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There is a certain group of people who love this narrative/propaganda for political reasons. I'm tired of it irrespective of whether it is true. I'm ready to s

There is a certain group of people who love this narrative/propaganda for political reasons. I'm tired of it irrespective of whether it is true. I'm ready to say "China is the greatest superpower ever and so much better than my US" so we can move on from this type of article.

churchill 1y ago
You can simply ignore it, but you can't wish China and the progress they've made out of existence. There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population. It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.
- vladms 1y ago
  Generally true, although population ratio seem a bit off (EU population is 75% of USA population and USA GDP is 1.5 of GDP EU). But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...
  - riku_iki 1y ago
    > I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
    - wing-_-nuts 1y ago
      >GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future. Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time. The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
      - chrisco255 1y ago
        Quality of life scores are completely subjective. There is no scientific way to measure it and it involves thousands of vectors that differ in importance for each individual. There's no way to objectively balance it. GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.
        wing-_-nuts 1y ago
        I disagree. There are objective measures for wellbeing... You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.
        riku_iki 1y ago
        I googled some numbers for human development index, as the most developed/popular/reliable, and have following findings: - there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom - US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      GDP and stock market does not reflect quality of life very well.
    - arp242 1y ago
      GDP is an extremely imprecise inaccurate rough measure of economic strength. Every country is unique and has its own set of footnotes and caveats. Even within the same country there are often huge differences (e.g. North of England is not the same as London, and California is not the same as Mississippi).
      - riku_iki 1y ago
        Sure, GDP is not totally accurate (not sure about extremely though), you feel free to bring better metric and we will check it.
        arp242 1y ago
        You can't capture a complex reality in a single number.
        riku_iki 1y ago
        you can capture approximation/estimation, which is much better than ignoring reality completely.
  - chrisco255 1y ago
    USA pop: abt 350 million EU pop: abt 450 million > I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. It's quaint to think that but compounding interest is a doozy. If your competitors are growing at 4% a year and you're growing at 1% a year, they will triple their economy over 30 years while your economy sees a meak 30% boost. At some point you'll find your economy an entire century behind in development. And you'll no longer even have power or influence over the decisions made at the grown ups table.
xg15 1y ago
Ignore the article and just read the last paragraph: > The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures. Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?
- neptuneskeptic 1y ago
  China is winning bc they re-invest the profits into society. West is losing bc their profits are wired to some tax-paradise far away.
  - seanicus 1y ago
    I love the threat of displacing billionaires out of our economy whenever taxing the wealthy comes up like the monied class aren't already incredibly sophisticated tax cheats
- potato3732842 1y ago
  >Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff? Because over the past decades the interests that used to focus on growing the pie have pivoted to scooping up more of the pie (usually by getting government, or government adjacent entity, to pull some string). Imagine the year is 1950/60/70/80 and you are a lobbyist for a construction product manufacture. What do you tell your paid off political to vote for? Stuff that lowers cost, creates more development, etc, of course. Because for every mil spent industry wide you know your employer nets $10, or whatever. In 2025 you'd wine and dine a bunch of IBC jerks and insurance jerks and maybe even government jerks to get them to phrase things so that the industry is "incentivized" to use your employer's class of products, to the detriment of literally every participant in your sector for whom a different class of product would have otherwise been superior in their situation. This sort of pivot to zero sum behavior has permeated damn near every class of economic activity, only in the most cutting edge spots of cutting edge sectors and the lowest margin, lowest sophistication, lowest security/moat sectors do you see anyone lift a goddamn finger to grow the pie.
  - karmakurtisaani 1y ago
specproc 1y ago
> California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h. Communism works.
- dheera 1y ago
  You are conflating the communist-capitalist axis with authoritarian-democratic axis. China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.
  - pasquinelli 1y ago
    that's what people say when china's doing well.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  > Communism works. This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.
- jedberg 1y ago
  Well, authoritarianisim does. They were able to do that because they don't believe in property rights or worker protections. So it's a tradeoff.
  - wk_end 1y ago
    Yes, but also they don't believe in the pseudo-democratic and ultra-bureaucratic mechanisms NIMBYs use to hamstring development.
    - jedberg 1y ago
Teever 1y ago
The House Select Committee on the CCP has been publishing the results of war games with China over Taiwan and the results are pretty dismaying.[0] They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years. China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out. America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically. You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America. [0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/CSIS%20Simulation%20Results.pdf https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-shipbuilding/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... [2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/why-is-xi-jinping-building-secret-commodity-stockpiles https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w... [3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-emissions-ab119c39f226cfbeb2f5c1449747cae9 https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...
- riku_iki 1y ago
  > China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.
  - klooney 1y ago
    > US builds military ships themself. Not recently...
logicchains 1y ago
It's absolutely propaganda. China's GDP per capita is around $15k while the US's is around $60k; China still has a long long way to go, decades at best, before the average Chinese person's standard of living is comparable to the average American's. And given the population aging/low birthrate problem is even worse in China than in the US, it's going to be a struggle to get there. China simply has a population around 4x larger than America's, so even at a much lower level of development/standard of living it can still have a very big impact on the overall global economy.
- loa_in_ 1y ago
  If you value money, and eventually exchange everything for money, you'll be left with money. China respects it's temples, traditions more than they respect money and that's where your measurements go wrong because the abstraction is very leaky.
- tokioyoyo 1y ago
  I would highly suggest checking out China, before comparing GDP per capita. Or at least have close Chinese friends who live in T1/T2 cities. China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.
like_any_other 1y ago
What does "political reasons" mean? Not wanting to lose economic sovereignty and be in thrall to a foreign country? It's not losing some meaningless race to be #1 economy or China's prosperity that worries me - I welcome it. What worries me is that, unlike China, Western politicians seem entirely unable or unwilling to protect their native industries.
paradox460 1y ago
The Soviets churned out almost identical propaganda, as does North Korea. The only difference here is there's a massive population of people (and bots) that parrot it ad nauseum across Western platforms, in ways that the cccp could only dream of

