You can’t really judge other cultures by their outward happiness. That’s really just a US thing. I think what it all comes down to is the probabilistic number

You can’t really judge other cultures by their outward happiness. That’s really just a US thing. I think what it all comes down to is the probabilistic numbers game - how many clever people do you have hacking at various problems. Some % will succeed, and the larger the population the more results will emerge from it. That’s China’s fundamental advantage. They can still fuck it up though with poor political structure, as they did for several hundred years up until the 2000s, and may yet revert to under Xi Jinping. But they’ll have to really screw things up to lose the numbers game.