State of the Discussion

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CharlesWT - who is behind the Economics Explained channel and where does their information come from? They don't seem to feature much information about who they are, what sort of educational background they have, or what sort of information literacy practices they use to verify their information, which leaves me wondering.
Hard to know how much trust to put into commentary when there is so little transparency.
Genuinely curious, marginally skeptical, but not going to dismiss it out of hand.

I, too, read the substack and found it interesting - probably more informative than anything I have read about Abundance which seems to me to be more of a work of mythology than one grounded in an understanding of technologies and practicalities that it champions. I think Klein has far too credulous a faith in the techbros and has not read widely enough in the literature to see where the silicon valley marketing buzz is all greed and ketamine.
I do agree that the US needs big public works, but those works need to constrain the techbros and aim for slower and wider prosperity. Instead, we have modernity as a casino.