While campaigning for the U.S. presidency, Barack Obama said:
"We can't just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 per cent of the world's resources with just four per cent of the world's population."
What a party pooper. But that characterization notwithstanding, this anti-capitalist and misleading assertion aimed at American voters helped win him their support and with it the White House.
Anti-capitalist? Yes. Why? Because the thought behind his statement precluded capitalism's ability to solve problems based on the desires of the free market.
But, misleading? How?
In his statement, Mr. Obama compares two statistics: 25 per cent resource consumption and four per cent population. By picking only these two statistics, then Candidate Obama's intent was to shame Americans into believing that they consume far out of proportion to the rest of the world. But his attempt at shame was misplaced because when discussing consumption, the other side of the act of consumption, production, must fairly be considered.
Humans don't just consume without producing something in return. Consumption: Production. It's a natural process. And the way we measure that production, on a national basis, a basis that Mr. Obama chose not to mention, is via gross domestic product, GDP. Mr. Obama conveniently omitted from his scolding the statistic of American GDP.
In 2010, according to the World Bank world GDP was US$63 trillion. U.S. GDP for that same year was US$16 trillion. This means that in 2010 (and for 2008, the year Mr. Obama ran for president, the number is about the same) U.S. GDP stood at 25.4% of world GDP (16 trillion divided by 63 trillion = 25.4).
So, for Candidate Obama not to be misleading, he needed to say that Americans consume 25% of the world's resources (I have a problem with the definition and veracity of that statistic, but for the sake of brevity let's just go with it.) and in turn produce 25% of the world's output, but with only 4% of the population. By evenhandedly mentioning both sides of the economic equation, Mr. Obama, instead of falsely shaming Americans could have said instead that Americans are one heck of a productive society.
But anti-capitalists are unlikely to extend such compliments to capitalists.
Richard Telofski is the principal researcher at The Kahuna Institute, Inc., a research group specializing in analyzing the effects of activism on organizations. He blogs about The War on Capitalism at Telofski.com.
Richard can be reached at: Richard@KahunaInstitute.com
