Here is another excellent example of an effort to create an intuitive understanding of something that we hear about every day, but most of us hardly understand -- China. The following comparison comes courtesy Thomas Barnett via James Fallows. How big is China? Fallows explains:
If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, [Barnett] said, all we'd have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.I for one now think differently about the size of China than I did before reading this comparison.
If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China's reality now.
10 comments:
Suppose, for a less demanding hypothesis, that 0.10% of China's population decide to emigrate to the US each year. That would detract 0.10% from the Chinese population growth rate of 0.47, reducing it to 0.37%, which would be very helpful to further decelerate demographic growth in China but not very dramatic anyway.
On the other side, it would involve nearly 1.4 million Chinese added to the US population each year, thus increasing its population growth by about 0.4%. Current annual growth of America's population is about 0.9%. This growth rate would rise to 1.3% per year as a direct effect of the Chinese inflow, not counting their indirect impact on the number of fertile women and thus births in successive years.
As the world becomes more globalized, and capital is mobile, the other main factor of production (labor) must also be more mobile to equate labor supply and demand everywhere. Large migration flows are already taking place on a much larger scale than this example, and efforts by individual nations to deny entrance and residence permits to would-be immigrants could not plug the hole in the dam for very long. In the end, it would add efficiency and well being to all economies as capital mobility does. But as the nation-state becomes increasingly too narrow a stage for a globalized economy (as most duchies or other feudal fiefdoms did some centuries ago to make room to growing nation-size capitalisms), the prospect of a more mobile world population in the global capitalist economy looms as a near certainty.
If the entire population of the US all lived in suburbs with 4 houses per acre we could all fit in Virgina.
I'll play devils advocate, but I think the challenges of providing services to the sparsely populated areas of the US are as great if not greater then providing services to densely populated cities.
Four houses per acre is well into 'middle class'.
Think of all the infrastructure we wouldn't need. All the airports serving rural communities, all the multi-lane interstate highways, all the cell phone towers, all the thousands of miles of phone and power lines.
-2-Harrywr2
I find VA to come up a bit short:
42,774 sq miles * 640 acres/sq mile * 4 houses per acre * 2.6 average household size = ~ 285 million people
How about 5 houses per acre? ;-)
Interesting comparison, thanks!
I, for one, aspire to be more than the "middle class" living on 1/4th an acre. Why not use all of the land mass of Earth and divide it up? Isn't that the definition of Utopia *cough*? How big is my piece of land?
-4-Easycure
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar ;-)
And if we all ate more we'd be closer together.
-2-Harrywr2
That presupposes that there is nothing of value in the rural areas. We could all live in one small state on the East Coast, but it would be one heck of a commute to work. Even D.C. couldn't employ all of us.
Hans Rosling highlights China's diversity by making the comparison in the other direction:
http://www.gapminder.org/videos/200-years-that-changed-the-world-bbc/
Shanghai province is like Italy in its life expectancy and GDP/capita, while Guizhou is like Pakistan.
Even the Canadians? You have to draw the line somewhere... ;-)
While you're importing people from other countries to make us like China, make sure to eliminate all social welfare law and regulation, the better to keep all those immigrants desperately poor and willing to work for pennies per day in factories. No environmental regulation, no property rights for average citizens, no forty hour week, no OSHA, no nuttin.'
All I can say is, Holy Monkey(King) Balls Batman!!
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