13 ms·

China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world

111 points by miohtama 1y ago

Igrom 1y ago
https://archive.ph/Jxlp3 https://archive.ph/Jxlp3
HPsquared 1y ago
They really are going all-in on the capitalism over there.
- billy99k 1y ago
  China has ownership in all major companies and influences all major decisions. This isn't really capitalism. In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
  - femiagbabiaka 1y ago
    I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.
  - conception 1y ago
    This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.
  - delusional 1y ago
    > In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far. I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements. What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
    - ii41 1y ago
      A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
  - Der_Einzige 1y ago
    All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related. Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist) A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
    - billy99k 1y ago
      Using this definition, identities are only copied, and not stolen. Learning from the Chinese is entirely different than using operatives to take the corporate secrets from lets say the biggest steel company in the world, and then driving them out of business within a few years. If this is the world you want to live in, fine. Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal oprecourse.
      - e3bc54b2 1y ago
        > Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse. To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.
    - lnsru 1y ago
      Tesla bought a company called Grohmann Automation in 2017, factory automation company. I am not sure what Tesla learned from Chinese…
      - bryanlarsen 1y ago
        Tesla's first purpose built car factory was built in China using mostly local expertise. Their Berlin factory is basically a copy of their Chinese factory. Grohmann Automation was to super automate their factories, which is why the Model 3 roll out was such a disaster and which they abandoned in favour of conventional car manufacturing techniques.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.
  - markus_zhang 1y ago
    Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources. Ironically, not too different from the US.
Ericson2314 1y ago
Gig work is actually totally fine with an adequate welfare state and reduced work week. Too bad China has neither of those things!
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Thinking lately how it mirrors "piece work" that, I think, countries like Japan used to have (still have?).
  - analog31 1y ago
    Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.
  - pessimizer 1y ago
    "Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.
    - JKCalhoun 1y ago
      I'm reacting to having seen it in "The Twilight Samurai" and perhaps other Japanese films depicting that era.
  - stevenwoo 1y ago
    From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-clothing-made-in-usa https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...
- John23832 1y ago
  You had me at the first sentence. My fingers were itching to comment.
- skrebbel 1y ago
  I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right? ¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.
alephnerd 1y ago
Tl;dr - 1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese) 2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy. ---------- I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases. It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0]. Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away. Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well. [0] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.html http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm... * - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."
- oezi 1y ago
  As Germany and Japan can attest, export-led growth works great until it doesn't, because you are stuck to suppress wages across the economy to maintain your export edge. You need to also build the internal market and carefully manage the housing market as the central instrument for wealth accumulation of your citizens. I think the US is unique to realize that they can achieve more by being a consumer spending economy and using run-away housing prices to inflate their citizens wealth (using immigration to increase demand).
  - t_mann 1y ago
    I can see the point re internal market vs export orientation. But why make the housing market the focal point of wealth creation? Wouldn't the stock market be a much more overall beneficial place to let your population accumulate wealth (which the US also does quite successfully, through 401k, cheap and trustworthy financial products like ETFs, a strong SEC,...)? Pushing house prices ever higher comes with so many societal problems, and also with serious financial risks. The start of Japan's lost decades, which you mentioned, wasn't weak domestic demand. It was a housing price bubble so extreme that small areas of central Tokio were worth more than all of California. Domestic demand was actually very strong in Japan up until that bubble burst. The biggest financial crisis in the US in recent memory (2008) was also due to the housing market, its consequences eclipsing that of the dotcom bubble or the 1987 crash. That being said, stock market bubbles are no fun either - the Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a stock market crash. But at least stocks don't tend to push people into homelessness already while they're booming.
yocoda 1y ago
> And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers. > The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible Is this author trolling or am I dumb?
- esafak 1y ago
  You're reading The Economist.
- atonse 1y ago
  I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.
  - fifteen1506 1y ago
    You are both the exploited and the exploiter.
  - maeln 1y ago
    Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month. The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage. From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live. It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.
- tdeck 1y ago
