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I'm not so sure about his metrics on what makes a country declining and another rising. He gathers data like education level and debt and creates an overall sco

• ironSkillet 4y ago
  China appears to have a massive demographics problem on their horizon, largely self-inflicted.
  • jpgvm 4y ago
    That is certainly true but they also seem willing to go much further than any country has before in an attempt to reverse their population growth decline.
    • nuclearnice3 4y ago
      what measures have they taken?
      • jpgvm 4y ago
        The biggest one has been deflating their property bubble. It still remains woefully unaffordable but they have stalled the relentless rise in housing costs and have started to even bring them down in some cities. Their "housing is for living, not speculation" policy along with 3 red lines and directives to deleverage developer firms are all taking effect. They banned for-profit tutoring to bring down the cost of raising children (but also ensure children have time to be children). These services are now offered by or in-cooperation with the state school system and no-longer teach the same subjects as are taught during normal school hours. i.e they basically converted it into educational after-school day-care that is strictly non-profit. 1 child policy was replaced by 2 child policy, then 3 and finally abolished. Ironically this was only ever applied to Han Chinese, minorities like Ughyrs have always had uncapped family sizes (another massively misunderstood fact about China but getting into it would just lead to downvote brigade by people that have never even been to China). So yeah the plan is to reduce cost of living, drive down costs of having children in particular, allow people to have as many children as they want and soon I imagine we will see direct incentives to have children.
        • seibelj 4y ago
          Private tutoring will always be available to the rich. The various bans on personal freedom will keep life mediocre and ambitions small for the majority. China won’t reverse anything and their authoritarian nature will (as always) lead to ruin.
          • pm90 4y ago
            Authoritarianism doesn’t always lead to ruin. It does have negative effects (stifling innovation, increasing likelihood of disastrous civil wars and revolutions etc.) but its not a given. With China, we’ve seen it go both ways: Disaster under Mao and revitalization under Deng Xiaoping. What will leadership under Xi look like? Remains to be seen.
            • mr90210 4y ago
              Have you lived in an authoritarian country?
            • FredPret 4y ago
              Deng did well because he unclenched a little
              • pm90 4y ago
                Yes he did. I don't know very much about him yet, but his life seems to be a fascinating one of gently guiding a failing state (that failed on epic proportions) back into normalcy and then into rapid growth.
          • chiefalchemist 4y ago
            If you compared China minus 50 years with China of today then ruin doesn't look so bad. Take away The West's (citizens) bailing out their financial markets (circa 2007 / 08) and again authoritarian ruin doesn't look so bad. I'm not stumping for China or authoritarianism; only pointing out that it's early days and there's more to that picture than brash big brush judgements.
          • 4y ago
    • spaceman_2020 4y ago
      Still not convinced any measure can change the direction unless capitalism and the experiences and lifestyles it enables are killed completely. No amount of incentives have managed to push fertility rate above replacement level in any country as far as I can remember. The data from countries like India also shows that as soon as any region experiences even moderate prosperity, birth rates drop like a rock. Heck, India’s fertility rate is now below replacement level and it happened waaay ahead of schedule.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • puranjay 4y ago
    Zeihan has the same thesis, plus insurmountable geographical challenges. Really hard to root for a country that now has a population rhomboid instead of a population pyramid. Soon to turn into an inverse pyramid aka a reverse ponzi where the old work to keep the few young alive.
  • eej71 4y ago
    Agreed. Scott Rozelle's _Invisible China_ is very much worth a read on this topic. The author is not a China hater - far from it. But he lays out in sobering detail the substantial demographic challenge they still face and why they may not escape what is known as at the middle income trap. If anything, I came away with the understanding that while many fear a rising China, it is a China that stumbles that can be more worrisome.
