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I don't really understand where you think America, or any other nation, is going to fit into the picture at all if your predictions of Chinese dominance come to pass. What is China going to buy from the US in 2038 in your view? They have a long track record of having an industry come into their sphere and then replicating as much as their can of it and then push out the competitor before exporting their version to any market that will take it. What are other trade partners supposed to do with a nation that's long term goal is to not buy anything from their partners? In the mean time I understand the economist position that says this is an obvious surplus, china sends us goods for pieces of paper, why look this gift horse in the mouth? But What happens when this happens to every industry?
I don't follow Noah too closely but in this piece recently I think he's spot on.
With the American hegemony other nations have options. Americans are happy to let other nations lead in some industries and rely on them long term. We're happy to buy Korean appliances, Japanese cars, European fine crafted goods and Columbian cocaine. If you want to build out a niche the American empire is happy to let you have it and integrate into the global family. This is not how China acts. China doesn't tolerate this kind of interdependence. I don't really see how you think allowing them to take up the dominant position in every industry is long term sustainable. Even in your post you talk about how China is already doing industrial policy to try to make sure that nvdia's position is obsoleted as soon as possible through energy subsidies.
The US is self-sufficient in almost everything. It does not need to trade with China in order to remain a great power.
And more specifically, the US can likely maintain itself as the hegemon of the western hemisphere and remain the richest country on earth. It does not need china.
100% yes
How? A significant % of that wealth was built on leveraging Chinese industrial production and being the primary/a majorly significant trade partner to the rest of the world.
American consumerism is built on buying cheap Chinese stuff. China has overtaken America as the primary trade partner in a huge % of the rest of the world, and that trend isn't getting better for America, especially thanks to Trump's trade policies.
How will America be the richest country on earth when it's consumers dollars don't go as far, and a large % of the world won't buy things from there anymore.
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I think this is somewhat incoherent.
Your narrative is a bit out of date. How will Europeans pay for Chinese imports if China has no need of their exports (in «fine crafted goods», services or anything)? Maybe they just won't, if China can do all that fine crafting cheaper and better. But they will face the same issue with American imports, indeed already are facing:
American Hegemony is not about building some happy global family with a division of labor. From software down to extractive industries, American Empire wants to be like Emperor Qianlong said: «our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders. There was therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce». Currently, the Chinese economy is pretty export-dependent, but Xi would prefer it to be otherwise – Dual Circulation is a big pillar of his policy, and in purely thermodynamic terms, if literally everything is cheaper in China, you can ignore standard macroecon, largely eschew exports, subsidize domestic demand and make Qianlong's boast a reality.
The main difference is that China got there with industrial policy and human capital, and you're trying to get there with tariffs and coercion and a Wunderwaffe. But the end result is the same for non-live players.
Back then, I asked for what the end game of AGI race is, and you said:
A center of commerce in what sense? The US currently has a very low fraction of international trade in GDP – around the level of Pakistan. The US wasn't a global center of commerce during its ascent either. You pat yourselves on the back for importing some junk but it's not really spreading a lot of your wealth around, it's only large in absolute terms. China is simply already doing what you want to do once you get «AGI», and by 2038, if AGI plans pan out, your narrative will be laughably quaint.
Moreover, what's wrong with that? Both nations are large, decently situated and can, in theory, produce all goods in prolific abundance within their own borders more economically than imports would be; and China is entitled to a larger and more diverse internal market on account of population size. There are some hard natural endowments – Australia has more accessible mineral wealth, Atacama desert has excellent solar resource, I don't know – but commodities are cheap. Maybe they'll become less cheap? What remains scarce after labor and R&D are commodified? Land? Copper? Wombs? We need to think of how the world would operate when major nations are capable of industrial autarky, because modulo some Butlerian Jihad we will have to deal with it anyway.
Finally, what exactly is your concern? The US imports more than it exports not out of some moral commitment to subsidizing globalism, but just because it has very credible IOUs to sell. You basically print USD and export inflation. The EU can't do that. China can't do that. Chinese industrial competence doesn't have a direct effect on that, they cannot deny you the ability to print paper and buy Columbian cocaine. Trying to rationalize the take – you deserve hegemony because what, it'll mean unquestionable military supremacy, hard guarantee of your IOUs, and therefore indefinite ability to exchange goods for paper?
