This is true.
But what you said about social mobility, there is still plenty of that in the US. If you are willing to work hard over a long time period, that is. I have no idea what social mobility looks like in China though, maybe it is better? China does seem to do economic capitalism pretty well.
Well, to @Destiny ‘s point, how much great philosophy do you know of that was produced in the west vs east? Most of the great philosophy I know of comes from the west. There is a lot of great stuff in terms of religion, meditation and all that in the east. But philosophy? What about innovation and production of new ideas? Just about every invention we use today came from European-American western people.
I recall reading something about when Europeans were in China in the old days trading with them for the first time. They noted how the Chinese did have telescopes, but they were very basic. They had not been significantly improved in a long time. The Chinese scientists were happy with the telescopes they had and felt no need to improve them. Meanwhile in Europe, telescopes were always being improved.
There is a kind of spirit of ingenuity and innovation, a DRIVE to this, reflected in European people. Partly also why they felt compelled to venture out into the world charting and exploring everything. Not all of that is capitalist lust for more markets and money, some of it is just the love and drive-ambition to go where no man has gone before, as Picard said.
It’s getting worse. Wealth is concentrated more and more in the top and its not looking good for the future because of the disastrous age-demographics, a result of the one-child policy.
Many of the rural poor live with a meal of rice and vegetables a day. They have more or less nothing. But then they have no or little debt, so thats arguably still preferable to living under debt burden like many Americans.
Not saying how trustworthy Google is these days, but this seems to indicate China has pretty good upward social mobility:
“China’s middle class has experienced explosive growth, expanding from roughly 3% of the population in 2000 to
over 50% (over 700 million people) by 2018. Driven by rapid urbanization and rising incomes, this group is expected to reach 1.2 billion by 2027, representing a significant portion of the global middle-class consumer market”
If you look at the statistics almost half of the population within the United States lives in poverty or economic penury 45-47%.
You have roughly 35-37% that can roughly qualify as middle class but even there it is an ever shrinking population.
6% qualify as millionaires and the rest of the equation at that point are billionaires. I do think it speaks huge volumes of the inequity or inequality inside of the United States when half of the population lives in poverty. Then keep in mind of all the foreign undocumented workers we have as well.
Everybody calls China capitalist but if anything they have a state governed public social welfare economic system where capitalism is paramount. Some Marxists especially the Chinese ones would say where communism and capitalism meets, that is to say economic capitalism that represents a sort of national social commune.
What is embarrassing or at least should be is how the Chinese have a much larger middle class than the United States currently does.
The problem as I see it is that any economic system is going to end up this way, with most of the wealth concentrated at the top and a rising poor class. This is just how things go, until the amount of poor becomes so large it is socially unsustainable and some kind of revolution occurs. Remember what professor Jiang said too about how revolutions begin from the upper middle class that wants to become elite. Elite over-productions means no more upward social mobility for all those middle class people who aspire to be more. By then, there are so many poor people with nothing that it’s relatively easy to get them on your side against the powers that be.
I don’t know if I trust the stats about the middle class in China, for one thing China lies all the time about their own statistics, for another thing I bet the economic standard of “middle class” in china is more like being poor in America. I didn’t look up the numbers yet, but let’s say being poor in America is having $20k or less in income per year, while in China the dollar-equivalent would be something like $1000 income per year. Including adjusting for purchasing power. Maybe that’s not true, but I have a strong intuition that “middle class” measn something very different in China than it does in the US.
I mean does it REALLY make sense that China has 700 million middle class people, more than the entire population of the US? Not really.
Yes, China is pretty good at capitalism. It is how they increased their wealth and industry so quickly. They prioritize or at least allow private ownership yet within state-controls. They incentivize productivity and are very customer-centric. They have good business skills overall. And there is apparently a lot of competition economically in China. Think about how competitive their schooling is there, parents are crazy about making sure their kid gets the best grades and into the best universities. Compare that to like what Destiny was saying about how in the US we have “no child left behind” and affirmatiev action and Montessori schools and all the rest of it. Competition in American education has become a dirty word, to be replaced with “cooperation” (which you seem to prefer?)
Hm, on poverty I get completely different results in two different searches. Like google corrected itself after my first search.
I do understand Chinese prosperity would collapse if the dollar would cease to function as the world’s reserve currency.
I never really understood this whole reserve currency scheme, now I understand it’s what makes smooth and small margin trade possible. In absence of a global default currency, the prices of the currencies traders would have to rely on would fluctuate too greatly to provide for stable trade, and the narrow margins on which China and most export nations operate would be impossible. So the US as a nation by issuing the default bears the brunt of the world trade system, basically forcing itself into trade deficit, forcing its industries to expatriate.
I researched into crypto default but apparently thats not possible because of the lack of flexibility, the fact that crises can’t be softened.
A digital, partly bold-backed blockchain token might be the only useful option left. Something like what the BRICS unit is being proposed to look like.
Except without a physical unit (cash, paper) it relies too much on the existence of electricity and internet. There must be a hard currency physical backup too.
Yes they lie, officially poverty is zero, but they do have child laborers in the electronics factories.
Whatever, their prosperity will be short lived because of the aging population. The show will collapse within 20 years unless they import half a billion laborers from somewhere with an actual demographic pyramid. Which, I guess, they probably will.
They’re not exactly truthful about economic and financial data inside of the United States either. So if China lies about its own economics, no more so than we already lie about ours. In the age of grand deception truth is a rarity.
They are pushing robotics very fast. Within 10-20 years most of their labor will probably come from robots.
