>>10854654Actually I don't believe that picture at all. In my personal theory, every measure of economic performance is a pointless meme except for one: the efficient utilization of energy. If you think about it in absolute terms, this is how we'd measure different alien civilizations as well - it is the ultimate measurement of the efficiency of a civilization in this Universe where energy is all that matters.
So let's look at pic related - turns out that it's quite correct - nations that we think of as the most developed consume abnormal levels of energy while the 3rd world consumes levels equivalent to 100 years ago. As an example of how bad this is, 1960 North America had an energy consumption per capita equivalent to Sweden right now. Turns out, this is exactly what happened as well - North America basically dominated production and innovation in the Western world for that time, significantly overshadowing anyone around them and having a complete monopoly on most things. This proves one thing - you can have as many people as you want, but if you fail to supply them with energy, they're about as useful as a villager from a century ago - they'd be disconnected from the world and their input would be close to zero when compared to the handful of energy-devouring people who spearhead innovation and production.
So the only way that your picture becomes reality, i.e China towers far above anyone else, is if their ECPC (2.23 tons) goes above Western Europe's (~3.6 tons avg). Now here's the problem, it's not that it's impossible, it's the fact that it's impossible for specifically China. The way China's geopolitics work is that they cannot project influence where there's oil and even if they ever did, the US specifically would absolutely never allow it. That would be the equivalent of having their problem with Iran materialize into an alliance of Iran plus Syria plus China plus potentially Turkey, Russia and so on.
