We are all made aware, by political discussions, of each of our nation’s debt, but I’m not sure we have had this debt explained to us in a proper fashion. It turns out that all of the information we need is on the web. Before we start this discussion, you might want to look at the Wikipedia article on Government Debt. This is a good place to get an idea of the mechanisms of national debt and how and why governments go into debt.

One source of data is the Economist Global Debt Clock that shows the total global debt and lists the various nation’s debt presented as a color coded global map. There is also the National Debt Clock website, which, beside the global total also lists individual national debts.

The first thing to note about these two sites is that they do not agree on the total. The debt clock presented by the Economist says total global debt is 60.66 trillion plus, while the National site says the debt is 56.67 trillion. As a physicist I would see this as acceptable (around 7 percent), but as a bookkeeper I would expect the books to balance to the penny. Clearly these errors come from a difference in reporting sources for the two sites. For our purposes, either site has numbers valid to use in relative comparisons.

While absolute numbers are valuable, reasonable comparisons can only be done when the numbers have the same meaning. The United States has an extremely large national debt (around 17 trillion) while Japan only has around 5 trillion in debt. If we look at the Debt as % of GDP web site we see a countries debt in proportion to the countries productivity that will be expected to pay back the debt. On this list, Japan has the largest debt of all the countries on the list, not just the United States.

Another way to compare debt is to consider it to be spread over the population evenly, sharing a countries debt evenly over it’s people. Japan, with a population of 127 million people, when compared with the US, with a population of 320 million has about 1/3 the population of the US with about 1/3 of the debt, so the debt shouldered by each person in Japan is about the same as the debt shouldered by each person in the US, making their debt appear about equal.

Considering the debt as being spread over the population implies that the debt is owed by the people to the government. However, in most cases this money has been borrowed primarily from the individuals in that country and is owed to them by their own government. While those governments work very hard to keep us all convinced that it is we who owe the debt it is, in fact, the government who owes us the money.

So, what can we say about this debt. It might be supposed that economically efficient countries would have lower debt, making the large debtors the most inefficient of them all. However, if you look at the bottom of the list of Debt as % of GDP, or at the color coded map, you see that the poorer African countries have almost no debt. It might be informative to try to correlate this debt with US foreign aid. This aid, coupled with the fact that the US has been involved in every major and most minor wars since World War Qne might be a contributing factor to this debt. The bottom line for everyone is that every large industrial country has debt, but it is not the kind of debt that competing countries are going to call due because they don’t hold that debt, at least not any more than any other country holds theirs. For the most part this debt is used by our governments to promote fear and drive political discussions that actually have nothing to do with that debt.