The Future, Made in China
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Oh common sense. If you believe all countries are autocracies, maybe. But to examine the trajectory of the US on a "Chinese timescale", the US rejected autocratic rule, built a system that decentralizes power, uses ambition to check ambition, and provides for frequent, peaceful transfer of power. To an autocratic Chinese bureaucrat, this is all wasteful shortsightedness, but allows the US to pivot, change, adapt, etc at very fast pace, at least for government.
I do not believe the autocratic bargain that China has made with its people is stable, lasting form of government, even as they seek to export it elsewhere. The fundamental trade is individual voice in politics for breakneck growth and dramatically increased standard of living. However, if you are one of the few young people born in China recently, what breakneck growth? A vicious gauntlet of schooling, the great filter in the gaokao, only to work for 996 company until you cannot anymore.
We can see what happened in places like Venezuela or Argentina when the government breaks their end of the bargain, as will likely happen to other autocratic states.
Leaders of specific autocracies change, right (e.g. king got killed, but now we have new king), but governing structure persisted.
Most common people care for abundance and affluence. Any system that helps them arrive there is ok.
And that might actually work, if that were the only problem. But it's not. The deeper problem is that people work better when they get to share in the proceeds. People didn't work very well in the "worker's paradise". They worked half-heartedly, doing the least they could to get by, and production (and quality) reflected it. (This isn't exclusive to communism, though. Large corporations can have similar issues.)
I am no fan of Kushner, but saying he runs US foreign policy is generously misleading at best.
They'd need to find alternate consumer markets to alleviate this, and what are their options? Domestic is out, China hasn't managed to create a domestic consumer market with their current demographics, which are only getting worse as their baby bust deepens.
Europe? Similar demographic issues, simply not enough consumption to replace the US and greater economic protectionism.
The 3rd world? Maybe, but first you have to develop it, and even if you could manage that they have nationalist impulses of their own. You think India is going to willingly offshore their industry to China on the scale of the US?
The American system for all its many flaws is extremely dynamic. Trump and his policies are mostly bad adaptations, but they are attempts at adaptation, and the attempts aren't going to stop. The US has changed radically in the last 10 years; there's no reason it can't change just as radically in the next 10.
Why can't they build for themselves?
But you have made no argument for why that must continue, only presented that is the status quo.
China is huge and I am simply wondering, why does it need to export? Except for oil, it has pretty much any resource needed to sustain a high technology economy.
Please, there are no similarities between North Korea and China.
Sometimes they win, sometimes the government just kills all the angry people, and you end up like North Korea or Russia under Stalin (or China under Mao).
There's also the fact that China is an aging population and is structurally incapable of having enough children to create a self-sufficient consumer economy, unless they suddenly develope a love of immigrants.
The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.
You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.
America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.
People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.
Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.
The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.
You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.
As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.
I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:
The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?
They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".
You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".
Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".
It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?
Don't get caught up in their "thousands of years of history". They had thousands of years of history before Kublai Khan, they had thousands of years of history before the first opium war. They still have issues with older citizens stealing toilet paper from public restrooms because they were so heavily traumatized by Mao's famine, and Mao himself would probably have had you re-educated for suggesting he had any historical ties to Imperial China. The current leadership are the successors of that government.
The Soviet Union's fall was hardly self-evident before the 1970s, for some decades their GDP growth was surpassing the US. Khrushchev's aggressive speeches are now seen as naive bluster, but there was some hard data to back them up when he made them. The US adapted, as we always have.
I'd say the US has a number of structural advantages over China that it is currently squandering, but that won't always be the case. Demographically we're going to be the last major consumer economy standing as the century winds on, we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion), our natural resources are plentiful, and neither the Euro nor the Yuan nor gold are capable of replacing the dollar.
Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards. They lack discipline, organization, intelligence, and numbers. All they have is a blatant disregard for any rules, including their own; the longer they're in charge the more enemies they make. Like the communists who attempted to take Berlin by force in 1919, they will wake up one day to find themselves having crossed a line with far less support than they imagine. I doubt they'll take it well, but they won't last.