    • dirtyid 4y ago
      Even conservative GDP and growth estimates will put PRC in high income within a few years. Official 2021 per capita figures is $100 away, so theoretically reachable at end of year even with stymied covid growth projections. That said middle income trap is overstated to the point that it may not exist, including by OG researcher who coined the term. TLDR is middle income countries with successful industrial structure still generally grows significantly better than developed economies. As for Rozelle, he does good work. But reality is even with deficient interior education infra, PRC is still massively overproducing talent after massive brain drain. There's record youth unemployment, again some of which is covid driven, but talent oversupply was evident pre-covid. The demographic crisis is going to be difficult to negotiate, but ultimately PRC has too manypeople, specifically undereducated older cohorts that can't be integrated into modern economy. Whatever happens PRC will be better off with 1B people than 1.4B, simply too many mouths to feed. Meanwhile there's plenty of talent to go around to build comprehensive power which more than GDP undergirds national strength. Xi/CCP's vison for "moderately prosperous society" was $10000 per capita, leadership knows PRC has too many people to reach developing country incomes. The current pipe "China dream" is $40000 per capita by 2049 (100 year anniversary) probably not realistic but still a lot of overhead to improve productivity. Likely enough to establish PRC as geopolitical superpower even with at low high income level. At end of the day, a populous country with $20000 GDP and 20 aircraft carriers is still much more powerful than a small country with $100000 GDP and none.
      • iabacu 4y ago
        One thing that you overlook is something that even Xi points out as an issue: right now, China needs more quality than quantity. For example, in semiconductors, Taiwan, with a much smaller population (and arriving late in the game) beat the US, Japan and Korea. China, with 600k STEM graduates per year, is still trying to catch up. On covid vaccines, even Russia has their own vaccine that reach mRNA levels of protection, but China is still stuck with the Covid Zero policy. Quantity was definitively an asset for Chinese growth based on cheap labor. That source of growth is almost running dry (to the point where they are resorting to labor camps). But at some point, quantity becomes more of a liability.
  • dirtyid 4y ago
    Self inflicted moderate demographics problems to delay a massive one. Without family planning, PRC would be at 1.7B people. Currently at 1.4B more than 600M are, to be blunt, excess people - underedcuated cohorts that subsists in informal economy that can't be integrated into modern consumption economy. PRC would be tackling a much grimmer demographic bomb if it were not for restricting births.
  • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
    And what would be that problem? That sounds like wishful thinking. The median age of China is below of that both the US and the EU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_ag... A significant fraction of the US seems to have problem to adjust to the notion that in the next decades China will become the clear number 1 country in many fields, and the US will be to China, what Germany is to the US.(Similar on a per capita basis, about 1/4 in absolute numbers) Wishful thinking is a terrible basis to plan.
    • ironSkillet 4y ago
      Specifically, the problem is not having a large and young workforce productive enough to support the elderly population. Observe both the shape and growth trajectory of populations for America, EU, China, and other entities at: https://www.populationpyramid.net https://www.populationpyramid.net. I think a lot of countries are going to have a similar problem - it's not isolated to China. However, China's unfriendly immigration policies, combined with the very large skew in their population demographics (both age and gender) lead many to believe that there will likely be issues like the one I mentioned earlier.
      • UmbertoNoEco 4y ago
        Again, the median age of China is lower than the US and the UE. How is that a problem for China not for them? Skin color?
  • gscott 4y ago
    Plus most of their infrastructure is poorly built. On this YouTube channel they lived in China for a decade and rode through it on motorcycles documenting their adventures. It is pretty amazing https://www.youtube.com/c/ADVChina https://www.youtube.com/c/ADVChina you learn beyond a few big Chinese cities pretty much everything is falling apart, shoddily built with no inspections, and not as rich as the government portrays. Demographics is certainly a problem but everything else is too... China is a house of cards.
• ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  Yeah I see I dont think Dalio is actually correct. I think he and bridgewater were the right place at the right time 30 years ago when they started. Returns at the fund actually havent been that amazing. I think he partly likes being in the public eye, and then its also good marketing for his firm.
  • seibelj 4y ago
    Everyone who is giving interviews likes being in the public eye. It’s extremely easy not to give interviews - unless you did something like a big crime or are the center of a big story accidentally, you actually have to go out of your way to continue being famous. It’s also why I’m suspect of everyone famous. It’s just such a warped personality that seeks and maintains a public persona. Not saying that they are evil or bad people - just that their motivations are very suspicious and you should be extremely critical of what a public person says. The vast majority of successful and wealthy people are not public figures and don’t try and parlay their opinions into personal fame.
