China Has Been the World’s Biggest Economy For a While

The Financial Times has a piece on how the Chinese economy is poised to take over the mantle of “world’s biggest economy” this year, which is earlier than previous estimates.

But China has been the world’s biggest economy since 2010. You can read about it in a post of mine from a couple of years ago, here.

That doesn’t mean that the news is meaningless; the fact that the relative economic positions of China and America are changing faster than expected means that the (nearly inevitable) political rebalancing will also happen faster than expected. As I said in my previous post: we’ll have to make room for others at the top, if we’re smart we’ll do it willingly and with good grace, but either way we’ll do it.