No one beats the Solow Model
The Solow model says many things , but one of the highly observable ones is that the income levels of poor countries will tend to converge towards that of rich countries. More to the point, it'll converge towards those rich countries with similar characteristics. The point? Ah. The point being that if the country that is going to eat your shirt ( China! Japan before that! Germany! etc.) is starting from a lower baseline than you, odds are that the closer it gets to you, the more it slows down. Or, to put it differently, you can't assume that a country is going to grow at 8% for the next 20 years just because a country grew at 8% for the last 20 years. So yeah, 20 years from now, China isn't going to have flying cars and free ponies. Noah Smith has a pretty good take on this based on the question - What happened to Japan in 1991 ? As he puts it Basically, by 1990, Japan had caught up to the richest large nations in terms of per capita GDP. The only way for Jap...