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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?).
I don't want to go too far into China stronk memes. But a lot of this does seem like a bit of cope the HSR to nowhere certainly feels so as most of the Subway stations to nowhere now have bustling new development around them and most of the ghost citeies have filled up. HSR isn't profitable but neither are American freeways. And China built a whole network of them too.
In general Chinese factory jobs suck but pay decent wages for Chinese standards. Chinese factory workers are not destitute child slaves but people working shit jobs to save money. Like the equivalent of oilfield workers. They can blow that on booze and hookers and many do. But many also use the decent wage and shitty dorm to save money and go back to their hometowns to buy a house and get married after 5/10 years of working.
Living in China feels to me what I imagine life in the 50s was like in the US with new prosperity industrialization . It's definitely not perfect but looking around at my surroundings I just don't think the China doomers have the right of it. The Party fucked up a bunch of shit during COVID but the post COVID norm seems to be a return to reasonably competent government and corruption has significantly declined since Xi took power.
The difference is that freeways are reasonably versatile. You can have passenger cars, busses, and eighteen wheelers on them. HSR is stuck in its particular niche.
I think mass transit stans, despite sharing some sympathies that we could actually build better public transit, really tend to miss that (paved) roads are a really configurable system. Roads are switched packet networks to the broad/multicast media of rail and such. I can drive point-to-point at a time of my choosing (or stream a TV episode) rather than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver (or watch new episodes Wednesdays at 7:00 Eastern! But I'm busy then!). And this is from someone that generally hates driving. The same network delivers all but the heaviest freight to nearly anywhere and is relatively cheap to build and maintain (rail is much more specific about grade requirements, for example).
And this is the whole point. Privately-owned cars just work better than any kind of scheduled or on-demand transit at low enough population densities, or at off-peak times (noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak). But something like London's Victoria Line or Paris's Metro 1 have enough demand to justify a train and professional driver every two minutes and then some, from 6am to after midnight. Roads for private cars don't scale to that level of demand. Autonomous cars help a little bit (because of faster reaction times) but not enough to turn London, Paris or Manhattan into DFW or Atlanta. Centrally co-ordinated autonomous cars can do a lot better, but the kind of person who really wants to live a car-based lifestyle is exactly the kind of person who doesn't want their car controlled by someone else's computer.
That's still enough to suck. I recently got stuck in Philly after missing the last train after a concert because I didn't realize there was a last train. Luckily I had a nightowl friend who answered an SOS and picked me up... in his car. And then drove me to my car, parked at a transit station outside the city, where I drove home. Sure as hell beat sleeping at the train station with the fent zombies.
I have jogged miles through Shanghai late at night because I missed the last train. Eventually came across a taxi and the smoking teenager driving it who was not the guy on the taxi license took me the rest of the way to the hotel.
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