I don't think this is accurate. What do you mean by this? What about the extent of trade between the two countries? It has dipped from peaks, but the story of Chinese growth and American wealth are intertwined. In what sense is this not a partnership? Because they stole some IP along the way? Or the access to their market comes with other costs? On balance it still works out for the average American, who enjoys cheap products. It's akin to the battle over Chinese AI. VC investors in the US would probably benefit from some kind of embargo against Chinese AI models. Would American consumers? It's the same sort of issue with Japan in the 80s, which is when Trump first really started talking about tariffs. Japanese vehicles are some of the most popular in the United States. The American consumer has benefitted from Japanese competition. Why can it not be the same with China? Because the Chinese government supports Chinese businesses? All countries do so. Who bailed out the American automakers? The American taxpayer. America worked in recent days to prop up the yen. Do you think this is a coincidence given the amount of US debt the Japanese hold? The Chinese also hold a large amount of American debt. Why are we not partners?
> we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion)
This gets said a lot. The problem is why is America not fully committed? You can't really have it both ways. "We're so powerful when we commit" without acknowledging why you don't commit. Why does no one want a land invasion? If the American military is "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" what's the big deal? Commit and invade then if it's so easy.
We know the answer. A reasonable follow-up question then is what is the advantage of "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" if your society does not want to take on the cost of ever fully committing? Are you suggesting the United States is more likely to want to incur costs against powers like Russia or China than it is against Afghanistan or Iran? If Americans don't want to invade Iran, why would they want to break a Chinese blockade of Taiwan? So what good is it? One of the virtues of democracy is actually it is harder to declare war. This is why the imperial presidency was created. If you're familiar with US history you would know an overriding popular view was avoiding foreign wars. Including WWII. FDR couldn't really help in Europe as much as he wanted, because Americans weren't interested in sending their blood and treasure to die an ocean away, especially after WWI. He had to wait for the Pearl Harbor attack, which galvanized support overnight. Why does America no longer employ conscription? Because wars aren't popular. It's actually in my view a pretty disgusting "adaptation" that a democracy has created an all volunteer army. This is not in keeping with basic democratic ideals, going back to ancient greece. If a land of "all men created equal" goes to war, all should have to sacrifice. Instead we send mostly poor kids to have their legs blown off in Iraq while at the same time people in the oil or defense or finance industry get to print money for their children. Why are the elites so hated in America? It's not about wealth alone. I keep hearing about how powerful the US military is, but all I actually see is a string of military failures from Afghanistan, to Iraq, to now Iran. These are impoverished, backwards pariah states. Why would I conclude the United States would do better against a power remotely approaching a peer?
> our natural resources are plentiful
So are China's. It's why the "trade war" failed.
> Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards.
This is an overly optimistic read. They were actually never "politically irrelevant". The faction of America they represent has always been relevant. It was merely the case that American elites could control them. Trump was never taken seriously by said elites, who repeated your sentiments pretty much verbatim. He proved them wrong. The information world we live in now is changing the nature of public discourse. Nothing could be of greater consequence in a democracy. Parties, and the public are not as easily controlled. What is going to reverse this trend? Just think about the information the average American had access to in the mid 20th century compared to now. Why would you look at the history of American politics and demagogues and conclude it will get better? How will living standards improve? Why is it inevitable that America will solve this? Seems like wishful thinking.
The invocation of 1919 Berlin as if this is some comfort is quite ironic. The saving grace of Trump is he really doesn't care about anything but himself, and so doesn't really believe in anything. You may not be so lucky the next time the Democrats choke away an election. The failures of 1919 Berlin would metastasize into another form of extremism in a nearby city that led to another failure in 1923. But then it was 1933. The history of this period tells us that many figures and people oscillated between "left" and "right" extremism as they worked to find an answer that resonated in a rapidly changing and destabilizing world. Hmm, much like the one we find ourselves in today. They've taken the White House twice now. The communists in Berlin in 1919 never tasted that sort of power. I'm not sure you're making the correct analogy. I'm also not sure I would celebrate the murder of German communists by proto-Nazis. Personally, a rather odd data point for you to single out as a reassuring one.
In any event, I am not sure why you are so confident that America is so immune to something approaching a similar fate. Germany was not some backwards society. This was the land of Kant and Hegel and Frege.
Just as the land of Washington, Jefferson and Madison found itself mired in fratricide within a few generations.