churchill 1y ago

You can simply ignore it, but you can't wish China and the progress they've made out of existence. There are also Europeans who feel uncomfortable with the US having 1.5* Europe's GDP with less than half the population. It's an extant truth and it'll become even more blatant as many Western countries struggle to do basic stuff like build out infrastructure.

vladms 1y ago
Generally true, although population ratio seem a bit off (EU population is 75% of USA population and USA GDP is 1.5 of GDP EU). But GDP is not the only thing that matters. I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. Also, worth mentioning EU has a lot of countries that grew a lot because there were so far behind (the ex-communist ones) which means it was playing "catch-up". There are advantages to not having lately a war on your territory (USA)...
- riku_iki 1y ago
  > I personally (as European) care also about how the average people lives and in that matter I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future.
  - wing-_-nuts 1y ago
    >GDP is projection of economy strength. If economy is weak, country will lose on competitive markets, and your lifestyle will become worse in the future. Europe has been ahead of US on quality of life scores for decades, and has had lower gdp numbers the entire time. The man who invented GDP argued vigorously that it's a synthetic economic metric, and it shouldn't be used as a goal or measure of well-being, yet we insist on it because it's one of the few measures where the US is handily winning.
    - chrisco255 1y ago
      Quality of life scores are completely subjective. There is no scientific way to measure it and it involves thousands of vectors that differ in importance for each individual. There's no way to objectively balance it. GDP, while imperfect, is at least rooted in a quantitative value.
      - wing-_-nuts 1y ago
        I disagree. There are objective measures for wellbeing... You've got health measures like life expectancy, infant / maternal mortality, disability adjusted life years, BMI, cortesol, blood pressure, suicide rates, etc. Economic ones like labor market participation, un[der]employment, poverty rates, gini coefficients. Societal ones like crime rates, trust levels, civic participation, environmental metric, public transit accessibility, international test scores, human rights, marriage and actual vs wanted fertility rates. The list goes on. There are countless measures, just few that economists genuinely value.
        riku_iki 1y ago
        I googled some numbers for human development index, as the most developed/popular/reliable, and have following findings: - there is strong correlation between index and EU countries GDP per capita: countries with high GDP are at the top, and countries with low GDP are at the bottom - US index is higher than combined EU index, some EU countries with high GDP top US
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    GDP and stock market does not reflect quality of life very well.
  - arp242 1y ago
    GDP is an extremely imprecise inaccurate rough measure of economic strength. Every country is unique and has its own set of footnotes and caveats. Even within the same country there are often huge differences (e.g. North of England is not the same as London, and California is not the same as Mississippi).
    - riku_iki 1y ago
      Sure, GDP is not totally accurate (not sure about extremely though), you feel free to bring better metric and we will check it.
      - arp242 1y ago
        You can't capture a complex reality in a single number.
        riku_iki 1y ago
        you can capture approximation/estimation, which is much better than ignoring reality completely.
- chrisco255 1y ago
  USA pop: abt 350 million EU pop: abt 450 million > I prefer the European style if that implies some difference in GDP. It's quaint to think that but compounding interest is a doozy. If your competitors are growing at 4% a year and you're growing at 1% a year, they will triple their economy over 30 years while your economy sees a meak 30% boost. At some point you'll find your economy an entire century behind in development. And you'll no longer even have power or influence over the decisions made at the grown ups table.

xg15 1y ago

Ignore the article and just read the last paragraph: > The tragedy isn’t that China is winning, it’s that the West stopped imagining better futures. Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff?

