In a recent email I tried to explain to an American why China has a bigger economy than the United States.
It was like talking to someone who was brain dead. He just kept repeating the same thing about the GDP.
No matter how many facts or statistics I gave him, like how the Chinese Yuan is pegged to the US dollar and is deliberately undervalued, that China's GDP is inaccurate because the Yuan is worth half of what its really worth in buying power, how China has 15 times more manufacturing power and a labor force of 800.7 million compared to America's 153.1 million, etc... he still remained convinced that the USA is the largest economy in the world just because the USA has a GDP of $14 trillion to China's $9 trillion.
I tried to explain to him REPEATEDLY that the Chinese Yuan is deliberately undervalued and worth 2 to 3 times that, which would make China's GDP effectively $18 to 27 trillion.
But that doesn't matter. To his arrogant Amerocentric mindset the United States was the biggest, the best and was "God's gift to the world".
At which point I realized I wasn't arguing against his statistics or his GDP figures, I was arguing against his FAITH in the American economy.
You see people can have Faith in anything. It doesn't have to be a god. People have faith in their lucky rabbit's foot, have faith that their spouse won't cheat on them, have faith that their kid will win the science fair, the beauty pageant or the soccer match. Faith is about believing in something even when there's little or no facts to support it.
And you can't argue against faith. It defies logic or reason. It doesn't care about facts or statistics. Faith is self sustaining and people can only lose faith when their spouse cheats on them, their lucky rabbit's foot stops working and their kid becomes a big time loser.
So some Americans will never lose faith in the American economy unless we have a recession and they lose their jobs. Oh wait, we're already in a recession... and the unemployment rate is going up...
And likewise people will never lose faith in god unless something happens that destroys that faith. Talking to them won't make them see reason, only disasters can shake and break someone's faith.
"Religion is to Faith what Science Fiction is to Science: Fairy Tales and Wishful Thinking." - Charles Moffat.
2 comments:
These facts are plainly wrong. The CIA factbook has the GDP (in Purchasing Power Parity) of China at $7.8 trillion and an official exchange rate GDP of $4.2 trillion. The Purchasing Power Parity already takes into account the buying power of the yuan. China does not have 15 times the manufacturing power of the USA. At best it is only slightly larger. Although the labor force is much larger, it is considerably less productive per person with a large number still in the agricultural sector (43%).
Although the yuan has certainly in the past been undervalued, many studies currently conclude that it has been set near to what it would if it hadn't been pegged since China's accession to the WTO. It is NOT undervalued by 2-3 times.
The USA still has a larger economy than China. The difference between the two economies has been eroded for many years and China will in the next 5-10 years surpass the USA (especially in the current economic climate) but no proper economist or institution would ever describe the Chinese economy as larger than the American one.
I am not American and so do not say this out of any bias to the US but recognise that this article is deeply flawed. I feel sorry for the person that you were trying to make believe this (as much as I dislike rightwing christian nutjobs), he clearly does not know much about economics but neither do you.
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