5 ms·
The Future, Made in China
- bell-cot 3mo agoLong-winded, as anyone familiar with the New Yorker would expect. But still very good. Whatever its other weaknesses, China has the enormous advantage that the people really in power are focused on raising China to global dominance. Vs. those really in power in America are, at best, worried about their personal status and wealth at the end of the next fiscal quarter.
- bojan 3mo agoThe Chinese leadership realized one doesn't exclude the other. Also, a leadership that is so enormously autocratic simply has to juggle fewer balls at the same time.
- bell-cot 3mo ago> ...one doesn't exclude... Yes, but I don't see that realization as noteworthy. Does history record a nation which never found its own advancement hobbled by the scheming of its petty local officials? > ...has to juggle fewer balls... When things aren't going so well, trying to stay in power adds more balls (to juggle) than being an autocracy takes away. And "things aren't going so well" usually indicates that less-competent autocrats are in power - meaning that they are less able to juggle any number of balls.
- WhyComboNadir 3mo agoWhat you said about "next fiscal quarter" is exactly right, and goes along with us (in the US) only thinking politically in 4 year cycles... which means on average we are thinking only 2 years ahead. China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond. I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too). If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).
- tw04 3mo ago> I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job Eliminate share buybacks. Raise the top tax bracket to 95% on earnings over $10m. Executive shares cannot be exercised until retirement if you really want to get aggressive. The nuclear option would be stocks cannot be used as collateral for loans, it would shore up 90% of the nonsense overnight and have 0 negative impact on 99.99% of the general public.
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoHow would raising the taxes force people to think 25 years ahead?
- arrosenberg 3mo agoTaxing profits incentivizes reinvestment over reaping.
- tw04 3mo agoIf I can reinvest my profits to grow my business or pay most of it out in taxes I’m probably reinvesting it if there’s a long term gain to be had. Unlike trickle down economics, it’s not just a failed theory. It’s something we’ve seen in action and it works as expected.
- Eueudhsbsj32 3mo agoWhy would the elites ever agree to that? It's already too easy for those in power to control popular opinion, and only getting easier, so you're not going to get mass protests or revolutions that upset the status quo.
- andriy_koval 3mo agoI think having wealth tax would make rich push money to innovations and production more aggressively.
- bell-cot 3mo ago
- altmanaltman 3mo agoChina had an enermous corruption problem, what are you talking about? Xi has been on an anti-corruption campagin since 2012 and they are just getting rid of top leaders like just last month. And I am sure his "anti-corruption" campaign is totally not ignoring some aspects. While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.
- verdverm 3mo ago1995 was a different leader in a different time. Let us not forget at one point, America forced walked people on The Trail of Tears. American Amnesia is very potent and powerful, we easily forget about last week, year, century When did we go from bad guy to good guy?
- xXSLAYERXx 3mo agoYes, let us not forget The Trail of Tears which happened two hundred years ago. > China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that. > This is one of the safest places in the world, if you’re not a dissident > In March, authorities abruptly barred the two founders of an A.I. startup called Manus from leaving the country. Did you even read the article?
- verdverm 3mo ago> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoTrue, that's the site standards. I notice that you didn't answer any of his actual points, though...
- aerodexis 3mo agoThe Chinese desire to raise China to global dominance is exactly a concern w/ status and wealth. It's naive to think that America and China are any different in the degree to which leadership is driven by these concerns. One simply hopes that the facts-on-the-ground (i.e. geography) structures this pursuit in such a way to provide peace and prosperity to normal people. America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this. China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale. Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth. Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.
- ricardobeat 3mo agohttps://archive.ph/w8J5L https://archive.ph/w8J5L
- recursivedoubts 3mo agoMaybe we shouldn't have moved the entire supply chain to asia. "we"
- derelicta 3mo agoLuckily for the rest of the world, your elites have made that mistake.
- recursivedoubts 3mo agoi don't think they view it as a mistake
- ZeroGravitas 3mo agoThe Capitalists Will [outsource the manufacturing of] the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them -- original quote attributed to various famous communists https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/02/22/rope/
- recursivedoubts 3mo agolol I almost included that quote, but the reality is that china isn't communist in any meaningful way
- notarobot123 3mo agoperhaps themselves driven by global consumers culture that doesn't care how or where something was made as long as it's slightly cheaper.
