I followed your tweet to your blog post and I have to agree, this is an extrmely thought provoking presentation. Extremely profound – thank you for sharing it (and Shiv Vithal for pointing it out in the first place)!

I agree and disagree...

First stats like these are nothing new. In fact they are pretty old. How old? Around the 1500's China had a population of 130 million in comparison to Europes 50 million. Do the math and the proportions have actually remained the same. In the 1500's China was actually quite superior to Europe.

China in the 1100's was producing 125,000 tons of steel, and where was Europe? Beating each other over the head with arrows and hammers.

My point is that when I see presentations like these it reminds me on how much people don't read history. The book "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" does a good job explain stats like these.

The shift has happened, and back and happened and happened again....

What I think has changed is how statistics are highlighted to seem interesting without actually giving a context. But then again that would be boring, no?

Attack china.

Just stating for the record that I'm not the Josh in the previous comment.

Christian - I agree to a point with you. The issue that you're not seeing is that in the states, China is largely viewed as that place that you get cheap plastic toys from. People tend to forget that they are (or at least could be) a fairly major player in a globalized market. Thats actually what's different here and now is the globalization of the markets. While Europe was "beating each other over the head with arrows and hammers", there wasn't a ton of fear from China because the cost of shipping and/or mobilization of troops was so high that it was a safety zone.

Now, all that is not the only reason that I posted the deck. I love the high quality of the deck and I'm trying to learn from it.

Well... Josh I agree and disagree.

I agree with respect to current times since people tend not to follow history.

HOWEVER... Europeans did actually fear and not the East. The reason is because up until five hundred years ago Europe was Italy, Greece, and parts of Western Turkey. And during those times there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atilla_The_Hun, and to a degree the mongols that were pushing westward. Of course this was not a direct threat to the Anglo Saxon states, but they were pretty much "primates."

Then about 500 hundred years the Europeans and Chinese did squirm around with each other.

Look Josh, I understand what you are trying to say with the slide deck. However, what I want to point out is that I find the slidedeck misleading. I looked at the slide deck again to verify what my original thoughts were. For example the slide "we are living in exponential times" I feel is wrong. We feel it is exponential, but what about those people that went across the ocean to live in a new world? To experience tobacco, potatoes and witness the "discovery" of new people (Native Americans). That was exponential for them.

What I feel is different now, is our ability to quantitatively store data. We can say, "hey here are 2,456,678 people. 300 years ago we would say, "ok maybe 10, maybe 30, maybe 40." That is a big shift. And since we believe we have so much information. But then again how do you think people felt when the printing press was created?