Maybe, but like you said in the other thread, the most basic jobs are hard to replace by machines. And also these robots have to be built, and kept working, will get damaged, have to be cleaned, and I just don’t see if a robot doing grandma’s dishes breaks down because some water got in the wrong place it will be another robot that heals him. I am pretty skeptical about the power of robotics to do basic labor. It is many years from now to a robot being able to go into a kitchen with the command ‘make me a nutritious meal’ and find out where all the ingredients are and assemble them into a meal. Robotics operating machinery in a rigid system have existed for decades, but I don’t see any robots yet close to being capable of cleaning a toilet unless they are installed as a function of the toilet and don’t leave there to do other stuff. So Im not so sure.
The problem I understand is that blockchain currencies because they’re basically honest and real, can’t be mass printed to be pumped into a crisis, which is necessary to keep this system on which the current market system relies.
In a ‘real’ system, you have many smaller crises and bankruptcies, many more restarts, many more hitches in the system, which slows it down and gives less smooth profit margins on the whole. It would be much better, I think, it would downscale everything, and localize everything, it would be great for Europe and the US. Not for the elites but for us. It would be bad for China as an economic superpower and other cheap export nations.
You are probably right when it comes to things like domestic house hold robots. But I mean more like robotics integrated into large -scale factories and industrial production and distribution. Think about UPS, the many package workers who load and unload trucks. A pretty basic kind of robot with a bunch of arms and wheels could do that same job far faster and better. Would it really be that difficult to maintain a workforce of robots like that? I don’t see why. How much of automotive production is already done by robots like this?
It simply requires re-formatting existing warehouses and industrial spaces to accommodate the robotic components. There is a large barrier to entry involving a lot of cost and logistical changed required, and as you say maintenance and running the robots will be a challenge to figure out at first. But give it sometime, maybe a full decade to work out the kinks and figure out how to smooth the processes along, and I see no reason why most economic production, packing and distribution will not be robot-labor. I have worked in various warehouses and assembly positions, they are already very robotic. You repeat the same task over and over. There are ways to subtly change the logistics of how the place is setup so that a robot can do this instead of a human, so that human-level adjustments and judgment calls are not really needed anymore.
Even modern cars still have lots of mechanical “robotic” parts, physical moving stuff going on, and they work just fine 99.9% of the time.
I realize we are not there yet and there are entry barriers, but I honestly do not understand the view that robots will not ultimately be doing most economic productive labor work. Maybe not in your home doing your dishes, but then who knows, maybe that too.
Yeah, with blockchain that is true. Although perhaps issuance of new currencies to the blockchain would still happen. They could still inflate the supply if they wanted to, but without any kind of gold-backing or basket of commodities backed like BRICS proposes.
The US is already moving to a digital dollar, do you know about this? Trump signed it into law already and it is being developed. Part of their evil genius here is two-fold: it is a gradual step into CBDCs, and it also props up the US treasury bond market.
For every dollar spent purchasing a digital dollar, that original dollar is required to be used to purchase US treasuries. So once the change-over begins to digital dollars the US bond market is going to experience tremendous investment overnight. At least that is part of the p[an.
I don’t like a currency that can be inflated during a crisis. Think about the housing crisis, we should have allowed those institutions and banks to fail. They made bad investment decisions, bad allocations of capital. Those errors would have been flushed out and corrected naturally. Instead the government printed trillions of monopoly money out of thin air, inflating the currency massively devaluing it for everyone else while at the same time papering over the errors that got us to the crisis to begin with. It prevents error-correction and keeps kicking the can down the road, that is why the US has unpayable 40 trillion of debt now and which keeps growing by something like a trillion dollars every 60 days. It is not sustainable, it must collapse. It is irrational.
Well either way is fine with me, Id quite like having a houserobot. You’re right, much industrial work is simple and repetitive enough for robots to take over in some time. I wonder if or when AI will take over the entertainment industry.
I saw a funny thing about the Greek political commentator Yanis Varoufakis, he was watching a lecture by himself and at one point realized he was in his beach house and wearing a shirt that he only wears in his other house (imagine that being what you notice)… so then he noticed that it wasn’t him at all, but an AI, who was making excellent arguments in his name. Then he found out there were hundreds of these videos of him with a lot of views and comments in full support. He was kind of resigned to it now, finding a bright spot in thinking maybe this will in time force people to judge things on the merit of the argument rather than on the authority of the speaker because you can never know if that is really the actual person. If robots do everything necessary I would like to spend my days on a sunny plot of land cultivating potatoes and cucumbers or something. Maybe raise some chicken, so I can have my own eggs and make some chicken soup. That would be the ultimate luxury in a robotic world. Thankfully we will never be able to eat robots. But unfortunately bill gates is already pushing for 3D printed meat.
Who benefits from this precisely and how? Who sells these bonds? I mean where does the money end up?
I always wonder who all this debt is owed to. All nations have debts.Obviously to banks of some sort, private creditors I guess, people well hidden from us. Are we able to know anything about them?
I know all the famous names of bankers but they can’t be the end-all of this scheme. Whats I can find about their fortunes covers only a fraction of the cumulative debts nations have.
I totally agree. Im just saying China is helped by all this corruption as much as our financial elites are. A lot of China’s wealth would evaporate if the west went back to sane, reality based, localized economics.
About being scared – Im just even more scared of these other regime-types.
That was so staged. Like those secret service guys are going to let him get his head up in the air. No way. They will treat him like a sack of potatoes, keep him low and surrounded and no matter what he does drag him to the nearest vehicle or safe room, period. There are a lot of other problems with the official story that day. But that was a choreographed scene and I laughed when I saw it. And that should have put pretty much anyone on notice that this guy is not an outsider coming to drain the swamp or whatever his metaphor was. This was an insider through and through.