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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 q

• 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
    The tragedy of free market is that once a player achieves a dominant position, they will have the resources to change the rules so that the market is no longer free.
    • uncircle 1y ago
      The true tragedy of free market is that we keep blaming it while in reality all we have is a market artificially influenced by lobbyists, governmental overreach and corruption. Until you have laws favouring one entity over another, it is not a free market.
      • karmakurtisaani 1y ago
        I think you almost got what I was saying: once the winners emerge, they have the money to lobby laws in their favor.
        • Jensson 1y ago
          > once the winners emerge, they have the money to lobby laws in their favor. Only works in a flawed democracy, in better democracies people vote out corrupt leaders that only listen to lobbyists.
          • karmakurtisaani 1y ago
            This better democracy sounds wonderful. I've also heard that in real communism everyone gets their needs met and anarchism would let the true human nature flourish and everyone would be happy. I'm sure one day we will habe a society of better people who will make all of these work.
• immibis 1y ago
  Because we have stage 4 terminal cancer. Cancer is when components of a system start working to their own benefit and the detriment of the system. If it spreads far enough without successful treatment, it leads to the destruction of both the system and its components.
• yorwba 1y ago
  Lots of things sound like good ideas that aren't. China has fewer checks and balances, so lots of things get built that sound like good ideas. This impresses people! Especially when they hear the huge numbers involved. E.g. the author gushes about "40,000 kilometers of high-speed rail that runs at 350 km/h." So as a counterpoint, consider the former President of the Geographic Society of China arguing to that there was too much focus on impressing with speed and scale and too little big-picture thinking about door-to-door transport within cities, which would've benefited more from suburban light rail and buses https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-high-speed https://www.pekingnology.com/p/china-massively-overbuilt-hig...