Who is winning?

US has gained ground on its international rivals in key areas.

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/whos-winning/

As it’s becoming increasingly clear, the system today survives only through the successful marketing of emergencies: pandemics, military conflicts, trade wars, and other disasters waiting patiently in line. Chaos and destabilization are deliberately weaponised in order to trigger a series of Pavlovian chain reactions whose actual raison d’être is emphatically financial. In other words, predicaments “of global concern” are the only resource left to an imploding civilization whose populations increasingly resemble multitudes of zombies marching in lockstep towards their grim destiny – while Instagramming every second of it.

The Not-So-Strange Paradox of American Power and Dysfunction

February 13, 2025

Americans seem to have forgotten that we are not slaves to finance-tech profits as the sole divining rods to what happens next.

A recent essay explores the paradox of American power: global reach amidst civic decline: The Strange Triumph of a Broken America: Why Power Abroad Comes With Dysfunction at Home.

The media, mainstream and alternative alike, has long been highly attuned to evidence of US decline. This sensitivity held sway throughout the Cold War (1950 to 1990), briefly morphed into triumphalism in the early 1990s "unipolar moment" and then returned to tracking decline in the era of China's rise (1998-present).

As a mind experiment, substitute "China" for the "US" in the following statistics drawn from the essay. Many of us find that we believe statistics showing China's dominance more readily than we believe those showing US dominance.

By virtually any measure, the US has gained ground on its international rivals in key areas. Autocratic regimes excel in cloaking their systemic problems behind unverifiable claims, while democracies are a free-for-all of self-criticism. This openness accentuates the sensitivity to decline while the decline of autocracies is papered over.

Consider these statistics with an open mind. (The essay is behind a paywall so I am excerpting data points. Let's stipulate that statistics can be massaged or inherently flawed, for example GDP, but they offer a general data-based context for discussion.)

The US accounts for 26% of global GDP, the same as during the 'unipolar moment' of the early 1990s.

In 2008, the economies of the US and the Eurozone were nearly equal in size, but today, the American economy is twice as large.

The US economy is roughly 30% larger than the combined economies of the so-called global South: Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A decade ago, it was just 10% larger.

In 1995, Japanese citizens were, on average, 50% wealthier than Americans, measured in current dollars; today, Americans are 140% richer.

If Japan were a U.S. state, it would rank as the poorest in average wages, behind Mississippi--as would France, Germany, and the UK.

From 1990 to 2019, U.S. median household income rose 55% after taxes, transfers, and adjusting for inflation, with income in the bottom fifth seeing a 74% gain.

The US dollar (USD) accounts for nearly 60% of global central bank reserves--down from 68% in 2004 but equivalent to its 1995 share. It is used in roughly 70% of both cross-border banking and foreign currency debt issuance--up from 2004--and almost 90% of global foreign exchange transactions. (China's renminbi holds a 2.3% share of global central bank reserves.)

Once the world's largest energy importer, the US is now the leading producer of oil and natural gas, surpassing Russia and Saudi Arabia.

US energy efficiency and renewable technologies have lowered per capita carbon emissions down to levels not seen since the 1910s.

The US consumer market is equivalent to China's and the Eurozone's combined.

U.S. firms generate over 50% of the world's high-tech profits, whereas China captures only 6%.

The US is the only great power whose prime working-age population is projected to grow throughout this century. In contrast, China's population of workers between the ages of 25 and 49 is projected to drop by 74%, Germany's by 23%, India's by 23%, Japan's by 44%, and Russia's by 27%.

Americans start businesses at two to three times the rate of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia and one and a half times the rates of China and the UK.

The US is home to 7 of the top 10 universities and a quarter of the top 200.

Exports account for just 11% of GDP, compared with a global average of about 30%.

Global capital flows into the US as a safe haven.

This chart of the global stock market reveals the enormous gap between the US stock market as a magnet for global capital and everyone else: the US market comprises 67% of global equities, while China has a tiny 3% share. Global capital is not pouring into China as a safe, profitable haven, it's leaving China to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, as China's property bubble burst has already erased $18 trillion and is far from bottoming.