Herring 1y ago
China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again. I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc) https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.
- inglor_cz 1y ago
  I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved. (I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
  - bryanlarsen 1y ago
    The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
    - nradov 1y ago
      The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
      - codedokode 1y ago
        You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?
        nradov 1y ago
        Yes, Europeans are equally unable to learn from their mistakes.
jmyeet 1y ago
Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West. In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically. Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people. China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is. Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy. China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough. The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  > Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen This is very untrue. A lot of richer Chinese owners a bunch of apartments that they are holding for speculation, maybe they rent it out (and often not), but it’s still very much hoarding. You got a lot of sweetheart deals that happened 20+ years ago where many connected Chinese were able to acquire apartments, villas, and so on as opportunities. Also, since the stock market is a hot mess, real estate acquisition was seen as the only real way to hold wealth in China. > China considers housing to be a public right, which it is You have more options for substandard housing in the cities (like sub basement room rentals aka “the ant tribe” in Beijing), but I also have no idea where you got this from. Rural hukou have the right to their land, but because they can’t sell it they can’t use it as collaterals in loans and such, making their life even harder.
howdyhowdy123 1y ago
[flagged]
thr0waway001 1y ago
Chinese leaders also: "gee, why aren't our people having more babies anymore?"
- throwaway173738 1y ago
  “Probably for the same reasons as Americans.”
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    As my mother once said during her time as a hospice nurse, “We’re all dying, some just faster than others.”
subw00f 1y ago
[flagged]
- more_corn 1y ago
  Do you disagree that China regularly censors speech? Retaliates against dissent? Locks masses up people up for being the wrong race or religion? Don’t get me wrong there are some amazing things about China. Freedom isn’t one of them. For someone criticizing commentators here let’s hear your credentials regarding knowledge of China. Or are you just a bot reflexively criticizing anyone who questions China?
  - lurking_swe 1y ago
    I think their point is many americans are simply not capable of having an honest debate about the pros / cons of living in both countries. It’s OK to not like a country and give them credit where credit is due. They just say china has NO FREEDOM and CANT TRUST THE CCP, and shut down the conversation, as if the debate has been won? As if no other metric matters in a society. There is nuance - which 90% of the comments on this post have missed. Most importantly, most commenters are not entering the discussion with an open mind. In which case there’s not point in debating anything. It’s a waste of time.
- blackoil 1y ago
  Not just that, HN normally avoids political topics; anything related to Israel is quickly flagged to oblivion. But as soon as China is mentioned suddenly it's all about Mao.
- lyu07282 1y ago
  I think china just is a big problem for the west, their even development on such a massive scale is hard to deny, raising 800 million out of poverty in 40 years, that's 3/4 of all poor people in the world raised out of poverty. In contrast western liberalism prescribed shock doctrine and endless austerity. People are inundated by propaganda, there is no independent thought, but the collective psyche is left in a bad place which makes us vulnerable. I think that's why psychotic right-wing cults like maga are on the rise everywhere, it's capitalizing on the vulnerable state liberalism has left us in. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...
charlie0 1y ago
The article came across as alarmist while completely failing to provide the bigger picture of whether this is actually a bad thing or not. We instantly assume it's bad because it would indeed be awful for us in the US to live like that. I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there? Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.
- Stevvo 1y ago
  Housing is cheaper, and pretty much everything else is cheaper also. For example the meals these workers deliver are very affordable. You will only pay more for imports.
decafninja 1y ago
I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong. Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system? That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted. What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  There is no way to really watch what is going on over there with how amazingly effective the great firewall is.
- woooooo 1y ago
  > West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom. What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.
- esbranson 1y ago
  If by progress do you mean rental housing, roads/bridges, computers, food, and gig work? Do we have a shortage of them? I keep hearing about everyday life we've had for generations like it's an earnings report.
  - bamboozled 1y ago
    I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it. Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are. The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.
RoyBean 1y ago
Googl Guy Standing.
RandyOrion 1y ago
In China, we call "gig workers" "flexable workers" (灵活就业), which are very similar to the unemployed. The reason is that the low, zero, or even negative walfare imposed by the Chinese goverment on all tax payers makes neither of them a viable option for a living. Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.
- aurareturn 1y ago
  What about "gig workers" and "the unemployed" elsewhere? Is there any difference?

