In article <[email hidden]>,
Todd Kuzma <[email hidden]> wrote:
Why do I get involved in political-statistical bunfights in bicycle
newsgroups? To paraphrase Homer Simpson, maybe I can be the voice of
wisdom that guides the mob.
Quoted message said:Matt O'Toole said:Todd Kuzma said:The downside of this business model is that we are a
high-wage country in a low-wage world. Just about
everything that we do can be done by somebody else cheaper.
And yet, we still have one of the lowest unemployment rates, and highest
standards of living.
Well, yes and no. Here is our current worldwide ranking
according the the latest UN statistics in several key
indicators:
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/default.htm
The UN Statistics website annoyed me until I gave up trying to use it,
and went elsewhere.
Quoted message said:4th Per Capita GDP
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/gdp_country_desc.php
This listing (mostly based on 2002 estimates) gives the US as second,
$37,600 pcGDP, behind only Luxembourg ($44,000!), but fourth is possible
in the latest data. What is interesting about the listing I have
referenced is that there are only two nations in the top ten with a
population over 30 million people: the US and Canada (a distant 9th with
$29,400). Going down the list, the next big country is Japan, 13,
$28,000 (Japan's science-fiction economy should be analyzed with some
caution, but that's a posting for another day), and then Germany at 18th
and $26,600. No G-7 nation makes less than $25,000 (hello Italy!), but
the gap between the US and any large nation is substantial.
Quoted message said:36th Unemployment Rate
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/gdp_country_desc.php
Forbes says 18th in 2002, a figure I find much more likely, but this is
a relatively volatile number. One caveat is that unemployment rates are
affected a lot by structural issues within a country, and that different
countries use subtly different ways of measuring unemployment, which
makes comparison difficult when dealing with small differences.
The top 20 countries include Japan (see previous warning about
science-fiction economics), a bunch of Eurasian "tigers" from Portugal
to Malaysia, all the Scandinavian nations, notorious statistical
anomalies Switzerland and Luxembourg, and interesting anomalies China
and Mexico. I would be very interested to see how China calculates its
unemployment rate, but the Chinese economy is hot by any measure. As for
Mexico, clearly it's sucking up all those NAFTA jobs, but it's not clear
where they're sucking them from, since the US and Canada (28th on the
Forbes list) have unemployment rates that are as low as anything seen
since World War II.
Quoted message said:10th Years of Schooling
You wouldn't want your favourite country to rank way off on this one,
but I wouldn't worry too much about it, as long as you're still making
more money than all those smarter countries. One curious thing is that
despite all that schooling, the common metrics of real academic research
and advancment (Nobel prizes and research publications) are still
disproportionately dominated by Americans. So whatever they're doing,
the smart kids are not getting left behind.
Quoted message said:32nd Life Expectancy (Male)
31st Life Expectancy (Female)
The diseases that kill Americans early, are, rather hilariously, related
to to overeating. I don't mean it's funny if Uncle Mike has a heart
attack and dies at age 50 because he liked Cheetos too much, but from
either a historic global or a contemporary third-world perspective, it
is malnutrition that is the classic problem (well, in the third world
the major killer is diarrhea, which is only funny until you find out how
effective and cheap Oral Rehydration Therapy is at saving lives...). In
order to get US life-spans up to Japanes and Scandinavian levels, I
propose a vast new government program in which social workers will be
trained to walk up to fat people eating unhealthy snacks, slap them
silly, and give them a bunch of leafy green vegetables to take home
(physician, heal thyself...).
Quoted message said:33rd Infant Mortality
http://www.geographyiq.com/ranking/ranking_Infant_Mortality_Rate_aall.htm
My numbers are actually worse than yours. 35th for the us, 6.75
deaths/1000 live births. Japan has 3.30, and the US is worse in this
stat than any other G7 nation. Some perspective should be kept: the US
is better than Israel and worse than Italy, at 7.37 and 6.19
respectively, so this isn't an insane rate for a developed nation. But I
think pulling even with Greece (6.12, and this in a country where my
relatives there are afraid of the hospitals) would be a reasonable goal.
To give some idea of the spread between prosperous nations with
apparently functional health systems, Canada is in 20th at 4.88.
And why on earth is Greenland reporting 16.80 deaths/1000 live births??
Are mothers there routinely exposing their babies if they don't like
them? Seriously, they're below Sri Lanka, at 15.22.
Quoted message said:We aren't always as good as we think we are relative to the
rest of the world. What the future holds for the US is not
clear.
Oh for sure. And as a humble Canadian, I keep a distanced but still
sharp interest in these stats. But by any measure, the US is an economic
powerhouse.
China and India want to be the next superpowers, and both have a
legitimate shot at the title, and have made huge progress. The US
doesn't have a large amount of control over that at the moment, aside
from ridiculous and nihilistic solutions ("we begin bombing in five
minutes."😉 But if I had to bet, I'd say that India, starting from well
behind, is going to find that being something like a functional
democracy is going to give it a substantial advantage over China. For
China to stay ahead of India, I suspect it will have to start giving up
on Communism even more completely than it has already. And if it does
that, the US can probably look forward to the kind of happy dotage
Europe has experienced in the presence of a US superpower: no longer
fully in control of its own destiny, but not going anywhere terribly
scary, either.
Quoted message said:Todd Kuzma
Heron Bicycles
ObBike: The migration of the bicycle industry has been practically a
microcosm of industrial transitions in the 20th century. It started out
with dominant English and American industries, plus European
componentry, now largely reduced to specialists at the high end of the
market or domestic companies with overseas production. Then it moved to
Japan, and when things got pricey, the same formula repeated as the
industry moved to a cheaper "tiger" economy, in this case Taiwan. And
now the pattern is repeating again, as Taiwan finds China eating away
its low-end business, and showing all signs of improving itself into the
high end. Don't fret for Taiwan too much, though: just like Europe,
America, and Japan, the outgoing bike industry will leave behind a
high-priced residue of designers and marketing companies, plus top-end
manufacturing, that will be a going industry for the forseeable future.
What was the question?
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email hidden] http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine/wiredcola/
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club
