In a remarkable confirmation of an earlier study done by Pew Research Center, USA Today is reporting this morning, on an newly released Gallup Poll, which shows that 52% of the American people think that China has the #1 economy in the world, while only 32% believe that it is the United States.
First of all, to set the record straight, China has a huge Gross Domestic Product, which is measured at over 5.7 trillion dollars, but the GDP for the U.S. is well over 14.6 trillion dollars. Nearly 3 times as large as the Chinese numbers. It's an even larger discrepancy with Japan at $5.4 trillion, India at $4 trillion or Russia at $2.2 Trillion.
So there is no doubt that the US economy is still dominating the world, and easily crushing the economies of the other leading countries and I think it is a simple matter of the general public's ignorance of economics that provides the statistics that show up in these studies.
But in my opinion, the new data is remarkable in the second side of the coin that was not mentioned in either study or the newspaper article.
If the majority of Americans believe that the Chinese have a larger economy than the United States, then why aren't they scared out of their wits?!? Why are we happily buying more and more products from Walmart and other discount stores for items that are manufactured, packaged, and shipped from China?
Understand the point... I'm not arguing cheap trade goods. I'm arguing the general weakness of the human mind. As a population of people, we think that China is taking over the world and we don't like it, BUT we are doing nothing to stop it. It is Chicken Little saying: "The sky is falling, but I am going to continue kicking sand out from under the support beams, because I can't see the correlation in my own mind." It's also similar to the people who continue to smoke year after year, but then complain about the health consequences. It's not the smoking that I mind, or the cheap imported goods that keep our cost of living down. It is the irrational rant of people complaining that someone else should be "cleaning up this mess" or "doing something about this" that riles me up.
In general, we as Americans are a lazy group of people who only respond to selfish needs and impulses. And we've created that atmosphere with our own success. Our standard of living has become so much higher than anything else in history, that we have the time and luxury of being forced into making a decision between a 32 gigabyte flash drive and a new MP3 player. If we were working in the fields pulling vegetables out of the ground for supper, we'd simply be too busy to even think about the economies of the world, instead we just choose to ignore the whole thing until we're forced to give an answer on a poll question that we know nothing about.
There was nothing surprising in the numbers this morning. The surprising thing is that people are blind to their own lack of understanding.
And don't even get me started on the fact that if 52% think it's China, and 32% think it's the USA, then the remaining 16% are even more confused if they think that Brazil, Great Britain or possibly
Niue has a larger economy than the United States. That's a whole other topic.