    • pm90 4y ago
      Good rule of thumb in general. One technique Ive found of understanding if someone is genuinely knowledgeable or faking it is to read their books or listen to long form podcasts (not just interviews). More data points create a more complete picture.
      • chiefalchemist 4y ago
        Also probably more complete in the sense an interview is likely to be edited (to establish or reflect a particular narrative). Along the same lives the interviewer and questions are often set up in advance to accomplish the same.
      • agumonkey 4y ago
        Also how they handle genuine debates.
  • paulpauper 4y ago
• sharadov 4y ago
  He is a Sinophile - I sort of agreed with him till couple years back, but then looking at China's zero covid policy, Xi's autocratic rule on steroids and foreign policy gaffes and a distinct change in policy which doesn't really care about the economy - makes me wonder why he is still so bullish on China. Probably has some ulterior motives with his fund or just plain loves being in the media eye.
  • Barrin92 4y ago
    >which doesn't really care about the economy I think investors don't buy this because long term population health and state capacity are significantly more important 10, 20, 30 years down the line than short term disruptions, and that is why investors are bullish on China. Shutting a port down for one month is bad, having a hundred million people struggle with long covid is a lot worse. The bull case is pretty simple. The country has governance that is effective enough to tackle problems that most other places have given up on, even if it isn't particularly pretty in the short run.
    • MaxHoppersGhost 4y ago
      Are you implying that approximately one out of ten people who get covid will suffer debilitation from long Covid?
      • Barrin92 4y ago
        study results seem to suggest about one in five to one in four people experiences long covid and further: Shruti Mehta, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Looking at people who report they are not able to function in life, we’ve seen about 3 to 5 percent, which is still a large number.[..]My bottom line is, with a potential cost of $2.6 trillion, that’s so big that there’s nothing, no preventive action, that wouldn’t be worth doing to reduce the burden of long-Covid,” Cutler said.” So I think one in ten being quite seriously affected is about in the right ballpark, if not too conservative. https://observer.com/2022/05/long-covid-will-have-a-massive-impact-on-the-u-s-economy/ https://observer.com/2022/05/long-covid-will-have-a-massive-...
• math 4y ago
  Michael Pettis did a great interview recently that covers why growth in China is likely to stall: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE5VczIFGZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE5VczIFGZA
  • jpgvm 4y ago
    Stall no. Moderate yes. I think a large part depends on if they are able to translate their infrastructure spending away from unprofitable or marginally profitable ventures like bridges into high-tech nuclear industry, more battery and solar tech, semi-conductors & lithography, etc. They are certainly capable (we saw that with EVs, batteries and solar already) but proof will be in the pudding.
• agumonkey 4y ago
  Is he listened to by serious people ? He sure has a following on youtube, people are parroting his ideas on a weekly basis.. whether he's right or wrong only matters if people in control are influenced too..
• swman 4y ago
  Is it wrong though? Maybe its because my immigrant (S. Asian) parents emphasized education heavily so they busted their ass to put me into the best public school districts. Believe me, being the poorest kid in school had its downsides, but doing well in school and sports was a great equalizer. Now that I'm in my 30s and interact with the broader world, I can't help but realize that most people I meet outside of tech are... how do I say this? Not that bright? I'm talking people who can't add small numbers or multiply, and seem to have short term goals and interests. BTW these people are in the same socioeconomic level (or better, as many of them own property here within their family) as my family when we were brand new to this country. In Los Angeles the schools are garbage and failing for the most part, and it is pretty sad to see the result - adults who can barely make ends meet and continue the cycle. Since I'm in the tech bubble, everyone else I hang out with is quite well to do and smart, but any time I've met people outside of this bubble I feel depressed and sad. Like I said, I grew up in the districts where most of the people were focused on providing a good education for their kids. It was in the midwest suburbs right outside of the city metro, and my peers were involved in sports and also studying. Our football/basketball team were AP/honor roll students who also played in the orchestra, and most of them went on to higher education and have really good careers. When I see their Linkedin updates, I'm always happy to have been around such people who also motivated me. I honestly believe that China, India, and other Asian countries will dominate the next century and beyond. They're pumping out engineers (people who can think, use their brain) while Americans talk shit about themselves and want to degrade. The USA needs to stop treating children like equals/adults (they're not, their brains are still developing) and focus on making sure their kids can think their way out of a box instead of crying or needing therapy (just stop giving them iPad games since they're 2 years old to make them shut up). We need to get off this addiction to instant gratification - that leads to mental retardation because when people don't have to think of alternatives or creative ways to do things, MOST people will just be lazy. We've proven this in animals, and we see it every day with people. I'm honestly pondering if I should raise my family in the same midwestern suburbs I grew up in because I can't see my kids succeeding here in California. The schools suck, the people are not interested in education, and tech basically carries this state in terms of brainpower.
