13 ms·

Jack Ma's theory of how America went wrong over the past 30 years

119 points by taobility 10y ago

snowwrestler 10y ago
This "brutal theory" is the banal obvious stuff you can find on Twitter for free in 5 minutes.
- kelukelugames 10y ago
  Mods should remove the word brutal from the title.
thinkingkong 10y ago
So... hindsight is 50/50. Anyone can look back and say what someone shouldnt have done and be "correct" but other action would have resulted in a different unknown outcome. It is cool that theres a dialogue about this at such a forum and spearheaded by a respected individual, but its nowhere near new information. Without an alternative its also just non-constructive criticism.
- lobster_johnson 10y ago
  On the other hand, what he's describing is still the status quo.
thisnotmyacc 10y ago
What rubbish! This is the thinking of someone that lives in a country with a philosophy that puts country before individuals. By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no doubt. But even for those people, what is the economic value of the wonders of the modern, internet and mobile phone age? When for the cost of an internet connection, people have access to millions of free flash games? Is that a better life than 1970s Harlem? I'm not sure either way, but it is a lot closer run thing that life is worse for the "losers" of globalization than people realize, and that is the comparison for the small minority that have missed out in the modern world, not the mean or median experience. The only way people are worse off is if they compare the best of 1960s living - e.g. have only the husband work, own a 4 bedroom house in the burbs, make a decent salary without a degree - and ignore the things missing that are present in the modern lifestyle. Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer, never got to use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980. If that sounds like a life people prefer - a big house, no lifestyle, no electronics, basic cable if lucky and only white people food - then I reckon most people could live like that even today if they so chose. But man, that isn't a life I'd be happy with. Not even slightly. If that is "losing" - better lifestyle, better food, better (and cheaper) entertainment and slightly smaller living conditions and more people working, man, "winning" would have been insanely good.
- jdietrich 10y ago
  That's a really crap excuse for inequality. The rising tide of technology has lifted all boats, but the political and economic system has systematically neglected working people. Fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible. We don't have a choice between 1960s society and modern life, but a choice between modern life in an unfair system and modern life in a fair one.
  - kmuber 10y ago
    "Fairness" is an imaginary concept. Inequality on the other hand is quite a natural concept, as in you see it everywhere in nature and the universe. There is no known process happening in nature that is trying to achieve "fairness". Temporary stability and equilibrium on the other hand is achievable. And technological progress is naturally inequality increasing/destabilizing to such systems. Tigers in nature don't just grow sharper claws or canines to be "disruptive". It happens only in response to an increase in the number of prey. Which usually happens in response to more grass on the plains. Which is in response to more rains and so on. If the tiger starts evolving hunting efficiency at a faster rate than the deer evolves defensive features like speed, hearing etc the tiger will kill more and the entire system will soon breakdown. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOHgztZ3XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOHgztZ3XI So to say "fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible" is just not true.
    - arximboldi 10y ago
      So what you are saying is that some humans are tigers and some are their preys. Humans: the first massively cannibal species. In fact, most developed mammals develop societies and specially in many apes these are quite egalitarian. In the same way as developing tools and understanding nature in order to adapt to it was key to the success of humans, I believe that the ability to cooperate and to feel for each-other via empathy is key as well. Your mechanistic view of evolution and nature disregards all social aspects of human existence. It is unscientific and and excuse to support oppressive systems and the predatory behaviors that are putting the planet and humans themselves at risk. Nature does not "disrupt", nature adapts and evolves. It creates symbiotic systems that enable long processes in which life, this weird mechanism constantly energy into movement, can happen. It created humans, with the abilities to discern, associate, help each other and pursue happiness. Your cannibalistic view of society is not gonna remove our "natural" thrive to build societies worth living in from the rest of us.
jusq2 10y ago
