I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity.
Age for sure. I don't know about gender, but as to sex I think Janie and I are the only women (maybe Snarki, wonkie, CaseyL?). Ethnicity - hard to tell. this was one of the few places I knew about where there was a wide range of views for a few years
I think there's a real advantage to being exposed to different views and arguments, as long as one doesn't just assume that people who disagree with one's own opinion are immoral monsters, or stupid, or ignorant, as the case may be. in a few cases were banned for being offensive. I remember a couple from the far far left like that.
bob mcmanus was the example of that I remember best. His open misogyny was really something. Funnily enough, I thought of him recently, when BBB in his final comment (clearly trying, as lj said, to foment more trouble) said words to the effect of "the men have decided". bob mcm said that exact thing in reverse, when pre-emptively implying that women (it was sapient, Janie and me who called it out) would force the men here to ban him, as women had on the other blogs where he commented.
I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity. So I'm not how we diversify ideology without dealing with those other categories.
This is an interesting video between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, but more specific to the observation of lack of diversity is the fact that both Klein and Hayes, after talking about how Mamdani used the TikTok genre to win, confess that they could not do it, or at least it would take a long time to get to the level that Mamdani showed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2KYhDLDQY&t=3s
Just curious, has anyone here made a Tiktok video? If not, does anyone have a Tiktok account?
McKT aside, we are a pretty narrow group ideologically most of the time. Wj is the token conservative and he is more centrist really. Of course things get real heated real fast when there are serious disagreements about important issues. I said this to LJ privately the other day, but the amazing thing about the hilzoy era was how she and whoever else was in charge kept things under control. I didn’t necessarily agree with her on everything, but this was one of the few places I knew about where there was a wide range of views for a few years. Of course people gradually dropped out or in a few cases were banned for being offensive. I remember a couple from the far far left like that.
The culture might also have gotten more polarized, but I am not sure about that. It was pretty polarized with Bush, esp in the early years when he was more popular, I think. Now I can’t remember when I first came here.
It would be difficult being polite with a MAGA type. I don’t think we have had any.
Weirdly,for a couple of years Rod Dreher had a wide range of views in his American Conservative blog comments. For a bit he was repentant about his Iraq War support and would sometimes critique the right. But his anti gay and anti trans mania got more and more evident and his Islamophobia came back if it ever fully left and he got super culture war paranoid and started taking like Franco was justified. I got more and more sarcastic and was eventually banned. Then he wrote his famous root wiener post and got eased out.
Well, libjpn@gmail address is working and he's not written. I don't want to pile thing up that he has to do, but I'd add that he also needs to admit that he snuck back here to try and set commenters against each other. In the normal cut and thrust, you can suggest that some person agrees with you, but trying to gin up conflict is really not acceptable and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
But would they prefer a person in Flint getting potable water from their faucet to another million dollars? That is a bit more opaque.
I understand the ban on McKT under whatever name, but I'd like to see him back. I urge him to apologise to the powers-that-be for having accused them of holding malevolent beliefs which they do not, and I urge those powers then to rescind the ban.
...economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth.
Economists are not necessarily stupid. They use a "utility curve" to describe how much an individual values increasing wealth. The standard assumption is that utility curves are increasing, i.e. people prefer more wealth to less, and concave, i.e. the curve gets flatter as wealth increases.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
I hope everyone in the U.S. had a great 4th of July. Especially, I hope everyone who loves them got to see a great fireworks show. Because, going forward you can expect fewer shows and smaller ones.
The thing is, virtually all of the fireworks used in the US are made in China. Which means they will be much more expensive in the future as Trump's follies tariffs kick in. Of course, drone shows are supposed to be the latest big thing. Color me underwhelmed.
Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
There is also the difficulty that "efficiency" can mean very different things to different people. And, in my observation, almost none of them are even aware that they are using the word differently.
when I say 'make them just like us', it's less that economists can 'make' Chinese be like us, it is that they are assuming that they are just like us in those areas and by getting them to save less and consume more, it will 'fix' the problems of the Chinese economy.
