First world prosperity

Brad De Long delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU
Wed Aug 26 17:08:42 PDT 1998



>On Wed, 26 Aug 1998, Brad De Long wrote:
>
>> But it's very, very, very difficult to make a serious argument that the
>> elimination of imperialism today would be noticed by first-world
>> consumers...
>
>So that the unpayable $2 trillion in hard currency debt which the globally
>imperialized owe to the global imperializers, plus all those factories the
>Fortune 1000 has built in China, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere, are just
>a figment of our imaginations, huh? Whew -- had me worried there for a
>second!
>
>-- Dennis

Look. Roughly 3% of the value of US GDP is imported from countries where the real wage level is less than half that of the United States. In most cases the cost advantage that third-world have over first-world firms is relatively small. Even if the prices of such goods are only 2/3 of what they should be because of imperialism, that's still only a 1.5% boost to U.S. GDP--and a boost that is distributed proportionally to income across the U.S. population.

If you want bigger numbers, you have to look at the Spanish crown or the Spanish aristocracy of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, at the London merchants of the eighteenth century, or at the southern planters of the nineteenth century.

Brad DeLong



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