He forgot celebrity worshipfulness and the consumer culture. The machine that produces celebrity/consumerism today is a hyper efficient over optimized machine. He is basically saying people didn't get what they need. And that's because the celeb/consumerism machine's only job is to keep giving people what they want. What they need has nothing to do with it. Whether its Obama or Trump, Zuckerberg or Musk, subprime mortgages or iphones it's all about what people want and not need.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  The advertising industry (which includes general media) have a lot to answer for there. They've been "programming" 2 to 3 generations now to just buy stuff and pay attention to people making the most noise for attention. Not having had a TV in the house for over 8 years now, I was reintroduced to the world of free to air TV during our Christmas holidays when we went away for a month and stayed with friends who were avid TV watchers. Been that long since I had seen a TV advertisement, and I was astounded at the how banal and low brow most advertising is these days. I seem to remember a time when ads were clever and creative, but the ones I kept seeing with monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick sound bites ordering people to go buy junk or watch more crap. Everything was really disjointed and jarring to me - I actually came across a couple of shows that I wanted to watch, but they never seemed to get started - every few minutes there was an interruption telling me what else I "couldn't miss" watching, which are just more shows that will in turn have interruptions to watch other shows. Oddly, my friends who owned the TV didn't seem to see a problem. Really makes me wonder if TV audiences these days are just conditioned to have such a short attention span and are used to being forced fed suggestions like this. Or perhaps they are so hardened to it that advertising companies have to just blast short messages to them with all the subtlety of a drone strike? Time for humanity to take control back over their time and attention, otherwise it will just be "All glory to the Hypnotoad"...
  - jusq2 10y ago
    I am with you. The attention economy has all kinds of unintended side effects that don't seem to have any great solutions. And its not just advertising most entertainment/propaganda/marketing is designed to just get an instant reaction. No contemplation necessary. Kind of like porn. And if we have to be honest hacker news is very similar. Nobody needs this much news.
panic 10y ago
This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0. People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix it.
- SerLava 10y ago
  The end of that video was disturbing. At least tomorrow I'll wake up to a 30 dollar an hour coal mining job, right?
- peterwwillis 10y ago
  The argument he's putting forth is so incredibly vapid and simple-minded that it's a stunning indictment of the lack of vision of a supreme court judge into the American zeitgeist. Americans understand the basic concept of the vote. A freaking six year old understands it. There are leaders, and they sycophantically grovel for the favor of the public, which the public gives freely in exchange for the politician promising to give them their hearts' desire. And then the public may or may not get what they want. If the politician cannot appropriately explain the reasons for this, they are dumped and the next sycophant is wrung through. That's about all they know, and all they need to know, because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf, and in general do good for the people. But that is not what happens in America. Here, our political leaders don't serve the people. And the people know that. But the people can't do anything about it. And the reason they can't do anything about it is the people voted their way into this mess. Trying to vote their way out will just result in exactly the same thing. What the former Justice is saying is, the biggest problem in politics and public life is people don't understand how the legislative and judicial and executive processes work. But people do not need to know how this works, they merely need to voice their opinions and vote. And half of the people do vote. The other half don't vote either because they can't, or because they know what the result of voting is. The American democracy in the 20th and 21st century is an artisanal machine which produces a specific output. Votes and labor go in, and money comes out. But the machine is designed to mostly spit out money which can only be used by corporations and rich people; only a small percentage of that comes out in a form usable by the people. The people know their votes are mostly meaningless, but it is their only tangible method left to express their discontent. So they support the system that produces an awful result because it's the only way they can express that the machine produces an awful result. I think the people see this contradiction, and I think this is why so many do not vote: it's like complaining that your shoe hurts and then putting it on again to see how it will fit.
lexap 10y ago
Ma makes a good point, but he's implicitly saying the China's authoritarian regime wouldn't have lost the money as "free" market actors did in the US. Sure, fine, but most Chinese would trade that money for American political freedoms and economic opportunities in a heartbeat.