- dominotw 3mo agoi dont know why this is such a sensitive topic that it gets immeditely flagged and considered some sort of hate speech. china gets massive advantage from western ideas that even benigh thing like 'lets not depend on china' is automatically considered hate speech and racism.
- pydry 3mo ago
- PaulKeeble 3mo agoChina's dominion as the worlds super power is going to be quite different to the US, EU and UK. They have a very different culture towards intellectual property, product versioning and quality control.
- CamelCaseName 3mo agoI have found Chinese quality control to be quite good in my daily life here. Or was that your point?
- Bridged7756 3mo agoCan you not be so obtuse? If you are implying that, as a generalization, to you, the West is superior, just say that. Such broad categorization about that vast of a nation seems disparaging to me. Grouping an entire nation on a label, and marking it inferior to your own.
- jalev 3mo agoThe article is exactly what you think it's going to be: "China is moving ahead, but at what cost?" and the usual breathless Sinophobia that comes with it. At the very least when this happened in the early 80s with Japan's "oh shit they're going to outdo us technologically!!!" we got really cool fiction out of it for the next two decades.
- dominotw 3mo agoyea history always repeats in patterns and nothing new ever happens.
- aerodexis 3mo agoIt is utterly fascinating the ends to which people will go to insist the opposite.
- ToucanLoucan 3mo agoThe mass media loves to talk about ANYTHING besides the ongoing decay of the west, largely facilitated by it's own ineptitude at the game it designed. We're losing because we outsourced everything for short term gains and have let supercorps run completely without oversight, buying each other left and right, until every "American" product left is owned by one of four conglomorates, and none of them know what they actually do anymore and the only way they can keep "growing" is by cutting costs to the bone.
- kibwen 3mo agoSurely you realize that this article is, in fact, about the ongoing decay of the West.
- throw-the-towel 3mo agoIt's not. It's about what's going well in China, not what went wrong in the West.
- feverzsj 3mo agoExport-oriented economy is never sustainable, especially when it's built upon low human rights.
- not-kinsale-joe 3mo agoWhy do you say that?
- osti 3mo agoIt's an axiom that the modern Western mind is built upon.
- jfyi 2mo agoThe foundational failing I see in my countrymen is the notion that China can't innovate. Their economic reliance on exports is not untrue. Just like their reliance on energy imports is a fact (though one that we are seeing right now become more questionable.) The average American will keep shouting over and over again that "China can't innovate" while they quietly and slowly tick off every box on their checklist of issues. It doesn't end well for us.
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoThe percentage of China's GDP that is dependent on foreign demand (15.7%) is the second lowest among major economies. The only major economy that is lower is the US at 9.0%, which is an extremely outlier.[0] By many OECD economic metrics[1] around trade dependence, the US and China consistently rank as the least trade dependent. This reflects the scale of the countries, diversity of the economies, and an intentional strategy of minimizing trade dependence for GDP growth. This last point is central to geopolitical leverage. Even if you treat the EU27 as a single trade entity, which operates at similar scales, there is little evidence of a coherent strategy to become functionally self-sufficient. A lot of geopolitical relevance is downstream of this. [0] https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/2082502536624287890 https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/2082502536624287890 [1] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/inter-country-input-output-tables.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/inter-country-input-ou...
- Hasz 3mo ago> Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government. I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore. We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
- kibwen 3mo agoThe belief that autocracies will inevitably fall (or perhaps that "the arc of history bends towards justice") is hopelessly naive. Technology is a force multiplier with the power to entrench autocracy, forever.
- _superposition_ 3mo agoWhat if communism/socialism works with the assistance of technology?
- polotics 3mo agoCan you be more precise maybe?
- AnimalMuppet 3mo agoThe problem always was that the central planners never knew enough to plan the economy right. Well, with enough technology, enough reporting into the central database, they theoretically could know enough. And that might actually work, if that were the only problem. But it's not. The deeper problem is that people work better when they get to share in the proceeds. People didn't work very well in the "worker's paradise". They worked half-heartedly, doing the least they could to get by, and production (and quality) reflected it. (This isn't exclusive to communism, though. Large corporations can have similar issues.)