The International Monetary Fund announced Wednesday that China’s economy, when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), surpassed that of the United States to become the world’s largest… For the US, which has occupied the top slot since 1872, the news may cause some alarm…
— from the International Business Times, October 2014
The Big Picture is really complicated, so I normally try to keep my focus local. But the local picture depends to some extent upon the Big Picture, and also reflects the Big Picture.
One of the informational sessions I attended on Wednesday at the Pagosa Springs Tourism Conference featured a panel discussion about cooperation among competitors. The panel included the tourism directors from three small Colorado towns — Pagosa Springs, Ouray, and Glenwood Springs — who have been collaborating for the past three years to promote a tourist-oriented “Historic Hot Springs Loop” which includes those three towns, plus Steamboat Springs, Ridgway, Buena Vista, Nathrop, and Salida.
There’s actually nothing particularly “Historic” about this highway loop, other than the fact that these various hot springs have been flowing, in their natural, undeveloped state, since before humans walked on the earth. The word “Historic” is typical marketing hyperbole, I guess — an attempt to assign something ‘value’ that it doesn’t actually have — but it helped the towns qualify for matching “historic” funding from the Colorado Tourism Office.
But what’s pertinent to the current discussion is the fact that these eight hot springs towns could easily see themselves as competitors, fighting over a limited number of tourists to win the largest piece of the pie. Instead, they’ve come together in a joint effort, working hand-in-hand, and each has agreed to market and promote the other seven towns as “historic” sites also worth visiting.
Here’s a three-minute YouTube video promoting the loop.
The lion’s share of marketing for this tourist experience is taking place through the Colorado Tourism Office website, Colorado.com. You can view the promotional website here.
Which is to say, it’s possible that numerous potential Chinese tourists have learned about this loop, via the magic of the Internet.
As our readers are probably aware, the economy of China recently surpassed the US economy, in terms of PPP — purchasing power parity. Most American economists, however, prefer to discuss national economies in terms of GDP — Gross Domestic Product. According to a wide variety of economist opinions offered on the Internet, China’s GDP will surpass that of the US at some point between 2020 and “never.”
On the tourism front, the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism recently announced that about 149 million Chinese engaged in international travel last year, an increase of about 15 percent over 2017. We might note that 149 million is close to half the total population of the US. But the Chinese government appears to be discouraging travel to the US since the beginning of the Trump administration’s trade war with China.
From a July, 2018 posting on JingTravel.com:
The Chinese embassy in the United States posted a new notice on its Chinese language website regarding summer vacation travel, particularly in regards to students studying abroad, warning visitors of gun violence, theft, robbery, and high medical costs. The noticed advised visitors to purchase travel insurance for travel in the United States and beware of how to contact emergency services via 911…
We can’t blame the Chinese embassy for warning its citizens, I suppose. Stories about gun violence appear practically daily in the US media. Per capita health care costs in the US are about twenty times higher than health care costs in China. Probably a good idea to purchase travel insurance.
But there’s another part of the Big Picture that intrigues me, and I’m trying to wrap my head around it.
I made reference, in Part Three of this editorial series, to the young men who came home to Pagosa Springs following the Second World War, to start their families and find jobs in the sawmills… on ranches… in the schools and retail establishments. The Pagosa economy in the 1950s was based on lumber manufacturing and livestock. I can imagine that the word, “tourism,” was not even part of most people’s vocabulary — probably as rare as the terms “quarter sawn” and “diamond hitch” are, to most of us current residents.
Here in Pagosa, and across the whole US, both manufacturing and agriculture have seen a steep decline, in terms of their economic importance to the American working class.
During the 2016 Presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised us that he’d make America great again by addressing the globalization of manufacturing and agriculture — by bringing back the jobs that had, somehow, been transferred to foreign countries like China — and by stamping out illegal immigration. Apparently, a lot of people thought Mr. Trump was making a valid promise.
But the true facts suggest otherwise. The reason American manufacturing jobs have disappeared, and the reason American agricultural jobs have disappeared, has less to do with “globalization” or “immigration” — and more to do with mechanization and automation. The latest trend is, of course, the loss of service jobs. Cashiers. Bookkeepers. Warehouse workers. Waitresses. Receptionists.
From a 2016 article in the New York Times:
Take the steel industry. It lost 400,000 people, 75 percent of its work force, between 1962 and 2005. But its shipments did not decline, according to a study published in the American Economic Review last year. The reason was a new technology called the minimill…
Andrew F. Puzder, Mr. Trump’s pick for labor secretary and chief executive of CKE Restaurants, extolled the virtues of robot employees over the human kind in an interview with ‘Business Insider’ in March.
“They’re always polite; they always upsell; they never take a vacation; they never show up late; there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex or race discrimination case,” he said…
Shortly after the 2016 election, Donald Trump was speaking to a group of technology company leaders.
“We want you to keep going with the incredible innovation. Anything we can do to help this go along, we’re going to be there for you.”
But the incredible innovation, more and more, seems to be coming from China. And with that innovation comes global influence.