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I don't know if "free market actors" is exactly the right way to describe the two things he talks about. War is certainly not a function of the market, Wall Street is kind of a grey area that uses the language of free markets to describe something that is an odd state-empowered cartel. Clearly the bailout was not a "free market" event. So...I don't think he is implicitly or explicitly saying anything about China's authoritarian regime. It wasn't free markets that lost the money he's speaking of. And, there wasn't a trade of that money for political freedoms and economic opportunities. The American people just got a bad deal out of their government and their financiers. They didn't buy freedom with that money, they just got fleeced.
- runholm 10y ago
  He is not comparing China or any other specific country to the US. He is giving his views on where the US could have done better. Yes, you should read this in the light of him being a successful Chinese businessman, but he is not saying that Chinese people live better than US people.
rmetzler 10y ago
I think it might be much more than $2 trillion the US spent on wars. Remember Sept 10th 2001? Donald Rumsfeld said on this day, they can't find out how they spent $2.3 trillion.
visarga 10y ago
It's always about the choice between short-term vs long-term benefits, or between us and them, or rich and poor. When people don't act as if other people (or even themselves, in the future) are connected to them, they make bad choices in the long term. On personal terms it's a battle between temptation and moral action. It's basically a problem of strategy in games (here, the game being well-being). There are two main strategies: optimize for low level features (immediate benefit) or high-level features (what you should do in order to succeed). Companies battle the same choices, often very rich and successful ones optimizing for short term instead of long term, as if they expect to close shop in a few years. The main purpose of politics should be to balance the focus between short and long term strategies, but short term relies on corruption and long term on consciousness, so it's an uphill battle. It's also called principle of "delayed gratification" - few can handle the rigors of it. With the new Trump administration we should prepare for a lot of short-term based choices that ignore the long-term consequences.
lend000 10y ago
The Wall Street comments are a bit vague/nebulous, but the amount we've spent on unnecessary war-mongering even after Vietnam is a relatively obvious problem that apparently is no longer obvious, now that we lost our "anti-war" party (the formerly anti-war Democrats). Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the US), we are truly buried financially. He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.
- srean 10y ago
  ..but but without frequent wars how are we going to run a welfare state for big corporations that produces artifacts with no natural demand. How are we supposed to channel tax payer's money to them so that they can share some of them back by employing people
  - fennecfoxen 10y ago
    Ethanol credits, duh.
  - kmuber 10y ago
    the wikipedia model.
- devoply 10y ago
  War in the US is essentially corruption rearing its ugly head. American political elite can't make money through local corruption because there are too many controls in place. So instead they make money by attacking and looting other countries through under the table, or even over the table, business deals. As Smedley Butler said, war is a racket. Americans are getting robbed and at the same time cheering on their politician robbers. Support our troops, yeah!
- peterwwillis 10y ago
NicoJuicy 10y ago
Jack Ma is very protective like China, if Americans / rest of the world was like that, chances were unlikely that China could grew so much. Also, by any measures, China is cheating right now and trying to minimize the capital bubble risk created by the government ( loans that are not payed back with worthless warranties eg. Failed buildings, subsidized shipping, manipulated / protected stocks,... ). Let's see what the future brings. PS. If downvoted, please explain why and if you have ever travelled to China :)
teknologist 10y ago
Jack Ma: a guy whose success can only be attributed to the existence of China's Internet firewall. I try to avoid reading about his "insights".
- runholm 10y ago
  He is not a neutral source of information, but his views might be interesting to read because of his unique bias. He has a perspective on the world which is very different from most other sources I read.
woodandsteel 10y ago
The idea that the US's economic problems are due to war expenditures is just plain silly. The economic golden age for the US was during the cold war, when the country spent 6-10% of its gdp on the military. Then the cold war ended, and military expenditures have been below 4% most of the time, but the US economy has done worse. Oh, and China has boomed at the same time it has been engaging in a huge, expensive military modernization program. I am not saying high military expenditures produce economic prosperity, just that they don't prevent it (unless they are much higher, as the Soviet Union's were).

