4 ms·

Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and ho

Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and how they compare to China.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Cities in the USA are already mostly developed, the USA is not a developing country, it’s not like there is much movement in our industries or skylines. After China reaches developed status, it will similarly become boring and stagnate (since you can’t grow forever).
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble. The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.
  - cromwellian 5y ago
    The idea of diminishing returns and that compounding growth can't continue is a "cultural product"? Funny, I thought it fell out of the math. Our developed world is stagnant because once you go from an agrarian undeveloped state into a state with vast quantities of built infrastructure, it becomes increasingly hard to economically justify ripping it all up to rebuild it better. Let's say you build a tremendously good enough sewage and public water delivery system. Water quality is practically perfect. Then a technological breakthrough happens and you could build an even more efficient, environmentally responsible system, but the cost is you have to dig up every municipal water system around the country -- that's already working -- and build this new system. It is far far harder for a country to justify that if it already has a working system vs a developing coutry which might not even have municipal water. And I'll point out that much of the architecture in European cities has preserved buildings that go back 1000 years. People aren't exactly tearing down 500 year old buildings to build modern glass and steel office buildings. The internals of these buildings have changed, like the Google office in Munich hid inside of an old city wall structure. The reality is, China's growth is going to slow, for many reasons. 1) They have passed the low hanging fruit, and each new improvement becomes more expensive and requires more investment. 2) there is tons of inherent corruption and malinvestment in the system, they seem on the verge of a 2008-style or Japan-90s style crisis in real estate. 3) The one child policy harmed their demographics, and the median age of Chinese citizens will be much higher than it is in the US, couple that with a political system that can't attract or encourage significant overseas immigration to replace that low birthrate, and you have a recipe for stagnation. This letter reminds me of lots of articles written during the 80s about Japan. Oh no, Japan is now spending on the Fifth Generation Computer Project, oh no, Japan just built this super impressive new manmade island airport, etc. Every month, a new article came out extolling the incredibly futuristically advanced Japan and how the US was falling far behind. We stopped making VCRs and TVs, Americans were bulldozing piles of CDs in anger. But the reality was that Japan's super impressive development run was going to hit diminishing returns, and Japan would become a nation like the US, or the countries of the EU, in terms of growth rate. This will happen to China too, as surely as it happened to all of the other "Asian tigers". The CCP doesn't have a magic wand here, and if anything, it may hasten the stagnation.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
- not2b 5y ago
  We're mostly stuck with the development we've got, which isn't great (rail transportation is hugely inferior in the US as compared to other developed countries, for example), because the US is a "vetocracy", to use a word the author mentioned. It's much easier to say no than yes, and new infrastructure is hugely expensive in part because of all the people who will fight it with everything they've got.

Fascinating letter. It's a bit of a tangent, but I would be interested in similar perspectives on the development (or stagnation) of cities in the U.S., and how they compare to China.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

Cities in the USA are already mostly developed, the USA is not a developing country, it’s not like there is much movement in our industries or skylines. After China reaches developed status, it will similarly become boring and stagnate (since you can’t grow forever).

Barrin92 5y ago
I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. A little over a hundred years ago we hadn't invented flight. We probably have many thousands of years left. Who says there's no way to build a city that makes our cities look the same way we look at a medieval town? Our 'developed' world is boring and stagnant because we've made a choice to not push towards the future, and instead relive the 80s pop culture in VR.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > I think that attitude is in itself completely a cultural product of the sort that Dan talks about, and which Mark Fisher lamented when he talked about the consequence of the neoliberal era to cancel any concept of the future. The fallacy of “rapid growth forever” has been repeatedly asserted multiple times in history, to be knocked down each time. The last time we went through this was with Japan, where, in the early 80s, the prediction was made that Japanese would be twice as rich as Americans by the year 2010. And then their real estate bubble crashed and they lost a couple of decades. China today is like Japan in the early 80s with an even more insane property bubble. The developed world keeps developing, just at a far slower pace than the developing world. If China avoids the middle income trap and reaches developed status, then they will experience slow growth just like other developed countries do. But rapidly aging demographics is a huge challenge for China to overcome in sustaining its current rate of growth before reaching developed status.
- cromwellian 5y ago
  The idea of diminishing returns and that compounding growth can't continue is a "cultural product"? Funny, I thought it fell out of the math. Our developed world is stagnant because once you go from an agrarian undeveloped state into a state with vast quantities of built infrastructure, it becomes increasingly hard to economically justify ripping it all up to rebuild it better. Let's say you build a tremendously good enough sewage and public water delivery system. Water quality is practically perfect. Then a technological breakthrough happens and you could build an even more efficient, environmentally responsible system, but the cost is you have to dig up every municipal water system around the country -- that's already working -- and build this new system. It is far far harder for a country to justify that if it already has a working system vs a developing coutry which might not even have municipal water. And I'll point out that much of the architecture in European cities has preserved buildings that go back 1000 years. People aren't exactly tearing down 500 year old buildings to build modern glass and steel office buildings. The internals of these buildings have changed, like the Google office in Munich hid inside of an old city wall structure. The reality is, China's growth is going to slow, for many reasons. 1) They have passed the low hanging fruit, and each new improvement becomes more expensive and requires more investment. 2) there is tons of inherent corruption and malinvestment in the system, they seem on the verge of a 2008-style or Japan-90s style crisis in real estate. 3) The one child policy harmed their demographics, and the median age of Chinese citizens will be much higher than it is in the US, couple that with a political system that can't attract or encourage significant overseas immigration to replace that low birthrate, and you have a recipe for stagnation. This letter reminds me of lots of articles written during the 80s about Japan. Oh no, Japan is now spending on the Fifth Generation Computer Project, oh no, Japan just built this super impressive new manmade island airport, etc. Every month, a new article came out extolling the incredibly futuristically advanced Japan and how the US was falling far behind. We stopped making VCRs and TVs, Americans were bulldozing piles of CDs in anger. But the reality was that Japan's super impressive development run was going to hit diminishing returns, and Japan would become a nation like the US, or the countries of the EU, in terms of growth rate. This will happen to China too, as surely as it happened to all of the other "Asian tigers". The CCP doesn't have a magic wand here, and if anything, it may hasten the stagnation.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
not2b 5y ago
We're mostly stuck with the development we've got, which isn't great (rail transportation is hugely inferior in the US as compared to other developed countries, for example), because the US is a "vetocracy", to use a word the author mentioned. It's much easier to say no than yes, and new infrastructure is hugely expensive in part because of all the people who will fight it with everything they've got.