It was either on this youtube video or another one, but someone pointed out that because the Chinese basically threw money at a number of problems, it actually was better because a more efficient distribution would have necessarily been more limited. Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
I'm spending the day hanging out with folks who are doing the grunt work required to put on the local fireworks show. (Not the "damned amateurs" you hear making loud bangs in your neighborhood. This is a professional operation, led by a licensed pyrotechnician.)
The sort of apolitical patriotism that has been drowned out by the fanatics. But it still lives on in the real world. My sense is that these are the folks who will rise up and crush the fanatics. Rise up slowly and reluctantly, not least because fanatics are so rare in their immediate environment that they struggle to get their heads around the idea that anybody could be like that. But once the reality breaks thru? Fanatic, meet junk heap of history -- at least for a generation or two, until the memory fades again.
I don't think I quite buy the thesis that (some? many?) Western economists want to make China "just like us.". For the simple reason that we are not "just like us". At least, not like the "us" that economists typically use to describe the populations whose behavior they are modeling.
To take just one example, economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth. Regardless of whether he already has more than he could ever spend. Certainly there are such people. But they are pretty clearly a) atypical, and b) seriously psychotic. Somebody spending the weekend volunteering in a soup kitchen, rather than hustling for another million? Unthinkable.
I celebrated by hanging up a flag with black streamers attached
I also spent the last 24 hours in the fetal position, moaning. Not over the degeneracy of America: the combination of a covid shot and a shingles vaccine.
About Charles' video, I share nous' hesitancy, but in this case, mine is less worry about astroturfing/misrepresentation, it is more that the assumptions of Western Economics may not apply to other societies and cultures in the same way. I've plowed through a shit ton of videos about economics related to China and Asia and while the balance seems to be very bearish on China, they all look at China through the lens of Western econ. I think one should consider that Western Economics is based on a number of cultural principles that may not be operating in China.
This might seem very strange if one thinks of Economics as a science, but I'm not totally convinced it is.
As folks here may know, there is no actual Nobel prize in Economics. The prize initiated and awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden and falsely dubbed as the Nobel in Economics has acted as an institutional vehicle to endorse and establish Neo liberal ideas (mostly Free market fundamentalism) within Economics (Offer & Söderberg, 2016). https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusion-why-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-needs-to-be-abolished/
I probably wouldn't be as harsh, because, as I have often noted, I don't know economics very well. Call me agnostic. I do note that a loud vocal group that thinks Thomas Sowell should receive the Economics neo-nobel, which simultaneously suggests that if the whole enterprise is a scam, at least they have enough taste to keep Sowell out. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/09/is-thomas-sowell-a-legendary-maverick-intellectual-or-a-pseudo-scholarly-propagandist
But it seems to me that some of the root cultural assumptions made in economics may not hold for China.
This is a typically bearish video, by Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2b4TjQa4gk&t=3371s
and you could ask 'how could he be wrong? He's actually been to China and spoken to principals' Well, he does present a narrative that China has been moving from a model of competence to an authoritarian model. A couple of quotes First I want to be careful to say that they listen to everybody. The Chinese are way better than we are at hearing a hundred different views. Mine would be one of many that they heard. I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. I actually gave a lecture in the Party’s training school where, if you’re a mayor, a provincial governor, any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. Of course there were various loyalty things. But when you met the leaders—and I met a lot of them when I was at the school—they actually asked really raw questions too. They said things I couldn’t believe they were asking. And I was told that within the school, you're allowed to say anything. So they had that system for a long time. When you met Chinese technocrats—or even the mayor of Shanghai—they were impressive. I'm not saying ours aren't, but it's a mix. I think you know that.
I think Xi Jinping has really changed that. He’s been the president since 2013, and over time he’s pushed out that system and moved more toward loyalists, people who are less technocratic. Probably the most important talk I ever gave in China was at what's called the China Development Forum in 2016. It's this giant hall that had most of the top leaders in the party. A lot of the elite of the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg and many others were there. I said, “Okay, I'm looking at your housing. I'm looking at your infrastructure. It looks to me like you're going into a classical housing crisis problem. Your catch-up is over. Your demographics don’t look good.” I gave a list of things. “And by the way, it looks like power is becoming very centralized in the economy.” And I said, “I'm a Western economist. You're doing an amazing job. What do I know? But I don’t think that would be good for growth.” After I gave the talk—I just figured you only live once, you just have to say what you have to say—a couple of top leaders came up to me and said, “Professor Rogoff, we very much appreciated your remarks.” I was thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to put me in jail or something at the end of this.”
