I have no special reason for posting this. I just happened to run across yet another item fretting over the possibility of China becoming bigger than the US and what that would mean for the future of the galaxy. But come on. Sure, total GDP matters for the heft it allows you to throw around on the world stage, but the real measure of a nation's economy is GDP per capita. Here it is:
China has obviously grown very impressively on a percentage basis. Nevertheless, in absolute terms their GDP per capita has grown $10,800 since 1980 while ours has grown $28,800. Even if you're more bullish on China than I am¹ and assume they'll enjoy endless exponential growth while the US is stuck with linear growth—as shown in the chart—by 2055 China will still have less than half the per capita GDP that we have.
China is not a country to be taken lightly. But it's also not a country to panic over. They have a whole lot of catching up to do, and the odds are that they can't do it any time soon.
¹Reasons I'm not that bullish on China: (1) they have an aging population, (2) they are coming up on the middle-income trap, and (3) they are addicted to autocratic control of both their population and the economy. The most important of these is #3. In the long run, they'll lose out to free market capitalism and a free populace.
Damn her to hell for dancing, but I would take a bubblehead neoliberal warmonger like Sanna Marin over any autocrat any day. Modi, Maduro, Xi, Putin, Duterte -- fuck 'em... But maybe I am just built different than Steve Bannon & Glemm Greemwald.
Remember they all dance, she just dances in a way that makes you want to dance too.
That is her real sin, she's a temptress and on the Right you can't do it in the open, you've got to do it in seedy motels, airport bathrooms, and gym locker rooms.
Lindsay Graham's Ladybugs can only thrive in a dark, moist place.
Did you use PPP in your GDP/capita? If not, why not?
No, he didn't. Those are inflation-adjusted exchange rate figures. PRC per capita GDP in PPP terms is about 20k USD, I think.
But the point is, even using PPP figures, Americans are more than three times wealthier than Chinese on average. And that understates matters if we're talking about actual material standard of living because the Chinese economy is characterized by a much lower level of personal consumption than the USA's. The broad, comfortable middle/upper middle class life enjoyed in the States by a couple of hundred million people: 2,000-3,000 square feet or more for 2.7 people on an half acre of land with a couple of SUVs in the driveway and bathrooms that actually come with bathtubs, plus good quality air, potable water, modern hospitals, unemployment insurance, quiet, uncrowded suburbs, swimming pools, lakes clean enough to swim in, pristine beaches, all of it in climate-controlled splendor—utterly unknown here in China. Seriously, 90% of Americans don't realise—don't truly realize—just how good they have it.
Indeed, so true:
“Seriously, 90% of Americans don't realise—don't truly realize—just how good they have it.”
After spending quite a bit of time in foreign countries (such as India), I basically agree with you 100%.
And if the socialist idealists or misinformed cynics throughout this thread were in fact to spend serious amounts of time in some of the many and tragically troubled countries throughout the world, I have no doubt they would return here with an all new appreciation for the Surpringly large number of things we’ve actually managed pretty well.
We're talking about growth, not absolute terms. At the rate China is growing, per captia gdp will be the same in 20 years.
At the rate China is growing, per captia gdp will be the same in 20 years.
Seems extremely unlikely. Chinese per capita GDP growth has been declining for years now—this is no longer a new trend. The US has essentially pulled even in the last couple of years. They may pull ahead again later this decade—we shall see. But only by a couple of percentage points or so. And probably only for a few more years. The PRC workforce is already shrinking, and overall population has started to shrink, too. Think "Italy" or "Japan" but a whole lot poorer and with much dirtier air and much more money wasted on missiles.
Catching the US in per capita GDP—even in PPP terms—isn't present in a foreseeable timeline. Perhaps you were thinking of total GDP?
PS—Did you bother to glance at the chart Kevin provides?
China is not a country to be taken lightly. But it's also not a country to panic over.
Kevin: if you run for president on this platform, I promise to vote for you and tell all my friends to do so. Because large swaths of the US political class from both parties are doing exactly that: panicking. And I'm worried it's going to get a whole lotta people killed before all is said and done.
(Carter's defense secretary called it "Ten feet tall syndrome." He was referring to US freak out at the USSR, of course, not Communist China. But the point still stands. They're not nearly as formidable as outsiders make them out to be, and it certainly looks like the PRC has already entered the dreaded middle income trap.)
