> we are approaching an aristocratic, low-churn society with a bunch of favored failsons at the top, then that would make more sense than trying to frame it in terms of Intrinsic intelligence.
Uh, I'm not sure exactly what you're disagreeing with. I think intelligence is a thing, I think tests can probably reflect it at least a bit, and I think the fact that wealth is not really correlated with it means that there are probably a lot of dummies making capital allocation decisions.
> immigrant-founded or run companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla
I'm talking about ownership and capital allocation, so the management of any particular firm is somewhat irrelevant. The immigrant founders of Google, for instance, only hold 14% stake in Alphabet. Much of the ownership is by these "favored failsons" as you put it, even if they aren't the managers. That's not even getting into the fact that the vast-majority of America's economy is not these popular-to-talk-about tech companies or that Google's have to run-the-gambit of getting green-lighted by "failsons" just to have a chance of being funded.
We could have a whole separate conversation about the effectiveness of China's bureaucracy, but all I'll say is that - even if they have the same problems, ours have had more time to solidify, and China's wealth Gini coefficient is smaller than ours, so the problems would be less magnified.