One doesn't have to get even halfway to such a 1933 outcome for things to get very bad. America has not been around for very long. Why so confident of such a short track record?
I simply suggest you not engage in hubris. Widen your imagination of the possible. And recognize we are all human. Citing some point about Mao or toilet paper is about as useful as bringing up Abu Ghraib or American slavery. The Chinese can also adapt if you haven't noticed. It's not Mao's party anymore.
What is the path for America's future? The world is getting smaller and more competitive. Your comfort in demographics might be warranted, but as it stands today there are over a billion people in China. Is the future for America better if the Chinese are our foes? I guess I just don't understand this constant drumbeat of conflict. We should not envy the progress of a billion people on the other side of the world. China doesn't setup bases in Mexico or Canada. It doesn't try to assert itself in the "Gulf of America". It doesn't support a separatist movement in Hawaii. Whose kids are going to die fighting China in the Pacific? Are you going to volunteer your kids? On what basis? A 21st century update to Wilsonian idealism? That which Americans already saw fail?
Maybe we should then pull back on the illusion of conflict and work together. I think the only people who will benefit from conflict (if any) are the elites, who will never send their kids to fight. Americans and Chinese may have more in common than you are led to believe. The fact you don't even think we are partners paired with the casual confidence in which you articulate your hubris is concerning, and suggestive that the forces of conflict are already succeeding to quite a dangerous degree.
China has never abided by WTO rules and has engaged in rampant dumping for decades, among IP theft and other unfair practices. I don't blame them for doing so, I blame our leadership for allowing it, literally selling them large pieces of our industrial plant at times. China was wise to not allow American companies to fairly compete domestically. We should have done the same from the start instead of hoping that free trade would magically make China more Democratic, which I'm now convinced was just a smoke screen for the corporate class to get cheap labor.
> This gets said a lot. The problem is why is America not fully committed? You can't really have it both ways. "We're so powerful when we commit" without acknowledging why you don't commit. Why does no one want a land invasion? If the American military is "the strongest military in the world when fully committed" what's the big deal? Commit and invade then if it's so easy.
We don't commit precisely because we are so dominant there is no need. The last war that seriously threatened us with military defeat was Korea. Everything from Vietnam on has been wars of choice for various ideological reasons and economic motivations, we lost most of them strategically, and even after all the wasted blood, capital and good will and time America maintains its position.
In an existential conflict against a peer power, where the threat was undeniable, things would look far different. Just look at public opinion at the start of Afghanistan. It's a shame Bush and Obama bungled it so badly.
> So are China's. It's why the "trade war" failed.
Unlike China, we have oil, and the ability to cut off their supply from the gulf. China's strategic resource edge is in things like rare earth smelting. We could build smelters, we have the rare earths and the technology. We just don't want to, and we'd need some serious protectionism for them to be competitive with China's pricing.
> This is an overly optimistic read. They were actually never "politically irrelevant". The faction of America they represent has always been relevant. It was merely the case that American elites could control them.
They weren't controlled, they were bribed with better standards of living. Easy to be apolitical when you have a job, a house and your bills are paid. These were the cynical, nihilistic people who generally stopped at annoying their families with conspiracy theories at Thanksgiving, and didn't vote because you can't trust the system. It wasn't until things got bad enough economically that they attracted enough support to both get engaged themselves and be a movement of any consequence.
I invoke 1919 Berlin because the Spartacist uprising shares a lot in common with MAGA. A movement born of resentment with little else to offer, which is why their uprising failed. They also got closer to real power than MAGA ever has, Germany essentially didn't have a government when they tried their uprising. MAGA meanwhile is running head-long into the political barriers of American federalism. They've done some damage, killed some people, and will likely do more, but for the time being the system is containing them as designed. Why do you think Trump turned outward to Venezuela and Iran? He ran into the classic problem of being stopped when tried to press his domestic agenda, so he turned to foreign affairs as the President has a lot of direct power there. He's hardly the first President to do so.
As for optimism, go look at the results of every election that's occurred at any level since Jan 2025. MAGA is the forcing function for change, the response is already in motion. They will likely lose the House and possibly the Senate this fall, particularly if Iran holds out that long, and then Congress will actually be motivated to act.