The West will prevail in the end: just like in the Cold War with the USSR, we have to play the long game, and outlast them. We're holding all the cards; and time—and demographics—are on our side. But we have to avoid blowing up the world in the interim. We somehow managed to do that in 1945-1990, although it got too close for comfort on one or two occasions. In some ways I think the situation with China is more dangerous because the Chinese—more so than the Soviets per my reading of history—are more strongly affected by considerations of national pride (or, to put it more cynically but also probably more accurately, CCP leadership uses national pride as a tool more frequently than the Soviets used Russian national pride).
Anway, national pride is fundamentally an irrational force. It's emotion. And dealing with an enemy that appears emotionally irrational—constantly nursing grievances and perceived past slights and bruised national honor—is a very difficult and risky proposition.
Contrary to my profile picture I tend to agree with you
I wonder what “winning” will look like with the PRC. With the USSR, we knew we won because it was stripped of its subordinates and went its own way. With China, does it just mean they stagnate like the Japanese? Unless we’re talking Tibet and Hong Kong I don’t know which parts of China would break off
Unrelated point, but I guess I have a hard time seeing how, if the Chinese plateau like the Japanese, how they won’t surpass us before they do. The huge population and landmass of the PRC compared to Japan makes me think they will. But that falls back to Kevin’s point about autocracy
My guess is that the Chinese sort of have an implicit agreement with their government that they will tolerate autocracy if it brings prosperity. Once the prosperity diminishes maybe they won’t accept autocracy anymore, and some liberal reforms will kick in
Interested to hear your thoughts though
When Xi came into power ten years ago and started his crackdown on corruption, oligarchs and other public figures, I assumed it was because he realized that growth was slowing and not likely to speed up anytime soon. It could have just been a purge, but the timing was awfully suggestive. He was preparing for the negative political repercussions.
I think we're seeing some of the future being built now. China more or less owned manufacturing. They had a modestly priced workforce and lots of support industries. Shenzhen was almost high tech magic. Now we're seeing manufacturing move to place like India, Vietnam and even back to the US or Mexico. Globalization relied on low cost, reliable transportation, but prices soared during peak - I hope - COVID and deliveries became spotty. A lot more shipping to/from the US now goes through east coast ports, and industries are hedging their supply chain risks. China will not go away, but they'll be one of many players that China will have to compete with.
I wonder what “winning” will look like with the PRC.
My guess: when the CCP's authoritarian rule ends and China adopt liberal democratic norms of governance. In a word, regime change. That should be the end goal for the West.
As long as this massive, nuclear-armed superpower remains a one party dictatorship, world geopolitics are going to be far more stressed, fraught and dangerous than would otherwise be the case.
We're utterly delusional if we think we're going to tell this 4,000 year old civilization how to govern itself, of course. So we can't impose regime change. I think about the best we can do is out-compete them over the long term, so that their own people and/or elites conclude the old model is no longer working.
Regrettably, we thought we had seen regime change in Russia and the other former members of the USSR, but Russia and many of the others backslid. They haven't reverted to even notional communism, but they're NOT liberal democracies.
No one exploits national pride as much as the GOP does.
It was said at least 30 years ago,that China would get old before it got rich ( as a consequence of it's fateful one child policy)…still true.
Arguably true, but always remember that in the long run, China can stay autocratic longer than you can stay alive.
Autocracy is bad for long-term economic growth, and especially bad for median wealth accumulation.
Of course, regular folks never, ever believe that, which is why you get so many sclerotic authoritarian regimes.
Define long term. Russia had massive growth for more than 50 years after the Russian Revolution. The chines have crushed western growth for nearly 50 years and are still going strong.
The secret to rapid economic growth is to start from way back in the pack. If you are still using 18th-century production processes in the 20th century, you can buy outdated technology on the cheap from the developed world and see productivity soar. But as your productivity converges to developed-world-class, growth rate will slow down to the rate of technological advance — the same as every other developed economy.
What is this, Back to the Future? Is it 1985 again?
Let your Reagan Democrat freak flag fly, Kevin!
"Alexa, play 'Yokohama' by the Capitol Steps..."
For reasons not given, Kevin seems to assume that the US will remain a free-market democracy. It has actually been trending toward a kind of capitalist aristocracy, and if Republicans get complete control in 2024 that may be the end of democracy.
