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Notes -
Does it now?
China doesn't have much to offer to its cognitive elite, or to any cognitive elite: their best and brightest live precarious, stressful lives of exhausted virgins, worse than the Chinese in the US tech schools do, and about the same as in other poorer Asian nations like India and Vietnam. And this happens precisely for the reason that there isn't a sufficient concentration of cognitive elite in Chinese government, thus they cannot internally propagate and execute bold moves to work around their pitiful $10K per capita GDP. All they have learned is to a) double down b) throw money in the general direction of the problem.
So many attractive proposals the US cannot match for ideological reasons were on the table, so easy to grasp with Chinese state power (even literally state-mandated catgirl gf, like they joke in Russia), 4chan retards could come up with them. But it's one thing to vaguely conceive of a policy and another to develop and deliver it; the latter requires American levels of collective intelligence.
I trust my eyes and my brain's ability to infer tendencies from anecdotes. And in fact anecdotes are more significant than any but the most sophisticated statistical metrics, because extreme seminal achievements that catch the eye and not averages drive technology and history. Nevertheless, even the conservative picture demonstrable by statistics is telling enough.
Many certainly would have returned already, if only it were more comfortable. A priori it shouldn't be hard to provide a more comfy environment for your people than a race 50000 years evolutionarily removed. But Xi provides something else.
Yes, that's a very interesting question.
I can't pedict the future. But I bet on them bungling it one way or another: either staying mad and falling behind, or lashing out to no lasting benefit. We'll see.
I don't want to project too much confidence here, but basically yes: higher GDP means the market addressable by Chinese startups is larger, which means those companies are more valuable, which means they can employ more cognitive elite under more attractive conditions (some combination of higher pay, better hours, nicer amenities and better career growth prospects). This discussion has gone a little sideways: my thesis is that higher GDP will make China more attractive than the status quo to the cognitive elite, and your rejoinder seems to be that the status quo isn't attractive to the cognitive elite, but that really isn't a disagreement.
And if all else is equal -- pay, career growth opportunities, etc. are largely comparable -- then I'd expect such baseline comforts as being able to speak your native tongue, living closer to your family and having a social network with a common cultural background would make the difference. And given their advantage in population and in intra-population human capital, they should be able to close this gap. The fundamentals are on their side. IMO it really is just a question of how badly they fuck it up.
Very cool chart, and definitely satisfies my challenge. It's the most interesting thing I've seen today. Thank you!
Certainly a possibility. I hope you're right, for my own provincial interests, and for my preference in not seeing Xi Jinping Thought indelibly etched into the cosmos.
For the sake of fairness, Hsu challenges it here but I believe that's where my anecdotal impression of latest achievements settles the uncertainty.
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