> What is the path for America's future? The world is getting smaller and more competitive. Your comfort in demographics might be warranted, but as it stands today there are over a billion people in China. Is the future for America better if the Chinese are our foes? I guess I just don't understand this constant drumbeat of conflict. We should not envy the progress of a billion people on the other side of the world. China doesn't setup bases in Mexico or Canada. It doesn't try to assert itself in the "Gulf of America". It doesn't support a separatist movement in Hawaii. Whose kids are going to die fighting China in the Pacific? Are you going to volunteer your kids? On what basis? A 21st century update to Wilsonian idealism? That which Americans already saw fail?
> Maybe we should then pull back on the illusion of conflict and work together. I think the only people who will benefit from conflict (if any) are the elites, who will never send their kids to fight. Americans and Chinese may have more in common than you are led to believe. The fact you don't even think we are partners paired with the casual confidence in which you articulate your hubris is concerning, and suggestive that the forces of conflict are already succeeding to quite a dangerous degree.
Unfortunately we don't live in the United Federation of Planets. China has their ambitions regardless of what I would like, and I think the world is a better place if America has more influence over the South China Sea shipping lanes than China does. It's notable that Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines would tend to agree, although I'm sure Trump has shaken their faith in that perspective.
The Hong Kong protests weren't that long ago, and MAGA's unprecedented abuses via law enforcement in the US are just an average Tuesday in China. I despise Trump, but Trump's America is a better place for most people than Xi's China
> Just look at public opinion at the start of Afghanistan. It's a shame Bush and Obama bungled it so badly.
This seems contradictory. The first seems like wishful thinking/unclear rationalization. The second implies a contradiction. Why are the polls relevant unless you mean to suggest this war involved more commitment? Yet it also ended in failure?
What was the last war America won against an adversary like today's China? Who is signing up for such a war today? If all these other wars have been a "war of choice" why would war with China be any different? Are you under the impression a Chinese move on say Taiwan will be preceded by an attack on the US homeland?
Anyway we'll have to agree to disagree on most of the rest. I don't know what metric your using to define "MAGA" but I don't think I share it. 80 million people roughly voted for the Jan 6th guy. His coalition is (or at least was) pretty wide. He will probably lose the midterms like most presidents. It's not clear he really cares or that it will really matter.
Anyway, I hope you are right and I appreciate the back and forth. Thanks!
I'm saying that America was not really all that motivated for Afghanistan (aside from the start), Iraq, Vietnam, or any major conflict since Korea. We can lose and life goes on. The stock market stays up, businesses keep doing business, the government stays in power, the conflict isn't existential in even the most minor sense except for that tiny minority that's directly involved. And those conflicts were largely insurgencies and attempts at nation-building.
A kinetic war at sea with a nation state like China is what America was built to fight, although perhaps less so now that the Trump admin has wasted most of our advanced munitions on Iran. They have a navy for us to sink and fighters and bombers to shoot down, and if we do that well enough we win! There's no caves to hide in, no religious insurgencies to plant IEDs, no land to occupy, no nation-building.
I'm not saying we wouldn't have casualties, but I think in a conventional war we'd do better against China than Iran.
> Anyway we'll have to agree to disagree on most of the rest. I don't know what metric your using to define "MAGA" but I don't think I share it. 80 million people roughly voted for the Jan 6th guy. His coalition is (or at least was) pretty wide. He will probably lose the midterms like most presidents. It's not clear he really cares or that it will really matter.
Most of those 80 million were not hardcore MAGA, just uninformed and pissed at Biden for whatever reason. Plenty of them have fallen off the train in the last year and a half. Between DOGE, ICE, Epstein, Iran and stepping the corruption into overdrive, there's at least one major thing that will keep many of them from voting for him again. Even the MAGA base started to turn on him after the MOU with Iran came out, he had to backtrack on that quickly
But yeah, good talk!
> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?
Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.
> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.
ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.
So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.
Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.
Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.
For a good review: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/10/05/chinas-authoritarian-m...
Shangahi went from a dusty fishing village to one of the largest, most populous metropolises in <50years.
> Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture
cmon, democracy as a word should tell you that is not be true. Earliest is probably Greek, about 500 BC. Notably, this is before Christian culture existed, unless you want to talk about the "borrowing" from older religions.
> China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy
Otherwise known as the Chinese Civil War :)
> China, a fairly insular culture
Modern China, 90% Han Chinese. Han were not always on top, notably China was ruled by outsiders (most famously the Qing imo), but also Liao, Jin, Yuan dynasties. Phrase is "conquest dynasty".
That would be news to the pagan ancient Athenians who invented democracy (although the Indus Valley Civilization may have beaten them to it). The Athenians were clear-eyed about the dangers to democracy and developed procedures like ostracism to deal with the threat from the inside.
This is completely wrong. "Christian culture" was perfectly content with feudalism and the absolute monarchy for over a millenia. The French Revolution was explicitly secular and anti-clerical, because the King had total support from the Church.
Similarly, "Christian culture" was used to justify slavery. So when it comes to Liberalism, can we correctly attribute it to the Enlightenment thinkers instead of the obscurantist Church?
Whatever its other weaknesses, China has the enormous advantage that the people really in power are focused on raising China to global dominance. Vs. those really in power in America are, at best, worried about their personal status and wealth at the end of the next fiscal quarter.
Also, a leadership that is so enormously autocratic simply has to juggle fewer balls at the same time.
Yes, but I don't see that realization as noteworthy. Does history record a nation which never found its own advancement hobbled by the scheming of its petty local officials?
> ...has to juggle fewer balls...
When things aren't going so well, trying to stay in power adds more balls (to juggle) than being an autocracy takes away. And "things aren't going so well" usually indicates that less-competent autocrats are in power - meaning that they are less able to juggle any number of balls.
China is the master of the long-game. It's shortest cycles are 5 year tactical plans. Their strategic plans go far beyond.
I don't know what the solution is in the US (and West in general) to be able to think 25+ years ahead, as no material incentive would do the job; only cultural/society/civilizational goals make someone think that far ahead (religion does too).
If the US can't think that far ahead for the same reasons as China, maybe we need to find things we care about long term and tie economic development to that (family, religion, and even our potential extreme longevity).
Eliminate share buybacks. Raise the top tax bracket to 95% on earnings over $10m. Executive shares cannot be exercised until retirement if you really want to get aggressive.
The nuclear option would be stocks cannot be used as collateral for loans, it would shore up 90% of the nonsense overnight and have 0 negative impact on 99.99% of the general public.
It's already too easy for those in power to control popular opinion, and only getting easier, so you're not going to get mass protests or revolutions that upset the status quo.
Unlike trickle down economics, it’s not just a failed theory. It’s something we’ve seen in action and it works as expected.
Not saying I was paying close attention to America from 1850 to 1950, but a variety of cultural and social factors - especially less hyper-individualism, and people's futures being far more closely tied to the success of their families, neighborhoods, towns, etc. - lead to very priorities.
It is far shorter than a fiscal quarter - the next market open is all that matters.
One of the two parties spends most of their intellectual capital on acquiring and maintaining power. The other party spends theirs on policies which they rarely have power to enact.
While Trump might be an outlier in how obvious the grift is, that doesn't make China suddenly the good guys who only care about their country or the people when they are not busy bulldozing them into drains like they did in 1995.
When did we go from bad guy to good guy?
> China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.
> This is one of the safest places in the world, if you’re not a dissident
> In March, authorities abruptly barred the two founders of an A.I. startup called Manus from leaving the country.
Did you even read the article?
I notice that you didn't answer any of his actual points, though...
America, for a time, made appeals to things beyond power and status when it talked about "freedom". Nowadays this has been debased to just mean the freedom to attain power and status. Americans are deeply resentful about this, and their thinking will remain incoherent until they move past this.
China never made appeals beyond power and status. Communism essentially claiming that power and status are all that exist, and that peace is produced by removing the ability for specific people to asymetrically amass it, which is equally incoherent as the Americans just on a different time-scale.
Because of better middle-term planning, China is in the better position to amass status and wealth. But this is not all because they are somehow less concerned with status and wealth.
Both powers have near zero long-term planning, because anyone with an iota of wisdom knows that status and wealth are fleeting.
I refuse to believe this is a coincidence.
"we"
china gets massive advantage from western ideas that even benigh thing like 'lets not depend on china' is automatically considered hate speech and racism.
Give them an extra 5% profit and theyll sell out the entire country and reduce its industrial base to ashes.
