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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.
Indians are what convinced me that there's a genetic component to filth-tolerance that's separate from general intelligence or conscientiousness. Africans in tin shacks post videos mocking their food handling practices.
Indian food safety leaves a lot to be desired, but even Indians don't wear shoes in the house which a lot of Americans do.
Okay I want to pick a fight about this.
Americans view their floors differently than other countries' floors. Our floors are treated much more like the ground outside than a clean indoor surface. We don't put pillows on the floor and lay on them, we don't eat off the ground. So it's really not a big deal.
That said, we don't just track filth indoors -- we have doormats and it would be unthinkable to track mud or shit inside the house. And in practice, a lot of people do kick their shoes off when they get home, they just do it near the couch instead of the front door. I live in Japan where walking into someones house with your shoes on is a sin nearly as great as, say, whipping out your junk unprompted. And while their floors have less outside dirt and dust, they are far from clean unless swept regularly, especially if one has kids or pets. So the difference in cleanliness is also exaggerated.
Don't get me wrong, I'm firmly in the side of taking off shoes near the threshold. But this whole meme smacks of "wypipo don season dey food" or "white people are all inbred pedos," nonsense made up out of whole cloth, or very nearly.
Yes, I have a "Mud room" by the front door, with a bench and a place to hang coats and store shoes. Unfortunately, we almost always come into the house through the garage. The first floor is basically a high-use area. With four kids, food goes on the floor, people track dirt in from the backyard to the mudroom to the garage and back. It gets swept every day, mopped and vacuumed twice a week. I wouldn't eat off the floor (though my toddler does and hasn't gotten sick yet!).
No one wears shoes on the second floor.
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