A recent Gallup poll found 53 percent of Americans think China has the world’s No. 1 economy; less than a third think America has the leading economy. In 2000, just 10 percent of Americans misidentified China as the world’s leading economic power.
The perception of American economic preeminence has fallen internationally, too. In reality, though, America maintains an economy more than twice the size of China’s while it has a population less than one-quarter the size of China’s. Perhaps more telling than Americans’ belief that their economy is second to China’s is the fact that most Americans view Chinese economic gains as zero-sum—that is, at America’s peril.
“[America’s] debt is rising, its population is aging in a budget-threatening way, its schools are mediocre by international standards, its infrastructure rickety, its regulations dense, its tax code byzantine, its immigration system hare-brained—and it has fallen from first position in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings to seventh in just four years,” read the cover story in an issue of The Economist magazine last month.
American pessimism, to be sure, is largely the result of a decade of economic stagnation and political malaise. The recovery from the Great Recession, after all, has been mostly jobless. In the face of dire economic straits, Washington has responded with partisanship and paralysis. For the last century and a half, the governing system the founding fathers envisioned—a type of government deliberately designed to frustrate legislative progress—enabled broadly shared economic growth. In the past decade that system has stymied and stratified growth.
The American Society of Civil Engineers grades America’s infrastructure as D-plus work. Coincidentally, that’s the same grade Americans give Congress. OK—I made that up. Actually, Congress would kill for marks that high. Gallup puts Americans’ approval of the job Congress is doing at a paltry 13 percent. And a January poll conducted by the Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling found that Americans hold colonoscopies, used car salesmen and even cockroaches in higher esteem than Congress. Amazingly, the electorate voted to maintain essentially the same balance of power in 2012.
Fareed Zakaria, a political scientist, columnist and author, has rightly noted the rapidly changing global balance of economic power is not the result of American decline, but rather the “rise of the rest”—countries like Brazil, India, China and South Africa transforming from impoverished to middle income nations. America has maintained the world’s dominant economy since 1871, but the stage is set for America to lose that designation—and soon. When adjusted for price differences between countries, China is projected to eclipse America as the world’s No. 1 economy in 2016, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
When you ask college-aged students what they think the future is for China and America, many offer a bleak prognosis: America is on the road to economic decline, while China is set on a path toward seemingly ever-increasing prosperity. Of course, they can be forgiven for making such bleak predictions. Our generation has witnessed America reach a high point of economic preeminence in the tech-fueled economic boom of the 1990s. Now many of the college-aged are sure that they will see America reach its economic low point in their lifetime.
Despite widespread pessimism there are bright spots: America’s higher education is second to none; its immigration system, once reformed, will once again foster broad-based economic growth; it remains the most innovative country in the world and its population is aging at a rate far slower than most developed countries and China.
America has reached a critical juncture, and how it responds to the rapidly shifting global balance of economic power will determine its role in the 21st century economy. But the notion America is on the road to irrelevance is, quite simply, a myth.
Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
