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Doesn’t the fact that we’re just now catching up to 2007 levels support my point rather than refute it?


When are you arguing globalization happened?


The watershed moment would be China admission to the WTO in 2001. We’ve been going basically sideways since 2000.

In the same period (2000-2018) that real manufacturing output increased 10%, US real GDP doubled.


What makes China's convergence different from those of postwar Europe, Japan, Korea, etc?


Scale, simply put.

China went from an economy of $1 trillion (1999) to ~$14 trillion (2019) at warp speed. It's the largest economic expansion, in the shortest amount of time, that has ever occurred.

South Korea has a good economy with a seemingly bright future, however it's still only a $1.5t economy today. That's sub 2% of global GDP.

The US post civil war industral boom (~1890-1930) and Japan from 1970 to 1995 ($200b to $5.5t), would be the two closest, most recent comparable extreme booms. Japan of course topped out in 1995 and in real terms has never surpassed that economic output since.

When you add $13 trillion in manufacturing-tilted economic output in 20 years, it's going to be very likely to dent the largest manufacturing economy at that point in time (the US). Considering the huge scale of that Chinese expansion, the US weathered it remarkably well and continued to expand its economy while retaining one of the highest GDP per capita output figures. I'd argue it harmed Europe far more than the US, suppressing their growth to a far greater degree than the US (the US economy has continued to grow over the last 15-20 years consistently, Europe has struggled to produce any net growth in the last ~12 years). Over those 20 years China rapidly built out a massive technology sector, with global giants, Europe has badly failed at keeping pace with the US and China on that front (one of the reasons Europe's growth has been so poor over recent decades).


It began in 2001 and the effects become very obvious when you watch country GDP's. Watch the of countries, but especially China, in this animation of country GDP: https://gfycat.com/energeticrigidalbertosaurus




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