If you wanted to bring everybody in the world to the level of the Western median income, total world income would need to be multiplied by 2.5. And you would need to reduce incomes of all those who currently make more than the Western median (~10% of global population).
Obviously, one-half of Western population would have to have their incomes cut; those with the Western mean income by some 15%.
If you were to do the same calculation in current exchange rates, the numbers are even bleaker.
The take home message is:
the idea that somehow we can all live at the Western median income and the entire GDP of the world need not increase much is...well, a pure fantasy.
We shall never know if the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was intentionally targeted or not.
Here are some arguments why I find accidental bombing highly unlikely.
-This was the only building targeting mistake in 78 days of very precise bombing.
-The ostensible target was a financial institution (bank giving loans, for, among other things, old SRFY's sales of armament). But that bank no longer worked; Serbia was bankrupt; it was not giving loans to anyone.
-It is the only fin institution having been ostensibly targeted.
-The Chinese emb & the Bank 2 very different buildings. Not only when you face them. Even if you have a 2-dimensional map, emb was facing, at an angle, towards the river, a solitary building w/a fence. The bank is 150m away across a 6-lane highway, adjoining another building.
In 1974, it made sense to speak of the Three Worlds, as among themselves, and treating China that never belonged to the Third World apart, they accounted for 98% of world GDP (in PPP terms).
Capitalist core 62%
Socialist countries 13%
Third World 24%
China 2%
But now we have a different situation. The capitalist core has shrunk despite its geographical extension to E Europe. The socialist world has disappeared. The 3rd world is more important thanks to the rise of Asia.
Core 44%
China 22%
Politically heterogen. periphery 31%
RUS 3%
In political sense, we have a unified West with 44%, China with ½ of that amount, politically heterogeneous periphery with almost 1/3 of global GDP (but its political power is low because of that heterogeneity) and Russia that is obviously trying to punch above its weight.
When in my recent talk in Edinburgh I claimed that Adam Smith could be seen as "a man of the left" (these terms btw are not used in the Visions of Inequality) this was based on the following:
Smith's extraordinary strong critique of how the rich have acquired their wealth (plunder, corruption, collusion, trade companies, monopoly, colonialism). That critique is often stronger than Marx's critique of "primitive accumulation".
Smith's view that of all social classes, only the interests of employers are opposed to the social interest because advancement of society implies a decrease in the rate of profit, and hence lower income for them. Netherlands is often cited there.
My new paper "The three eras of global income inequality 1820-2020, with the focus on the past 30 years" is just out in World Development. Access is free for 50 days.
Here is the link: sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
It is an important paper. Not only because it gives calculations of global inequality over 200 years (following Bourguignon & Morrisson seminal work) but because it looks at the political implications of the three eras: the rise of the West, the Three Worlds & the rise of Asia.
It then focuses on the past 30 years. Global inequality went down by ~10 Gini points mostly thanks to China. But this is not the full story. The convergence happened in total numbers becase Asian countries are so populous, were poor ad grew fast.
Much has been written about China's train system. But not enough. I think that it will be seen, with the system of canals and the Great Wall, as one of the most important contributions of China. One can see it as a proof that China excels in network industries.
The speed, punctuality and cleanliness of the system are absolutely remarkable. But even more striking to a visitor is how apparently simple and well-organized is everything so much that one cannot but wonder why other countries have not done the same thing.
Building no-nonsense train stations that look like airports, laying down the tracks, producing the trains, planning the exact number of cars by journey in function of ticket sales, building in redundancies, controlling the speed are not tasks requiring some new superb knowledge.
Somebody asked me for book recommendations re. the classics, capitalism etc. (I am not exactly sure what b/c it is hard to judge what people are interested in from just a couple of sentences). Nevertheless, I sent a list of books. First, those published in the past 3-4 years...
Darrin McMahon, Equality
David Lay Williams, "The greatest of all plagues"
Glori Liu, Adam Smith's America
Marcelo Musta, The last years of Karl Marx
Krishnan Nayar, Liberal capitalist democracy
Fritz Bartels, The triumph of broken promises
Ian Kumekawa, Pigou: The first serious optimist
Kevin Andrson, Marx at the margins
Jamie Martins, The meddlers
Dannis Rasmussen, The infidel and the professor (Hume & Smith)
Michael Heinrich, Marx and the origin of the modern world