I. The Atlantic Perspective and the emergence of a Concrete West
The actual statistics on the West and Emerging Powers
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- Worst case (for the West) projection: still solid Western hegemony in 2050
- GDP projections 2010-2050
The actual statistics on the West and Emerging PowersPresentAt present the Concrete West has 73% of world GDP. It has 15 times the GDP of China. It has 8 times the combined GDP of the four “BRIC” countries, Brazil, Russia, India, and China, “emerging powers” that are often cited as making the West and its global leadership obsolete. The U.S. alone has more than 4 times the GDP of China. That is the main reality: the reality of the present, and the reality of the future in this generation. But what of long-term projections? They show far less that is different than people presently imagine. Worst case (for the West) projection: still solid Western hegemony in 2050Much has been made in the media of projections of China surpassing the U.S. in GDP by 2050. Actually they show a continued robust Western hegemony in 2050 long afterwards, although they failed to provide the requisite categories for noticing this. Even on their own terms of limited categories, 2050 is a long way off. If the projection were realized, it would still mean 40 years more of preponderance for the U.S. alone, before being overtaken by China as the biggest single country. Historians know that projections of changes 40 years out have a low probability of realization: too many unforeseen contingencies arise in such a time span. Nevertheless, the projection has become popularized as a prediction, the prediction treated as if an achieved fact, and as the foundation for the consensus declinist discourse. What is not understood in this discourse -- not by those who believe in the projection, not by those who have maintained a degree of critical caution about it -- is that, even if the projection were fully realized by 2050, its numbers still show the West as hugely preponderant over China and the BRIC countries at that late date. But then, the projectors did not bother to add up the numbers for the West. Nor did anyone else in the declinist discussion. Less ink was spilt on the Concrete West, with its long history and substantial institutions, than on BRIC, a newly formed amorphous coalition with almost no collective substance. This shows, inter alia, the need to start providing figures for the real collective categories when making international projections. The chart below gives the numbers from a much discussed projection. Let me make clear that I do not view them as likely to be an accurate statement of the size of national economies in 2050. The reason I give them is in order to provide, by adding in the requisite collective categories, a more accurate picture than hitherto of the meaning of the numbers that have been bandied about in the current discussion. GDP projections 2010-2050Top ten entities (including top six countries) by Gross Domestic Product, in billions of US dollars, listed by projected 2050 rank. SOURCE: Goldman Sachs (2005) for national figures;25 totals for collective entities added by author26.
The Concrete West’s total for 2050 is 150% of the BRIC total, 280% of China’s. The Concrete West’s effective power factor for 2050 is 190% of BRIC’s35, 200% of China’s. These are robust leads. There is no sense in which either BRIC or China is catching up in 2050; not even on numbers that assume unrealistic long-term growth rates in China and India, and unprecedented absence of disruptive crises in their development. The inattention to these realities is regrettable. It leads to fundamental misunderstandings of the world; to inversions of policy prescriptions; and to gross miscalculations by some great powers. The following similar results, more limited and careful, were calculated on a basis of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s projections36: 
This shows the reality with graphic clarity37. Why the persistent promotion of misleading versions of the statistics, in disregard of the relevant facts and categories38? It is partly a matter of being paradigm-bound. Thomas Kuhn observed that old paradigms always find ways to rule out contrary or falsifying points. Paradigm-protection is even harder to get through than Password-protection: as Kuhn showed, it sometimes takes a generation or two. This is because paradigms are bound up with social circles that entrenched the paradigms as group habits and group interests; as mental and political commitments; reinforced by group mechanisms of praise and blame (good-evil, goodspirited-meanspirited, right-wrong, intelligent-stupid, sane-insane), inclusion and exclusion (us-them), reward and deprivation (jobs, grades, publication, censure). Thus paradigms come to be perpetuated by vicious circles in society as well as in logic. The ability to turn a blind eye to facts that don’t fit, and to sincerely make false statements of fact, is well known; Kuhn explains it as a Paradigm-protection-mechanism, Freud as a defense-mechanism for shielding against confronting mental complexes. It is not necessary to suppose it is deliberate mendacity toward others when the international economic statistics are repeatedly distorted; when people are lying, they are usually lying to themselves. The repetition is a sign of the workings of a group paradigm and group spirit. Bertrand Russell once said there was too much of a “party spirit” -- in his own favor! -- in his peer community of academic philosophy; sociological surveys have since confirmed such a spirit to be strong in nearly all academic departments (partly excepting the physical sciences), and in most other intellectual communities including the media, with almost all of these groups spirits sharing the same specific political orientation. This makes Paradigm-penetration more difficult; it enables the formation, in the general world of public thought and discourse, of vicious circles that are almost completed closed off from external penetration. I am stating the difficulty of Paradigm-penetration strongly, which some people will think accurate others exaggerated, not for its own sake, but in order to underline the responsibility of people to make whatever effort it takes to escape their Paradigm-protection reflexes as they read. After everything they have heard for several years, it is not surprising that many people will have a hard time imaging that what I am saying could possibly be within the range of reality, sanity, good, right. There must be something wrong about it -- or else there is something wrong with nearly everything they have heard and believed, a thought that understandably feels unimaginable. And so, I admonish you, dear reader: If what I am saying sounds somehow crazy to you, despite its clear factual foundations; if it is the sort of thing for which you feel an impulse to just dismiss it and put it out of mind; if you feel that this would be an easy and safe way in your circles to dispose of it: then for this very reason, you owe society the effort to overcome that impulse and consider the matter at full value. If the simple statistical calculation of mine breaks through the barriers of Paradigm-protection and restores an awareness of the central realities of the world economic order, it will have served sufficient purpose. That is the reason why I have made the personal effort at calculating the numbers for the relevant categories. It is not my specialty. Others should have done this work, and could surely do it better than I. I will be pleased if my effort sparks others to try their own calculations for the collective categories, even if in hope of refuting me. Probably in many cases this is the only way that most Paradigm-protective people could overcome their assumption that this must all be nonsense and allow the truth of the matter to penetrate. I am in fact pleased to be able to say that the Streit Council has taken up my challenge, in the period prior to publication of this work, and done its own calculation which I have shown above, and its own thinking through of the assumptions and categories. I hope others will next. I am sure my main conclusions will hold up: the ratios are simply too robust to be overturned. I will be even more pleased if my effort sparks the major GDP assessors and projectors -- IMF, World Bank, CIA, Goldman Sachs -- to start including calculations for the most relevant categories, the collective ones, on their published charts. Then at long last we will have semi-official projections expressed in forms that are not misleading. The policy makers of the world need this. 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