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 wor

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.