But Kevin is apparently ignorant about the history of centrally-directed economies. Japan modernized and became a world power in a very short time in the second half of the 19th century. The socialist government basically pulled Russia out of feudalism to the point where it defeated Germany in WW II, although the USSR came to an end in the later 20th century as its citizens became aware that people in the US were getting more bluejeans. Krugman has an interesting piece in the NY Times about the recent economic history of Russia - converting from socialism to capitalism certainly did not put it on a superior path. Mao ran China into the ground, but a different leadership turned China around in a couple of decades. Does China now have an ideal combination of central direction and capitalism? Nobody really knows - Kevin just pronounces judgement on the basis of blind falth in capitalism. Does Kevin think that the US now has the ideal combination of central direction and capitalism?
The world is a different place now from what it was in the 19th or even 20th centuries when capitalism flourished in the Western World (at the expense of colonized areas). It should be obvious that capitalism is not going to defeat global warming. Nor do countries rely on for-profit capitalism in time of war.
I think you made some fair points and it definitely made me think, but I still respectfully disagree
When do you consider to be the golden age of American democracy (as opposed to aristocracy)?
To be fair, we are not a democracy, we are a constitutional republic, which has a lot more of the flavors of aristocracy than something more Athenian. There’s virtues to that in my mind, since it’s good to have bounds on majority rule. Even still, every bum on the street has vote equal to every industry CEO, which would be so foreign to those from the early republic
And to your point
**USSR came to an end in the later 20th century as its citizens became aware that people in the US were getting more bluejeans**
How about the fact they still had vacuum tubes in their TVs in 1990? Or that a store would sell 4 things, be out of 3 of them, and had an hour wait to buy the thing they had?
Granted China is not as forceful in their economic control as the USSR was, but for a system with a history as blemished as central planning does, the burden of proof is on its defenders. WHY is it different this time? WHICH problems of central planning has China overcome? To me it looks like more of the same, with economic goals subservient to short term political ones (with disastrous long term effects)
I don’t think most people would contest that central planning is a better system but feudalism, but it plateaus quick and can’t compete with a modern free market economy backed by a liberal political system
You should learn what the word republic means so you don;t continue to embarrass your self. In your context, it means representative democacy (as opposed to what it means when we refer to cuba or N. Korea as a republic). So when you imbecicly write the US is not a democracy it is a constitutional republic, you are saying we are not X we are a specific type of X.
The trendline based past isn't prologue; and it is very difficult to make predictions especially about the future.
It's easy to make predictions about the future, but being right is another thing.
Today China's population is 4.2X the US's. By the end of the century, that ratio is projected to be closer to 2X. Can China maintain GDP growth at an accelerated rate to keep pace when its population is shrinking? Good luck on that. The cost of China's one-child policy is one they'll be paying for decades to come, and one reason I question the idea of China becoming the dominant world power this century.
I have no blind faith in capitalism, but I do think market-based economies outperform. Both China and the US need reforms to their own brands of capitalism, but I see the challenge for China as far greater.
English is today's lingua franca.
The US dollar is the world's reserve currency.
US cultural influence is dominant worldwide.
US remains a beacon of hope for people yearning for freedom.
I don't see China replacing the US on any of those points.
We're quite a bit shaky on whether our institutions and customs can adapt for the needs of this new era of our history. But having a history of meeting past challenges to provide prosperity and freedom is an advantage to our side.
It should be obvious that capitalism is not going to defeat global warming.
Not without government playing a big role. Yet capitalism -- i.e., the market -- is a big reason we're making progress. Coal is dying not by diktat but by cleaner energy and renewables being vastly cheaper. The same is happening with other fossil fuels. If we'd had a mechanism for producers paying for externalities (e.g., a carbon tax), we'd be far down the road to solving the challenge already. I think our politics is a greater hindrance than capitalism.
"The cost of China's one-child policy" The chinese birth rate was much higher than the US's for most of the one child policy period.
This is some oddly selective history:
“Kevin is apparently ignorant about the history of centrally-directed economies. Japan modernized and became a world power in a very short time in the second half of the 19th century.”
Great, and where did their unquestionable emperor(s) lead them during the first half of the 20th century?
“The socialist government basically pulled Russia out of feudalism to the point where it defeated Germany in WW II, although the USSR came to an end in the later 20th century as its citizens became aware that people in the US were getting more bluejeans.”
Now this one really is odd. First of all, this comment seems to make light of the fact that USSR imploded. Secondly, this comment also seems to place blame on citizens of the USSR for that implosion: how dare those dastardly peasants desire blue jeans!
