The Futurist: Why the US Will Still be the Only Superpower …

Version 2.0 of this article is posted here.

One of the most popular dinner party conversation topics is the possibility that the United States will be joined or even surpassed as a superpower by another nation, such as China. China has some very smart people, a vast land area, and over four times the population of the US, so it should catch up easily, right? Let's assess the what makes a superpower, and what it would take for China to match the US on each pillar of superpowerdom.

A genuine superpower does not merely have military and political influence, but also must be at the top of the economic, scientific, and cultural pyramids. Thus, the Soviet Union was only a partial superpower, and the most recent genuine superpower before the United States was the British Empire.

To match the US by 2030, China would have to :

1) Have an economy near the size of the US economy. If the US grows by 3.5% a year for the next 25 years, it will be $30 trillion in 2006 dollars by then. Note that this is a modest assumption for the US, given the accelerating nature of economic growth, but also note that world GDP only grows about 4% a year, and this might at most be 5% a year by 2030. China, with an economy of $2.2 trillion in nominal (not PPP) terms, would have to grow at 12% a year for the next 25 years straight to achieve the same size, which is already faster than its current 9-10% rate, if even that can be sustained for so long (no country, let alone a large one, has grown at more than 8% over such a long period). In other words, the progress that the US economy would make from 1945 to 2030 (85 years) would have to be achieved by China in just the 25 years from 2005 to 2030. Even then, this is just the total GDP, not per capita GDP, which would still be merely a fourth of America's.

2) Create original consumer brands that are household names everywhere in the world (including in America), such as Coca-Cola, Nike, McDonalds, Citigroup, Xerox, Microsoft, or Google. Europe and Japan have created a few brands in a few select industries, but China currently has none. Observing how many American brand logos have populated billboards and sporting events in developing nations over just the last 15 years, one might argue that US dominance has even increased by this measure.

3) Have a military capable of waging wars anywhere in the globe (even if it does not actually wage any). Part of the opposition that anti-Americans have to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is the envy arising from the US being the only country with the means to invade multiple medium-size countries in other continents and still sustain very few casualties. No other country currently is even near having the ability to project military power with such force and range. Mere nuclear weapons are no substitute for this. The inability of the rest of the world to do anything to halt genocide in Darfur is evidence of how such problems can only get addressed if and when America addresses them.

4) Have major universities that are household names, that many of the worlds top students aspire to attend. 17 of the world's top 20 universities are in the US. Until top students in Europe, India, and even the US are filling out an application for a Chinese university alongside those of Harvard, Stanford, MIT, or Cambridge, China is not going to match the US in the knowledge economy. This also represents the obstacles China has to overcome to successfully conduct impactful scientific research.

5) Attract the best and brightest to immigrate into China, where they can expect to live a good life in Chinese society. The US effectively receives a subsidy of $100 to $200 billion a year, as people educated at the expense of another nation immigrate here and promptly participate in the workforce. As smart as people within China are, unless they can attract non-Chinese talent that is otherwise going to the US, and even talented Americans, they will not have the same intellectual and psychological cross-pollination, and hence miss out on those economic benefits. The small matter of people not wanting to move into a country that is not a democracy also has to be resolved.

6) Become the nation that produces the new inventions and corporations that are adopted by the mass market into their daily lives. From the telephone and airplane over a century ago, America has been the engine of almost all technological progress. Despite the fears of innovation going overseas, the big new technologies and influential applications continue to emerge from companies headquartered in the United States. Just in the last two years, Google emerged as the next super-lucrative company (before eBay and Yahoo slightly earlier), and the American-dominated 'blogosphere' emerged as a powerful force of information and media.

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The Futurist: Why the US Will Still be the Only Superpower ...