Yeah, I think it's less sustainable than «China is a very large and very productive autarkic country». They've been exactly that for centuries, and the world managed fine. In the limit of this trajectory, they will only need to export enough to cover the raw commodities imports necessary for their internal economic activity. That's not a lot, in dollar terms. The more interesting question is what else we all will be trading in 2038.
A lot of your links seem to be broken and affixing themotte's url in front of them.
I guess I should have noted that I oppose Trump/American Autarky designs in the strongest terms. The man is without vision or sense and deviates wildly from decades of American policy.
It should probably be noted that this policy of autarky didn't exactly turn out well for China over the following two centuries ending in their century of humiliation. The period itself was also an aberation as China was center to a vast trade network before the Qing. Do you have some theory of the recent rise of China that does not require the liberalization of its markets? Explanations for its backwardness coinciding with their close? I suppose this time could be different, China woke for a few decades, learns all the world's secrets and then returns to slumber dead to the rest of the world. But I think the Chinese are smart people, they won't repeat that mistake.
And no, the American hegemony has not historically been about autarky, We've historically traded security guarantees for access to international markets.
Tariffs are industrial policy and of course China imposes tariffs and had before the trade war. This is simply a game of Russel conjugates. I again oppose Trump's buffoonish actions but to think the CCP doesn't employ coercive tactics in trade is pretty surprising. This is a place with a habit of outright banning outside competitors, not just tariffing them. market access for IP bargains, forced technology transfer, straight up state sponsored industrial espionage and Cyber theft(APT10, PLA Unit 61398, Equifax hack, ect). It's just not the case that China has risen in some saintly within the rules manner.
This conflates a few different worlds. My model for an ai future if ai drops marginal labor cost to the base electricity needed to complete the task(but doesn't go infinite intelligence like the yuddites expect) isn't every nation turning inwards, like civilizational wire headers. I find that a bleak image frankly but I suppose some may and China may be one that does if that comes to pass. I don't find that future particularly likely really. And if it goes all the way to AGI then all I know is I want someone with my interests to have been the one to do the alignment work.
This map just seems to be a measure of economy size relative to nearest neighbors, no? Mongolia isn't a huge player in the international trade Arena, it's just landlocked between two countries with economies that are much much larger than its.
this is an interesting point and framing, thanks. I hadn't been thinking of the precise scenario where labor costs drop to marginal much. It does seem far-fetched but we are in the time where far-fetched things happen. I still find things shaking out this way unlikely and if they do I think the world would be unstable. When labor is very cheap and raw materials, even if they can be harvested much more efficiently, are the scarce thing then what is the offense/defense equilibrium?
also replying to this comment
The CF40 piece is interesting but doesn't address my point. They're arguing PPP calculations understate Chinese purchasing power, that Chinese people get more stuff per yuan than World Bank stats suggest. I'll grant it all for the sake of argument because the PPP discussion is boring and one can look elsewhere for it. My claim was about income distribution, not purchasing power. Household consumption being 40% of GDP means households receive 40% of national income to spend. The rest goes to the state and corporate sectors, funding the investment-heavy model. Even if every yuan buys more calories than we thought, that doesn't change the share going to households versus the share going to industrial buildout.
This matters because the investment heavy model requires external demand. Household savings fund the investments through financial repression - artificially low interest rates transfer wealth from savers to state-favored borrowers. The resulting production has to go somewhere, and domestic consumers don't have the purchasing power to absorb it because their savings were the input. Rebalancing toward consumption has been official CCP policy since 2006. In that time, household consumption has moved from
35% to38% of GDP. They know the problem. They haven't solved it because the mechanisms that suppress consumption are load-bearing for the political economy.He has a vision, though we can debate the merits of that vision, I agree he's a pretty vulgar individual and his execution is often appalling. But was “decades of American policy” sustainable? The permanent deficit only makes sense if you can serve the growing debt indefinitely. Why should we assume that this can hold? As I've said multiple times, Trump is correct in his diagnosis even if ham-fisted with treatment. If America becomes materially productive, it will diminish European share of the pie, you can't sustain your consumption with just soy and LNG exports, something has to give. Or what is the idea, make AGI and sell tokens instead of IOUs, in exchange for TRUMPF machines? I guess that can be argued, but far as I can see, nobody argues for this. Do you argue for this?
