Japanese parents probably were never warped by "milk carton kids" -- throughout the 1980s and 1990s in the U.S., we'd see missing kids plastered on the sides of our milk cartons. It made people think that kids were being kidnapped by strangers all the time, when in fact nearly all the missing kids shown on the cartons were either runaways or were taken by a parent involved in a custody dispute (bad, sure, but not the same thing as a stranger kidnapping them). The national hysteria that resulted from this led to our current era of helicopter-parented kids. I was a kid just before all this happened, so I consider myself a member of the last generation of free range kids in the U.S.
1. US GDP per capita is still almost 8x that of China: $53,042 US vs. $6,807 China (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). While there are other ways to measure this (such as the PPP Sam cites), the magnitude of difference remains large. So even if China's economy in the aggregate is larger than the US's, the US is still much richer per capita.
2. As China grows richer, I expect the US will too. In modern inter-connected economies with few trade barriers growth in one generally benefits the other too. One example would be as one country's citizens gain greater purchasing power, they become bigger consumers of the other country's goods and services.
US GDP per capita is still almost 8x that of China
One reason this might not be the right metric is because absolute power of a country matters more than power per citizen. Imagine a country with only one citizen, but a trillion dollars. The country wouldn't be very relevant. Even if the citizen tried to hire a military and use it, they wouldn't get very far. They wouldn't exert much influence economically either, in the sense of causing other countries to become dependent.
Also, total number of citizens is an important metric in itself. People in both the US and China will pretty much do whatever their power structures tell them to do. If that means beating a war drum, there are going to be a lot of people agreeing with war on both sides, but far more in China. Overwhelming forces can be stopped with tactics and technology, but when technology is comparable the casualties are usually comparable. And China has been gathering our technology for a long time.
War isn't the concern right now, though. The example was just meant to illustrate that China seems to have more options than the US.
As China grows richer, I expect the US will too. In modern inter-connected economies with few trade barriers growth in one generally benefits the other too.
History seems to disagree. As one country grows richer, other countries tend to become subservient. There's no such thing as modern human nature.
The documentary "A State of Mind" is terrifically disturbing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_State_of_Mind). Follow two participants in North Korea's Mass Games as they prepare to put on a show for the Dear Leader. Filled with "only in NK moments."
There are actually laws prohibiting non-banks from using the word "bank" in their name. A lot of bank holding companies (which are not, technically, banks) got around this by replacing the "k" in "bank" with a "c" -- such as "BancAmerica Corp". I'm sure we all breathed a sigh of regulatory relief seeing that "c" there.
I have this quote from Charlie Munger taped above my desk: "You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high IQ." Here's a tip on reading non-fiction: It is very easy to get into a rut reading and re-reading what you already know. To achieve broader understanding leave your comfort zone and read what don't know. That is much harder to do well, but much more rewarding if you want to truly understand why things are happening. I scan book reviews looking for ecstatic reviews of books in areas I don't know. It's hit-and-miss, but I've learned so much more this way.
I love this Walt Disney quote from the post: "We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies." That is exactly what separates great content providers (the top 1%) from hacks (the other 99%). HN commenters often dismiss John Gruber as the uber-reflexive Apple fanboy he is, but posts like this suggest there are deeper waters.
There are deeper waters, but I tired of wading through the muck. Anything of his ( like this ) that is interesting enough to me to read, usually comes to me through here anyway. Except when he posts about the Rat Pack. Or baseball.....darn it.
A lot of cash rich multi-national companies have this foreign cash "problem." They earn it overseas and can't bring it back without paying U.S. tax on it, so they leave it there. On page 31 of Google's 10-Q it says that $17 billion of its $37 billion cash hoard at March 31, 2011 was held outside the U.S. and was unlikely to be repatriated to the U.S. for tax reasons. Of course that still leaves them with $20 billion in the U.S., plus whatever they've earned in the U.S. since March 31, 2011, but I guess borrowing an extra $3 billion at ultra-low US Treasury-like rates is an historically cheap way to top up the tank.
For more information see http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2402/how-many-kids-...