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Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
The competition with China is asinine. It really is time for the West to look inward, abandon Asia to the Chinese (not even really that, given so many in the region have their own severe differences with them, including most of their neighbors - the Russia truces are only ever temporary, the India tensions will continue indefinitely) and resolve the ongoing demographic and political crisis, which feeds into so many other economic and social issues.
China is pretty nice now in the tier 1 cities. Sure, the Chinese work long hours, but so do many Americans (you know who works the ‘996’? New York investment bankers, hotshot corporate lawyers and apparently Silicon Valley AI startup engineers). The food is good, the societies are clean and safe. You can’t be too nasty about state policy, but the same applies in much of Europe, and even in the US you still “just” get your life ruined and yourself cancelled depending on what you said and who is in power.
In 50 years, will Britain still be British? Will Germany still be German? Will America - the America of the prosperous and peaceful time still within living memory - still be America? Trump (or Miller, I guess) was right about this. Countries aren’t soil, they’re people. The people in China 50 years from now will be the descendants of the people in China 50 years ago (by and large). Can the same be said for Europeans, in Europe or in North America?
Forget about Chinese cars and datacenters; the Chinese have rarely dreamed of world domination, they are content in their backyard and with the occasional moment of international abuse around fishing fleets and ripping off poor countries with expensive development loans (many of which backfire on them anyway). Whether America rules the world or not is irrelevant to most of its people - at the height of the British Empire, the greatest in world history, the people of the metropole worked in squalid Victorian factories and lived in disgusting, fetid tenements. Even today material conditions are much better. Plenty of small countries do just fine.
And it really is important to emphasize just how bad the demographic transition is. I would rather live under the Chinese thumb in Hong Kong than “free” in Rio de Janeiro. I would rather live pretty much anywhere in China than in Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan, Niger, much of Central America, Eritrea, Haiti. And yet this is what Western lands are becoming. Better to submit to Xi Jinping than suffer Houellebecq’s Submission, although in many ways even that text is far, far too optimistic about what awaits us.
Particularly as Putin welcomes millions of Indians to Russia too. Scary is the future ahead.
Could you elaborate on this scary future? I'm getting sick of Indians being portrayed as an amorphous pestilence. Like a brown mongol horde dipped in shit that's about to destroy western civilizations.
Clearly you (or people who make such comments) find something about the character of Indians to be revolting.
What's the source of it ? Is it lived experience ? Is it that they are Pagans ? Is it the state of their nation ? Is it a feeling of being threatened ? Is it something else ?
I can easily pass off as 'one of the good ones' so I am not too bothered. But, I've realized that my calibration of how a section of American society viewed Indians was off by a wild margin. I am trying to re-calibrate, so an honest answer would be appreciated. Don't hold back.
edit: I am reading all of the replies. Will try to find a common theme to consolidate this over the weekend.
Lived experience
Bangalore - the road turns into dirt road to cross a creek
Bangalore - next to the creek there is a holy cow in such a pathetic state that you want to euthanize the poor animal
Bangalore - in the same creek a person is shitting in the creek, a person 10 meter downstream is washing his face
Bangalore - it stinks everywhere
Bangalore - our parktronic is beeping constantly because we move so slow that the poor car is thinking we are parking and there is a torrent of scooters passing by
Bangalore - no one even admits that such things as traffic laws even exist
Bangalore - when you go to the toilet in the business center you take a pee. After flushing the water color doesn't change
Bangalore - where the water bottles have warning - please crush before throwing.
Bangalore - where the contractor team is giving us a solution to the problem that is so offensively unworkable and stupid that it is literally insulting our intelligence
And from what I have heard Bengaluru is among the better parts of india on any metric.
I can tell similar stories about Pakistan (like the guy that took a shit on the street next to the fucking Centaurus Mall) and Bangladesh too.
London - just the night before the demo the Indian subcontractor living in Zurich arrives and the demo is not even started to be implemented. We ask why - well what do you expect for X pounds? But you said X pounds - well you wouldn't have given me the project otherwise.
UK - where every eastern european I know comes home to get medical treatment (and our healthcare is on the bad side), than take a chance with subcontinent personnel filled NHS
Bangladesh, Pakistan and India are the places where any person even with tiniest authority I have met is treating everyone above them with daily rimjob (figuratively, I hope) and everyone below them as subhuman cattle Eastern Europe - where the second generation Pakistani medical students from UK are mostly know for their willingness to bribe on any exam than study. Yeah - honest advice - if you need to ever be treated by brown skinned doctor that got its diploma in Eastern Europe - just run away.
The subcontinent has some serious cultural issues that will prevent it from becoming the next china. Being poor and being a shithole are different things - India will stop being poor eventually. But being a shithole is choice.
There seems to be only two ways to make sure Indians don't enshittify your country - highly selective with human rights or mass migration under the heavy yoke - like in the gulf.
Do I want to say that all of India is terrible and so are the people there - no - I haven't traveled there too much. And well - in a nation of 1.5B - there will be a lot of decent people. Probably more than all the whites combined. But I am absolutely certain that separating the good from the bad is not worth the effort for mass influx of Indians. Kris Rock had an amazing segment on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas_vs._Black_People
The buttlicking superiors and lording over subordinates is really pernicious because whites hire them (especially the competent ones) and are impressed by how energetic and agreeable they are. But beneath them is a very different experience. People who buttlick expect the same from their subordinates and when they don't get this they are not pleased.
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