It wasn't so much about trade autarky as about comprehensive intellectual isolation and stagnation, the Qing did not understand the world outside China's borders and honestly bought into the idea that they'll naturally be productive enough to not worry. Qianlong still had some clue, thanks to Heshen, who was ultimately executed for vast corruption, leaving the Qing blind for decades. Then, it was too late and they grew too dysfunctional to modernize like Japan. By First Opium War, Daoguang emperor didn't know where Britain is. It was a pathological regime preoccupied with managing a quaint and unnatural arrangement of Manchu superiority. I definitely won't say their trade policies made sense but it is just a small part of overall Manchu awfulness. Though to be fair, Manchus were following the Ming with their tryhard Confucian disdain for trade. By 1736, China had mostly lost its ironworking. Insularity is the dominant Chinese policy for many centuries. We need to go back like 1000 years to see China that's even remotely as trade-oriented as the modern one. And yes, none of this is plausible in the modern world with high-density information flow.
Anyway, what does it matter? People complaining that “China is making trade impossible” don't mean anything like Ming-style ban of maritime commerce. They mean precisely the opposite, that Chinese exports are too cheap and abundant, and call it unfair. What exactly do you want them to do? Enforce the internal demand for more expensive foreign goods, such as subsidizing private consumption of Macbooks? Get worse at manufacturing? Make their subsidies as ineffectual as European ones? Focus on welfare spending, until they get old, slow down their value-add climb, and fall behind far enough to balance trade? It's just hopeless demands to change their value system, they won't change it. Keep raising tariffs if you don't want to compete on prices. 100% on EVs, 200% or whatever on solar panels, outright ban on Huawei… seems to work, keep going. American deficit with China is already shrinking.
American hegemony itself is a very recent phenomenon, and may have run its course. America was a relatively prosperous and absolutely powerful nation before it became “a hegemon” and so massively involved itself in Old World affairs, for intrinsic reasons of having a large internal market, little red tape, and good geography.
Your security guarantees don't look very credible and monetizable now.
I don't oppose any of that, it's fair game so long as it works. By coercion I mean buffoonery like forcing allies to invest in American production or Lutnick's machinations around TSMC (again, “security guarantees” come into play). China simply can't do any of that, irrespective of morals. It can only offer terms of the deal and expect consent. JVs were not coercion. Expropriation of Trina Solar, meanwhile, is coercion with extra steps. But whatever, this is sliding into moralism, everyone will price in those tactics and act rationally.
Pretty much, but that doesn't change the conclusion. The US is a vast economy. China is becoming comparably vast (or is already bigger depending on how you count), and specifically on goods production it's just no contest. Such economies gravitate towards autarky, both for security and macroeconomic reasons and because of basic logistics.
I repeat that Chinese household consumption is underrated due to in-kind transfers (such as all this public infrastructure), while American consumption is overrated due to Baumol disease. CF40 doesn't just argue that they're even richer than PPP suggests, and consume on par with developed economies (just not the US). It argues that they spend 20 times less on healthcare and get comparable outcomes. Americans cannot not consume some of these items, their floor for cost of living is just too high, you physically cannot survive in a modern city for $137 a month for two people over 3 years, and for the Chinese the ability to do that is subsidized by in-kind transfers. There can be a spirited defense of American consumption pattern, about allocation efficiency or whatever, but the crux is that while the Chinese are directly extracted from to build up physical capital and trade competitiveness, Americans are indirectly extracted from to make pharma/hospital/insurance company etc. stonk go up, charitably – fund R&D and reinvest into tech. The latter is accounted for as “consumer spending”, the former is not, both are effectively non-optional capital transfer from civilians to the national backbone, largely physical in their case and largely financial in yours. I think that when all is considered fairly, both nations have about 50% “real consumption” share of GDP.
Right. That's the big question, isn't it.
