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> I simply brought up China's remarkable economic success, and you responded with a laundry list of "China Bad!" that mostly had nothing to do with economics.

> I simply brought up China's remarkable economic success, and you responded with a laundry list of "China Bad!" that mostly had nothing to do with economics. You're right that I insufficiently explained what I meant with the links. I'll break down how I felt the list had economic relevance: [0][1] ~55mm people died or were killed during the Great Leap Forward and the Chinese famine likely stemmed from it as well. Looking at a series of historical Chinese GDP data, you can see that these policies caused economic contraction of -26.6% at their peak. If evaluating the merits of economic systems, this is a clear failure. [2] China uses its human rights abuses to further its economy. Consider the harvest and sale of human organs [`]. That's clearly economic activity. It's also mortifying. Ultimately though, I'd say it's relevant to the discussion. [3] Industrial espionage has everything to do with economics. There's no doubt that China is the largest perpetrator of industrial espionage in the world. If you want to demonstrate that Western values aren't necessary to develop prosperity, it doesn't help to steal so much IP from the West. [4] Chinese consumers do not trust many consumable Chinese goods. That's certainly related to economics. In fact, it indicates weakness in the Chinese regulatory regime. I'm not informed enough to posit why this is, but my understanding is that foreign consumable goods command a premium because of it. [5] Science and technology are major drivers of economic growth. Fraudulent research undermines trust in the published body of research, making it more difficult to perform science in the future. Hopefully you can see the economic relevance now. I'm happy to make lists of problems with Western economies, of which there are many, but I won't pretend China is a paragon of economic development. > Sauce for the goose. Rather than the abstract theoretical exercise you presented, you should offer a measurable scale, so we can compare China to western nations. Otherwise, it's meaningless. Otherwise, I'll see your human costs and raise you a slavery. The exercise was simply to demonstrate that an economy is more than just GDP. As for hard numbers, consider the 55mm killed in the Great Leap Forward. Although I had already mentioned slavery as an atrocity perpetrated by the US, I'll provide numbers. In 1860 there were 3.9mm slaves in the United States. Approximately 12.5mm slaves landed in the US during the slave trade [^]. Since we live in the present and not history, let me provide some current statistics. 1mm - 3mm people are currently in concentration camps in Xinjiang [!]. 70mm Falun Gong practitioners are prohibited from their beliefs [~]. Your argument still engages in whataboutism. In July you tweeted [#]: > Whataboutism is a lazy and uninteresting argument. It’s what you use when you don’t like someone’s point, but don’t have a solid argument against it. If you’re using “But what about...?” as the basis of a rebuttal, check and make sure you’re not just being dumb. And you are attempting to put words in my mouth here: > If you'd stop thinking about why China is more evil than the west I never stated that I believe China to be evil or western countries to be good. In fact, I consider China's economic development to be a phenomenal advancement for human welfare. However, that is not what's being discussed. We are considering whether China's prosperity could have occurred without the existence of Western values. > A bad social structure eventually falls away and is replaced by a better one, and over the course of a couple of generations, the nation accelerates radically. Ideally this is what happens. Economic growth models (like Solow) indicate that this is an expected outcome over time. However, there are no guarantees. Structural phenomena impact this quite a bit. Countries with better infrastructure, physical, legal, and otherwise, should enjoy higher rates of growth. Yet many developing countries have less developed infrastructure. This serves as an impediment to such economic convergence. > seems to happen to nations regardless of their history, language, culture, government This is obviously not true. Corruption appears to harm economic growth (most strongly in the medium term) [<]. Argentina, had the largest economy in the world in 1895. Poor decisions on the part of the government caused a century of economic turmoil. My understanding that corruption is simultaneously a government and a cultural phenomenon, so you can see that history, culture, and government can have measurable impacts on economic growth. [`] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go... [^] https://www.theroot.com/slavery-by-the-numbers-1790874492 https://www.theroot.com/slavery-by-the-numbers-1790874492 [!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps [~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong [#] https://twitter.com/davestagner/status/1021810579890159616 https://twitter.com/davestagner/status/1021810579890159616 [<] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1331677X.2016.1169701 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1331677X.2016.11... [>] https://panampost.com/marcelo-duclos/2018/04/14/in-1895-argentina-had-the-worlds-highest-gdp-per-capita-what-went-wrong/?cn-reloaded=1 https://panampost.com/marcelo-duclos/2018/04/14/in-1895-arge...