Meanwhile, a thread of cognitive dissonance seems to run throughout the whole post. Skeptonomist points out that one autocratic regime after another (each with greater or lesser extents of benevolence) somehow just kept collapsing into self destructive infernos, yet he doesn’t seem to notice there might be a problem there.
So I bring our attention to the last sentence of Kevin’s post: “In the long run, they'll lose out to free market capitalism and a free populace.”
That free populace, among other things, turns out to be pretty important. Like the other countries mentioned, we’ve gone pretty far down our own set of rabbit holes; but our Democratic mechanisms have served as guardrails to prevent the sort of self-destruction seen in more repressive societies.
And that seems to be largely what Kevin is getting at. There’s only so far China can go in its current autocratic form before it implodes. We’ve seen it so many times before, and yet people still try to selectively praise such monstrous regimes. Clearly, history did not actually end in the early 1990s: some people will never stop defending long-since discredited collectivist economies.
"Meanwhile, a thread of cognitive dissonance seems to run throughout the whole post. Skeptonomist points out that one autocratic regime after another (each with greater or lesser extents of benevolence) somehow just kept collapsing into self destructive infernos, yet he doesn’t seem to notice there might be a problem there." Your sole basis for claiming tis is you are a liar.
I agree with this. Our Republicans want an economy run by oligarchs and a government dedicated to nothing but cutting their taxes and preserving their fossil fuel empires, and the part of our electorate that is motivated by spite, racism and misogyny will support them no matter what.
What is it, exactly, that you agree with? You dislike our society, therefore we should … what? Become an autocracy like China? Because autocratic regimes have such a great track record through history? Rather than continuing our 250 year old attempt to perfect our Union we should … what? Just chuck the whole thing? Because then, of course, it would be so easy to establish a socialist utopia with freedom and Justice for all?
I am, of course, well aware that there are extremes on both the left and the right who simply want nothing more than to tear everything down: but I still never tire of mocking that sort of idiocy (sorry not sorry …)
Japan Inc. after WWII was by no means free-market capitalism; I don't think it would be right to say it was centrally-directed, but it was certainly centrally guided, and guided very successfully.
Should never have let them into WTO etc.
Wouldn't have made much difference. If anything PRC economic growth began to slow after it joined the WTO.
I know it offends may Westerners (or at least Americans) to hear this, but China didn't become a huge economy with middle income levels of wealth because we "let" them do so. What enabled that transformation, rather, was that the Communist Party jettisoned Marxist-Leninist central planning: China began to grow rapidly once Deng's reforms got underway.
"What enabled that transformation, rather, was that the Communist Party jettisoned Marxist-Leninist central planning: " You seem to ignore that they went with Confucianist central planning like S. Korea. Taiwan and Japan.
There are fairly large differences between a centrally-planned economy like those of the Soviet Union or Mao Zedong’s China, and economies of countries that implement industrial policies, as do Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. State ownership is one such difference; production quotas are another.
+1
wto is irrelevant.
China's an unusual place though, not really comparable to the Soviet Union I think.
Off the top of my head, in two ways:
1) China is really a rich country attached to a poor country. There's a country of around 200 million pretty rich people (by world standards) dragging along (and running the factories in) a poor country of about 1.2 billion. The Beijing region, the Shanghai region, the Hong Kong region have tens of millions living at pretty much the US standard (nice apartment, good public schools, great public transportation, great parks). I dunno what that means politically.
2) Chinese culture really emphasizes learning, technology, and especially -- competition with the west and beating us at our own game (which is justified by a) the greatness and breadth of Chinese civilization and b) the really true exploitation of the Chinese by the west over the past 200 years. If you don't know what the Opium War was, read up. The west really did try to addict China to drugs for profit). Anyone who's worked for a Chinese company is familiar with the whole thing of "hire the foreign experts, learn all their knowledge, send them home, trounce them ourselves". Was that ever the situation with the Soviet Union? Our big companies never used the Soviet Union as a manufacturing center in the way they do with China. Again, I dunno what that means politically, but it's different. This is why the Chinese focus on businesses like supercomputing and solar power that they think are going to be big in the future. It's not only to develop their economy; it's so they can eventually be better than the west at the stuff that's important. How's that gonna work out? Search me...
I think your 1) means that Chinese society looks more like Argentina or Brazil than it resembles Europe or the US, but with much more government involvement in the economy than the others.
Your point 2) is indeed the key to China’s future. Surpassing the West technologically takes a different skill set from importing the West’s current knowledge and competences. Can they develop a innovative and flexible R & D culture within a relatively rigid and centrally-controlled system?
