They're able to do a lot of things quickly, but principal–agent problems remain and there is a ton of corruption. Local party cadres are under a ton of pressure and frequently use overly large carrots and sticks to get stuff done.
This isn't very efficient.
You don't need to be super efficient when you're a developing country, but China is solidly middle-income. The things you need to do to go from 0 to 1 will eventually hurt you, and from their slowing GDP growth it's clear that it's already doing that.
I know plenty of people from China who have talked about the crazy levels of corruption there. Some are related to those in power, and they've said it very much goes through 'official channels.'
How corrupt was dick cheney?
... seriously?
/Edit: America isn't perfect, I'll give whoever that. But the defeatist equivalence shit has to stop. We are working on it. We won't stop working on it. We can always do better. Pick up a shovel and help, rather than "lol we're as bad as {place} because {thing}."
In the US things like Dark Money and bribery and lobbying and monopolies are all a sort of an ephermal fact rather than a fact of life like it is in China.
My argument is underneath all that the US and China are the same in terms of the volume of corruption.
China is just an extension of this from what you normally do to tip toe around your boss to the government. Yes it's bad, yes it's a negative. And Yes it's at a whole different level than America.
However, Does it prevent you from living a happy life in China? Does it prevent you from becoming rich and powerful? Does it prevent you from talking shit about the government with your friends? Does it prevent you from pursuing the equivalent of the American Dream in China? No it doesn't. China has problems just as America does but to think that you're living under total oppression is an exaggeration at best.
Take a look at this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2236746/Road-built-... An elderly couple refuses to move and the government bends to their will. Would an evil despotic controlling government allow this to happen? Would you imagine this kind of behavior being allowed in North Korea? Yes there is no talking shit about the big boss in China, but you need to open your eyes, it's nowhere near as bad as you think. This is not stalinist russia.
Definitely if your job and your intentions are against the will of the government you're gonna have a hard time. But for most people they'll be fine.
However the topic at hand is corruption. Not freedoms. If you were talking about freedoms, than yes, America is more free. My argument is China and the United States are equally corrupt.
> it's nowhere near as bad as you think > However, Does it prevent you from living a happy life in China? Does it prevent you from becoming rich and powerful? Does it prevent you from talking shit about the government with your friends? Does it prevent you from pursuing the equivalent of the American Dream in China? No it doesn't. > This is not stalinist russia
This is an extremely naive and ridiculous belief. Depending upon your definition of "happy life", if that involves having to suck up and follow orders given by the government, then sure go ahead. But don't pretend as if China and every other socialist/communist country will let average joes be happy. They have re-education camps for people who don't follow, camps for certain religions, a social credit system blocking millions from traveling/renting and what not.
Not fighting back when things are starting to get worse is exactly how things exaggerate to the point of no return. I would recommend you watch a documentary on how Stalin came to power and how things got worse. Look at Venezuela now vs 20 years ago and you have proof.
I'm assuming you haven't been to China otherwise you wouldn't be saying these things.
You cannot claim the following are anywhere close to how things are in US. Or will you claim these are all fake propaganda being spread by western countries? It's almost ironic that defending China's practices yet China doesn't even allow Google and most social media sites in the country without a VPN. If this stuff happens in US, media would be having a field day:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/07/china-bans-win...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/07/720608802/reporters-notebook-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...
Also, we are not supposed to engage in political debates on HN so I am going to stop here.
CPI index (corruption perception index) places USA on 22nd place while China is way down on the 89th place.
It was really the last remnant of the British Empire according to historians. Some of the Hong Kong population (younger especially) wants to be an independent state, but China wants to integrate it, and is slowly sapping it of its famous liberal policies and freedoms.
Individuals within the FBI that were revealed to have intent to plot against/subvert the President were criticized in tweets.
The FBI is not under attack.
The Chinese government doesn’t believe in rule of law or checks and balances, leaving lots of room for unchecked abuses.
The 2008 banking crisis revealed massive levels of fraud, collusion and corruption in the banking system and the bailouts with 'too big to fail' betray something even more deep seated and systemic. There is a huge problem of revolving doors across industries with regulators getting hired by the companies they were regulating and politicians getting hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches. There is a well documented history of corruption in banking, real estate, pharma, energy and multiple other sectors and we have even seen this entering education.
Most commentators know about the widespread corruption in their countries but there is weird dissonance and finger pointing making any kind of informed discussion impossible.
What in your opinion is a neutral venue? I like the technical expertise here but opinions are definitely not neutral.
I would say I am less biased on this topic than the average person on HN. How can I say that though when bias can color my judgement on my own bias? How can anyone say such a thing due to this recursive fact?
I believe the method around this problem is not to use your own judgement to judge bias in your own judgement but to look at external factors surrounding your circumstance and use probabilistic causative connections between those external factors and possible bias to determine a persons' overall level of bias. For example, an African living in the congo will have less bias on a China vs. America debate than a chinese person, an icelander will be less biased than a new yorker for the same debate. The external factor in the previous examples is race and location.
So for me I come from a more different background. I am chinese and american. I hold no nationalistic pride for either country and I could see my self living in either country if need be. It's apples and oranges to me, literally. Racially though, I'm chinese so from circumstance my bias would be equal to an chinese born american but less than an american born white guy or an asian born mongoloid. Overall I'm probably more biased than the african.
In short, I am less biased than most people on this forum because of my background. So a neutral venue would be like people who talk about this stuff but are mostly from like singapore.
