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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 think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
In the 1950s the United States had quite recently literally destroyed the infrastructure of its major European competitors and made sure that only plausible hostile industrial competitor was thousands of miles away and surrounded by friendly client states. Compared to America of 1950, China doesn't have such an advantage, it has a dramatically worse age pyramid, and a worse debt-to-GDP ratio to boot. In fact, this is even true of China compared to America of 2025. To the extent that "America in 1950" describes any country in 2025, it's, uhhh, well it's the United States.
...as opposed to the Germans, Russians, British, French, and other Europeans doing so with the second generation-ruining war in a lifetime?
I wouldn't say it's opposed - the Europeans started the war, the United States finished the war (in part) by strategically bombing Germany and its allies/occupied territories (including France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the Netherlands).
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 were not what destroyed the infrastructure of Russia, Britain, France, Italy, Romania, Czechoslavakia, Austria, or the Netherlands.
The American strategic bombing campaigns in WW2 didn't even destroy the German war industry, even if you ignore the British and Russian strategic bombing campaigns. Germany as a European competitor was destroyed by occupation and post-war partition, during which it was still a relatively rich and industrialized portion of both super power camps both relative to the rest of Europe and much of the world.
The vast majority of infrastructure damage in Europe during WW2 was done via land-based artillery, urban fighting, and deliberate sabotage to deny infrastructure to the enemy. Plus occupational plundering of heavy industry, which was a signature of both the Nazi and Soviet occupational forces and centralized economic planning.
This is without addressing that the US was hardly the party that finished the European war, given the roles of not only the British but particularly the Soviet Union.
Just accepting all of this for the argument instead of quibbling (and I think there's a lot of quibbling that could be done, but Second World War bombing campaigns aren't really my area of expertise, so possibly I'm just wrong) the US was still an important part of the post-war partition, and an important part of the Soviet Union's victory in the East, and an important part in the reindustrialization or, if you prefer, continued industrialization of Germany after the war through the Marshall Plan, to say nothing of the shelling, urban fighting, and sabotage that you mention (and of course removing German scientists after the war to serve the United States).
My broader point, though, is that, despite the Iron Curtain, the world was the United State's oyster in a very real way in 1950 that it is not for China in 2025.
In so much that the world was the United State's oyster, it was because the Europeans destroyed themselves and had ruined much of the world via imperialist squabblings, not because the Americans destroyed the Europeans or their spheres of interests.
This is a hyperagency versus hypoagency point of the allocation of agency and responsibility. Just because the Americans benefited from being the last economy standing does not make the Americans responsible for the various european decisions that destroyed each others economies.
I don't disagree with your point about the Europeans shooting themselves in the foot, but by the same token of agency and responsibility, the Americans of the day did not merely sit around and let their country become the last economy standing by default (even though isolationism was probably a live option); they took advantage of the situation to better their own standing (perhaps some would argue not as much as they should have due to sympathies with and penetration by the Soviets).
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