Yeah, agree, who knows how long the top scientists who get PhDs at Berkeley and MIT then go back to China to be heroes (in their profession) will put up with the extra difficulties of using Google there (difficult) etc. I will say in my experience the government is pretty savvy about doing what it can to make life comfortable for those "special talents".
An interesting test case is what's been happening in the world of entertainment. A couple of years ago it looked like Hollywood would kowtow -- appropriately enough -- to China wherever it could, putting a Chinese star in a bit part in big action movies, for instance, in order to curry favor with the Chinese government (with the goal, ultimately, of getting a release in Chinese theaters, which the government tightly controls). But then the internet and streaming happened and Chinese box office suddenly didn't really matter. As well, South Korea became cool in way China wasn't and isn't. That's why "Squid Game" was a phenomenon and you never hear about any Chinese shows or movies any more...
You're going to, though.
I was so bored during lockdown that I started watching Chinese extended-episode TV based on a glowing review I read in vox.com. Now I subscribe to viki and not Netflix. There are some amazing Chinese movies out there...
The Beijing region, the Shanghai region, the Hong Kong region have tens of millions living at pretty much the US standard
Not even close. Or, to put it another way, your "pretty much" is doing massive heavy lifting.
Per capita GDP in much of coastal China isn't too far from the EU median, in PPP terms (though pretty far from USA). But again, consumption levels in China are drastically held down both because of the absence of an effective safety net and the (still) major presence of State-owned enterprises (these firms, for obvious reasons, don't operate per the invisible hand, and as such engage in practices—low salaries, low/no dividends, hoovering up resources per Party diktat—that hold down living standards.)
I live in an upper middle class Beijing community with extremely high levels of education attainment by Chinese standards, and the typical family here lives in a 700 square foot apartment with a tiny galley kitchen and a single bathroom with no bathtub. Parents often drive their kids to school using electric scooters—neither parent nor kid wears a helmet. Healthcare is extremely primitive by US and European standards: Getting an appointment to see a doctor means getting up at 5 AM to get to the hospital well before the "appointment center" opens, and then waiting in a queue (maybe for 1-2 hours) to finally get an appointment time. That's right: instead of calling or texting a doctor's office, merely making an appointment could easily eat 4-5 hours of a person's day. And before you get your procedure done, you normally have to pay in advance. And then if you're lucky, and you have decent health insurance, after you've submitted your receipts you might get a check for 50-60%, six months later!
My friend G. and his wife who live in the apartment below me are dual income professionals: he's a local government official (works on the other side of Beijing) and she's a high school mathematics teacher. Gross annual combined salary is in the 40k USD range (income taxes are low). Both have postgraduate degrees. They (couple plus two daughters) live in a 700 square foot, 2 bedroom, 1 bath apartment. A single modest-sized room serves as living room and dining room. No yard (obviously). No car (they both have scooters). They have a washer but no dryer (almost nobody in China uses a clothes dryer). G. has to live in a workers' dormitory M-F because he has a four hour round-trip commute (Beijing is huge). This is typical. And they are very comfortable—indeed privileged (they're both Party members, like a lot of my neighbors)—by Chinese standards (Beijing is the richest provincial level unit in China after HK and Macau—even a bit richer than Shanghai). Can't drink tap water. Air pollution levels most here most days are in the 70-110 AQI range (most US cities from what I can see average around 30-40). And so on.
Again, not even close.
Thanks for the insider perspective. Interesting read
+1
And, I didn't mean to paint on overly grim picture of life in the PRC. For one thing, living standards have improved massively for most people over the decades. Just getting enough calories used to be problematic. That's no longer the case. Urban elites like my friend and his family enjoy decent education, healthcare (primitive in terms of customer service, but it's reasonably high quality in terms of outcomes if you need it). China enjoys very, very low levels of violent crime (I seriously doubt any city on the planet, even Tokyo, is freer from violent crime than Beijing). Public services—especially transport—are unbelievably good. The cashless economy is ahead of the West, and internet shopping is highly convenient. Food is good—the restaurant culture in Beijing is truly outstanding. There are lots of public parks (my local government seems to open a new, high quality park every few months). Much of China (about 60% of folks live in urban areas now, I'm told) is very walkable. Middle class/professional people can travel in comfort (at least notwithstanding Covid), via fantastic bullet trains. Before 2020, they could even travel abroad—something their parents couldn't even dream of. And maybe in 2023 or 2024 foreign travel will resume. And something like half of high school students in China these days are able to go on for post-secondary education. That compares favorably with the West.
So it's a matter of perspective. The Chinese middle classes know they have it a lot better than previous generations (frankly, this is true of a lot of the working class, too, although they have to work like dogs and suffer deprivations like being separated from kids from years on end before there's light at the end of the tunnel).
But they're a very good ways behind North Americans and Western Europeans in terms of material standard of living. (And things are gradually getting worse in many ways because of Zero Covid; so time will tell).
I've been to various cities in China including Wuhan, Wushi, Qingdao and Jinan and none of these cities are that much different from Shanghai. You're at least a decade out of touch with reality with your views. Today, your 500 million should be 700millihon.
"China is really a rich country attached to a poor country"
So's the US.
"competition with the west and beating us at our own game"
How've they done with that over the past half millennium?
Sure but the difference is the rich country inside China is as big as the whole of the US -- rich and poor.
No idea what that means politically but a thought I've never had before just occurred to me: what if the rich areas of China decide they're being held back by the poor areas? It's arguable at the moment Xi Jinping & Co. are whipping up the poors against the rich (just like Trump sorta), and the rich might decide they've had enough. What happened in Shanghai the past few months is possibly an early example of that: a policy born of not keeping with the world technologically (meaning: not just buying the best vaccines from Europe) which results in big problems for the rich in the cities (crazy lockdown in a major city). The result of that lockdown so far seems to be: set us free and we'll forget our grievances. I.E., no big deal. But will that be true in the future? Who knows.
"not keeping UP* with..."
“… what if the rich areas of China decide they're being held back by the poor areas?”
This is apparently what kept some rich people in Hong Kong after the British left… this idea that China wouldn’t squeeze too hard because eventually the rich “would decide they’ve had enough” and push back against the central government or at least remind the central government that they hold all the capital.
Didn’t really work out as well as some of those rich Hong Kongers thought.
Not sure why Shanghai rich people would be in a better position to push back against Beijing than Hong Kong was. Hong Kong has even more wealth than Shanghai does… and it’s still kowtowing to Beijing’s wishes.
I'm not an expert, but I think a lot of the big Western companies that used to be in HK pulled out and have moved to Singapore, which to some degree fits my theory the Chinese are only hurting themselves with the crackdown.
"but the real measure of a nation's economy is GDP per capita."
That's fundamentally wrong, as the great powers Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco will tell you. They all have higher GDPs per capita than the United States and are all minnows in the international world. In terms of global power, sheer volume will overwhelm anything.
GDP per capita is a first-cut rough measure of the general welfare, although the distributions of income and wealth can’t be ignored.
There is more to global power than absolute level of GDP, of course. Just one example: it is often said that the renminbi suffers from the lack of transparency of the Chinese banking system.
That's fundamentally wrong, as the great powers Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco will tell you
No. Kevin's on firm ground here. If he had written GDP per capita is the only real measure of a country's geopolitical power, I'd agree with you he's wrong. But that's not what he wrote. Aggregates are obviously very important for projecting national power. But they don't tell us vey much about how a strong or high-functioning a country's economy is.
GDP per capita makes countries like Luxembourg and Switzerland appear more powerful than they are. GDP makes China look more powerful than it is.
An easy way to combine the two and get a single number that is far better than either one is:
Population^.5 times GDP per Capita
Try it. It works pretty well.
"GDP makes China look more powerful than it is." Except that's false. GDP makes China look exactly as powerful as she is. As can be seen by how a minimal level of help from China to Russia has completely defeated the west's economic war against Russia.
Not completely. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/04/us/politics/russia-missiles-ukraine.html
Free economy and free people? Maybe. A free population is not the goal of one of our two political parties at present (has not been since the Reagan administration). And a "free economy" does not exist, freedom is something that humans (and maybe animals) can have, not abstract things like "economy". What they mean by "free economy" is an unregulated economy which is a major disaster for the vast majority of the population.
There is good reason to conclude that pure socialism generally failed in the 20th century, especially when led by paranoid or lunatic individuals like Stalin or MaO (such people often come to the fore in non-democratic countries). But pure capitalism also failed, as boom-and-bust cycles got worse and eventually led to the Great Depression. The US actually had its greatest success in the period of about 1933 to 1973, when capitalistic finance was restrained by New Deal regulations as well as some memory of the Depression. After about 1973 the economy continued to grow but inequality increased. The Federal government directed the economy through WW II and also expanded its influence in infrastructure and social services. Predictions by right-wingers than the kind of government control that was exercised would be disastrous were falsified. The government is still expected to take control in case of war or national emergency - there is no profit to be made in dealing with hurricanes, massive floods, etc.
