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McKinsey sends me their global economic reports, which are also available online. This caught my eye:

How is that even possible? Here’s how:

You can see that the horizontal box representing China is about the size of the beige triangle, representing global GDP when I was 9 years old. America’s per capita GDP has more than doubled. The biggest gains went to blacks, Hispanics and Asians (in the case of the latter two groups, partly because many were living in other countries in 1964.) But whites are also modestly better off.

Of course that’s not where the action is. In 1964 China was about as poor as the worst basket case in the world today. Poorer than India in 1964. You can barely see the rectangle. So if you wanted to explain to someone from outer space what happened to the world over the last fifty years, you’d say Asians got a lot richer. Everything else is a footnote.

Here’s another nice graph:

So that group of countries will gain 347 million workers (2014-64), but India and Nigeria alone gain 408 million. Again, China is the elephant in the room, losing a massive 152 million workers.

The next graph shows the uncanny similarity between India and Indonesia, both over the past 50 years and the next 50.

Be careful, however, they have South Korea growing 4.3%. South Korea’s already a developed country, and even McKinsey admits their population will decline. If they growth 4.3% over the next 50 years then I will be the next Pope. Perhaps they confused the two Koreas—North Korea will probably be the fastest growing country in the world over the next 50 years. Japan’s growth rate will be close to zero, not 2.1%.

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This entry was posted on March 22nd, 2015 and is filed under Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.



