I’ve used “most depressing chart” in the title of columns about Germany, Japan, the western world (twice), Europe, and the United States.

Well, here’s a candidate for the most depressing chart about the global economy. The pink dots show how fast different economies grew from 2004-2014 and the red dots show growth from 2014-2024.

As you can see, the rich world (“high”) is basically stagnant while the rest of the world is suffering from a growth slowdown.

The chart comes from the Economist.

Here are some excerpts from the accompanying article.

An unfortunate club of countries is gaining new members. China, the world’s second-biggest economic power, and Russia, the most belligerent one, have joined. So have Germany, a far richer big economy, and Brazil… Some 3.3bn people, or more than two in five humans, now live in places where GDP per person grew half as fast or less in the decade to 2024 than in the previous ten years. In 2014 the figure was 1.1bn, or fewer than one in six people. Over 730m are experiencing outright declines in economists’ favourite gauge of living standards. …the number of countries and territories in the low- or no-growth club has risen from 68 in 2014 to 80 in 2024. They range from rich Canada to the dirt-poor Democratic Republic of Congo… Chinese GDP per person grew half as fast in 2014-24 as it did in 2004-14. …In Russia, per-person improvements are less than half what they used to be, despite a declining denominator because of a shrinking population.

The article specifically cites the slowdown in China and includes some sobering data.

A ten-yearly survey in China conducted by researchers from Stanford University found that in 2023 only 28% of Chinese believed hard work was always rewarded, down from 62% in 2014. …Lu Yao of Columbia University and Li Xiaoguang of Xi’an Jiaotong University have found that roughly two-fifths of jobless 23- to 28-year-old Chinese have university degrees.

Here’s a chart showing slower growth and rising joblessness in China.

As you look at this data, keep in mind that there are concerns that China’s economic output has been exaggerated.

For what it’s worth, I think the discussion of voter discontent is the most important part of the article. The bottom line is that sluggish growth means unhappy voters. And unhappy voters are susceptible to populism.

In places that are not as repressive as communist China or revanchist Russia, young people’s professional apathy can go hand in hand with political ague. …western Europeans in the throes of “nostalgic deprivation” are 55 percentage points more likely to vote for populists than those who report no such views. Research by Ruth Dassonneville of KU Leuven, a Belgian university, shows that slowing growth can lead to volatile politics. Voters swing from left to right and back, as they blame incumbents for things getting worse. Brazilians aged 16-34 helped elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-winger, as president in 2022. Amid stagnating living standards, they are likelier to back his right-wing rival in elections next month. Instability is unlikely to promote growth, provoking more instability—and so on. In another ten years’ time more places may face a similar vicious cycle.

Unfortunately, populism usually means big-government, Santa-Claus policies of more spending and easy money.

That’s a recipe for making things worse, not better (as explained in my three-part series available here, here, and here).

I’ll close by adding my two cents.

While the article addresses a very important topic, it would have been better if two issues were examined.

First, growth is a function of population growth and productivity growth, and ChatGPT tells me that world population growth dropped from about 1.3 percent per year to about 1 percent year when comparing 2004-2014 and 2014-2024. So the growth slowdown is real, but perhaps not as bad as shown in the first chart.

Second, I think Paul Krugman is wrong on lots of policy issues, but he is exactly correct about the importance of productivity. Yet the article from the Economist does not examine why productivity has slowed down. This is the proverbial elephant in the room.

As you might imagine, I put the blame on deficient government policy. And that seems to apply to every country mentioned in the article, such as China, Russia, Germany, Brazil, and Canada.

Sounds like we need to clone Javier Milei and somehow put him in charge of almost every country in the world.