March 20, 2007
The Richest and Most Powerful Country of the Time Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:45 AM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “I’ve got bad news for Mr. Gordon. America is not categorically the ‘richest and most powerful country of the time.’ See this chart.” This reminds me of a joke a Canadian friend once told me about the forthcoming conquest of the United States by his country. I asked how Canada was planning on achieving this impressive military goal, and he said, “You know all those Canada geese that are all over the place? They’re not what you think they are.” Mr. Zeitz’s chart is a list of countries ranked by per capita GDP, with the United States ranking only tenth. That well-known global economic powerhouse, Bermuda, sits atop the list, followed by the equally formidable Luxembourg and the Isle of Jersey. Two of these three are not even sovereign states, but possessions of the Crown of Great Britain. With a collective population about equal to Chattanooga, Tennessee, Bermuda and Jersey may be rich, but they are not powerful. That is also true of the other eight territories ahead of the United States on the list. With the exception of Norway and Ireland all of them are either tax havens or oil puddles. And while both are “real countries,” even Norway is an oil puddle and Ireland a tax haven. Per capita GDP is utterly irrelevant here. If I own a single Rembrandt worth $50 million, do I have a richer and more powerful art collection than the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose 100,000 pieces of art are worth only an average of $1 million each? A more relevant chart is this one, which shows GDP per country, not per capita. The United States had a GDP in 2005 of $12.5 trillion. That is more than three times the GDP of the second-ranked country, Japan, and exceeds the GDP of the next four countries on the list—Japan, Germany, China, and the United Kingdom—combined. With 28.15 percent of world GDP, the United States is by far the richest and most powerful country of our time, perhaps any time. Bermuda is a statistical anomaly with a very pleasant climate and easy access to New York and Washington, where the power is.
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