I’m less impressed by them now. And I’m worried. Let’s say they get into a crisis—which I think they’re in now. I think they're still in a deep crisis—or somehow hotter heads prevail between the United States and China and we get into some kind of entanglement nobody wants. I worry that we’re not as competent. I’m speaking about right now. We have some very good people, but the average quality at the very top, I think, has gone down. And China’s not as competent either. That’s a recipe for having bad things happen.
It's a story and it's a plausible one. But you go down a bit and Rogoff says this The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. First of all, there’s nothing like our Social Security system. You need to save for your old age. There’s nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you healthcare, but otherwise you’re on your own. They’re not allowed to invest abroad. It goes in waves, but they’re not allowed to put their money abroad. So they’re trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There’s nothing to do overnight. But fundamentally, if you’re looking at China and asking what’s wrong, it’s that the consumer isn’t spending enough.
And I hear 'make them just like us'. Economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that. You go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. They happen periodically. Maybe Brookings puts one together, maybe the government does. My former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know. But my gut instinct is that what’s happening to China is what’s happened to Japan. It’s what’s happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union. We have a more dynamic economy. We’re not perfect. Maybe we’re screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and deglobalization. But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places—at least other large economies—just can’t replicate. They can build stuff. The French have better high-speed trains than we do. I hope you don’t ride on the train from Boston to New York. It’s nicer than it could be, but it’s no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible. They’re good at that. But the really creative stuff? I don’t want to say they don’t have any. There are some amazing Chinese companies. But let me say that the US is really good at it. We’ve kept that in our DNA. I think it’s very important, to preserve it.
Getting in an argument about who is the most dynamic and creative is a mug's game.
It's hard to contest the points that Rogoff makes, but when he says 'they have to consume more', I have to wonder if at the heart of a lot of discussion about China's economy is the idea that they have to be us. Yes, the social safety net is nothing compared to western societies, but how do you factor in the fact that a society built on confucian values is going to take up a lot of that. Certainly, there is a lot of grumbling, and there are a lot of knock on effects. But given the way the US and UK safety nets are unravelling before our eyes, I have to wonder if we are just using different measuring sticks.
This resonates with some of the comments in the substack, like this one There's this perfect example: a Democratic delegation visited Japan recently, and several congresspeople toured the Shinkansen—which, by the way, was built in the 1960s with American funding.1 What's almost laughable is that even today, this public transportation system—which isn't exactly cutting-edge anymore—still managed to "shock" American congresspeople. This tells you that even the highest-ranking political elites don't really have opportunities to experience or understand the kinds of lifestyles other countries have built.
[...]
I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing's public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.
I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they're less likely to be misunderstood as depending on "authoritarian order" for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this "authoritarian scratch"— people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They'll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries' inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.
But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what "ideal life" looks like.
I really like the point of 'authoritarian scratch'. It extends to Japan and Korea, and when you point out some aspect of life, it sends some scurrying to find counter examples.
I had to reconstruct this from last night, so I better stop here.
This will be broken into a couple of comments.
First, I got a copy of Abundance and made notes to make a post, but nous basically said what I would have said, only more succinctly. Klein is a wonk, which I say respectfully. However, I don't think his wonkiness serves him well in writing something which is essentially utopian. He writes as if all of the drag in the system is the result of progressives constantly screwing up the system. But a lot of it was trying to win over stakeholders and make sure they were included. That many of those procedures were hijacked to stymie progress shouldn't be blamed on progressives, unless you demand a level of cynicism from progressives that has never been apparent.
It's interesting that there was a flowering of interest in the book, but, afaict, it's all dried up. I'm not sure how any solution can gain a hearing, but the speed at which the book bloomed and then passed away is telling.
Second comment might take a while, I have to check some sources
American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs. NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready. I am learning to hate AI
It seems to me that AI, at least as quoted on this site, could readily replace the MBAs and other B-Arkers, but not the people who actually know and understand stuff.
