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Correct, China may regress further backwards under the new system that Xi has installed (and with the continued tightening down on everything across the board t

Correct, China may regress further backwards under the new system that Xi has installed (and with the continued tightening down on everything across the board that he is pursuing in the name of absolute control). Most likely the US will increase its advantage overall during this time, as China's Government puts itself into a straight-jacket along with its most talented people. As opposed to unleashing them in Deng-style with further liberalization. China can never have a full answer in terms of exports vs the US software juggernaut. That's inherent to their system of extreme government controls and limitations. Why would anybody in the West ever use Baidu, Ctrip, or Chinese equivalents of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Slack, DocuSign, Fortinet, Github, GitLab, Splunk, Twilio, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, et al? There are dozens of booming enterprise companies in the US in that mold, China inherently can't compete with most of them globally. That also goes for the burgeoning software companies in the 'West' outside of the US, such as Atlassian and Shopify (both with $30b market caps). There is a reason why AWS is globally dominant, while China's cloud providers are lagging by five years or more (both in service offerings and sales size) - businesses in the West mostly won't go anywhere near China's cloud services and never will. It's another case of their companies being firewalled inside of China. To the parent's point re allies, Trump is a mess, however he is gone after one or two terms. US allies generally understand this is a speed bump in a very long-term relationship. Xi's authoritarianism is practically guaranteed to increase by the year for a long time to come. It's going to get worse. Dictatorships become more aggressive and paranoid with time, rather than less.

WanderPanda 7y ago
I agree, without holding their people as slave workers they will not be able to compensate the lack of efficiency in resource allocation in the long run. People are accepting this right now because there is so much progress but if that progress stalls for a couple of years, because of some economic cycle e.g. they might lose their patience. This will be answered with more force/control of the government which in turn kills even more of the efficiency. In my view this is the most probable scenario but there are also some advantages they have. One I find particularly valuable is that most of its government is constituted of engineers (70% if I remember correctly) vs. in the US most are some sort of Lawyers (?). It is really interesting how this will play out in the mid/long term. I am kind of bullish on the western countries though they are all (especially here in europe) shooting their own feet by killing their most valuable asset: their free markets.
- repolfx 7y ago
  I don't think engineers have any special insight into running governments, or are even particularly likely to beat lawyers at running governments. I know it's tempting to believe this, given how many of us here are engineers, but I suspect the mentality of lawyers might be better suited to being democratic politicians than engineers and democratic politicians are clearly better suited to running countries than dictators - history is very clear on that point. What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.
adinobro 7y ago
If this is true then there is nothing for the US to be afraid of.

WanderPanda 7y ago

I agree, without holding their people as slave workers they will not be able to compensate the lack of efficiency in resource allocation in the long run. People are accepting this right now because there is so much progress but if that progress stalls for a couple of years, because of some economic cycle e.g. they might lose their patience. This will be answered with more force/control of the government which in turn kills even more of the efficiency. In my view this is the most probable scenario but there are also some advantages they have. One I find particularly valuable is that most of its government is constituted of engineers (70% if I remember correctly) vs. in the US most are some sort of Lawyers (?). It is really interesting how this will play out in the mid/long term. I am kind of bullish on the western countries though they are all (especially here in europe) shooting their own feet by killing their most valuable asset: their free markets.

repolfx 7y ago
I don't think engineers have any special insight into running governments, or are even particularly likely to beat lawyers at running governments. I know it's tempting to believe this, given how many of us here are engineers, but I suspect the mentality of lawyers might be better suited to being democratic politicians than engineers and democratic politicians are clearly better suited to running countries than dictators - history is very clear on that point. What matters in a politician is primarily gathering wisdom from around the population and combining, synthesising it into policy. Reality is complex, nobody can see the big picture, there are millions of factors that can affect any nation-level decision. See it as hand-crafted logic (dictatorship/engineers) vs machine learning (votes/lawyers). Lawyering is likely especially suited to creating decent leaders because the heart of being a (trial) lawyer is debate and being able to represent people who you may not only disagree with, but actively suspect are criminals. You have to do your best to be the devils advocate anyway - which is a good skill to have if your job is or should be primarily implementing the decisions of the electorate.

adinobro 7y ago

If this is true then there is nothing for the US to be afraid of.