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> yet as soon as things started slowing down the entire system collapsed with a shocking rapidity, because these things don't create social harmony, they create

by ethbr1 2mo ago

> yet as soon as things started slowing down the entire system collapsed with a shocking rapidity, because these things don't create social harmony, they create a dystopic nightmare that people want to overthrow. Different read: command economies collapse because they invariably have higher levels of corruption and inefficiency. Both of those are tolerable during boom times of economic growth, and China has kicked the can down the road by pursuing intermittent corruption purges. Ultimately though, when things start to slow down, the system attempts to conceal the slowdown, which causes even more economic dysfunction, which eventually paralyzes the whole system and leads to collapse. Making a command economy work sustainably means solving the "People lie to avoid consequences of bad news" problem.

somenameforme 2mo ago
China isn't a command economy. Internally they're more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition. It's a big part of the reason they're able to bring the prices on basically everything down to absurdly low levels. Even politically they're paradoxical in that they're a dictatorship but also quite decentralized. For each instance each 'region' down to a few thousand or so people has a local representative who has meaningful political power. It'd be like if the House of Representatives had actually continued growing with population, as was initially envisioned. There's really quite a lot to learn from China in things that they're doing right, but stagnating Western powers only seem able to see what they want to see - the censorship, surveillance, and propaganda apparatuses which are largely uninspired and more likely to cause their downfall rather than meaningfully contributing to their rise.
- ethbr1 2mo ago
  > more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition. I'd argue that the US and Europe are bad benchmarks, given the entrenched quasi-monopolies the governments refuse to break up. But we'll see how that goes for China. It's still early days for their capitalistic ambitions, and tensions between party and corporations are starting to show (Jack Ma et al.). Personally, I think the more destructive moment is going to be after they have large national champions competing globally. Is the CCP going to have the discipline to let an Alibaba, BYD, or SAIC be supplanted, if an external or internal more efficient competitor starts growing? Or will they become too big to fail and intertwine with government?
  - somenameforme 2mo ago
    In general I'd agree with all of this. I think the biggest challenge they're going to face is that Xi Jinping isn't immortal. The nature of a dictatorship is such that benevolent and skilled leadership can achieve amazing things, but incompetent leadership can completely destroy a society. And relying on good leadership to choose good successors is rife with precedent of failure. By contrast in the US whether we have a vegetable or a clown in the driver seat, the system remains relatively more stable. But that also means that even if somehow we managed to find a skilled and benevolent leader, the amount of good he'd be able to really do is just as limited as the amount of harm the aforementioned can do.

by ethbr1 2mo ago

somenameforme 2mo ago

China isn't a command economy. Internally they're more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition. It's a big part of the reason they're able to bring the prices on basically everything down to absurdly low levels. Even politically they're paradoxical in that they're a dictatorship but also quite decentralized. For each instance each 'region' down to a few thousand or so people has a local representative who has meaningful political power. It'd be like if the House of Representatives had actually continued growing with population, as was initially envisioned. There's really quite a lot to learn from China in things that they're doing right, but stagnating Western powers only seem able to see what they want to see - the censorship, surveillance, and propaganda apparatuses which are largely uninspired and more likely to cause their downfall rather than meaningfully contributing to their rise.

ethbr1 2mo ago
> more capitalist than the US in many ways, particularly with regards to healthy competition. I'd argue that the US and Europe are bad benchmarks, given the entrenched quasi-monopolies the governments refuse to break up. But we'll see how that goes for China. It's still early days for their capitalistic ambitions, and tensions between party and corporations are starting to show (Jack Ma et al.). Personally, I think the more destructive moment is going to be after they have large national champions competing globally. Is the CCP going to have the discipline to let an Alibaba, BYD, or SAIC be supplanted, if an external or internal more efficient competitor starts growing? Or will they become too big to fail and intertwine with government?
- somenameforme 2mo ago
  In general I'd agree with all of this. I think the biggest challenge they're going to face is that Xi Jinping isn't immortal. The nature of a dictatorship is such that benevolent and skilled leadership can achieve amazing things, but incompetent leadership can completely destroy a society. And relying on good leadership to choose good successors is rife with precedent of failure. By contrast in the US whether we have a vegetable or a clown in the driver seat, the system remains relatively more stable. But that also means that even if somehow we managed to find a skilled and benevolent leader, the amount of good he'd be able to really do is just as limited as the amount of harm the aforementioned can do.