I never thought I'd be saying this but I gotta give it up for my man Lester Thurow!! Really!! The erstwhile merchant of American doom nicely debunks the China Monster here.
He points out that the reported double digit aggregate economic growth rates coming out of China conflict with some disaggregate reports from the same sources and conflict strongly with the historical relationship we have observed between electricity consumption and growth. He puts China's actual growth at somewhere between 4.5% and 6%.
So China is still a long way off from catching the US in total size of the economy, more than 100 years according to Lester, and they are an order of magnitude further away from catching up in per-capita terms.
2 comments:
He's still Less Thorough to me.
Using his logic, we should jump for joy if Switzerland loses its ability to make excellent chocolate.
Is Mr. Lester mentally retarded? If you haven't realized, energy consumption per GDP has lessened since the Meiji Restoration.
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