By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, MARCH 3, 2015) — There has been much made, and rightly so, of the spectacular economic growth in the East, in Asia, and in the Pacific Rim countries. Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a new book by Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, evens asks the question in one of his subchapters, “Will China Own the World?”

Surely, to an extent, the question is rhetorical. Nonetheless, Piketty poses the question based on the data that supports its asking. China represents a great example of economic success, a triumph all the more impressive when you consider that the country has had no petroleum exporting to account for its riches.

China has made its money the old fashioned way. It has used money to make money. China has beaten the United States in the decidedly capitalist game of using capital as a way of accumulating capital. With China’s ascendancy as a world economic power — #1 or #2 by almost all recognized measures — the country that not so long ago was still undeveloped and agrarian has ditched peasantry and achieved parity-plus with developed countries in knowledge and technological sophistication.

World Implications of China’s New Status

The productivity miracle of China’s manufacturing capabilities has raised the country’s standard of living farther and faster than any historical example. China, like India, can no longer be considered an “emerging” country. It has emerged. It will now deal with the problems brought on by prosperity, and the choices it makes will have world implications.

For example, Piketty notes that China will soon be designing a retirement systems for its workers. In the bad old days of feudalism and Mao, it didn’t have to worry about such matters. Now it does. If China decides to fund a retirement system with investment income rather than using a pay-as-you-go system such as we have in the U.S., it will institute policies that concentrate on boosting saving rates. In a low-growth environment once China reaches a more saturated development, the results will be stunning.

“For example,” Piketty writes, “if China saves 20 percent of its national income until 2100, a large part of the Old and New Worlds will be owned by enormous Chinese pension funds.” This will be do to the accumulating power of capital invested even at conservative rates.

From the website tradingeconomics.com: “Personal Savings in the United States remained unchanged at 5 percent in October of 2014 from 5 percent in September of 2014. Personal Savings in the United States averaged 6.81 percent from 1959 until 2014, reaching an all time high of 14.60 percent in May of 1975 and a record low of 0.80 percent in April of 2005. Personal Savings in the United States is reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.”

We bring this up to give perspective to the International Monetary Fund’s declaration that China has surpassed the United States “in terms of economic size” Marketwatch.com writes on Dec. 4 of this event:

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Hang on to your hats, America.

And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.

As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.

This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade.

I reported on this looming development over two years ago, but the moment came sooner than I or anyone else had predicted. China’s recent decision to bring gross domestic product calculations in line with international standards has revealed activity that had previously gone uncounted.

Make no mistake: This is a geopolitical earthquake with a high reading on the Richter scale. Throughout history, political and military power have always depended on economic power. Britain was the workshop of the world before she ruled the waves. And it was Britain’s relative economic decline that preceded the collapse of her power. And it was a similar story with previous hegemonic powers such as France and Spain.

This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.

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THE PLANET shares these speculations and this information in light of the erosion of those very “civil liberties, democratic processes, and constitutional rights” in America. If for no other reason, every time local government works to suppress these rights — and THE PLANET has exemplified numerous examples — the Brave New World long predicted by artists and writers will have become that much closer to reality. Look at what passes for “leadership” in the seat of Berkshire County. It is as appalling as it is disheartening, starting with the “fairest of them all,” Mayor Daniel Bumstead.

Judging by your participation in recent city elections, this matters more than you may realize, for your the future of your city is at stake in November. Are there enough intelligent, organized, and competitive alternative candidates who will step forward in this campaign season, yank the reins of government from the likes of Bumstead, and give them back to We the People?

Will those same People give rise to a new day, a new dawn, for the once prosperous and clean city?

THE PLANET doubts it, but we shall be more than happy to be proven wrong.

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“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two …” — T. S. Eliot, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.