Over at Project Syndicate: The Long-Run Economic Trend is Our Friend
These are days of grave disappointment at the state of the world. Sinister forces of fanatic religion-linked murder that we thought had been largely scotched by 1750 are back. They have been joined by and are reinforcing forces of nationalism, bigotry, and racism that we thought had been largely scotched in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. (There is a bright spot: the other principal fanaticism of the twentieth century, that of ideology, is comatose if not dead.) In addition, the state of economic growth since 2008 has been profoundly disappointing. There is no reasoned case for optimistically expecting a turn for the better in the next five years or so. And the failure of the globe’s institutions to deliver ever-increasing prosperity has undermined the trust and confidence which in better times would be strong factors suppressing the murderous demons of our age. Read MOAR Over at Project Syndicate
In these days of pronounced pessimism, it is past time to engage in enthusiastic and positive contrarianism with respect to the state of global economic growth not over the next five but over the next 30 years, and beyond at least to the next 60.
The reason that the 25 to 50-year economic growth future looks very bright is that the biggest of the macro trends that have been operating since the end of World War II are still, under the surface, at work. Technology continues to diffuse. World trade continues to grow. The population explosion continues to ebb. The innovative heart of the world economy in the global north continues to beat–albeit perhaps more sluggishly than it has since the 1880s (maybe). War and terror continue to destroy, terrorize, shock, and horrify, but on a scale much less than the holocausts and megadeaths of 1914-1978.
And these trends are likely to continue.
Our best source of summary information on global economic growth remains the Penn World Table research project started two generations ago by Alan Heston and Robert Summers. Take the geometric mean of individual country estimates of real GDP per capita as our first summary statistic of the state of the global economy. The Penn World Table then tells us that the world in 1980 was some 80% better off than it had been in 1950, and the world in 2010 was another 80% better off in measured material-well being terms that it had been in 1980. That places us today more than three times as well off as our predecessors in the 1950s were.
Moreover, this more than tripling of world material well-being is an underestimate. First, our real GDP measure was designed to be something Simon Kuznets could estimate quickly from data that was easily available. It does not not take proper account of use-value surplus accruing to users but only of market-value revenue captured by sellers. Over time the commodities we are producing are shifting in a direction that makes user surplus a greater and market value realized a smaller proportion of their total contribution to societal well being. And I find attempts to claim either that it has always been thus profoundly unconvincing given how much of our leisure and even our work time is spent interacting with information systems where the revenue flow is not of the essence but is only a small dribble tied to ancillary advertising.
Second, there is the case of China–and, more recently, of India. According to the PWT, China’s real GDP per capita in 1980 was more than 60% below of that of the country at the then-geometric mean of the world distribution. Today China is 25% above that moving benchmark. India in 1980 was more than 70% that benchmark, but since 1980 it has closed half the gap vis-a-vis the contemporaneous geometric mean. In the scatter of country experiences, India and China are only two counties. But they are 30% of humanity.
Now do not push optimism too far. There has been no sign of the world’s countries drawing together in their levels of prosperity. In 1950 two-thirds of countries had GDP per capita levels between 45% and 225% of the geometric mean of the world’s nations. By 1980 you had to widen that spread to 33% to 300%. And today it is 28% to 360%. That on the level of individuals the world economy is a more equal place than it was in 1980 is due to rulership that has been on the whole much better than average in China and India since the accessions of Deng Xiaoping and Rajiv Gandhi. But there are no more countries of the size of China or India to stand up. And few observers have anything like the confidence in and hopes for Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi that they had in their predecessors. It may be harder to find an export niche in the world economy to accelerate technology transfer in the future than it has been since the end of World War II. It may well be that the engine of innovation at the world’s leading technological edge will beat more slowly. But it will continue to beat. And technology will continue to diffuse. And the world will continue to grow.
Expect–terror that somehow triggers global nuclear armageddon aside–my successors in 2075 or so to be writing about how their world is, once again, three times as well off in material terms as we are today.
And beyond that? It is harder to project. We are already letting global warming, a potentially very large demon for the post-2080 world, out of the Pandora’s Box we hold. Our children’s children’s children will not thank us for that.
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