119 points by taobility 10y ago

snowwrestler 10y ago

This "brutal theory" is the banal obvious stuff you can find on Twitter for free in 5 minutes.

kelukelugames 10y ago
Mods should remove the word brutal from the title.

thinkingkong 10y ago

So... hindsight is 50/50. Anyone can look back and say what someone shouldnt have done and be "correct" but other action would have resulted in a different unknown outcome. It is cool that theres a dialogue about this at such a forum and spearheaded by a respected individual, but its nowhere near new information. Without an alternative its also just non-constructive criticism.

lobster_johnson 10y ago
On the other hand, what he's describing is still the status quo.

thisnotmyacc 10y ago

What rubbish! This is the thinking of someone that lives in a country with a philosophy that puts country before individuals. By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no doubt. But even for those people, what is the economic value of the wonders of the modern, internet and mobile phone age? When for the cost of an internet connection, people have access to millions of free flash games? Is that a better life than 1970s Harlem? I'm not sure either way, but it is a lot closer run thing that life is worse for the "losers" of globalization than people realize, and that is the comparison for the small minority that have missed out in the modern world, not the mean or median experience. The only way people are worse off is if they compare the best of 1960s living - e.g. have only the husband work, own a 4 bedroom house in the burbs, make a decent salary without a degree - and ignore the things missing that are present in the modern lifestyle. Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer, never got to use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980. If that sounds like a life people prefer - a big house, no lifestyle, no electronics, basic cable if lucky and only white people food - then I reckon most people could live like that even today if they so chose. But man, that isn't a life I'd be happy with. Not even slightly. If that is "losing" - better lifestyle, better food, better (and cheaper) entertainment and slightly smaller living conditions and more people working, man, "winning" would have been insanely good.

jdietrich 10y ago
That's a really crap excuse for inequality. The rising tide of technology has lifted all boats, but the political and economic system has systematically neglected working people. Fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible. We don't have a choice between 1960s society and modern life, but a choice between modern life in an unfair system and modern life in a fair one.
- kmuber 10y ago
  "Fairness" is an imaginary concept. Inequality on the other hand is quite a natural concept, as in you see it everywhere in nature and the universe. There is no known process happening in nature that is trying to achieve "fairness". Temporary stability and equilibrium on the other hand is achievable. And technological progress is naturally inequality increasing/destabilizing to such systems. Tigers in nature don't just grow sharper claws or canines to be "disruptive". It happens only in response to an increase in the number of prey. Which usually happens in response to more grass on the plains. Which is in response to more rains and so on. If the tiger starts evolving hunting efficiency at a faster rate than the deer evolves defensive features like speed, hearing etc the tiger will kill more and the entire system will soon breakdown. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOHgztZ3XI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOHgztZ3XI So to say "fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible" is just not true.
  - arximboldi 10y ago
    So what you are saying is that some humans are tigers and some are their preys. Humans: the first massively cannibal species. In fact, most developed mammals develop societies and specially in many apes these are quite egalitarian. In the same way as developing tools and understanding nature in order to adapt to it was key to the success of humans, I believe that the ability to cooperate and to feel for each-other via empathy is key as well. Your mechanistic view of evolution and nature disregards all social aspects of human existence. It is unscientific and and excuse to support oppressive systems and the predatory behaviors that are putting the planet and humans themselves at risk. Nature does not "disrupt", nature adapts and evolves. It creates symbiotic systems that enable long processes in which life, this weird mechanism constantly energy into movement, can happen. It created humans, with the abilities to discern, associate, help each other and pursue happiness. Your cannibalistic view of society is not gonna remove our "natural" thrive to build societies worth living in from the rest of us.

jusq2 10y ago

He forgot celebrity worshipfulness and the consumer culture. The machine that produces celebrity/consumerism today is a hyper efficient over optimized machine. He is basically saying people didn't get what they need. And that's because the celeb/consumerism machine's only job is to keep giving people what they want. What they need has nothing to do with it. Whether its Obama or Trump, Zuckerberg or Musk, subprime mortgages or iphones it's all about what people want and not need.

