Communicating vessels: Asia grows up, while the West gets poorer.
February 14, 2018
Principle of communicating vessels: if total wealth in the world grows slowly and a group benefits from this, the other group loses weight, strength and money.
What are we talking about?
From the 1990s onwards, Eastern countries, dragged by China and then by India, have achieved the so-called globalization. While Africa was growing very slowly, Asia made the lion’s leap. China’s GDP grew exponentially, so much that the country reached – and even overcame – the USA.
In facts globalization offered a better and more sustainable life to almost 3 billion people who had been in need until that moment. These people’s per capita income increased from 600 to 8000 dollars a year.
But, at the same time, global growth has made some steps backwards and, while millions of people were living an improvement in the quality of their lives, the bill was paid by European and American middle classes.
The result? Great tensions in our countries, where groups of workers, especially those with a fixed income, saw their buying and political power getting weaker. Brexit is a result of this situation and Trump is the most obvious consequence. And maybe traditional parties are quite responsible of this, as they kept on acting without taking into consideration the principle of communicating vessels.
Some years ago, the most famous inequality’s economist, Thomas Piketty, predicted a slow trend in global growth in his book “Capital in The Twenty – First Century”. This too little growth couldn’t do but damage the weakest parts of society’s structure: middle classes.
We don’t need to say that Africa, already out of globalization, hasn’t been involved in this mechanism…