A meme popular among American pundits claims that China’s economy is doomed by a slowly declining population. More important than the aggregate Chinese population is the technically proficient Chinese population.
That has grown 20-fold, or by 2,000%, in the past 40 years. Other Asian countries, notably South Korea, previously achieved record-shattering productivity gains with similar enhancement of skills.
We’ve heard this argument before, applied to the Asian Tigers. The doomsayers had their heyday just before East Asia’s growth went vertical. Perhaps the worst economic prediction in recorded history was Paul Krugman’s 1994 assertion that the Asian economic miracle was a myth, and that the Asian Tigers—Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—would crumble like the Soviet Union.