I'll tell you a communist joke:
"Any party member has a primal fear of an election with more than one candidate"
Why? "Because it means that one of choices is wrong"
I my opinion, that is only nominally a joke, and the joke tells a lot about CPCs internal arrangement: pick a wrong side even once, an you are a toast, and you are better off supporting status-quo
This is incorrect, at least in the US. A majority of Americans are shareholders (Somewhere between 51%[0] and 55%[1]), since if you have a 401k or IRA, you are a shareholder.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf [1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/211052/stock-ownership-down-amo...
[EDIT] I mean the claim that most Americans aren't shareholders is objectively false, thus claiming that increasing shareholder value isn't in the interests of most Americans because of this is objectively false. How valuable increasing shareholder value is to most Americans is not objectively false, as it depends on your opinion on the consequences of some people benefiting more than others.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-peop...
it is true that without democracy, governments can make a lot more changes a lot more quickly and easily. I prefer the government have to work hard to achieve the will of the people
I mean, yeah - we technically have "representation" - but you'd have to be blind and willfully ignorant to believe that's really the truth.
Unless "we" is a corporation or business interest, of course. Somehow, these fictional things have got more voice than actual people with voices. At some point in the future, if GAI actually occurs, they will have real voices - and then what?
Right now, the claim is "but they are composed of people" - but in reality, even that is a fiction; the majority of the people in most businesses - even small businesses - have no real say in anything about the business or how it operates, or it's politics (or political leanings). People can threaten or actually "walk out" or whatnot, but if the business is large enough, they'll just find themselves out of work and replaced (probably not entirely legal, but the actual litigation of it after the fact can be dragged out for years). So again - just another fiction we tell ourselves for some reason.
I'm not sure why we lie to ourselves so much about these things; probably because most people have no stomach for what real change would entail; the sacrifice, the blood, the pain - real pain. Terrible pain.
But...if something isn't done...it's going to happen anyway. It always does, as anyone familiar with history knows.
The claim is that they are owned by people, and therefore represent their speech, not the employees'.
Saying that Congressional voting doesn't track public opinion and therefore the US isn't democratic is suspect for two reasons. First, it ignores the fact that the subjects of opinion polls are different than voters. Votes track older, more conservative, wealthier, and more rural than the public overall. Second, it ignores the fact that people don't vote for policies, they vote for leaders. People trust their leaders to make the right decisions, and consistently reward them for those decisions by reelecting them, even when those decisions don't necessarily map onto opinion polls.
"I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it's the sand of the coliseum. He'll bring them death - and they will love him for it."
where do corporations fit into that ?
Corporations operate to fulfill their mandate to shareholders, which is to make a profit. Employees, suppliers, real estate, customers, even executives are just mechanisms to achieve that end goal. There's no real sense of justice beyond not getting shut down.
People, on the other hand, live in the real world, and need protection from forces that wish to obliterate what they need to seek happiness. This is the primary function of government, ideally, to create the markets within which corporations and people can get along and operate to their goals with relative safety.
Yes, we need corporations. But we are not corporations.
Corporations have no greater or lesser sense of justice than people, because corporations are just groups of people acting in concert. (A fact that I'm reminded of every time I see a long line of cars with a single occupant in the HOV lane.)
a better description would be "acting under contract" to produce returns for 99% wealthy shareholders at any cost whatsoever to the environment, to the economy, to other corporations, or to under-represented members of society.
One cannot have both high paying manufacturing jobs and $500, 70" TVs.
Moving jobs overseas is evading the "free market" by literally moving the labor market somewhere else. The corporation captures the benefit, the old workers are unemployed, the new workers do not benefit from the social benefits of the nation to which the corporation pays it taxes, and the shareholders get an extra $1.00EPS on their dividend sheet (that they pay very litle tax on because their rates are lower than wage tax). It's an all-around scam.
Probably not the same people, mind you. People are inherently selfish. It's likely that those whose livelihoods depend on manufacturing realize the importance of buying domestic. But for everyone else, it's all about the wallet. Your sentence could be rephrased as: "I can have my inexpensive goods with a 10% markdown. You can go on unemployment."
If people were not so selfish in their spending habits the more socially conscientious corporations would be the dominant ones, but clearly that is not the case today.
Isn't this the policy that mainly resulted in increasing the instance of dual car ownership?
The USA was always like this. It was considered a feature, not a bug. A government that makes decisions quickly and executes them smoothly was thought of as very dangerous.
> Whatever remains is typically taken away by lobbyist that only help to further inflate shareholder value, which large majority of population isn’t.
This remains a problem.
I would suggest almost the opposite. I think the West suffers from having too much similar politics. Overall the developments have been largely the same, roughly following the UK and the US. Very few countries stand out, especially not as a result of recent policies. And if they do it isn't a positive thing.
I honestly love this. The mechanisms of consensus have never been so unguarded while entrenched interests are guarding polar fringes of every party. This is great, for me.
Have fun with the popular vote.
How is that only available to authoritarian governments? Athens (GR) has had an even/odd number plates policy since the 1980s...
It's obviously true that the decision making process is easier in authoritarian regimes, but that's no excuse for the west simply not developing fast enough anymore. No big infrastructure projects (no matter how long decisions would take, nobody even tries), no real visions for Europe's future (Trump has one for the USA, as simple as it may seem, at least it exists). Laissez-faire attitude on unqualified and illegal mass migration (i.e. "come and take our stuff!"). We're so stuck that we won't even notice if one day China decides to wipe us off the face of the earth in order to replace us with a functioning society.
Until our space program gets out of politics it will continue to be a political football, some politicians will deem it too expensive, others will treat it as a jobs program with no objective. Look at his current cabinet? Do you think any of them will stick around for the next decade to shepherd a successful space program. I don't think any of them have the political capital to finish whatever he may start.
Similar policy in Paris, which I don't think anyone could argue falls in the authoritative side of the spectrum. I do think that the poor examples don't take away the overall point they're making though.