However, China is four time larger with 1.3 Billion citizens. The US is a very large nation with 330 million citizens. However, for reasons nicely articulated in this book, China’s productivity is growing much faster than the US and will steadily close that gap.
Right now, China’s productivity, the amount of economic output per person, is substantially lower than the US. It’s just a few basic facts and simple math. The issue isn’t that China is working harder than the US, nor does it have anything to do with capitalism, socialism or communism. Every serious observer of the data knows this is true, but almost nobody talks about a real strategy to come to grips with it. The exact timing of the shift is debatable, but it’s well underway. That is already happening in many areas, a trend that will steadily expand over time, eventually accelerating to the point where it shapes everything we encounter. If we remain on our current course, we will cede global leadership to China. The combination of those two desires is impossible.
And, we’d like that course of action to allow us to retain supreme global leadership - economically, militarily, and politically. We would like to continue behaving roughly as we have been, making whatever minor policy adjustments make it out of our broken political system. Most discussions about America’s future role in the world have a set of underlying assumptions that are simply incompatible with reality. One Billion Americans, by Matthew Yglesias
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