Niall Ferguson's Incoherent Critique of Obama

Yglesias deemed the attempted takedown so comprehensive it's incoherent, and indeed there are plenty of reasons why the Newsweek cover-story by the economist Niall Ferguson, whom in a sense I admire, is flawed. But let's start with this bit:

The failures of leadership on economic and fiscal policy over the past four years have had geopolitical consequences. The World Bank expects the U.S. to grow by just 2 percent in 2012. China will grow four times faster than that; India three times faster. By 2017, the International Monetary Fund predicts, the GDP of China will overtake that of the United States.

Richard Green takes issue:

Niall Ferguson is horrified at the prospect that total Chinese GDP will catch the US in 2017. Let us leave aside for a second the fact that if China's total GDP matches the US', its people will still be less than 1/4 as affluent, or the fact that maybe it would be a good thing if the most populous country in the world had living standards comparable to ours. So far as I can tell, his 2017 projection comes from assuming growth in China will continue over the next several years at the same pace it has experienced since 1989. Such projections are always problematic.

Matthew Yglesias says that the graphic I've included at the top of this post, which appeared within the article, tells you everything you need to know about the "kitchen sink quality" of his argument:

Ferguson is implicitly making two points with this graphic and it's difficult to know which of them is more absurd—the idea that Obama is responsible for rapid economic growth in China or the idea that if he were responsible that would be blameworthy.