China overtaking the US seems a lot more likely based on sheer numbers. China’s population is over 4x larger than that of the US. So China “just” needs to reach a GDP per capita of 25% to have a larger economy than the US. This metric has been growing rapidly in the past decade or two and from a rough search, seems to currently stand around 17-18% of the US’s figure.

Of course GDP isn’t the only factor in world power status, but it sure is a big one.

Compared to the US, China also has a far larger labor force, a greater ability to manufacture things, and greater government control over its population.

Access to natural resources is similar for many things, less for some (like oil and gas) but greater for others (like rare earth minerals).

Give it a few years. The one child policy, even though it’s gone now, it really going to mess up population growth.

By how much? At best its going to be 25%, which is still around 1 billion people.

> less for some (like oil and gas)

If worldwide carbon caps and tariffs become a thing, the oil and gas in the ground suddenly becomes nearly worthless if you can't use it.

Whereas China has a huge amount of not-good-for-much desert and mountains which could become a solar powerhouse.

> If worldwide carbon caps and tariffs become a thing, the oil and gas in the ground suddenly becomes nearly worthless if you can't use it.

It may be worth less, but it won't be worthless. I have a hard time seeing another fuel source for long distance aviation (although we may move to synthesized fuel in the future).

Companies will also need feedstock for plastics - that use won't be affected by carbon caps at all.

Those tariffs are also a joke in and of itself. As we can already from the oil price cap idea you can only enforce things when the world plays along, but looks increasingly like the global south is fed up by these dictates. So good luck enforcing carbon caps and tariffs when the majority of the world population doesn't play along.

You can still have them, but ultimately it's the people in western societies that will pay the price with their own pensions and social services gradually degrading.

>If worldwide carbon caps and tariffs become a thing, the oil and gas in the ground suddenly becomes nearly worthless if you can't use it.

2nd and 3rd world countries are going to bathe in cheap oil when/if the 1st world bans it.

How do you plan on enforcing the bans globally?

We kinda enforce "don't trade slaves" globally... And "No child labour"... And "don't steal other countries ships when they sail near your country".

"Don't emit more than your fair share of carbon" is just another rule like the others. If most countries agree, but there are a few dissenters, we can deal with it like other international disagreements - warnings, then sanctions, then war.

Currently, we're far from that, because we don't have a majority of countries agreeing on carbon caps.

So the British Navy is gone blockade Africa so they cant import oil from the middle east? Great plan.

Nah - it'll go down like Venezuela [1]. The government of a country flagrantly ignores the internationally agreed carbon caps, and so some country or group of countries get together and sponsor a coup.

It happened to Venezuela because they refused to align with US interests, and with other economic and political issues, they were an easy target. The wikipedia page [1] has a nice summary of the list of countries on each side of the dispute, and you can see a nice 'pro USA' and 'anti USA' divide.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela#Since_2018

Sponsoring foreign queue is not actually that easy.

China has the fastest aging population in recorded human history, along with some of the worst demographics.

What exact advantages do you see in that?

I think China could easily fix their demographics if they wanted to.

They have sufficient control of their population that if they said "everyone of child bearing age must try for a child this year and next", they'd probably double their population within 2 years.

The 'demographic problem' is only a problem because they don't see it as an issue worth fixing.

I think this is wildly off base.

Lots of them don’t want to have kids. The government has many ways to influence the public. But I don’t think it’s true to say that they have so much control over their populace that they could do anything like double their population in 20 years, let alone 2.

People in China are just people, right? Many of them don’t want to have kids. What’s the government gonna do?

Of course, hypothetically, the government blocks people from leaving the country and literally forces them to procreate but that’s getting a bit imaginative (it would be turning the China that exists today into something very different).

Realistically I think the government is worried about their demographic problem and is using every reasonable tool in their arsenal to attempt to address it.

> People in China are just people, right? Many of them don’t want to have kids. What’s the government gonna do?

See the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine etc for examples of what it can do. Basically anything.

> See the Cultural Revolution and Great Famine etc for examples of what it can do. Basically anything.

Even assuming China is all powerful and can achieve "anything" here, the policies would still have a latency of an entire generation. Unless you include time-travel as part of "anything".

Killing people is much easier than making people raise babies.

Any developed country could fix its demographics problem with a stroke of a pen - provide housing to young family.

We've studied this, n1 reason peolle dont have kids is housing.

The housing crisis has done more damage to western economy than the black plague.

> they'd probably double their population within 2 years.

you are conveniently forgetting that children take 20 years before they can work??

There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.

Providing housing to young families will not make a meaningful dent to declining demographics in the affluent world. People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing. That's a cultural change and no amount of housing is going to reverse it. And even in the financial scenario, the housing aspect is only one chunk of the huge cost of raising several children.

> There's nothing that needs solved. It's ideal to shrink the global population while boosting per capita quality of life. The focus should be on improving per capita, not on expanding the overall economic size or population numbers.

Then why do we simultaneously import millions of workers each year to make up for the supposed shortage of natural population growth (caused by policy)?

In part because importing people without paying for 12 years of public education is an economic bargain.

But many of those coming here are not well educated. Hard working maybe, adventurous certainly, but often economically deprived and undereducated as a result, or so I’ve read.

