire.

The largest or is it the tallest?? Consider this: The record for being the tallest building expires as soon as another taller building gets built.

And how is this going to show the US falling behind Dubai? In case the news hasn't reached you, Dubai has gone bankrupt. Yes, it was all over the news last year. And that nice tall building may even be foreclosed. On November 25, 2009, Dubai World announced that it could no longer make payments on its debt for at least the next six months. And this is the state of their economy: A quarter of Dubai's office space is vacant. Workers have taken salary cuts of up to 30%. The Emirati government is in debt up to its eyebrow, $80 billion to $120 billion.

A lot of people feel that the world is being ruined by free market capitalism: by greedy, vulgar, selfish, materialism. ...Many associate this vulgarity with Americans. The general stereotype of an American in Europe, Australia and Canada is of a fat, ignorant, nationalistic, vulgar person with no class.

Just so you know, UK banks lent billions to Dubai. That's free market capitalism at work. Hopefully no one is going to start calling the Brits fat, ignorant, nationalistic, vulgar, no class. Americans don't like competition

In 20 or 30 years China, then India will pass you by. Even the E.U and Russia will rival the USA.

China grew their economy from world trade with huge exports to the US. China's economy is sound as long as US companies outsourced their manufacturing to China. I believe other posters already said that.

Because of this trade relationship, if you're betting on the US to go down, China will possibly go down. Then we'll be singing a different tune: US DECLINE, CHINA DECLINE.

[Emil Miller]

This is probably the most important thread on this forum but we can only scratch the surface of how the geopolitical shift in the East/West relations will affect us all. That there has been a shift is without question and it leaves the USA with the quandry of how to adapt to the new scenario.
For years the world was essentially divided into two camps ie. USSR v USA but US technology eventually caused the collapse of the USSR and the dust still hasn't settled on it. Just as the US was, quite rightly, congratulating itself on their successful strategy, a new monster appeared on the horizon in the form of radical Islam and in the meantime the Chinese had stolen their economic clothes. I was speaking to an American recently who displayed an amazingly complacent attitude to the rapid rise of China; saying that it would take a long time for China to match the US in technology and that the US would remain the only super power for years to come. Well I happen to know something about the Chinese, having had friends among these people for a number of years and having been to China twice. Like the Americans they have a work ethic superior to that of the British and they are tenacious in pursuit of their aims. Unlike the Americans, however, they do not generally think in the short term where every wish is granted at the press of a button, they are in it for the long haul and it is the next generation they care about rather than their own. Of course there are examples of behaviour that we in the west would not contemplate and I have even see leprosy there but they have also just launched the world's fastest train, shot down a satellite in space and are planning their first aircraft carrier. The ramifications of this kind of technological advance cannot be underestimated. China still has huge problems which are too obvious to mention but if anyone can solve them I believe they can. Their entrepreneurial instinct is best illustrated by the story that when the French set up the penal colony of Devil's Island in the most inaccessible place they could find, the Chinese appeared shortly thereafter and began opening shops.

[Virgil]

I'm amazed at all the economic experts in this thread.

I welcome competition. Capitalist countries are interdependent countries, and while they are on a micro level competing for business, they are on a macro level intertwined. Prosperity requires economic engines that trade and each free trade is in its microscopic way a mutually enriching process. The US/China trade has been an incredible prospering exchange for both sides. Yes the blue collar union people complain that blue collar jobs have been exported, and that has enriched China greatly, but white collar jobs have increased considerably here. Until this recent recession, which has nothing to with US/China trade, our uneployment was typically around 5%, which is considered full employment, for the past 25 years, except for a couple of mild recessions in there. European countries typically have double that unemployment rate. China's transition to capitalism has been wonderful for both sides and further freeing of their markets and culture will only increase prosperity for all. Also similar can be said of India's economy and it's trade with its partners.

The EU structure has in my observation helped the European countries economically. It seems to have halted the socialist path that they were on and established a fiscal discipline that seemed to be lacking before. The gov't leaders of each EU nation can now blame the EU structure for not spending more of the public money, whether they want to or not. If anything, in my superficial observation, some of the socialism has been reverse. Thatcherism, and then confirmed by Blair, reversed the nationalizing of industry. While I'm hardly an expert, I suspect that's been going on across Europe. And it's been good, for Europeans and anyone trading with the Europeans, which includses the US.

I can envision numerous economic engines across the world, the large engines bolstering the smaller. And this will hopefully include the middle east. That's why Iraq was so important. Iraq has the potential to be the economic engine that bolsters the middle east to prosperity. As middle east countires go, they are a more educated and developed society. A free market democracy prospering in the middle east will bolster the entire region and hopefully disuade this terrorist ideology. I can envision a middle east type of EU, and as long as it's free and pro business it will be a good thing for them and us. And then perhaps we can see about Africa. The more economic engines, the better. The freer the markets, the better. Adam Smith has not been wrong yet.

[JBI]

It isn't capitalist and communist. Read James Fallows book Looking at the Sun for a good analysis out of the 90s on the subject. He describes how the American model of progress and economic development is not necessarily a universal one, and how systems may work in one place, but perhaps something different is better elsewhere.

The whole idea I think many westerns have is that the path to success lies in some North American model - so when Japanese people do things completely differently, people don't seem to get it. When China puts a system in that goes against capitalism, it is automatically assumed to be a bad idea.

The whole Capitalist Communist dichotomy is a Western construction - the same rules don't apply to the rest of the world - what works in one country, and what one country values are perhaps different things.

This whole idea of building the biggest tower is perhaps interesting - bit of a waste of time if you ask me. The truth of the matter is, if you measure success by how much a country has, perhaps the US is up there - though, from what I know more people live in terrible debt in the US than elsewhere in the world. If instead you value other things, perhaps the US has never been on top.

That's the flaw of this whole idea - the fact that the bulk of the world's capital is for sure going to move around the Pacific region for a while is inevitable. How that is distributed is another matter. If everything is made in China, and people in China are paying Chinese prices (that is, buying in an artificially low Yuan) and selling at a much bigger profit margin in the states, where the junk is resold at an astronomical margin, who exactly is getting the profit and this wealth anyway - it would seem both people are getting the same garbage, just Americans, on a world scheme are paying more, as their countries wealth is being jeopardized, whereas China's is boosted since they are dealing in US capital on the foreign market.

When it comes down to it though, the same clothes are more or less worn in both countries, and the same food eaten - the balance is just completely off - so we can say the US is richer, but how rich are the people, and how much stuff can they afford, and how much debt do they have - that is the real question - how much, for instance, would an American pay for a new heart, or kidney, or how good is the education system funded by the government, or privately?

How much of one's income gets absorbed into goods, or into education, or into interest on debt?

[Admin]

Current politics are not allowed in the forum. Why this thread made it this long I'll have no idea, but I've noticed it now, so it is closed.