One interesting factoid I learnt the other day is that the number of unemployed Chinese alone is more than the entire US population! * * *

On the subject of competing hemispheres, I think it's very important to remember that the Western Hemisphere has only one eighth of the world's population. I remember a very impressive animated sequence in War Comes To America, the final member of the Why We Fight series of World War II propaganda films, which describes the reasoning for American entry into the war. [The populations cited are 1940s figures; multiply by 3 or so to get the present-day equivalents.] The narration goes:

German conquest of Europe and Africa would bring all their raw materials, plus their entire industrial development, under one control. Of the 2 billion people in the world, the Nazis would rule roughly one quarter, the 500 million people of Europe and Africa, forced into slavery to labor for Germany. German conquest of Russia would add the vast raw materials and the production facilities of another of the world's industrial areas, and of the world's people, another 200 million would be added to the Nazi labor pile.

Japanese conquest of the Orient would pour into their factory the almost unlimited resources of that area, and of the peoples of the earth, a thousand million would come under their rule, slaves for their industrial machine.

We in North and South America would be left with the raw materials of three-tenths of the earth's surface, against the Axis with the resources of seven-tenths. We would have one industrial region against their three industrial regions. We would have 1/8 of the world's population against their 7/8. If we along with the other nations of North and South America could mobilize 30 million fully equipped men, the Axis could mobilize 200 million.

Thus, an Axis victory in Europe and Asia would leave us alone and virtually surrounded facing enemies ten times stronger than ourselves.

YES, the Western Hemisphere does have only about 1/8 of the planet's population. Asia alone has more than half the world's total population, not even counting the European component of the Eurasian landmass, which has apparently stabilized at about 730M and is expected to decline. The Americas (c. 850M now) has more people than either Europe or Africa, but less than 1/4 as many as Asia, which is where the bulk of our "competing" economies are located. Plainly, if China has more unemployed than the U.S. has people, any attempt to give China full employment would eradicate job prospects for much of the rest of the planet, in free trade. Worse, China is actually mechanizing away jobs, replacing people with machines! That may improve the technological capabilities of Chinese manufacturing, but at what human cost? And for whose benefit? At end, we keep coming back to the basic question: what is an economy FOR?

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:34 PM