There is a real illegal vs legal split here, legal immigrants tend to be quite well educated. The majority of illegal immigrants have a high school degree but they are definitely less educated than the average American.

That said, while undocumented immigrants tend to be less educated being able to work when we didn’t pay for any of their education is still a boon. It’s something of a waste to pay for 12 years of education and then have someone doing manual labor.

If you immigrated to the west as a working proffesional, then you have to have job offer, education and usually you have to be somewhat well off to be able to afford lawyers and get through the visa process.

> boosting per capita quality of life

The per capita quality of life has been stagnant for like 20 years. Housing crisis does not boost quality of life at all

> People do not want to have so many children (3-5 or more) and it's not due to lack of housing.

We've conducted polling and studied the issue. You don't need 5 kids, you need 2.1 for replacement rate

"The stress of housing problems is preventing almost 2m people from having children, the Affordable Housing Commission has claimed"

https://www.mortgagestrategy.co.uk/news/housing-stress-preve...

I don't think you can fix population issues in 2 years. Takes ~20 to make an adult (unless you have a liberal, multi-cultural society -- American adult citizens could be made in an afternoon if we shifted some laws around).

PRC demographics are extremely advantageous for great power competition / building comprehensive national power going forward. The TLDR is PRC leadership has been too preoccupied with sustaining 1.4B people, huge% of which are old and undereducated (to be blunt: a drain) that drags on her potential. Shedding quantity while improving quality will significantly improve PRC competitiveness.

Family planning / One Child Policy = concentrating resources on only kids = PRC now produces comparable STEM talent as all OECD countries combined. Demographic bomb collapists narrative fixate on absolute population decline without realizing PRC is starting to undergo the largest (by an order of magnitude) high-skill demographic divident in "recorded history" that will last decades. Meanwhile reducing net population = declining import dependency over time = more strategic (military) flexbility. Combine with massive home ownership % and high savings rate, and most of population likely settle around middle / low high income = no expectation for onerous social safety nets.

Over the next 10-30 years, we will see PRC (even with shit tier TFR) close/lead in technology due to having the largest and likely best talent pool (courtesy of PRC scale), that exceeds what US can produce domestically + immigration. Which will also erode western dominance/economy for high value niches it tried to fence off for itself. Also a PRC with increasingly less import vunerability due to lower absolute population, which mitigates much of the geographic shortcomings, i.e. first island chain "containment" nations that will be forever import dependant will lose their geographic leverage. Meanwhile increasingly burdensome social nets will drag down / destablize developed economies vs PRC who can sustain domestic serenity on relatively lean welfare estate.

Yes, generally, PRC nationals (Tier 2/3/4 cities) will (continue) to have worse QOL relative to developed societies. But in terms of overtaking US, and improving existing strategic enviroment, demographic trends are pointing up, up, up.

The US could solve the population difference fairly easily by having some family friendly policies, and walking back laws that are destructive to families such as by incentivizing divorce etc.

I agree.

I was of the view that China could be the next super power and overtake the US.

But two things changed my view:-

1. COVID and their response to it. China still does not have a good vaccine and they still rely on lockdowns. That speaks a lot to how backward China is in basic sciences.

2. The move to remove term limits for the president. History tells us that one person can’t be relied on to make good long term decisions for a country specially a communist country.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/11/592694991...

China's covid response was extremely damaging to China, but thanks to the US and their allies response to Russia, China has received plenty of intermediary free money to add to their economy. Cheaper energy, and arbitration returns from Russian goods to western economies for a premium. Ultimately China will find a way to cope without the products from the west. Europe however cannot cope without the cheap goods from China and the cheap energy from Russia.

India is by the way the only major economy that is projected to grow over 6% next year. That's largely due to profiting off of resell of Russian goods.

The problem is that people conflate their own moral standing with actual factual realities and unfortunately it will cost _us_ dearly.

India isn't growing (projected, un huh) at 6% due to profiting from Russian exports, that's a joke.

Russia's economy is trivial in size, as are their non-energy exports.

A $20-$30 gap in the price of oil via artificially cheap Russian oil isn't the difference between India's large economy (3x larger than Russia, nearly the size of Germany) growing at -3% vs growing at +6%.

We need to put the hammer down far harder on Russia than we have so far.

> COVID and their response to it. China still does not have a good vaccine and they still rely on lockdowns. That speaks a lot to how backward China is in basic sciences.

I think this was a policy move more than a lack of science understanding. In fact, leadership in China is very science-heavy. Time will tell, but it's actually looking like possibly a good move, now that 5% of the UK population is not working due to long term sickness, the highest ever[1], and covid is looking like a contributory factor.

I could even imagine China extending their lockdown policy to other diseases which might have long term population-wide effects, like influenza.

The main downside of such a policy is you need to have effectively closed borders forever, otherwise travellers re-introduce diseases from other countries into yours.

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63204333

>Lots of people thought Japan would overtake the US as well, and that didn't exactly pan out.

not even comparable situations, Japan has a fraction of the population, natural resources, isn't a nuclear power, and is effectively militarily occupied by the US to this day. People using Japan as a comparison to China are either naive or just coping with reality to comfort themselves