111 points by miohtama 1y ago

Igrom 1y ago

https://archive.ph/Jxlp3 https://archive.ph/Jxlp3

HPsquared 1y ago

They really are going all-in on the capitalism over there.

billy99k 1y ago
China has ownership in all major companies and influences all major decisions. This isn't really capitalism. In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
- femiagbabiaka 1y ago
  I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.
- conception 1y ago
  This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.
- delusional 1y ago
  > In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far. I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements. What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
  - ii41 1y ago
    A thing that could be interesting particularly for hn folks: in China, you can sue entities for open source license violation citing American-origin licenses like GPL, and win. There are many such cases. So one can potentially sue e.g. Onyx over their Linux kernel usage and stop their violation. This hasn't happened probably simply because no one cared enough.
- Der_Einzige 1y ago
  All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related. Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist) A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
  - billy99k 1y ago
    Using this definition, identities are only copied, and not stolen. Learning from the Chinese is entirely different than using operatives to take the corporate secrets from lets say the biggest steel company in the world, and then driving them out of business within a few years. If this is the world you want to live in, fine. Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal oprecourse.
    - e3bc54b2 1y ago
      > Just don't complain when large corporations copy your work one day with no legal recourse. To be fair, that is the schadenfreude. Large corporations have been copying works of little people for ages. They only started crying about 'IP theft' when someone bigger (China) started doing the same to them, and to make it worse, most of the corps willingly handed the IP over because they wanted cheap exploitable labor.
  - lnsru 1y ago
    Tesla bought a company called Grohmann Automation in 2017, factory automation company. I am not sure what Tesla learned from Chinese…
    - bryanlarsen 1y ago
      Tesla's first purpose built car factory was built in China using mostly local expertise. Their Berlin factory is basically a copy of their Chinese factory. Grohmann Automation was to super automate their factories, which is why the Model 3 roll out was such a disaster and which they abandoned in favour of conventional car manufacturing techniques.
inglor_cz 1y ago
It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.
- markus_zhang 1y ago
  Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources. Ironically, not too different from the US.

Ericson2314 1y ago

Gig work is actually totally fine with an adequate welfare state and reduced work week. Too bad China has neither of those things!

JKCalhoun 1y ago
Thinking lately how it mirrors "piece work" that, I think, countries like Japan used to have (still have?).
- analog31 1y ago
  Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.
- pessimizer 1y ago
  "Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    I'm reacting to having seen it in "The Twilight Samurai" and perhaps other Japanese films depicting that era.
- stevenwoo 1y ago
  From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-clothing-made-in-usa https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...
John23832 1y ago
You had me at the first sentence. My fingers were itching to comment.
skrebbel 1y ago
I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right? ¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.

alephnerd 1y ago

Tl;dr - 1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese) 2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy. ---------- I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases. It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0]. Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away. Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well. [0] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.html http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm... * - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."

oezi 1y ago
As Germany and Japan can attest, export-led growth works great until it doesn't, because you are stuck to suppress wages across the economy to maintain your export edge. You need to also build the internal market and carefully manage the housing market as the central instrument for wealth accumulation of your citizens. I think the US is unique to realize that they can achieve more by being a consumer spending economy and using run-away housing prices to inflate their citizens wealth (using immigration to increase demand).
- t_mann 1y ago
  I can see the point re internal market vs export orientation. But why make the housing market the focal point of wealth creation? Wouldn't the stock market be a much more overall beneficial place to let your population accumulate wealth (which the US also does quite successfully, through 401k, cheap and trustworthy financial products like ETFs, a strong SEC,...)? Pushing house prices ever higher comes with so many societal problems, and also with serious financial risks. The start of Japan's lost decades, which you mentioned, wasn't weak domestic demand. It was a housing price bubble so extreme that small areas of central Tokio were worth more than all of California. Domestic demand was actually very strong in Japan up until that bubble burst. The biggest financial crisis in the US in recent memory (2008) was also due to the housing market, its consequences eclipsing that of the dotcom bubble or the 1987 crash. That being said, stock market bubbles are no fun either - the Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a stock market crash. But at least stocks don't tend to push people into homelessness already while they're booming.

yocoda 1y ago

> And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers. > The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible Is this author trolling or am I dumb?

esafak 1y ago
You're reading The Economist.
atonse 1y ago
I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.
- fifteen1506 1y ago
  You are both the exploited and the exploiter.
- maeln 1y ago
  Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month. The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage. From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live. It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.
tdeck 1y ago

Herring 1y ago

China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again. I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc) https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.

