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Comment by joyjoyjoy | Hacker News Reader

"What they aren’t good at is making people happy. See Hong Kong for the last 6 months."

Wrong Chinese people are very happy. In some rankings they belong to the happiest people. Here they are medium range: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/09/10...

My prediction:

We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/09/12/our-energy-and-debt-pr...

PS: The US is also pretty good at making other countries unhappy. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran to name a few :-)

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"How's life in soviet russia?"

"Can't complain!"

This is the mistake you're making regarding China.

Source: grew up there

I mean, yeah, being against those in power isn't a good idea in authoritarian regimes. At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. Being taken care of as long as you do as your told isn't all bad and probably was the default state of the smaller communities in the past. Whish we would find ways to achieve this without the authoritarian aspects.

>At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_attempts_and_victims_of...

People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree. Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional. Balance that against the thought that the eastern system was unsustainable, and had the west not been able to step in when it did, the results would have been far worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine for an example of what happened in a centralized system that didn't have outside assistance when things collapsed.

> Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional.

Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.

Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.

But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.

>Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.

It's a convenient narrative, but it isn't, IMO, a correct one. Yes, the Treuhand had to decide quite literally which businesses got to live, and which didn't. Never before had an entire country been converted from a planned economy to a market one. There was no road map to follow. Decades of land and property seizure by both the Nazis & the Soviets made untangling actual ownership rights a Sisyphean task.

But at the same time this transition was occuring, billions and billions of Marks/Euros were and are invested in bringing the East up to the same levels of development. What do you think would have happened with the same governmental collapse, if the Treuhandanstalt hadn't existed? Honest question.

Exactly. To say that you're unhappy is frowned upon. I'd assume in China it's both politically and also socially steming from confucianism, (i.e. against upsetting the harmony).

"How's life in China?"

"Great!"

Source: I live there!

This is the mistake you're making regarding stuff you have no idea of.

>Source: grew up there

Yeah. Because we know that post-soviet Russians are very happy people. Not.

Source: I am there once a month.

I think you are missing the joke...

I imagine that if English is not your first language, it would be easy to miss this, since the joke plays on multiple meanings for the phrase "can't complain".

Usually, in this context, "Can't complain" means "life is good".

However, in this joke, the secondary meaning of "Can't complain" indicates that "You can't complain about life in soviet Russia, because if you do complain, you get in big trouble".

Basically, this indicates that life in soviet Russia was NOT good.

You're missing the wordplay in the post you're replying to.

You can roughly divide the Chinese population into the well educated and the rest; the boundary of course is fluid. It doesn't mean the latter category isn't smart or doesn't have college education. It means that those people didn't know the kinds of freedom (speech, assembly, etc) that Westerners think are the pillars of democracy. They didn't live through or have memories of a China on the verge of having a beginnings of a real democracy in the 1980s before the massacre killed it. They didn't know there is a vast Internet outside China so tightly controlled by the government as to be unusable. They didn't know President Xi had been increasingly instituting "red" policies that were worryingly similar to the 1960s. Those are the people who had newly gained wealth and didn't know any better. They could very well equate material wealth with happiness without yet realizing anything more.

difficult to know the truth when the population answers surveys by picking the right answer instead of giving their true opinion.

>We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy:

One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing money. They are bouyed by the current, generationally low interest rates which are built upon politicized central banking policy. When interest rates rise, fracking grinds to a halt. When fracking stops, the price of oil shoots to 2008 or greater levels and the global economy grinds to a halt. The century scale economic depression that will result entirely invalidates each and every prediction made by the author of the article we're discussing.

america has an interest in making fracking viable, since it's a technology that not many nations can employ (without the involvement of american firms anyway).

Fracking also allows america to place economic pressure to some countries like Russian (by lowering the price of their primary export).

Given the above, it will be unlikely for interest rates to grow in the next decade - since doing so has no advantages (except inflation, which is kept under control by the dollar's reserve status), and has many dis-advantages (such as causing a shock to businesses borrowing, which can precipitate a depression).

So you're saying that Hong Kong is a different country?

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