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Comment by sharetea | Hacker News Reader

> Have you ever been in China?

Yes, I've been to China. Btw, have you ever read the thread? I was responding to OP's statement 'nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies'

> The world GDP has already shifted back to the East after it shifted to the west due to the industrual revolution. The economic future lies in the Eurasian continent with Russia/CIS, India and China.

Yeah that like sounds something out of Zerohedge. You're gonna have to provide some evidence.

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> I was responding to OP's statement 'nobody else is going to come in and take those customers except Chinese companies'

But you haven't refuted that statement. You merely pointed out there is a tiny amount of "western" companies operating in China, with no numbers on the ratio of foreign to local operations. Which would be the real way to refute that point.

There are foreign brands sniffing around the edges. But mostly, Chinese spend their money IN china. The car companies are a good counter example, but that's mainly because China didn't have the Car manufacturing expertise in house, I believe this is changing. McDonalds and KFC are a joke in China for every one of them you see, there will be at least 10 chinese fast food competitors with more customers. (Turns out Chinese have a preference for Chinese food - Crazy huh?)

iPhone still only hold about a 30% market share. I think that'll change too, as Huawei, and Xiaomi have become significantly more competitive and are significantly cheaper.

This is common knowledge. Google the numbers. I actually tried to include a graphic that I saw once but I was not able to track it down anymore. I was basically a world map with a ball/point that showed movement of world GDP. This ball was far on the east before the industrial revolution since much more people lived in Asia than in Europe and they also had more efficient agriculture. With America becoming populated mainly by European and with the industrial revolution the percent of GDP product by the Western world shifted to the west. At one point this trend decelerated, then stopped, then reversed and then accelerated (towards the east). This should not come as a surprise.

Actually, the picture was similar (but better designed) to this one: https://dannyquah.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/how-we-miss-the-g...

I don't think that graphic you're thinking of shows "world GDP" so much as "the centre of gravity of GDP across the planet": These are two quite different things. In any case, you might have in mind a map by McKinsey Global Institute in their "Urban World" 2012 report.

I'd disagree that that depiction was better designed than http://www.dannyquah.com/Quilled/Output/2010.09.27-Danny.Qua... or the animation http://www.dannyquah.com/Quilled/Output/2010.08-Danny.Quah-w... It depends on what you're trying to understand. For what you describe, I personally don't like so much the McKinsey graphic. This is discussed in Section 8.3 (in Chapter 8) of my draft manuscript http://bit.ly/1KeSicU on Ordering the World.

Ah, you are the maker of the graphic. Well, I vaguely remember the graphic I saw.

But as a feedback

- What are the two extremes? I don't know the end points in your graphic.

- You graphic does not show how the center shifted from the East to the west after the industrial revolution. Because from 1500 to 2010 you actually have either hard data or past estimates.

- I would have put the distance of the dots (years) and a color legend in the picture.

- I am to stupid to understand what the different sized arrows mean in the graphic. What information do they provide?

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