neptuneskeptic 1y ago
China is winning bc they re-invest the profits into society. West is losing bc their profits are wired to some tax-paradise far away.
- seanicus 1y ago
  I love the threat of displacing billionaires out of our economy whenever taxing the wealthy comes up like the monied class aren't already incredibly sophisticated tax cheats
potato3732842 1y ago
>Or as a question: Why can't we do that stuff? Because over the past decades the interests that used to focus on growing the pie have pivoted to scooping up more of the pie (usually by getting government, or government adjacent entity, to pull some string). Imagine the year is 1950/60/70/80 and you are a lobbyist for a construction product manufacture. What do you tell your paid off political to vote for? Stuff that lowers cost, creates more development, etc, of course. Because for every mil spent industry wide you know your employer nets $10, or whatever. In 2025 you'd wine and dine a bunch of IBC jerks and insurance jerks and maybe even government jerks to get them to phrase things so that the industry is "incentivized" to use your employer's class of products, to the detriment of literally every participant in your sector for whom a different class of product would have otherwise been superior in their situation. This sort of pivot to zero sum behavior has permeated damn near every class of economic activity, only in the most cutting edge spots of cutting edge sectors and the lowest margin, lowest sophistication, lowest security/moat sectors do you see anyone lift a goddamn finger to grow the pie.
- karmakurtisaani 1y ago

specproc 1y ago

> California approved high-speed rail in 2008 to link LA and San Francisco for $33 billion. Costs ballooned; there’s still no service. The U.K. canceled HS2’s northern leg after years of overruns. Berlin’s new airport opened almost a decade late and billions over budget. Meanwhile, China built 40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h. Communism works.

dheera 1y ago
You are conflating the communist-capitalist axis with authoritarian-democratic axis. China is not a communist country in practical terms and hasn't been for 30+ years.
- pasquinelli 1y ago
  that's what people say when china's doing well.
delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
> Communism works. This isn't communism; this is a 'let's get shit done and not argue' mentality. Counterpoint: India is generally considered democratic and capitalist, has a similarly-sized population and a similarly-sized landmass, but has zero kilometres of proper high-speed rail.
jedberg 1y ago
Well, authoritarianisim does. They were able to do that because they don't believe in property rights or worker protections. So it's a tradeoff.
- wk_end 1y ago
  Yes, but also they don't believe in the pseudo-democratic and ultra-bureaucratic mechanisms NIMBYs use to hamstring development.
  - jedberg 1y ago

Teever 1y ago

The House Select Committee on the CCP has been publishing the results of war games with China over Taiwan and the results are pretty dismaying.[0] They show the US narrowly holding Taiwan at the cost of dozens of ship, hundreds of planes and the depletion of missile stockpiles that have lead times measured in months to years. China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. At the same time China is stockpiling commodities[2] and has come to dominate the solar and battery manufacturing industry[3] by building a tightly integrated and automated supply chain which will greatly reduce their dependency on imported hydrocarbons should war break out. America can't even muster up enough artillery shells to fight a proxy war with Russia right now and is in complete and utter disarray politically. You should be paying attention to these kinds of articles instead of dismissing them. The next few years are not going to be very kind to America. [0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/CSIS%20Simulation%20Results.pdf https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-shipbuilding/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/countries-dominate-global-s... [2] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/why-is-xi-jinping-building-secret-commodity-stockpiles https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/23/w... [3] https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-emissions-ab119c39f226cfbeb2f5c1449747cae9 https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

riku_iki 1y ago
> China dominates the shipbuilding industry[1] and can easily rebuild whatever ships they lose while the US will be dependent on South Korea and Japan to rebuild whatever they lose. US builds military ships themself. Also, this will be very asymmetrical war: missiles which can destroy ship costs XM vs XXXM for military ship cost.
- klooney 1y ago
  > US builds military ships themself. Not recently...

logicchains 1y ago

It's absolutely propaganda. China's GDP per capita is around $15k while the US's is around $60k; China still has a long long way to go, decades at best, before the average Chinese person's standard of living is comparable to the average American's. And given the population aging/low birthrate problem is even worse in China than in the US, it's going to be a struggle to get there. China simply has a population around 4x larger than America's, so even at a much lower level of development/standard of living it can still have a very big impact on the overall global economy.

loa_in_ 1y ago
If you value money, and eventually exchange everything for money, you'll be left with money. China respects it's temples, traditions more than they respect money and that's where your measurements go wrong because the abstraction is very leaky.
tokioyoyo 1y ago
I would highly suggest checking out China, before comparing GDP per capita. Or at least have close Chinese friends who live in T1/T2 cities. China has a lot of problems, like a lot. But comparable QoL isn’t there. I’d say insane competition and work hours is probably the biggest problem for average person, from what I’ve heard from my friends, and browsing Chinese media.

like_any_other 1y ago

What does "political reasons" mean? Not wanting to lose economic sovereignty and be in thrall to a foreign country? It's not losing some meaningless race to be #1 economy or China's prosperity that worries me - I welcome it. What worries me is that, unlike China, Western politicians seem entirely unable or unwilling to protect their native industries.

paradox460 1y ago

The Soviets churned out almost identical propaganda, as does North Korea. The only difference here is there's a massive population of people (and bots) that parrot it ad nauseum across Western platforms, in ways that the cccp could only dream of