The Tuesday Podcast: We're Number Two!

On today's Planet Money, we leap 30 years into the future — a time, if current trends persist, when China's economy is bigger than America's.

What does it look like?

We're watching Chinese reality shows dubbed into English, and taking life-saving drugs invented by Chinese scientists. We're exporting more goods to China's growing middle class.

The yuan probably has not supplanted the dollar as the world's reserve currency (and even if it has, it's not the end of the world).

And Chinese people are still much poorer, on average, than people in the U.S.

Today's podcast was inspired by this week's news that China passed Japan to become the world's second-biggest economy. That's important for geopolitics, but it says much less about the standard of living for the people in a country.

In GDP per capita — which says a lot about a country's standard of living — China ranks 100th in the world.

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Here's a list from the IMF of countries around the world ranked on GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity.