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Comment by lp4vn | Hacker News Reader

In the 60's western economists were afraid that the authoritarian central planning of the Soviet Union was intrinsically more efficient than the slowly adapting free market to the extent where economists started to study ways of incorporating the sovietic dynamic in the west. [https://www.gsid.nagoya-u.ac.jp/sotsubo/Krugman.pdf]

Now China doesn't represent any kind of alternative model that risks replacing the one adopted by western countries, unlike the Soviet Union. Realistically nobody is afraid of being taken over by China. So I think that any kind of impact that China might have in this regard would be quite limited.

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There is quite a lot of fear of China being ahead or getting ahead, and it is being exploited by tech companies to secure funding from the department of defense: https://t.co/7by2iroWWD

It's a different type of fear.

Competition from a completely alien culture can generate mobilization, i.e. different societal strata working together for a common purpose. This is what the US is doing with China today, or did with Japan in the '80s.

What the USSR generated was different: it was the fear that the lower classes could band together, overthrow the established order, and actually succeed in running the country. It wasn't an attack from an alien culture, that the establishment feared; it was successful subversion from within. There is no fear of that when it comes to China.

Yes, every external force that has influenced the US is unique in some dimension.

To me the biggest difference between China and Japan is that China is much more likely to challenge the US among all dimensions of power, whereas my understanding of Japan in the 80s is that they simply started to be slightly competitive in an economic dimension.

So I do think that there is a higher likelihood that China’s rise opens up more debates about certain deep assumptions we have in the US than Japan’s did. And some of these may be about the primacy of private property. Private property is not a law of physics but it is a very deeply set assumption we have. The idea that housing is an investment more than it is a human necessity is something that may be worth questioning more and more. If investor owned housing in the US keeps trending up (already around 20%) then at some point it will likely be helpful to have another successful system to point at and learn from for solutions.

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