Niall Ferguson does not think China will overtake America in the next twenty years

When I was in Peking I bought and read Niall Ferguson's interesting 2011 book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest and had dinner with the historian James Palmer, who lives in the city. 

He told me that everything that Niall Ferguson said in the book about China (a lot) was wrong.

I realise now that James Palmer is ardently anti-colonial and left-wing and so disposed not to like a historian who has achieved my childhood ambition and presented imperialism in a fair light. Also, like me, Niall Ferguson loves AJP Taylor.

Still, I assume Mr Palmer knew what he was talking about. 

There is something slightly too feather-footed about Niall Ferguson, a conservative who apologised for saying that there might be a link between Keynes' homosexuality and his economic theories (a remark I remember someone making in the Spectator fifteen or twenty years earlier) and who, unlike Andrew Roberts, opposed Brexit before coming round to it after the referendum. 

Dr Fergusson also opposed Donald Trump. Perhaps it would have ruined his career had he not. 

This is from Dr Fergusson's latest and very inconclusive thoughts on China. He is honest in hedging his bets. Nobody, least of all historians, know the future. 

A major mistake of the Cold War was the tendency of Western observers to overestimate the Soviet Union. I have often wondered if the same mistake is being repeated with the People’s Republic of China. Then again, for every article over the last 10 years that predicted China’s economy would overtake that of the U.S., there were at least two prophesying a “China crisis.”

.....Let’s begin by recalling how many experts believed the Soviets would overtake America. In successive editions, the economist Paul Samuelson’s hugely influential economics textbook carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the U.S. at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the time frame had been moved forward to 2002-2012. The graph was quietly dropped after that.

Samuelson was by no means the only American scholar to make this mistake. A late as 1984, Harvard’s liberal guru John Kenneth Galbraith could still insist that “the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

It is good to be reminded how wrong the experts were about Bolshevik Russia, including the drily funny J.K. Galbraith, whom I respected in my teens and twenties very much more than I do now. He had a sense of humour, something not nearly so common on the left of centre as on the right. 

As you get older, you see who are political ideologues and he was one.

I remember how shocked I was when in 1981 I read him saying that if he were British he would certainly certainly vote Labour. 

I read his account of his visit to the USSR and remember him expecting Brezhnev's Russia to deliver the goods yet he appeared on the BBC and his books sold well in Penguin. Galbraith would have been an ardent admirer of Joe Biden now. Yet he is still considered very clever and Donald Trump a fool.