American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs.
This
I'm willing to believe that someone who has actually worked for some years, including some years as a low level manager, could find an MBA curriculum useful. But someone right out of an undergrad degree program? No. And, sadly, that seems to be what we are mostly afflicted with.
We need a W.S. Gilbert to write an analog to "I am the very model of a modern major general". It encapsulates the situation so well.
Grok's summary is not particularly helpful
I know that this is just further proof that I'm an old man yelling at cloud, but I am learning to hate AI.
It's like mansplaining as a platform. Plus, an electricity hog.
Doesn't anybody read a book anymore?
I will now go yell at random kids to stay off my lawn.
The China Debt talk compares US to China 10-year government debt yields, without saying that the yield should be the inflation rate plus the credit spread plus something for time value. In fact, the different yields are almost entirely explained by the different inflation rates.
American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs. Dim, fad-prone, and given far too much responsibility.
NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready.
America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious.
Most of us here are probably old enough to remember when Kaizen, the Japanese term for continuous improvement, was a hot topic. Japanese car manufacturers, especially Toyota, (and other Japanese manufacturers) were eating American manufacturers lunch. This was the explaination. A lot of American manufacturers even made a big deal about adopting it.
Of course, if you dig deeper, the originator of the whole concept was an American (W. Edwards Deming). But until the Japanese made spectacular use of his ideas, he had trouble getting a hearing in the U.S. From the sound of it, perhaps American manufacturers have lost the thread. Again.
Thanks CharlesWT, but Grok's summary is not particularly helpful. Mostly it underlines for me that we don't know much about the author(s) or what sorts of institutional connections or outside funding may be influencing the commentary.
I get that this is true for a lot of popular media sources, but I tend towards sources that do a better, more careful job of practicing research transparency.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity.
Age for sure. I don't know about gender, but as to sex I think Janie and I are the only women (maybe Snarki, wonkie, CaseyL?). Ethnicity - hard to tell.
this was one of the few places I knew about where there was a wide range of views for a few years
I think there's a real advantage to being exposed to different views and arguments, as long as one doesn't just assume that people who disagree with one's own opinion are immoral monsters, or stupid, or ignorant, as the case may be.
in a few cases were banned for being offensive. I remember a couple from the far far left like that.
bob mcmanus was the example of that I remember best. His open misogyny was really something. Funnily enough, I thought of him recently, when BBB in his final comment (clearly trying, as lj said, to foment more trouble) said words to the effect of "the men have decided". bob mcm said that exact thing in reverse, when pre-emptively implying that women (it was sapient, Janie and me who called it out) would force the men here to ban him, as women had on the other blogs where he commented.
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What is this "TikTok" you speak of?
"
I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity. So I'm not how we diversify ideology without dealing with those other categories.
This is an interesting video between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, but more specific to the observation of lack of diversity is the fact that both Klein and Hayes, after talking about how Mamdani used the TikTok genre to win, confess that they could not do it, or at least it would take a long time to get to the level that Mamdani showed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2KYhDLDQY&t=3s
Just curious, has anyone here made a Tiktok video? If not, does anyone have a Tiktok account?
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McKT aside, we are a pretty narrow group ideologically most of the time. Wj is the token conservative and he is more centrist really. Of course things get real heated real fast when there are serious disagreements about important issues. I said this to LJ privately the other day, but the amazing thing about the hilzoy era was how she and whoever else was in charge kept things under control. I didn’t necessarily agree with her on everything, but this was one of the few places I knew about where there was a wide range of views for a few years. Of course people gradually dropped out or in a few cases were banned for being offensive. I remember a couple from the far far left like that.
The culture might also have gotten more polarized, but I am not sure about that. It was pretty polarized with Bush, esp in the early years when he was more popular, I think. Now I can’t remember when I first came here.
It would be difficult being polite with a MAGA type. I don’t think we have had any.
Weirdly,for a couple of years Rod Dreher had a wide range of views in his American Conservative blog comments. For a bit he was repentant about his Iraq War support and would sometimes critique the right. But his anti gay and anti trans mania got more and more evident and his Islamophobia came back if it ever fully left and he got super culture war paranoid and started taking like Franco was justified. I got more and more sarcastic and was eventually banned. Then he wrote his famous root wiener post and got eased out.
