Peter Burgess commented on I would like to provoke your thoughts and initiate a debate: 'Do you think China is our Key for changing the world?' If yes: why? If...
Run the numbers. China is important. India is important. Europe and North America increasingly less important.
But population numbers only tell part of the story. I grew up in Europe (England) and have lived most of my adult life in North America. I have done assignments in more than 50 different countries, including India and China. These countries have very long histories and purely Western ideas are very recent, and dangerously unsustainable.
I am optimistic that there are going to be changes in the direction of sustainability. In India, being quite democratic, the change will be quite chaotic. In China, with a more authoritarian system, the change may be more linear.
Western influence in the form of business and economic metrics that encourage consumption and waste in order to increase profit and stock prices will slow change and increase the damage done to the environment. The industrial revolution (and the agricultural revolution) made the West more productive than the East (India, China) for much of the last 200 years, but that period is over, and no amount of financial creativity is going to change that.
I am an optimist. China is going to become a leader in changing the world ... and the world will be better for it.
Peter Burgess TrueValueMetrics less…
Peter Burgess commented on I would like to provoke your thoughts and initiate a debate: 'Do you think China is our Key for changing the world?' If yes: why? If...
I grew up in Europe (England), have lived most of my adult life in North America and have done assignments in more than 50 countries around the world, including the Middle East India and China.
Relative to Europe, North America was the 'New World', but relative to China, India and to some extent the Middle East, Europe is really 'New World' as well. These places all have very long histories, and I find it encouraging to think what these long histories can tell us.
If we do the math, a world built on the economic model of modern North America / Europe cannot be sustainable ... but who would want this anyway? Clearly some do, but while they may be rich and powerful for now, they cannot prevail.
In my view, India, as a democracy will progress in the right direction, but in a rather chaotic manner. There is some world class education in India but not enough of universal education. India will be a major power in the world.
China has a very different governance structure. If the leadership encourages the right decisions, China will be an amazing place. Ancient Chinese history has lessons for modern times. One of the big risks for the future success of China, and indeed the world, is that China fully embraces a Western high consumption life style that the planet cannot support.
One of the worst things that the Chinese might do is to aim for consumption assisted GDP growth. This is a very real danger because Western economists (and the policy makers) want Chinese consumption growth to be the driver of the global money profit economy and capital market values. In this model, the value destruction that would impact the planet is ignored, and for a relatively small (population) country like the United States this may not matter, but for the large (population) countries like India and China, this is a very big deal.
China is going to make a huge difference in the future ... hopefully in a more intelligent way than progress was achieved by Western nations.
Peter Burgess TrueValueMetrics less…
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