I could go on at length about my problems with Trump but at the hope of not starting too many skirmishes with this forum I'll limit myself to saying that Trump's gift is identifying an aggrieved feeling in his base and validating/stoking it. If that means vanquishing woke, which I mostly agree with, he will try to do that. If that means striking at China who much of his base holds responsible for decaying rust belt towns then he'll do that. He is not setting out to balance our budget or deal with the infinite deficit, he has increased the deficit. Long term sustainability is not something he cares about, part of his appeal that got him elected was dumping the idea of sustainability by breaking the GOP on Medicare's obvious unsustainability. He's a slop populist that refuses to acknowledge trade offs, a national embarrassment. Perhaps the only thing worse than him being in charge is the Bernie wing of the democratic party that looks to Europe's fat decay into a retirement home with envious eyes and wants to squash our attempt at relevance through ai dominance with pure stupid ludditism.
If you've said Trump is right in his diagnosis of the American sickness multiple times then you've been wrong multiple times, Trump doesn't know about or even think about the American sickness. He has diagnosed the ugly populist urgings of his base and as people are often mad about real problems sometimes strikes out at those problems in total ignorance of their structure. Our problem has something to do with trade so he strikes out against trade, broadly, untargeted and with great zeal.
well no, it's your model that we should be trying to sustain our consumption with just Soy and LNG exports, the raw commodities while every nation does their own production. I think we should continue to try and dominate in aerospace, tech, entertainment and other industries. We should happily let ASML dominate in fab design, TSMC dominate in fab execution(although China hungrily eyeing their island for conquest does justify some industrial policy to move that particular industry into safer territory), Samsung dominate in RAM and maybe we could encourage some home grown competition but integrate with the partners without like, doing state sponsored spying on their designs to that end.
I have to point out that China is led by an aging dictator who has progressively isolated himself from the type of people who would bring him bad news. The whole autarkic emperor blinded to their weaknesses and his subjects being afraid to tell him he's wrong seems to me at least as good of an explanation for denial of NVDIA imports as some pending competitive domestic chip manufacturing that you seem to think is likely. And it parallels nicely with your history lesson, which I do genuinely appreciate. I try to not let my bias for democracy show too prominently in my analysis, but it seems important to point out the downsides here and also that it's not clear how succession after Xi is done is supposed to work smoothly.
What I'd like is kind of like an onion, we've got a few layers here.
At first are the demands I have for my own government that started our back and forth a while back. I want to not surrender our advantage for no real gain. You seem to oscillate between claiming NVDIA is going to establish some kind of vendor lock in while also celebrating an impending Chinese internal semiconductor champion that will make refusing to export toothless anyways. Either lock in is real or it isn't. If it's real then surely China's efforts won't mean much if they can't even get their national champion to use their home grown chips. If it's not, and this is my position, then we should under no circumstances allow NVDIA to export our most powerful chips to China. And I don't want to hear any free trade paeans on this, China wipes its ass with free trade.
As for what I want China to do. Well I do have family there now, they're more privileged than most Chinese people so the reforms I'd like aren't exactly for maximizing their benefits, but I'd like China to shift its focus from out competing the world and territorial conquest to getting its internal household consumption up. I'd like further Hukou reforms so there are fewer second and third class Chinese citizens. I want to see more of the returns from China's growth go to improving the quality of life of Chinese people rather than Xi's vanity in needing to dominate every market that exists. Step away from autarky. Perhaps geopolitically untenable but I'd also like to see them stop aiding Putin in his horrific war in Ukraine. Of course this is a bit of the awkwardness that I've just listed a bunch of things in the "what if we pretend AI is a mundane technology" world. What I want China to do if AI is a pivotal technology is to lose to America in a race to develop it, I would understand if Xi declined, but he doesn't seem particularly AI pilled honestly.
which ones don't? Yes, Trump is a bully to our allies in an embarrassing and disgusting way, but the line people are fighting over right now is how much we should be materially supporting people who aren't even our allies and just have implicit value to people that are our allies to prop up.
I'll continue to not want to defend Trump policies but will point out that this is similar in effect to Chinese Market access for IP and tech transfer policies where China gets a substantial amount of the return on foreign investment and then forces the foreign competitor out once it can replicate the production anyways. At least Japan would get some lasting equity in this deal formulation. China's high-speed rail program was built on technology transferred from Siemens, Kawasaki, Bombardier, and Alstom. Do those companies or their home countries enjoy any stake in CRRC's international expansion?