China's economy is no longer purely socialistic nor is it laissez-faire capitalism, and its growth has been outstanding and has benefited most of its citizens. There is no reason to think that China is doomed to failure because it is "autocratic" although there are many things that could go wrong with it - as there are with the US.
Agree, with dissents. The rise of unions must be acknowledged as a major factor in the period of ‘greatest success’. During the postwar period there was also a boom in research funding, fueled by the ‘space race’ and by a mini-industrial-policy that fostered corporate research (Bell Labs was richly funded by government limits on AT&T’s profits).
Would the post-Civil War period be an interesting comparison to today? The US had recently seen an influx of Europeans fleeing after the failed 1848 revolutions. They definitely brought liberal and leftist/socialist ideas, and I suspect they were more highly educated than other immigrant waves. I haven’t seen any news lately on the reported brain drain from the Russian Federation, following the crackdowns of the war against Ukraine. How significant is it, and could we see something similar if China were to engage in hostilities against Taiwan, or other South China Sea nations?
Interesting to consider whether labor unions were a big contributing factor to the economic distress of the 70’s (depending on who’s telling it)
Read some interesting takes which discuss the union contribution to wage-price spirals that fueled inflation. Sure it can be dismissed as anti-union agitprop but given the extended period of stagflation in the 70s and early 80s it’s an interesting idea given the huge raises that unions commanded during that period. Also a possible reason why our current bout of inflation hasn’t gone off the rails yet (our unions are weak)
To answer your second question, I would guess the early 1920s would be the best comparison to today. Anti-immigrant sentiment, rampant political corruption, the rise of robber barons, and an interwar period (i.e. we’re between the Cold War and whatever is cooking between the US and China)
Perhaps we could stand to gain from an East Asian crackdown. But I doubt it. China doesn’t like letting its dissidents leave, since nowadays it’s pretty easy to foment discontent even from foreign shores
Nope. Bad post. I see little comparison.
That brought leftist ideas is dead wrong as well. Stop equating transcendental crap with left hegelian movement. I mean, the stuff was already there and declined after the civil war until the 20th century. You need a nostril rip and detachment. So your wrong.
The big surge after the Civil War were Italian, met people from southern Europe. They were more Sardines than Steppe. It's why by the 20's with the surge of organized crime, they became unpopular.
I’d think the US effectively having the only surviving (non-centralized at least) economy after WWII was involved as much as anything else.
“… there is no profit to be made in dealing with hurricanes, massive floods, etc.”
Not for a lack of trying. Disaster capitalism is still being perfected.
"pure socialism generally failed in the 20th century" The scandinavian countries would dispute this. This would be more true if applied to totalitarian countries , but Japan, Taiwan and Korea would note that isn't even true.
The Scandinavian countries are far from having ‘pure’ socialist economies. Iceland’s government spends the most proportionately, just under 28% of GDP, so almost three-quarters of spending is private; the other Scandinavian countries have smaller government sectors.
China's 'autocracy' prevents corporate oligarchy from controlling governance, which is institutional in the US. GDP per capita does not reveal the accrual of all economic surpluses to the top .1% of income earners, which inflates the performance of the US when compared to China. Whether China's aging population will be more of a deterrent to future improvement than America's growing population of sclerotic diabetics will have to be determined, but certainly the US will never be able to compete quantitatively with China's college graduates in engineering and science.
China's Belt and Road Initiative will prove to be very effective for raising the living standards of the Chinese. Nonaligned nations already recognize developing infrastructure through cooperation with the Chinese improves prospects for building wealth than the destruction which US foreign policy achieves. A multipolar world is perceived as a threat to US global full spectrum dominance. America's oligarchic rule will waste wealth and goodwill combating opposition to its dominion, which will be framed as defending free market capitalism and individual liberty, imperiling minimum and median wage American spending power.
This was written in English, but somehow it’s still incomprehensible.
Current events demonstrate it does not take a high GDP per capita for a country to inflict at least serious discomfort on many others: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/russia/china
China's autocracy will probably screw them much sooner for a different reason...
