re: "It's still hard to find a producing-and-consuming substitute (for the U.S.A.)
How about India and China?
India is already a software powerhouse. Jobs that can be done over the phone, or over the net, are increasingly being outsourced to India, from all over the world. After trying socialism and economic isolationism for 40 years, they now are trying to copy the S. Korean model. If they don't dissolve into their constituent ethnic units, like the Soviet and Ottoman Empires did, they will be a superpower (and a super-consumer/producer), in a generation.
And China is further along, on the road to replacing the U.S. as the dominant world power, sometime in the 21st Century. For most of the last 3000 years, China has been the world's wealthiest, and most technologically advanced, nation. They went through one of their periodic "times of chaos", with the foreign barbarians invading (French, English, American, Japanese), from 1839-1949. They are still recovering from that. But, within my lifetime, the Chinese will be making and consuming more PCs, cellphones, Palm Pilots, etc., than Americans do. |
