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The USA, at 300 million people, is only 5% of the planetary population (over 6,000 million people). Even if you discard huge chunks of the developing world as
by cstross 17y ago
The USA, at 300 million people, is only 5% of the planetary population (over 6,000 million people).
Even if you discard huge chunks of the developing world as not a reliable market, you've got 500M people in the EU, 200M+ in the developed Pacific Rim (Japan, SK, Taiwan), 300M middle-class Chinese, and so on. It probably adds up to 1-1.5Bn developed world citizens.
For a 5% minority, the USA punches above its class at 20% of traffic ... but in the long term, hopefully it will trend towards only 5% of traffic. (I say "hopefully" because that'd indicate the rest of the world was at the same average level of connectedness ...)
- dejb 17y agoSince the article is about monetisation I'd say GDP would be the best importance metric to use. I believe the US is around 25% of world GDP.
- a-priori 17y agoA quarter is about right (it's 23.4% as of 2009). What's more interesting is the graph of US GDP and world GDP: http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&met_y=ny_gdp_mktp_cd&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=country&idim=country:USA&tdim=true&hl=en_US&dl=en http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&ctype=l&m... In the 80s, the US sat at about one-third of the world GDP. Something happened in 2002, and since then the world GDP has been skyrocketing relative to the US.
- xiaoma 17y agoThat graph is in US dollars. If you look at a currencies graph, it should become clear what's happened in the past decade.
- dhughes 17y agoIf that's the situation look at Germany population of 81 million or Japan population 127 million (Wikipedia). Germany has the fifth (CIA factbook) largest economy in the world and Japan is third. Japan has a very high percentage of elderly who probably don't work so Japan's workforce may only be half or a third of the population (excluding babies, children, prisoners etc). That's pretty humbling when compared to 300 million or China's 1.2 billion, of course adjusting for elderly, children too.