"
And I should add, that's just me talking, we would have to discuss it between Russell, wj, Janie and me and that might be a pretty fraught discussion.
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Well, libjpn@gmail address is working and he's not written. I don't want to pile thing up that he has to do, but I'd add that he also needs to admit that he snuck back here to try and set commenters against each other. In the normal cut and thrust, you can suggest that some person agrees with you, but trying to gin up conflict is really not acceptable and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
But would they prefer a person in Flint getting potable water from their faucet to another million dollars? That is a bit more opaque.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I understand the ban on McKT under whatever name, but I'd like to see him back. I urge him to apologise to the powers-that-be for having accused them of holding malevolent beliefs which they do not, and I urge those powers then to rescind the ban.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
...economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth.
Economists are not necessarily stupid. They use a "utility curve" to describe how much an individual values increasing wealth. The standard assumption is that utility curves are increasing, i.e. people prefer more wealth to less, and concave, i.e. the curve gets flatter as wealth increases.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I hope everyone in the U.S. had a great 4th of July. Especially, I hope everyone who loves them got to see a great fireworks show. Because, going forward you can expect fewer shows and smaller ones.
The thing is, virtually all of the fireworks used in the US are made in China. Which means they will be much more expensive in the future as Trump's
folliestariffs kick in. Of course, drone shows are supposed to be the latest big thing. Color me underwhelmed.On “From the Chinatalk substack”
Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
There is also the difficulty that "efficiency" can mean very different things to different people. And, in my observation, almost none of them are even aware that they are using the word differently.
"
when I say 'make them just like us', it's less that economists can 'make' Chinese be like us, it is that they are assuming that they are just like us in those areas and by getting them to save less and consume more, it will 'fix' the problems of the Chinese economy.
It was either on this youtube video or another one, but someone pointed out that because the Chinese basically threw money at a number of problems, it actually was better because a more efficient distribution would have necessarily been more limited. Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I'm spending the day hanging out with folks who are doing the grunt work required to put on the local fireworks show. (Not the "damned amateurs" you hear making loud bangs in your neighborhood. This is a professional operation, led by a licensed pyrotechnician.)
The sort of apolitical patriotism that has been drowned out by the fanatics. But it still lives on in the real world. My sense is that these are the folks who will rise up and crush the fanatics. Rise up slowly and reluctantly, not least because fanatics are so rare in their immediate environment that they struggle to get their heads around the idea that anybody could be like that. But once the reality breaks thru? Fanatic, meet junk heap of history -- at least for a generation or two, until the memory fades again.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
I don't think I quite buy the thesis that (some? many?) Western economists want to make China "just like us.". For the simple reason that we are not "just like us". At least, not like the "us" that economists typically use to describe the populations whose behavior they are modeling.
To take just one example, economics, as I understand it, has no concept of "enough". It assumes that every individual will always act in order to accumulate wealth. Regardless of whether he already has more than he could ever spend. Certainly there are such people. But they are pretty clearly a) atypical, and b) seriously psychotic. Somebody spending the weekend volunteering in a soup kitchen, rather than hustling for another million? Unthinkable.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I celebrated by hanging up a flag with black streamers attached
I also spent the last 24 hours in the fetal position, moaning. Not over the degeneracy of America: the combination of a covid shot and a shingles vaccine.
"
Wait, I thought we were an anarcho-syndicalist collective...
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
About Charles' video, I share nous' hesitancy, but in this case, mine is less worry about astroturfing/misrepresentation, it is more that the assumptions of Western Economics may not apply to other societies and cultures in the same way. I've plowed through a shit ton of videos about economics related to China and Asia and while the balance seems to be very bearish on China, they all look at China through the lens of Western econ. I think one should consider that Western Economics is based on a number of cultural principles that may not be operating in China.
This might seem very strange if one thinks of Economics as a science, but I'm not totally convinced it is.
As folks here may know, there is no actual Nobel prize in Economics.
