Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

I think there's no denying that this is super impressive. Realpolitik aside, well done China.

I wonder how manufacturing output compares between China and US+EU, say. It doesn't make that much sense to look at EU constituents in separation. Even then I suppose China is ahead, but maybe it's not a total wipeout.

That led me to wonder about manufacturing output vs GDP. Is China producing more, after adjusting for its total GDP. So for example, China's GDP is about 4-5x bigger than Germany's, whereas the fraction of manufacturing output is about 5-7x different. It still puts Germany "behind" but it's not outright domination.

In fact, such fraction, of manufacturing to GDP, is a basic economics measure: it's the fraction of GDP coming from manufacturing! And it's no surprise to anyone that this fraction is high in China.

So then I guess the questions would be:

- is manufacturing expected to outperform the other constituents of global economies going forwards (i.e. is China smart putting its eggs in this basket)

- is the rest of the world at risk because China can squeeze them (perhaps)

- what is the outlook for manufacturing outside of China (maybe not great but it seems like people are waking up to this).

I wonder how much of that simply cuts back to marginal costs of energy and ESG. Presumably in China you can manufacture cheaply partly because you don't need to pay for employee rights or clean energy. Not all of this, clearly, but where would US+EU be if it wasn't constrained by broadly speaking ESG (I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is a thing).

World War II was won because of US and (less advertised) Soviet manufacturing capacity.

Ukraine is more constrained by weapon supplies, especially drones and artillery, than by manpower.

I'm not sure both sides are playing the same game. In the game I think might be afoot, if your economy is management consultants, therapists, and hair stylists, that's "bad" GDP. Resources and manufacturing are "good" GDP. Resources are complex in that stone are renewable, and some go away when you export them.

I'm not even going to talk about education or, related, R&D capacity.

high finance/management can be quite valuable when you’re trying to plan a conflict. this is how you get the industries developed that are capable of designing a system to turn sand into missile-targeting systems.

i’m extremely skeptical of people’s ability to view the economy from on high and pick out the “good, productive gdp” and the “bad, makework gdp”.

> i’m extremely skeptical of people’s ability to view the economy from on high and pick out the “good, productive gdp” and the “bad, makework gdp”.

Maybe in general, but rent-seeking is a pretty large part of the economy by estimates I've seen.

That's not quite my point. "Productive" is for a reason. Is manufacturing perfume productive? Making video games?

It depends on your goals.

However, in a great power conflict, they're much less productive than tanks, drones, fighter jets, and guns.

Conversely, money thrown into weapons can't be used for quality-of-life improvements.

Neither of these is "good" or "bad" per se.

Some industries are hybrid. A ship yard is dual purpose.

If two hypothetical countries are playing this game, and one exports movies to buy ships and vice versa, when war breaks out, one country might be stuck without movies and the other without ships.

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