Josef Joffe, Columnist

U.S. Is No. 1, China Is So Yesterday

The World Bank recently said the end of U.S. economic hegemony was coming before 2015 arrives. But we've heard this story before. Don't believe the hype about China.

May 12, 2014 at 2:58 PM UTC

By Josef Joffe

Josef Joffe, the editor-publisher of Die Zeit, teaches American foreign policy at Stanford University where he is also a fellow at the Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution. He is author of "The Myth of America’s Decline."

Sure, the Big Macs are cheaper, but is there enough freedom to develop the next big thing? Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg — Sure, the Big Macs are cheaper, but is there enough freedom to develop the next big thing? Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg

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A decade ago, the fabled Goldman Sachs report "Dreaming With BRICs" predicted that China's gross domestic product would overtake the U.S.'s sometime in the 2020s. The World Bank study released last month was the hype to end all hype. It advanced the date of doom to the end of this year.

Last time I looked (yesterday), the U.S. economy in 2013 was three times larger than the Chinese (in real 2005 dollars, according to the magnificent historical data set of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service). Did the Chinese economy triple in the last four months?