China to Overtake U.S. Economy by 2032
Pure numbers is the worst way to try to make this comparison. Quantity is not the same as quality, and quality really matters when you&#x27;re analyzing national economies.<p>What often gets lost in the equation, because it&#x27;s difficult to put a number to, is <i>robustness</i>. The Chinese economy can be looked at as a gaggle of one trick ponies. For example, you can go to a Chinese factory, hand them a blueprint, and get very good results, on maybe the third run, after you iron out all the kinks.<p>American industry iterates on proven designs that have been iterated on continuously since the Industrial Revolution. Our creative professionals can get <i>very</i> specialized. I met a young lady engineer once who could talk your ear off about toilets. She was in charge of a very niche aspect of toilet design and her one specialty likely numbered in the hundreds.<p>Now I&#x27;m not saying that Chinese engineers can&#x27;t produce quality products. What I&#x27;m saying is that as quality as these products are, they&#x27;re still stone age in many, many, many respects compared to American designs. Techies can&#x27;t really see or understand this because all of this collected industrial knowledge isn&#x27;t open source and is passed through institutions.<p>They can produce a toilet that works. We can produce a toilet design that lasts 4 times longer, uses 30% less water, meets recyclability guidelines for porcelain, does not compromise strength yet is 40% lighter, and can be packed 30 per pallet rather than 10. Sure it gets manufactured in China, and they might rip off one of our designs, but they&#x27;re going to be perennially playing catch-up. Can they make that toilet in 10 different fashions to match both upscale and low-end bathrooms? Rinse and repeat for <i>every single other consumer and industrial product that modern society uses</i>.<p>We&#x27;ve been dominant in so many areas for so long that for China to even get on our level would mean to first create a middle class that&#x27;s the same size as ours, so they can start iterating on a similar level as we have been doing for over a hundred years. That&#x27;s no mean feat. Just because they&#x27;re moving similar quantities of products around as we are doesn&#x27;t mean that that wealth is getting shared with the public enough to create a professional class.<p>And until they can create a professional class of their own, they will always be playing second fiddle to our professional class.