cyberferret 10y ago
The advertising industry (which includes general media) have a lot to answer for there. They've been "programming" 2 to 3 generations now to just buy stuff and pay attention to people making the most noise for attention. Not having had a TV in the house for over 8 years now, I was reintroduced to the world of free to air TV during our Christmas holidays when we went away for a month and stayed with friends who were avid TV watchers. Been that long since I had seen a TV advertisement, and I was astounded at the how banal and low brow most advertising is these days. I seem to remember a time when ads were clever and creative, but the ones I kept seeing with monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick sound bites ordering people to go buy junk or watch more crap. Everything was really disjointed and jarring to me - I actually came across a couple of shows that I wanted to watch, but they never seemed to get started - every few minutes there was an interruption telling me what else I "couldn't miss" watching, which are just more shows that will in turn have interruptions to watch other shows. Oddly, my friends who owned the TV didn't seem to see a problem. Really makes me wonder if TV audiences these days are just conditioned to have such a short attention span and are used to being forced fed suggestions like this. Or perhaps they are so hardened to it that advertising companies have to just blast short messages to them with all the subtlety of a drone strike? Time for humanity to take control back over their time and attention, otherwise it will just be "All glory to the Hypnotoad"...
- jusq2 10y ago
  I am with you. The attention economy has all kinds of unintended side effects that don't seem to have any great solutions. And its not just advertising most entertainment/propaganda/marketing is designed to just get an instant reaction. No contemplation necessary. Kind of like porn. And if we have to be honest hacker news is very similar. Nobody needs this much news.

panic 10y ago

This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0. People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix it.

SerLava 10y ago
The end of that video was disturbing. At least tomorrow I'll wake up to a 30 dollar an hour coal mining job, right?
peterwwillis 10y ago
The argument he's putting forth is so incredibly vapid and simple-minded that it's a stunning indictment of the lack of vision of a supreme court judge into the American zeitgeist. Americans understand the basic concept of the vote. A freaking six year old understands it. There are leaders, and they sycophantically grovel for the favor of the public, which the public gives freely in exchange for the politician promising to give them their hearts' desire. And then the public may or may not get what they want. If the politician cannot appropriately explain the reasons for this, they are dumped and the next sycophant is wrung through. That's about all they know, and all they need to know, because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf, and in general do good for the people. But that is not what happens in America. Here, our political leaders don't serve the people. And the people know that. But the people can't do anything about it. And the reason they can't do anything about it is the people voted their way into this mess. Trying to vote their way out will just result in exactly the same thing. What the former Justice is saying is, the biggest problem in politics and public life is people don't understand how the legislative and judicial and executive processes work. But people do not need to know how this works, they merely need to voice their opinions and vote. And half of the people do vote. The other half don't vote either because they can't, or because they know what the result of voting is. The American democracy in the 20th and 21st century is an artisanal machine which produces a specific output. Votes and labor go in, and money comes out. But the machine is designed to mostly spit out money which can only be used by corporations and rich people; only a small percentage of that comes out in a form usable by the people. The people know their votes are mostly meaningless, but it is their only tangible method left to express their discontent. So they support the system that produces an awful result because it's the only way they can express that the machine produces an awful result. I think the people see this contradiction, and I think this is why so many do not vote: it's like complaining that your shoe hurts and then putting it on again to see how it will fit.

lexap 10y ago

Ma makes a good point, but he's implicitly saying the China's authoritarian regime wouldn't have lost the money as "free" market actors did in the US. Sure, fine, but most Chinese would trade that money for American political freedoms and economic opportunities in a heartbeat.