Their economy has only exploded at all because they are the planet's manufacturing floor. But that can change faster than people think. All it takes is them flexing their new muscles and acting crazy, and convincing everyone that they may not be a reliable supply chain after all.
Companies are already frazzled from the pandemic and the Ukraine war... it won't take much more stress to have them running for the exits to mitigate their supply risks.
They would have to actually disrupt supply chains meaningfully to have any effect on the business calculus. Even with all the strongman posturing if it costs a fortune to switch suppliers, things would have to get pretty seriously bad for companies to switch lanes away from China
Right now it’s still too cheap and easy to manufacture in China for companies to start worrying about what-ifs
It's actually already happening. Apple and others recently announced that they're moving some of their products to Vietnam, India, etc. If the U.S. and China's relationship continues to go south, I'd expect that trend to accelerate.
" Apple and others recently announced that they're moving some of their products to Vietnam, India, etc." GM was moving to vietnam from China back in the year 2000. You're ignorance is complete if you think the things you're talking about haven't been business as usual for decades.
Apple just moved some production out of China for the first time in it's history. You sure you have any idea what you're taking about?
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/apple-move-ipad-production-china-first-time
I disagree. Technology and psychosocial understanding of human behavior will keep things manageable. And look at basket case states like Iran and Venezuela and DPRK. 0 chance they will change because anyone with any force backs the regime. I wish I lived in a country that was able to tamp down coronavirus spread.
How rich a population is counts for little when the country is a hegemon. Meanwhile the US continues to be incredibly stupid, disfunctional and incapable of making changes. Europe is feckless as ever.
Silly and stupid governments are the exception rather than the rule. Incentives just aren’t laid out right
Not going to give the Trumpian “run the government like a business” line since government will always be a money furnace but if there was a real penalty to not keeping the lights on then things would work better. But there isn’t and probably will never be so better to offload as much as you reasonably can to a cutthroat market
Tucker Carlson last month:
[Biden wants to] completely destroy the west in order to make way for Chinese global dominance.
Carlson is a whore for China. Try harder dude. Lazy posts.
I think an underappreciated problem that both China and the west are going to have to deal with are the human fertility issues that are creeping into industrial societies. People mention the 'one child policy' as the main source of China's ills but there are plenty of other societies (Japan, Italy, France) going through a population inversion that is going to massively stress these countries moving forward. Posing fertility as a problem of govt/life choices misses some underlying biological changes that are also occurring in humans possibly related to the bioproducts of industrial agriculture or massive exposure to secondary plastic-derived chemistry that we frankly, do not understand very well. To put it plainly, we really do not know how the chemical soup that we live in affects our biochemistry. If we have a functioning EPA and an opposition party that recognizes some problems require government regulation, then we win. But if we are stuck in this idiotic debate about 'government always does it worse' for another 50 years, then we are probably doomed. If an autocracy recognizes problems and by fiat makes changes, then they win. The question is not really who can own more flat screen tvs, the question is whether a society, if it finds out that a flat screen is making you sterile can change course---They win.
Population overgrowth is a far larger issue. There is no population slowdown in China.
I am fairly sure by the end of the century we will have artificial wombs and can just test tube replacements. The main issue is that raising a kid is far far too much trouble than it's worth. Economically but also it's no fun and the free market has conditioned us to value our personal happiness above all else.
China abandoned the one child policy years ago. When it had it, it's fertility rate was higher than the US. Americans like to ignore that the national one child policy only applied to ethnic hans living in cities. Most chinese didn't live in cities.
We are all going to have to adapt to zero (or slightly negative) population growth.
When the debt is Called in, all GDP per capita will collapse globally. It's nothing more than a government sanctioned bubble now. Capitalism never did work. It was the change in technology that drove the illusion. Then in the 1920's it began to slowdown noticeably......
Kevin's math skills have completely abandoned him. If China was to0 continue its exponential growth than the re line would be well over 300k by the end of that graph or four times higher than the US. It increase by nearly 30 fold between 1980and 2020. Exponential growth would mean it would increase by another
nearly 30 fold by 2060
Actually, that’s geometric growth - same ratio over equal intervals of time.
Come on, the threat from China is not in regard to how they do on GDP per capita. The threat is when China has a GDP greater than the US, and they can fund a military as good or better than ours in terms of equipment. And they certainly can have more soldiers too.
The only consequence of that scenario is that the US will no longer be able to be the world's policeman. Nuclear armed powers or alliances do not attack each other.