International Law

China Versus India. How To Always "Win" The Argument.

By Dan

iLook China has a post up comparing China's economic future with India's. The post focuses on the recent Economist cover story positing that India's economy will soon out-pace China's. I never read that article because I find articles like that somewhat silly. Economists have trouble predicting two years out, much less ten or twenty. The problem with predictions is that they have to be based mostly on the past and though the past is one of the best predictors of the future, it is still not all that accurate.

So I thought the iLook post, "Comparing India and China's Economic Engines," would provide me a with a super-quick summary of the Economist cover story comparing India with China, but it did not. Instead, it puts forth an utterly absurd and panda-istic argument for why China's economy will continue surpassing India's into the distant future. iLook's argument is essentially that China is working on becoming a republic and India's existing democracy is not all that it is cracked up to be. In other words, iLook takes what he sees as China's aspirations and assumes (without a shred of factual support or even argument) that China will very shortly fully achieve those aspirations. As for India, he takes India's government as it is (and exaggerates its problems a bit for good measure) and assumes (again without a shred of factual support or even argument) that India will never progress even one iota.

Not fair, iLook. Not fair at all.

What do you think?

Full post as published by China Law Blog on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).