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Donald Trump is not very good with arithmetic, but that is not a reason the rest of us should not use it. The US economy shrank at 0.3 percent annual rate in the first quarter. This figure needs the usual caveats. This is preliminary data that may be revised substantially in the next two months. It also was a very quirky report, with a huge surge in imports dwarfing everything else, as households and businesses stocked up in advance of Trump’s tariffs taking effect.

Meanwhile, it seems China’s economy remained on a healthy growth path in the first quarter, reportedly growing at a 5.4 percent annual pace. This number also needs some qualifications. China’s growth figures are always somewhat suspect.

Nonetheless, there is little doubt that the long-term story of Chinese growth is more or less accurate. They manufacture more electric vehicles than the rest of the world combined, the same holds true with solar panels and many other cutting-edge items.

They also have hugely overbuilt their housing stock, enough to house 300 million people in now vacant homes. That is a huge amount of mis-investment, but it nonetheless speaks to how much the country actually is producing.

The point is that we should take the country’s growth figures seriously, even not literally. And by their measure the economy grew by roughly 1.2 percent in the first quarter. This translates into $420 billion measured in purchasing power parity GDP.

By contrast, the US shrinkage for the first quarter comes to about $24 billion. It’s roughly 0.075 percent of our $30 trillion GDP.

To be clear, the decline in US GDP reported for the first quarter is not a big deal, and it is very possible that it will be reversed when the data is revised over the next two months. But it is the wrong direction. If Donald Trump envisions that we will surpass China and retake the leadership as the world’s dominant economy, we are so far going the wrong way.

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