The prize initiated and awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden and falsely dubbed as the Nobel in Economics has acted as an institutional vehicle to endorse and establish Neo liberal ideas (mostly Free market fundamentalism) within Economics (Offer & Söderberg, 2016).
https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusion-why-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-needs-to-be-abolished/
I probably wouldn't be as harsh, because, as I have often noted, I don't know economics very well. Call me agnostic. I do note that a loud vocal group that thinks Thomas Sowell should receive the Economics neo-nobel, which simultaneously suggests that if the whole enterprise is a scam, at least they have enough taste to keep Sowell out.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/09/is-thomas-sowell-a-legendary-maverick-intellectual-or-a-pseudo-scholarly-propagandist
But it seems to me that some of the root cultural assumptions made in economics may not hold for China.
This is a typically bearish video, by Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2b4TjQa4gk&t=3371s
and you could ask 'how could he be wrong? He's actually been to China and spoken to principals' Well, he does present a narrative that China has been moving from a model of competence to an authoritarian model. A couple of quotes
First I want to be careful to say that they listen to everybody. The Chinese are way better than we are at hearing a hundred different views. Mine would be one of many that they heard. I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. I actually gave a lecture in the Party’s training school where, if you’re a mayor, a provincial governor, any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. Of course there were various loyalty things. But when you met the leaders—and I met a lot of them when I was at the school—they actually asked really raw questions too. They said things I couldn’t believe they were asking. And I was told that within the school, you're allowed to say anything. So they had that system for a long time. When you met Chinese technocrats—or even the mayor of Shanghai—they were impressive. I'm not saying ours aren't, but it's a mix. I think you know that.
I think Xi Jinping has really changed that. He’s been the president since 2013, and over time he’s pushed out that system and moved more toward loyalists, people who are less technocratic. Probably the most important talk I ever gave in China was at what's called the China Development Forum in 2016. It's this giant hall that had most of the top leaders in the party. A lot of the elite of the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg and many others were there. I said, “Okay, I'm looking at your housing. I'm looking at your infrastructure. It looks to me like you're going into a classical housing crisis problem. Your catch-up is over. Your demographics don’t look good.” I gave a list of things. “And by the way, it looks like power is becoming very centralized in the economy.” And I said, “I'm a Western economist. You're doing an amazing job. What do I know? But I don’t think that would be good for growth.” After I gave the talk—I just figured you only live once, you just have to say what you have to say—a couple of top leaders came up to me and said, “Professor Rogoff, we very much appreciated your remarks.” I was thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to put me in jail or something at the end of this.”
I’m less impressed by them now. And I’m worried. Let’s say they get into a crisis—which I think they’re in now. I think they're still in a deep crisis—or somehow hotter heads prevail between the United States and China and we get into some kind of entanglement nobody wants. I worry that we’re not as competent. I’m speaking about right now. We have some very good people, but the average quality at the very top, I think, has gone down. And China’s not as competent either. That’s a recipe for having bad things happen.
It's a story and it's a plausible one. But you go down a bit and Rogoff says this
The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. First of all, there’s nothing like our Social Security system. You need to save for your old age. There’s nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you healthcare, but otherwise you’re on your own. They’re not allowed to invest abroad. It goes in waves, but they’re not allowed to put their money abroad. So they’re trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There’s nothing to do overnight. But fundamentally, if you’re looking at China and asking what’s wrong, it’s that the consumer isn’t spending enough.
And I hear 'make them just like us'.
Economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that. You go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. They happen periodically. Maybe Brookings puts one together, maybe the government does. My former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know. But my gut instinct is that what’s happening to China is what’s happened to Japan. It’s what’s happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union. We have a more dynamic economy. We’re not perfect. Maybe we’re screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and deglobalization. But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places—at least other large economies—just can’t replicate. They can build stuff. The French have better high-speed trains than we do. I hope you don’t ride on the train from Boston to New York. It’s nicer than it could be, but it’s no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible. They’re good at that. But the really creative stuff? I don’t want to say they don’t have any. There are some amazing Chinese companies. But let me say that the US is really good at it. We’ve kept that in our DNA. I think it’s very important, to preserve it.
Getting in an argument about who is the most dynamic and creative is a mug's game.
