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By definition this scenario would lead to a massive increase in GDP growth, if your thesis is that growth in investment and exports spikes while growth in consumer spending and government spending is held roughly even.
I do think a more realistic scenario under your basic premises is that American consumer spending spikes, driven by consumer surplus and redistribution, even as wages stagnate and net exports rise moderately; there are simply no other markets in the world that would be able to absorb American production overcapacity, in the way that America allows the Chinese strategy of suppressing domestic consumption to function by absorbing Chinese overcapacity.
In either case, I don't see how GDP growth would be unable to capture these benefits. I think if this is the modal scenario you expect, you should be expecting fairly high GDP growth.
This is, of course, a bizarre way to look at the situation. There is no such thing as "overcapacity", it's cope. Chinese productivity is also not about "suppressed consumption", this is a thought-terminating cliche, they earn and consume plenty for their GDP bracket and had a fast income share growth over the entire period of getting more competitive.
But regardless, we've been here before. Has Internet made everything vastly more productive? Yes. What is the Internet's impact on GDP growth? For a pretty long time it's been a subtle scientific question and hard to register. Before, computers followed the same trajectory. Productivity improvements can escape GDP accounting.
If you want a bullish forecast, Anthropic expects GDP growth up to 15% a year by 2030.
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