China Slowdown Means It May Never Overtake US Economy

bloomberg.com

10 points·pg_1234··5 comments

'Never' is a long time, especially based on fluctuations over a very short period...

> That’s according to Bloomberg Economics, which now forecasts it will take until the mid-2040s for China’s gross domestic product to exceed that of the US — and even then, it will happen by “only a small margin” before “falling back behind.” Before the pandemic, they expected China to take and hold pole position as early as the start of next decade.

Reading this and the wildly varying track record of economists, I can only think that taking it seriously is like going all in on a weather forecast. It also assumes the US economy is stable during that whole time.

The Huawei mobile chip story also on the front page shows how lack of information repeatedly leads to underestimation.

You might consider the Evergrande story side-by-side with Huawei, it's not all roses. They also angered many western companies of the last decade and the state of foreign investment is very different from their boom days. As we move into a bi-polar world again, there will be much uncertainty. I'm on the BB side, if only for the fact that communism has never outlasted capitalism, and Xi is reigning things in over there of late

It's far too difficult to predict. Growth is exponential. So the difference between a 3.5% growth rate and 4.0% growth is miniscule to the average person, but the latter leads to twice the economy after 50 years.

It's not that I don't trust economists--It's just that they have an impossibly difficult task. Tiny variations in the growth rate make huge differences after decades.

https://archive.ph/G2G0N

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