  • DwnVoteHoneyPot 4y ago
• qiskit 4y ago
  > but I'm also watching Polymatter videos which makes me a China bear. Shouldn't base your worldview on silly youtube videos. What are the odds that grifters peddling youtube videos are experts on china, mrbeast, ikea, india, dennis rodman, etc? These people just make videos targeted for their group of dumb masses in order to sell ads. Just go to their youtube page and ask yourself what are the odds that the grifters running polymatter are experts on any of the topics they pumped videos out for? The answer is none. What they do is most likely analyze what types of garbage their subs may like and create garbage for these people. You'd think HN would be the last place anyone would take polymatters seriously. But from the comments, many actually look to youtube grifters and outright propagandists ( zeihan ) to form their opinions.
  • wenc 4y ago
    Yes. YouTube educational videos are fun to watch because they surface “cult” or “not widely known” knowledge in a fun way. But they are also availability machines usually not backed by domain knowledge or deep research. They’re designed to grab views. Wendover productions for instance has lots of great videos about transportation (especially aviation) which are mind blowing. The creator Sam is also just a college student in his 20s with no deep domain knowledge on any of the subjects he covers — his expertise is perhaps enthusiasm, knowing how to do research into trivia type knowledge, and making great videos about it. Most Wendover videos are good, but there are some in which he is pretty wrong.
• paulpauper 4y ago
  He's been pushing this narrative for a while, and his Bridgewater fund has a heavy China tilt, but I'm also watching Polymatter videos which makes me a China bear. Yeah, he is intellectually and emotionally invested in it. It's also unfalsifiable. America has been running large debts forever but has only become bigger and more successful post Covid, whereas other countries have become weaker relatively speaking. I think his ego is too invested in this model of the world to let it go.
  • andreilys 4y ago
    America has been running large debts forever but has only become bigger and more successful post Covid Citation needed, not clear how America has become more successful post covid.
    • paulpauper 4y ago
      compare US dollar to other currencies, GDP gains ,stock market gains, corporate profits , etc.
      • andreilys 4y ago
        All those metrics are down post covid because the era of cheap and easy money is over.
  • iforgetti 4y ago
    It’s possible to believe his concerns regarding indebtedness of “The West” and the state of the current debt cycle while also disagreeing with his bullish view of Chinese economic growth / dominance. This is my personal view after reading his most recent book.
  • sudosysgen 4y ago
    The elephant in the room is China, whose GDP got relatively larger post-covid compared to the US, with significantly less inflation and debt.
  • roenxi 4y ago
• antoniuschan99 4y ago
  I like Lei’s Real Talk Videos (it’s like China Uncensored but more in-depth at least with some of her older content). I discovered her channel when looking for videos on the Shanghai Clique and the infighting that goes on within the CCP. Western Media is thin on that, they tend to portray the Chinese Government without any disfunction. Ironically, Chinese Media tends to portray United States the same way too. https://youtube.com/c/LeisRealTalk https://youtube.com/c/LeisRealTalk Polymatter is great though. At least the videos on China (like the demographics one) seem well researched and have a unique take on the subject.