inglor_cz 1y ago
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved. (I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
- bryanlarsen 1y ago
  The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
  - nradov 1y ago
    The history of China going back millennia is chock full of violent revolutions and civil wars. They don't seem to learn anything from mistakes. I fully expect another one in our lifetimes.
    - codedokode 1y ago
      You should look at European history for comparison. I don't remember, what did they have, a 100 or 200-year war?
      - nradov 1y ago
        Yes, Europeans are equally unable to learn from their mistakes.

jmyeet 1y ago

Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West. In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically. Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people. China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is. Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy. China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough. The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
> Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen This is very untrue. A lot of richer Chinese owners a bunch of apartments that they are holding for speculation, maybe they rent it out (and often not), but it’s still very much hoarding. You got a lot of sweetheart deals that happened 20+ years ago where many connected Chinese were able to acquire apartments, villas, and so on as opportunities. Also, since the stock market is a hot mess, real estate acquisition was seen as the only real way to hold wealth in China. > China considers housing to be a public right, which it is You have more options for substandard housing in the cities (like sub basement room rentals aka “the ant tribe” in Beijing), but I also have no idea where you got this from. Rural hukou have the right to their land, but because they can’t sell it they can’t use it as collaterals in loans and such, making their life even harder.

howdyhowdy123 1y ago

[flagged]

thr0waway001 1y ago

Chinese leaders also: "gee, why aren't our people having more babies anymore?"

throwaway173738 1y ago
“Probably for the same reasons as Americans.”
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  As my mother once said during her time as a hospice nurse, “We’re all dying, some just faster than others.”

subw00f 1y ago

[flagged]

more_corn 1y ago
Do you disagree that China regularly censors speech? Retaliates against dissent? Locks masses up people up for being the wrong race or religion? Don’t get me wrong there are some amazing things about China. Freedom isn’t one of them. For someone criticizing commentators here let’s hear your credentials regarding knowledge of China. Or are you just a bot reflexively criticizing anyone who questions China?
- lurking_swe 1y ago
  I think their point is many americans are simply not capable of having an honest debate about the pros / cons of living in both countries. It’s OK to not like a country and give them credit where credit is due. They just say china has NO FREEDOM and CANT TRUST THE CCP, and shut down the conversation, as if the debate has been won? As if no other metric matters in a society. There is nuance - which 90% of the comments on this post have missed. Most importantly, most commenters are not entering the discussion with an open mind. In which case there’s not point in debating anything. It’s a waste of time.
blackoil 1y ago
Not just that, HN normally avoids political topics; anything related to Israel is quickly flagged to oblivion. But as soon as China is mentioned suddenly it's all about Mao.
lyu07282 1y ago
I think china just is a big problem for the west, their even development on such a massive scale is hard to deny, raising 800 million out of poverty in 40 years, that's 3/4 of all poor people in the world raised out of poverty. In contrast western liberalism prescribed shock doctrine and endless austerity. People are inundated by propaganda, there is no independent thought, but the collective psyche is left in a bad place which makes us vulnerable. I think that's why psychotic right-wing cults like maga are on the rise everywhere, it's capitalizing on the vulnerable state liberalism has left us in. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/l...

charlie0 1y ago

The article came across as alarmist while completely failing to provide the bigger picture of whether this is actually a bad thing or not. We instantly assume it's bad because it would indeed be awful for us in the US to live like that. I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there? Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.

Stevvo 1y ago
Housing is cheaper, and pretty much everything else is cheaper also. For example the meals these workers deliver are very affordable. You will only pay more for imports.

decafninja 1y ago

I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong. Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system? That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted. What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?

mensetmanusman 1y ago
There is no way to really watch what is going on over there with how amazingly effective the great firewall is.
woooooo 1y ago
> West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom. What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.
esbranson 1y ago
If by progress do you mean rental housing, roads/bridges, computers, food, and gig work? Do we have a shortage of them? I keep hearing about everyday life we've had for generations like it's an earnings report.
- bamboozled 1y ago
  I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it. Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are. The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.

RoyBean 1y ago

Googl Guy Standing.

RandyOrion 1y ago

In China, we call "gig workers" "flexable workers" (灵活就业), which are very similar to the unemployed. The reason is that the low, zero, or even negative walfare imposed by the Chinese goverment on all tax payers makes neither of them a viable option for a living. Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.

aurareturn 1y ago
What about "gig workers" and "the unemployed" elsewhere? Is there any difference?