The Growth Map

Jim O'Neill's claim to fame is having invented the BRIC acronym for Brazil, Russia, India & China. O'Neill is clearly a deep thinker, however, who prognostication has underlying current of optimism often absent in what is often called "the dismal science". He believes that the growth of the BRICs will drive growth in other countries, both developed and smaller emerging markets. The Growth Map dates from 2011 and for the most part the trends he identified were correct.

China is now huge - the second largest economy in the world after the USA. There are a lot of ways this can be seen today. It was obvious this summer as we saw busload after busload of Chinese tourists at National Park after National Park. We have been traveling West on roadtrips since 1999 and this was our first time encountering them. Even as recently as our last trip in 2013 we didn't see the droves of Chinese that were so prevalent this past summer.

In a less personal way, last week I was looking through Fortune's list of unicorns, that is, new companies valued at over $1 billion. I like to think that I'm pretty hip and knowledgeable about the startup ecosystem. I ride Uber. I send & receive Snapchats. I listen to Spotify. I've used Atlassian products to manage a team of developers at work. I was surprised to discover that, of the companies on the unicorns list, there were many I wasn't sure how to pronounce, much less have even a passing familiarity with. These companies were all Chinese. Xiaomi. Didi Kuaidi. Zhong An. Meituan. And many, many more!

In his zeal for Chinese growth O'Neill has some moral blinders, however. While it is true that China is becoming an increasingly important part of the world economy, that does not mean the rest of the world should just accept the authoritarian, undemocratic rule of the Communist Party. O'Neill goes so far as to suggest that a country which executes thousands of its citizens every year would be a good candidate to run the World Bank!

Jim O'Neill saw 15 years ago the major role the BRICs would play in the world economy, and part of The Growth Map is undoubtedly self-congratulatory back-patting. Nevertheless, having a firsthand account inside Goldman Sachs - a company that seems to fill so many US government offices with its alumni - as their economists tried to understand how the world economy was growing is educational. O'Neill's mind at the time of writing (2011) was clearly on where the next big wave of growth would come from - Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia, etc. He also spend no small amount of time deriding the multiple representatives the Eurozone gets to send to meetings like the G8. Don't think O'Neill isn't a fan of the common currency idea though. He actually thinks it could be applied other places, although probably not among the BRICs. For all its flaws, I enjoyed the window into O'Neill's fruitful mind this book provided. We'll see if accepts my follow request on twitter.