The United States remains an economic powerhouse, accounting for 26 percent of global GDP, the same as during the “unipolar moment” of the early 1990s. In 2008, the economies of the United States and the eurozone were nearly equal in size, but today, the American economy is twice as large. It is also roughly 30 percent larger than the combined economies of the so-called global South: Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. A decade ago, it was just ten percent larger. Even the Chinese economy is shrinking relative to that of the United States in current dollar terms—the clearest gauge of a country’s purchasing power in international markets—and that measure flatters China, since Beijing inflates its numbers. In reality, China’s economy is smaller than the Communist Party claims, and it is barely growing. That dismal performance is backed up by the behavior of China’s citizens, who increasingly vote with their money and their feet. From 2021 to 2024, Chinese citizens illicitly moved hundreds of billions of dollars out of China and became the fastest-growing migrant group crossing the U.S. southern border, with their numbers surging 50-fold over this period.
The United States is also widening its lead in per capita wealth. In 1995, Japanese citizens were, on average, 50 percent wealthier than Americans, measured in current dollars; today, Americans are 140 percent richer. If Japan were a U.S. state, it would rank as the poorest in average wages, behind Mississippi—as would France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. From 1990 to 2019, U.S. median household income rose 55 percent after taxes, transfers, and adjusting for inflation, with income in the bottom fifth seeing a 74 percent gain. Although most major economies have suffered declining wages since the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. real wages have kept rising, showing a modest gain of 0.9 percent from 2020 to 2024. Many Americans, especially renters and citizens without stock holdings, feel they are losing ground because of persistently high housing and food prices, but the majority are wealthier than before the pandemic, with low-income workers seeing particularly strong gains. Since 2019, wages for the lowest-paid decile have grown nearly four times as fast as for middle earners and over ten times as fast as for top earners, helping reverse about a third of the wage inequality accumulated over the past 40 years. Today, American millennials earn roughly $10,000 more on average than previous generations did at the same age (adjusting for inflation) and are similarly likely to own homes. Many U.S. middle-class households rank within the richest one to two percent of global income earners.
Even the Council on Foreign Relations journal , here, admits America is still number 1.