SwellJoe 10y ago
I don't know if "free market actors" is exactly the right way to describe the two things he talks about. War is certainly not a function of the market, Wall Street is kind of a grey area that uses the language of free markets to describe something that is an odd state-empowered cartel. Clearly the bailout was not a "free market" event. So...I don't think he is implicitly or explicitly saying anything about China's authoritarian regime. It wasn't free markets that lost the money he's speaking of. And, there wasn't a trade of that money for political freedoms and economic opportunities. The American people just got a bad deal out of their government and their financiers. They didn't buy freedom with that money, they just got fleeced.
runholm 10y ago
He is not comparing China or any other specific country to the US. He is giving his views on where the US could have done better. Yes, you should read this in the light of him being a successful Chinese businessman, but he is not saying that Chinese people live better than US people.

rmetzler 10y ago

I think it might be much more than $2 trillion the US spent on wars. Remember Sept 10th 2001? Donald Rumsfeld said on this day, they can't find out how they spent $2.3 trillion.

visarga 10y ago

It's always about the choice between short-term vs long-term benefits, or between us and them, or rich and poor. When people don't act as if other people (or even themselves, in the future) are connected to them, they make bad choices in the long term. On personal terms it's a battle between temptation and moral action. It's basically a problem of strategy in games (here, the game being well-being). There are two main strategies: optimize for low level features (immediate benefit) or high-level features (what you should do in order to succeed). Companies battle the same choices, often very rich and successful ones optimizing for short term instead of long term, as if they expect to close shop in a few years. The main purpose of politics should be to balance the focus between short and long term strategies, but short term relies on corruption and long term on consciousness, so it's an uphill battle. It's also called principle of "delayed gratification" - few can handle the rigors of it. With the new Trump administration we should prepare for a lot of short-term based choices that ignore the long-term consequences.

lend000 10y ago

The Wall Street comments are a bit vague/nebulous, but the amount we've spent on unnecessary war-mongering even after Vietnam is a relatively obvious problem that apparently is no longer obvious, now that we lost our "anti-war" party (the formerly anti-war Democrats). Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the US), we are truly buried financially. He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.

srean 10y ago
..but but without frequent wars how are we going to run a welfare state for big corporations that produces artifacts with no natural demand. How are we supposed to channel tax payer's money to them so that they can share some of them back by employing people
- fennecfoxen 10y ago
  Ethanol credits, duh.
- kmuber 10y ago
  the wikipedia model.
devoply 10y ago
War in the US is essentially corruption rearing its ugly head. American political elite can't make money through local corruption because there are too many controls in place. So instead they make money by attacking and looting other countries through under the table, or even over the table, business deals. As Smedley Butler said, war is a racket. Americans are getting robbed and at the same time cheering on their politician robbers. Support our troops, yeah!
peterwwillis 10y ago

NicoJuicy 10y ago

Jack Ma is very protective like China, if Americans / rest of the world was like that, chances were unlikely that China could grew so much. Also, by any measures, China is cheating right now and trying to minimize the capital bubble risk created by the government ( loans that are not payed back with worthless warranties eg. Failed buildings, subsidized shipping, manipulated / protected stocks,... ). Let's see what the future brings. PS. If downvoted, please explain why and if you have ever travelled to China :)

teknologist 10y ago

Jack Ma: a guy whose success can only be attributed to the existence of China's Internet firewall. I try to avoid reading about his "insights".

runholm 10y ago
He is not a neutral source of information, but his views might be interesting to read because of his unique bias. He has a perspective on the world which is very different from most other sources I read.

woodandsteel 10y ago

The idea that the US's economic problems are due to war expenditures is just plain silly. The economic golden age for the US was during the cold war, when the country spent 6-10% of its gdp on the military. Then the cold war ended, and military expenditures have been below 4% most of the time, but the US economy has done worse. Oh, and China has boomed at the same time it has been engaging in a huge, expensive military modernization program. I am not saying high military expenditures produce economic prosperity, just that they don't prevent it (unless they are much higher, as the Soviet Union's were).