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:
unstats.un.orgdefault.htmOpen ↗
The UN Statistics website annoyed me until I gave up trying
to use it, and went elsewhere.
Quoted message said:4th Per Capita GDP
worldfactsandfigures.comgdp country desc.phpOpen ↗
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
worldfactsandfigures.comgdp country desc.phpOpen ↗
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
geographyiq.comranking Infant MortalityOpen ↗
_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]
sfu.cawiredcolaOpen ↗ President, Fabrizio
Mazzoleni Fan Club
