In 2001, Jim O’Neill, the chief economist for Goldman Sachs, coined the BRIC acronym to represent the combined economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. He was also so bold as to predict that by 2032, or sooner, the BRIC would overtake the six largest western economies (which includes America) in terms of economic might.
Then in 2010, South Africa joined the BRIC turning that acronym into the BRICS.
In fact, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has predicted that China, a member of BRICS, will beat the United States as the world’s largest economy by 2016 with a GDP of $19 trillion compared to $18.8 trillion for the US.
There are about seven billion people on the planet and almost half live in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The US, by comparison [I prefer factual comparisons over opinions], holds less than 5% of the world’s population. However, I thought I’d throw in this comparison as a footnote. The King’s College of London reported that in 2009, “More than 9.8 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world… About 2.3 million were in the US,” which means 23% of the total global prison population was in America.
About prison slavery in the United States.
Did you pay attention? A country [the US] with less than 5% of the global population has 23% of the global prison population.
By comparison, the five BRICS countries [without the freedom American citizens seem to enjoy] has almost half of the world’s population but only 35% of the global prison population.
What does that tell us—that the more freedom and wealth a country has, the more crooks it grows and attracts?
Anyway, the world’s combined GDP, according to The World Bank was more than $63 trillion (US) in 2010. The GDP of the US was $14.6 trillion, while the BRICS’ combined GDP equaled about $11.6 trillion (US).
Recent drops of property values in China, sometimes reaching 50%, caused dire predictions in the Western media that China’s economy would soon crash and take the BRICS down with it causing their economies to suffer as well.
However, it is best to understand China’s economy and banking system to see if this wishful thinking on the part of China’s Western critics is valid.
Continued on January 12, 2012 in The Economic Health of BRICS – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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Trouble also reading english we have now, huh Troy?!? Or is it u’re just desperately trying to find something to attack as u usually do when you are at a loss for arguments (which is the vast majority of times)?
Reread the post carefully, would you?
Alessandro,
Mr. Parfitt’s comment that you responded to may have been deleted. I’ve deleted four so far. The last one I deleted was a string of questions. I will not accept any more questions from Mr. Parfitt or anything that comes with the logical fallacies he uses so often.
He must stay on topic, quote sources to defend his opinions of China, provide evidence from sources in pull quotes and provide links to those sources but no more questions or logical fallacies from the so-called China expert.
Understood and appreciated Mr. Lofthouse, thanks for the info 🙂
Lloyd said,
“What does that tell us—that the more freedom and wealth a country has, the more crooks it grows and attracts?”
If that’s what it tells us, how about some sources? There must be studies about the correlatiion between wealth and crime, or incidence of crime in rich countries vs. poor countries.
If you go on to argue China’s economic system is sound, and that it’ll soon be the big man on campus economically, then, by your own logic, the incidence of crime and inmates would have to increase proportionally. Or sorry, in lloydspeak, the number of “crooks it grows and attracts.” (Can you grow a crook?)
Aren’t there a host of factors involved in crime? Doesn’t poverty also, in some instances, lead to crime? What about a nation’s legal system, law enforcment, education, etc.?
Saying money causes crime is an oversimplification. It’s an exercise in monocausalism.
Mr. Parfitt,
Since you challenged my opinion on this particular issue, which is all it was [I never claimed anything else as you often do since you are the only China expert alive — Oh, and the authors you read and quote, which is called Cherry picking], you do the research and see if there are any studies linking the wealth of a country with economic and financial crime. If you do, make sure to include the links to those studies so readers may easily find them.
In fact, the 2008 global financial crises, which has been linked to a 1999 change in US banking laws, opened the door for greedy risk taking leading to the crash.
In addition, you may want to compare the total cost of corruption in Western democracies to the total cost of corruption in China. To do that, I am sure you will find a source that will inflate any numbers that China has reported due to the possibility of underreporting. The so-called China experts you choose to believe are good at that sort of exaggeration.
This video explains what happened. Too bad that you feel that the thousands of videos I have embedded in my posts are stupid, which includes your video. Most of them actually teach people something. After all, that was how I learned about your book and the bias embedded in it.
Mr. Parfitt,
Correction to my first reply to your attempt to “Poison the Well”, which is the act of delegitimizing one’s opponent before the opponent has even had the chance to make their case. A subtype of Ad Hominem attack.
Parfitt says, “That’s what it tells us, how about some sources? There must be studies about the correlation between wealth and crime, or incidence of crime in rich countries vs. poor countries.”
Since when does someone have to provide sources for a question? “What does that tell us—that the more freedom and wealth a country has, the more crooks it grows and attracts?” Did you see the question mark?
It appears that Mr. Parfitt’s comment introduces a “Red Herring” into the conversation. I also see “Weasel Words” buried in that comment and an attempt to introduce the “Interrogation” fallacy.
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A Red Herring is a fallacy when irrelevant material is introduced to the issue being discussed, such that everyone’s attention is diverted away from the points being made, and toward a different conclusion. It is not logically valid to divert a chain of reasoning with extraneous points.
As for the “Interrogation” fallacy. The question asked has a presupposition, which the answerer may wish to deny, but which he/she would be accepting if he/she gave anything that would count as an answer. Any answer to the question “Why does such-and-such happen?” presupposes that such-and-such does indeed happen.
Weasel words are essentially empty words and meaningless phrases that are used to mislead the listener or reader into thinking more is being said than actually is.