Rafael R. Guthmann
@GuthmannR
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Major update of a working paper: This project was motivated by my desire to understand the puzzle of intellectual property. As it is not a standard type of property, but a monopoly granted by the government on a specific market. Very glad to have arrived at this paper.
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Our world today is a different kind of nature from the historical world of empires: it is a decentralized world of nation-states. The US is indeed one of the largest, richest, and most powerful of these states, but in the end, it is a nation-state like the others.
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@Lane_Kiffin LSU reminds me of the artist Prince. LSU is NOT just defined by football championships and Heismans. It's tailgates from another world, it's Shaq and Honey Badger, it's 1/5th if the ESPN broadcast staff, it's baseball championships, basketball championships, track
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For example, in Roman times, a man selling his camel in Egypt would draft a contract specifying the sale "in the Year X of Emperor Hadrian's reign," who was regarded and worshipped as a living god across what they called the "inhabited world." That was "imperium romanorum."
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By the way, the same applies to modern China. It is also a modern nation-state with relatively inclusive institutions that is not interested in sacrificing its population to achieve an "imperium" degree of military hegemony, such as historically achieved by, for example, Rome.
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The US is not an imperialist policy in the likes of Ancient Rome, Napoleonic France, or even Nazi Germany, or the Soviet Union. A polity capable of mobilizing a large fraction of its population to die for the polity in wars of aggression. And that is a good thing.
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That showed that even at the peak of its relative power, soon after WW2, the US's capacity to project power across the world had severe limitations. Today, its relative power has eroded substantially, and now it can't even take out the Houthis. Let's see if it can take Maduro.
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After WW2, it's true that one can argue the US became the world's most powerful polity; however, the Soviet Union won WW2 too, and was more powerful than the US on some dimensions (particularly in its capacity to deploy ground forces across Eurasia). Then the US lost to Vietnam.
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From a long-run historical perspective, the US was never a particularly powerful "imperial entity" relative to the world system in which it was inserted. The Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlan was much more dominant in the Mesoamerican world than the US ever was in our world.
@GuthmannR The US is the most powerful country to have ever existed. Nobody will be replicating the leverage of being the world's only nuclear power and winning a global ideological war. China is the defining power in a system America built
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Overall, India's GDP figures are also consistent with convergence to the developed world, as GDP per capita has growing 3 to 4 times the typical rate for developed countries over the last few decades.
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This convergence between US and India is already apparent across many basic industrial indicators. For example, India's per capita steel production capacity is set to match current US steel production by 2030. Cement production per capita is already close to parity.
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Its well know among economists that countries tend to converge in productivity over the long term as long as they don't do very stupid economic policies like the USSR and Brazil did. Thus, economic power tends to converge to demographic size and India is >4-times the US's.
@GuthmannR Can you provide some information concerning India overtaking USA? Very bold statement in my opinion.
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I can personally vouch for a dozen of these - from the genius silverware storage, to the perfect leggings with 70+ reviews, to the hands-down best pillows on earth.
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This axiomatic viewpoint that "the US is the number 1 power" is common among Americans, Chileans, and Brazilians. It is not a claim based on evidence; it's just assumed to be true, like that the earth is round and that there are 365 days in a year.
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The US was the world's dominant economic power for 120 years, but now it is clearly not (and will be the 3rd economic power soon, as India is growing fast). Still, this legacy of 120 years has hardwired many people's brains into taking "US is number 1 power" as an axiom.
@DoggyDog1208 Yet, somehow the United States is the wealthiest, most powerful nation that has ever existed - precisely because we’re a nation of hustlers. I mean that both in the positive sense: builders, doers, go-getters, dreamers, hard workers, inventors, organizers, and engineers, but also
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While growth was slow in pre-modern times, it was positive most of the time. However, we know about Late Antiquity, a period in western Eurasian history that provides an example of a civilization with slightly negative growth for several centuries.
The end of growth must be the end of creativity. When there is no aspect of society that can be conceivably improved. That’s a much more frightening future than just 0% growth.
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Just that investors have very, very, very optimistic expectations about future growth of the tech companies vis-à-vis other companies, plus the fact that many other big companies are state companies like Petrobras, which do not seek to maximize shareholder value.
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There are times on ones journey when they must be reminded in gentle ways of where they have been and that which has been experienced. Reminded of each catalyst in pain and suffering and the lessons attached to them they were to learn of themselves and what they were accepting,
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Measured by the value added by the enterprise (EBITDA + wage bill of employees), and converted into real terms, it is likely that only one or two of those tech companies are in the top 10 largest enterprises in the world. This does not mean these companies are overvalued.
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One must keep in mind that the actual enterprise size is not well reflected in nominal market capitalization. Brazilian oil company Petrobras' EBITDA is in PPP terms about 90 billion USD, 2/3 of Apple's and 3/4 of Nvidia's. Its market capitalization is <2% of those.
The top nine most valuable companies in the world were all formed on the West Coast of the United States. The top eight are tech companies.
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See a short paper I wrote with a simple analytical example:
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These are ca. 60 economies corresponding to 80% of the global population; I lack data for Sub-Saharan Africa. There are theoretical reasons why the official GDP growth rate might not reflect convergence, even assuming identical methodology and preferences across countries.
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This is clear if we look at long-run data, unconditional convergence for the last 60 years has not been that strong in official national accounts, but if we consider primary energy consumption and estimate growth by its correlation with GDP, convergence is much stronger:
If you use measurable proxies like life expectacy or energy consumption, the tendency for global convergence becomes much stronger than using official national accounts.
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By the 1950s, iron consumption had already grown much faster in India and China than in the developed West, despite reconstructed national accounts showing divergence since the 1910s. The same tendency applies to life expectancy.
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