National per capita wealth is measured in Gross National Product divided by the population. But if Paraguay decreed that everyone in the country write a poem and sell it to someone else for $100 ten times a day for a year, Paraguay would have the fifth largest GNP in the world and per capita income of an astronomical $300,000 per year. This would be a mirage.

But so was much of the Clinton-Bush/Blair-Brown economic boom and its foreign imitators' replications. In the US, there are now a formidable 48 metropolitan areas with more than one million people. All of them have clusters of skyscrapers filled with busy and talented people who don't really add value to anything. Merchant bankers promoting deals that later usually go sour; lawyers generating a trillion dollars annually in legal bills, half of which should not have been run up in this insanely over-lawyered country; consultants generating another trillion dollars of billings, for telling well-paid executives how to do their jobs; $2.4 trillion of medical expenses, $3,000 more per capita than any other advanced country; and teeming masses of retail sales people. They don't produce much, but make money move around faster and multiply transactions that add to the GNP. Yes, the learned professions, medical research and the drug companies are indispensable, but the US legal and healthcare systems are hideously over-expensive, and this administration, after a few verbal throwaways, has done nothing to reduce the cost of either.

About 30 years ago, the West acted on the self-important delusion that overalls and metal lunchboxes were beneath it and we plunged into the fool's paradise of the service economy. Some parts of that economy, such as computer programming and, up to a point, academics, are legitimate value creation, but most are not.

Even 30 years ago, sophisticated economies were manufacturing economies, balanced by natural resources, heavy industry and professional and technical executive support of adequate depth and innovation. Resource economies were just hewers of wood and drawers of water, as natural resource importers such as Japan financed new production of everything they imported and maintained a buyers' market.

Now, with China and India representing 40 per cent of the world's population, with annual economic growth rates of six to ten per cent, there are steady, firm and rising prices for almost all base and precious metals, energy, agriculture and forest products. Manufacturing has been outsourced to developing countries, with only the most sophisticated, such as aviation, high-tech and advanced defence production, retained. Resource-rich countries with relatively small but well-educated populations, such as Canada, Australia and Norway, are now the most successful in the world.

When economic meltdown hit, the Left, battered into a coma by Reagan and George W. Bush, rose up and proclaimed the ignominious end of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. But those leaders had left their countries in excellent condition, with current-account surpluses and, in America's case, only a modest budgetary deficit. This crisis is no victory for the Left.