China was only shooting itself in the foot, it was argued, by not opening its markets fully and following export oriented industrialization.
profit margins dictated economist opinions though. This is why EOI was treated as quaint while TOCA was treated as gospel truth even though one was nonsense.
I think this has left its mark. A lot of people do not seem to be able understand that this is not true. Even if they accept it intellectually its such a fundamental assumption that its still influential.
I think there was, and is, an element of racism. It still persists in that a lot of westerners cannot comprehend that they can be overtaken technologically or threatened by non-western societies. This includes people who think they are not racist, or are anti-racist.
Totally agree on the racism. I do hope the West doesn’t learn that lesson the hard way.
So what if they're technologically superior? What we can't steal, we can buy.
When the time comes to geld the Yankees an' hitch them to the plough, we'll cut
off their balls with a knife they competed to sell us
All this talk about evil corporations selling out the west reminds me of the leftists "50 companies do all the pollution" bullshit. Who buys products from those companies? Who rewards lowering price at all costs?
- We'll only move cheap plastic toys to asia
- We'll only move low-value clothing to asia
- We'll only move inexpensive electronics to asia
- We'll only move TVs to asia
- We'll only move computer assembly to asia
- We'll only move low-value semi-conductors to asia
- We'll only move CPU production to asia
Only thing really left is IP and frankly I expect asia to outperform the west in that soon enough (my understanding is that they already are in some areas, I am not an expert)
And if you’re worried that the US is about to be out competed by China in the IP sphere, surely the US would be in a much weaker position if say 50% of its economy was focused on the production of cheap generic goods?
the us has papered over it w/credit (no coincidence that the credit card came out right when productive capacity was being shifted to asia) but eventually every country sits down to a banquet of consequences
same story as ever (florence under the medici, england under the whigs, etc) first productivity then usury
Could you be more specific about the knock on effects of not making cheap plastic toys, etc. domestically? The US is still the clear global leader in technical innovation in nearly all sectors (and I'm not an American).
Not making cheap plastic toys means you don't have the supply chain and expertise around plastics molding, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce housing for electronics, which means you eventually lose the ability to produce electronic components, etc. And as we see, this is exactly what has happened, just like we saw happen in Florence, England, etc. before when the elites became more interested in financialization/usury than in production.
I'm american and I don't think america is the clear global leader in technical innovation, particularly looking at electrification. We are pretty good at R&D but have lost a large part of our ability to manufacture due to the supply chain shift.
R&D is fine and all, but we've got (or had) a middle class to feed, and for the last fourty years we've been faking that with credit.
This is a bizarre claim?
The total ability of an economy to produce goods and services is most certainly finite. For it to be infinite, we'd need infinite workers, infinite factories, infinite raw materials, infinite land, infinite infrastructure, infinite energy, etc.
But of course, as I'm sure you recognize, that isn't the main point. The main point is that now we aren't even able to dominate high value manufacturing like microchips, despite being told we were only giving away the low end.
I do not. When you say, “what I mean is economic capacity is constrained by demand and raw materials” - that’s a significant deviation from your claim that economic capacity is infinite which is why I asked you about it. I’m not a mind reader.
But even this claim makes no sense with your toy factory example. Building such a factory consumes no land, no construction workers or engineers’ time, requires no energy to construct or operate, requires no human effort at all to operate and all this can be done for zero cost?
Can you point to any example of such a factory anywhere in the world? I mean if this were possible, why would places like sub-Saharan not be full of such factories?
The average American will keep shouting over and over again that "China can't innovate" while they quietly and slowly tick off every box on their checklist of issues. It doesn't end well for us.
By many OECD economic metrics[1] around trade dependence, the US and China consistently rank as the least trade dependent. This reflects the scale of the countries, diversity of the economies, and an intentional strategy of minimizing trade dependence for GDP growth.
This last point is central to geopolitical leverage. Even if you treat the EU27 as a single trade entity, which operates at similar scales, there is little evidence of a coherent strategy to become functionally self-sufficient. A lot of geopolitical relevance is downstream of this.
[0] https://x.com/JonathonPSine/status/2082502536624287890
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/inter-country-input-ou...
Or was that your point?
Such broad categorization about that vast of a nation seems disparaging to me. Grouping an entire nation on a label, and marking it inferior to your own.