beat 8y ago
As long as we're playing whataboutism... the Great Leap Forward occurred roughly 10-20 years after WWII, which led to a similar number of deaths in Europe. Without looking up data, I think it's safe to assume Europe's economies contracted substantially during WWII as well. So there's plenty of "clear failure" to go around. At best, one might argue that the US recovered from WWII faster, because it was the only major nation left undamaged. As for the argument about the impact of concentration camps... the US currently has 2.3M people incarcerated with a third the population of China. If you're arguing that this is somehow economically relevant, then you're arguing the US (the richest nation in history) has it even worse. I don't think the argument that "Countries with better infrastructure, physical, legal, and otherwise, should enjoy higher rates of growth" goes where you want it to go. Just about any "developing country" has a far higher rate of growth than the mature western nations with the best infrastructure. If the theory doesn't fit the facts, the theory is wrong. I think you may be conflating current state with growth here. They're not the same. Speaking of developing nations, Argentina is not the example you want it to be, either. Per Wikipedia, Argentina's per capita income from 1890-1950 was "similar to western Europe". The economy grew steadily until the 1976-1983 coup and military dictatorship, which is when the debt crisis set in. It took nearly 20 years of difficult experiments to get past the problems caused by seven years of right-wing incompetence. The Argentinian economy has grown more or less steadily and well since 2002, and their per capita income is on par with Brazil, Chile, and other major South American nations. (As an aside, in Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshal argues that Argentina and other South American nations are ultimately limited economically relative to powerhouses like the US, China, and France, due to their geography - and that the success of the US, China, and western Europe is a direct consequence of some really marvelous geographic features, such as outstanding ports and long navigable rivers through rich farmland.) So anyway... if the question is, as you phrase it, "whether Chinese prosperity could have occurred without the existence of Western values", well, maybe. Western technology, moreso than western values, has led to the rise of not only China, but dozens of other nations as well. Vaccination, industrialized farming, and other advances have created wealth throughout the world (again, read Factfulness!). It's not as simple as saying China succeeded by industrial espionage, any more than it's simple to say that America succeeded through exploitation of other nations. The technological acceleration of the past two centuries has been widespread, with widespread impacts. But the "western values" I started with were democracy and free market capitalism. China succeeded without democracy or free market capitalism. Your continued insistence that China is a more violent and brutal state than the western nations only reinforces my initial argument.

beat 8y ago

As long as we're playing whataboutism... the Great Leap Forward occurred roughly 10-20 years after WWII, which led to a similar number of deaths in Europe. Without looking up data, I think it's safe to assume Europe's economies contracted substantially during WWII as well. So there's plenty of "clear failure" to go around. At best, one might argue that the US recovered from WWII faster, because it was the only major nation left undamaged. As for the argument about the impact of concentration camps... the US currently has 2.3M people incarcerated with a third the population of China. If you're arguing that this is somehow economically relevant, then you're arguing the US (the richest nation in history) has it even worse. I don't think the argument that "Countries with better infrastructure, physical, legal, and otherwise, should enjoy higher rates of growth" goes where you want it to go. Just about any "developing country" has a far higher rate of growth than the mature western nations with the best infrastructure. If the theory doesn't fit the facts, the theory is wrong. I think you may be conflating current state with growth here. They're not the same. Speaking of developing nations, Argentina is not the example you want it to be, either. Per Wikipedia, Argentina's per capita income from 1890-1950 was "similar to western Europe". The economy grew steadily until the 1976-1983 coup and military dictatorship, which is when the debt crisis set in. It took nearly 20 years of difficult experiments to get past the problems caused by seven years of right-wing incompetence. The Argentinian economy has grown more or less steadily and well since 2002, and their per capita income is on par with Brazil, Chile, and other major South American nations. (As an aside, in Prisoners of Geography, Tim Marshal argues that Argentina and other South American nations are ultimately limited economically relative to powerhouses like the US, China, and France, due to their geography - and that the success of the US, China, and western Europe is a direct consequence of some really marvelous geographic features, such as outstanding ports and long navigable rivers through rich farmland.) So anyway... if the question is, as you phrase it, "whether Chinese prosperity could have occurred without the existence of Western values", well, maybe. Western technology, moreso than western values, has led to the rise of not only China, but dozens of other nations as well. Vaccination, industrialized farming, and other advances have created wealth throughout the world (again, read Factfulness!). It's not as simple as saying China succeeded by industrial espionage, any more than it's simple to say that America succeeded through exploitation of other nations. The technological acceleration of the past two centuries has been widespread, with widespread impacts. But the "western values" I started with were democracy and free market capitalism. China succeeded without democracy or free market capitalism. Your continued insistence that China is a more violent and brutal state than the western nations only reinforces my initial argument.