Comment by dnomad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dnomad | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What China manages to do quite well is stop rentiers from stifling innovation. This is a remarkable achievement. There's corruption in China but the CPC has made it very clear that corruption that threatens national growth won't be tolerated.

Contrast this to America where an enormously large and powerful rentier class have come to completely dominate not just the economy but the government itself. These corporations have managed to carefully stifle and misdirect innovation in order to ensure their rents aren't threatened. Old school media and publishers have neutered ebooks and tried again and again to kill Netflix and any distribution vector they don't control. Banks have made it so Americans are only now just getting payment flexibility that others have enjoyed for decades. ISPs have killed net neutrality and will do their best to become the new railroads, making sure to take a piece of every pie even if it sets the country back. Note that these corporations didn't do it alone. Every step of the way the government was there to help powerful rentiers.

Every high growth era is defined by the abundance of "new adopters" - people who do not have habits or who are willing to change their habits. What happens with populations is that they do things a certain way for long enough periods of time that they don't want to do it another way.

This has little to do with Chinese policy, and a lot to do with the fact that Chinese life is moving from extremely rural/poor to middle class and thus, had no prior opportunities to do things like reading physical books, so no habits or preexisting preferences to overcome.

In what age did Chinese had no opportunities to read physical books? That was at least half a century back

I meant, reading physical books as a recreational activity because you're living on a farm with subsistence wages and lack the income or time to do so. China was a country with 750 million people living on less than $2 a day in 1990.

Not to mention the burning of books and disdaining of intellectual pursuit in the cultural revolution.

> What China manages to do quite well is stop rentiers from stifling innovation

Tell that to the dying startups that have to stand up against Tencent and Alibaba. Beijing is littered with them. Let's not forget the various Chinese state-owned enterprises.

Any successful Chinese business is or becomes a Chinese state-owned business. The only difference is that the Chinese govt is the rentier, versus multiple ones in the US.

You can't become a state-owned business. You either are (because you have government ties in the first place), or are not (and you are doomed, sorry for that). People have no chance to succeed unless born to the right parents. Even Chinese people admit that. The problem is not how many, but who the rentier is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com