It's hard to contest the points that Rogoff makes, but when he says 'they have to consume more', I have to wonder if at the heart of a lot of discussion about China's economy is the idea that they have to be us. Yes, the social safety net is nothing compared to western societies, but how do you factor in the fact that a society built on confucian values is going to take up a lot of that. Certainly, there is a lot of grumbling, and there are a lot of knock on effects. But given the way the US and UK safety nets are unravelling before our eyes, I have to wonder if we are just using different measuring sticks.
This resonates with some of the comments in the substack, like this one
There's this perfect example: a Democratic delegation visited Japan recently, and several congresspeople toured the Shinkansen—which, by the way, was built in the 1960s with American funding.1 What's almost laughable is that even today, this public transportation system—which isn't exactly cutting-edge anymore—still managed to "shock" American congresspeople. This tells you that even the highest-ranking political elites don't really have opportunities to experience or understand the kinds of lifestyles other countries have built.
[...]
I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing's public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.
I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they're less likely to be misunderstood as depending on "authoritarian order" for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this "authoritarian scratch"— people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They'll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries' inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.
But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what "ideal life" looks like.
I really like the point of 'authoritarian scratch'. It extends to Japan and Korea, and when you point out some aspect of life, it sends some scurrying to find counter examples.
I had to reconstruct this from last night, so I better stop here.
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This will be broken into a couple of comments.
First, I got a copy of Abundance and made notes to make a post, but nous basically said what I would have said, only more succinctly. Klein is a wonk, which I say respectfully. However, I don't think his wonkiness serves him well in writing something which is essentially utopian. He writes as if all of the drag in the system is the result of progressives constantly screwing up the system. But a lot of it was trying to win over stakeholders and make sure they were included. That many of those procedures were hijacked to stymie progress shouldn't be blamed on progressives, unless you demand a level of cynicism from progressives that has never been apparent.
It's interesting that there was a flowering of interest in the book, but, afaict, it's all dried up. I'm not sure how any solution can gain a hearing, but the speed at which the book bloomed and then passed away is telling.
Second comment might take a while, I have to check some sources
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American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs.
NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready.
I am learning to hate AI
It seems to me that AI, at least as quoted on this site, could readily replace the MBAs and other B-Arkers, but not the people who actually know and understand stuff.
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American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs.
This
I'm willing to believe that someone who has actually worked for some years, including some years as a low level manager, could find an MBA curriculum useful. But someone right out of an undergrad degree program? No. And, sadly, that seems to be what we are mostly afflicted with.
We need a W.S. Gilbert to write an analog to "I am the very model of a modern major general". It encapsulates the situation so well.
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Grok's summary is not particularly helpful
I know that this is just further proof that I'm an old man yelling at cloud, but I am learning to hate AI.
It's like mansplaining as a platform. Plus, an electricity hog.
Doesn't anybody read a book anymore?
I will now go yell at random kids to stay off my lawn.
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The China Debt talk compares US to China 10-year government debt yields, without saying that the yield should be the inflation rate plus the credit spread plus something for time value. In fact, the different yields are almost entirely explained by the different inflation rates.
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American industry has been inflicted with a plague of MBAs. Dim, fad-prone, and given far too much responsibility.
NASA is *far* too slow getting the B-Ark ready.
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America definitely has advantages in excavating "innovation points" that have clear commercial value and market acceptance, but when it comes to those "1.1 improvements"—the continuous polishing and optimization—the gap compared to China is obvious.
Most of us here are probably old enough to remember when Kaizen, the Japanese term for continuous improvement, was a hot topic. Japanese car manufacturers, especially Toyota, (and other Japanese manufacturers) were eating American manufacturers lunch. This was the explaination. A lot of American manufacturers even made a big deal about adopting it.
Of course, if you dig deeper, the originator of the whole concept was an American (W. Edwards Deming). But until the Japanese made spectacular use of his ideas, he had trouble getting a hearing in the U.S. From the sound of it, perhaps American manufacturers have lost the thread. Again.
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Thanks CharlesWT, but Grok's summary is not particularly helpful. Mostly it underlines for me that we don't know much about the author(s) or what sorts of institutional connections or outside funding may be influencing the commentary.
I get that this is true for a lot of popular media sources, but I tend towards sources that do a better, more careful job of practicing research transparency.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.