You know that fake news you’ve been hearing so much about lately? Ironically, much of the whining has come from purveyors of fake news.
At any rate at RealClearWorld Derek Scissors points out that there are good reasons to believe that the reports of China’s coming ascendancy are more fake news:
There are data, grounded in real-world calculations, that show China’s economic importance falling — not rising slowly, nor staying stable, but falling. The most important indicator is net private wealth, which is the single best measure of a country’s economic size and of the pool of resources available to its public sector for military or social spending.
In work dating back to 2000 and carried out with no geo-economic agenda, Credit Suisse has estimated private wealth. The new estimates, through the middle of 2016, show American private wealth at $84.8 trillion and Chinese private wealth at $23.4 trillion. Moreover, the gap is widening. With $60 trillion less in private wealth than the United States, China’s global economic leadership is a fable.
It’s an interesting article.
I don’t know whether China’s power is growing, declining, or what. Honestly, I don’t much care as long as the lives of Americans get better. I think there are legitimate concerns about that and not much is being done about it.
