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I need to find the quote, but historian and political commentary Adam Tooze suggested a few months ago that China's global economic and political dominance in t
by dcre 1y ago
I need to find the quote, but historian and political commentary Adam Tooze suggested a few months ago that China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is. I find myself thinking about this almost every day.
- chrisco255 1y agoAnyone who makes such breathless predictions about the future is automatically worth dismissing. At no point in history did any such opinions ever play out to be true.
- dcre 1y agoYou're saying nothing dramatic or surprising has ever happened in history, or at best that when it did, no one saw it coming. Both are obviously wrong. In any case, Tooze is a serious thinker who has written various things besides this line I paraphrased from a podcast. I recommend checking out his work. https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-401-the-dollar-system-in https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-401-the-dollar-sy...
- chrisco255 1y agoI mean you can always find a number of people predicting anything and everything in every single direction. There are no shortage of intellectuals predicting China's decline just as there is no shortage of intellectuals predicting the West's decline. We will only know in hindsight but even then we won't be able to trust any given intellectual's hot take on the next few years or decades, whether they were right in the past or not! I believe pretty solidly in chaos theory. The future is exponentially more unknowable and unpredictable the further out you try to predict. Anyone claiming they have a script for the 21st century is worth dismissing outright, no matter what their IQ is and no matter how many GPUs they have under their command. The future is dynamic and evolving and people are more adaptive than you think. Any outcome that can be conceived is being hedged against.
- readthenotes1 1y agoGiven their population implosion, I find China 2099 hard to grasp...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- wing-_-nuts 1y ago>China's global economic and political dominance in this century could be so total that future historians will come to think of the entire modern history of Europe and the US as a mere setup for China becoming what it is That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt. Say what you will about capital markets, but they do tend to deliver things that are actually desired and economically valuable given the right pricing incentives. I've long argued that we should replace our income tax with a progressive but heavy carbon tax. This would be far more effective than federal greenhouse gas regs and incentive programs. Unfortunately they're politically dead on arrival because they would tax the rich, powerful and politically connected far more than your average joe.
- kamikazeturtles 1y ago> That's surely an interesting take when their demographics are absolutely imploding, and their economy is rife with state sponsored excess funded by debt. “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War I don't believe any of the stats coming out of China. I think it is best to approach data coming out of adversarial countries with lots of paranoia.
- kilroy123 1y agoWhat? Demographics are collapsing all across the globe. If anything, they have consistently under-reported how bad it is.
- thombee 1y agoSo should China trust US stats and data? Since the US is apparently an adversarial country?
- jonnybgood 1y agoThere are only disadvantages for the US to skew stats and data since much of the global economy depends on it. Whereas it’s advantageous for China to skew stats and data for the time being as it rises to be a peer adversary militarily and economically.
- hash872 1y agoAdam Tooze's grandfather was one of the most notorious Soviet moles/traitors in British history, so I guess I don't find it surprising that he's found a new Communist regime to hang his hat on. (For anyone saying 'he can't choose his family'- Tooze famously dedicated his first book in effusive praise for his grandfather) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wynn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wynn
- paradox460 1y agoWumaos gonna wumaos. Only the names change
- thefourthchime 1y agoThe thing I keep coming back to with China is that it's (mostly) mono-ethnic and that ethnicity is rapidly aging, such as South Korea and Japan. The birth rate is tragic, and soon they're going to have a lot of infrastructure and old people and no one around to support it. The other shoe that is waiting to drop is the amount of spending and shadowy debts that to prop up the real estate industry. The vast majority of Chinese have invested their life savings into what looks like a mirage. Thirdly, they've become the world's factory. But now now they've priced themselves out and it's moving to places like Vietnam and India. So now what's left? Consumer spending? High tech? It looks like they need to reinvent themselves again.
- aurareturn 1y agoTo be honest, you can write similar gloomy vibes for any country. Every country has its own set of problems. No?
- thefourthchime 1y agoNo, USA doesn't have those problems. South Asia / India can grow its industrial base. I don't know of another country with such a terrible real estate bubble (Japan in the 90s maybe).
- kelipso 1y agoi don’t think real estate bubble is a “real economy” thing. It’s just property prices, so states with strong influence over the economy should be able to handle it fine.
- HSO 1y agoYea, Tooze is one of the very few westerners who gets it https://overcast.fm/+AAN68WmR_iU/45:36 https://overcast.fm/+AAN68WmR_iU/45:36 He also wrote a reasonable piece on the western mischaracterization and rewriting history of china‘s pandemic response
- canucker2016 1y agothe USA was worried that Japan would take over/buy up the USA in the late 80s, esp. after Sony bought Columbia Pictures and Mitsubishi bought Rockefeller Center in NYC. see https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buying-spree-2013-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-eighties-america-buyi... and movies like Gung Ho, and Rising Sun, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gung_Ho_(film) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(1993_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_(1993_film)
- terminalshort 1y agoThe dominance of the West came from the industrial revolution. The countries that industrialized first could generate such a massively higher economic output per capita that they could easily dominate all pre-industrial nations. This level of advantage hadn't been seen since the last fundamental change in human society from hunter-gatherer to agrarian. China may well be the dominant state of the 21st century, but their advantage will be incremental unless there is some similar breakthrough waiting to happen that will occur in China first.
- jpgvm 1y agoTheir edge will be population size. For China to remain less economically powerful than the US their standard of living must remain massively below that of the US. That is just unrealistic on a longer timescale.
- uncircle 1y agoDo you really think the Western, especially the US hegemony would go down without a bang? Sure, China might rule over the ashes, but I wouldn't make large bets over what the world would look like when the tensions that have accumulated over the past 30 years explode catastrophically.