There's a big difference between aggressively pursuing autarky and just the natural internal trade that exists because you're a big country and most of the things you buy aren't hyper specialized products. I keep hammering this because it's important. America doesn't, or at least didn't, see it as a problem that its most advanced chip products are the result of cooperation between firms for dozens of countries. Yes, if you're buying groceries in the US then naturally they will be sourced relatively locally and generally the most common things a person consumes are commodity and service products that don't gain much by having a long supply chain. Every local area is probably going to need to answer the "where do we get milk from?" question in their own way. Not every local area should try to answer "how do we design cell phones?" for themselves. If they have a competitive advantage in cell phone design, or some step of the process, then sure go ahead, but autarky is the madness that has Trumpists trying to figure out how they're going to produce coffee beans in the contiguous united states hundreds of miles from where they can grow effectively.
well, kind of. The high speed rail buildout you may have a point. But the excess industrial buildout? That's going into exports. It's the Americans and Europeans enjoying discounted goods that is enjoying the surplus here. At least the American excess spending is circulating among American Doctors and Pharma companies, which yes are actually making miraculous drugs.
Baumol's applies to all sectors, household, state and industrial at least equally, probably more to state, so this can't explain inflated household consumption as a percent of gdp. It's the same factor in all sectors, it cancels out.
Normally if a point isn't responded to I don't insist on bringing it back up but I need to make an exception here. It's really important that the whole Chinese industrial production system relies on exports and the CCP has been unable to change that fact despite ticking past two five year plans of it being a goal. It just is the case that Chinese people enjoy less of the fruit of their labor than Americans do.
It certainly seems like a question central to the world of inward facing nations you're putting forward. How is China getting the 70+% of its oil imports in this future? The iron ore? The soy beans? Surely they have resources but this seems a hollow sort of autarky.
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Any theories, here? Does every country decide to just sit back, possibly import raw commodities and energy that aren't otherwise attainable, and live in blissful abundance?
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Here's another article to add to your arsenal and broadly echoes what you're saying: China is making trade impossible
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Huh? Isn't that the supposedly pea-brained Austrian Economist take? Why are neolibs copying other people's homework now?
It’s a mercantilist take; as far as I know, the Austrian school has nothing against trade deficits and indeed would support even unilateral free trade.
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When you're trading with an actor with ulterior motives free trade assumptions break down, even neoliberals know that you ought not actually sell the rope that will be used to hang you.
Depending on how you define “neoliberal”, not necessarily! As always the devil is in the details—I’m sure some self-described neoliberals would advocate for a measure of protectionism in industries relevant to defense and national security, for instance—but one plausible neoliberal response to a foreign country engaging in so-called anti-competitive trade practices (e.g. dumping) would be “Keep the goods flowing; why should we say no to their foreign aid?”
This is of course always the rub.
I think this is best described as just the classical naive econ model. As far as models go this is at the very least middling, with most popular variations from it being the result of poorly thought out motivated reasoning for doing things that people want to do for other reasons. Still, one should not rely on game theory to keep the scorpion from jabbing you to death or however that fable goes.
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And I know the obvious critique. If America can't compete in semi-conductors on a level playing field or any other industry then they should lose and China should make these things cheap as the pie growing move. But this isn't a level playing field. No one does more industrial policy than China. The CCP has an autarkic goal and pursues it at the cost of many things.
They systemically suppress domestic consumption through keeping deposit rates so that households earn below inflation returns so that those savings can be pumped into industrial buildout. The Hukou system creates workforces with limited rights in their migratory cities suppressing their wages to reduce labor costs. They spend very little on social safety nets. the end result being that Chinese household consumption is something like 40% of gdp vs 65% in the states.
You can say that's just them running their economy lean and that decadent westerners should lean down their consumption to compete, but if they did then you really would run into an environment where demand is too scarce. I know you've mocked that idea in the past but it really would be a problem for industrial buildout if no one was buying the stuff China or everyone else was producing.
I simply don't think this is even true, it's more self-serving imperial propaganda to present failures as a moral choice. Most of your consumption value is rent-seeking like high rents. Chinese consumption is not that low, read this. Even Chinese safety net is not as low as is often said, it's on par with other middle-income nations.
You're not doing anyone a favor by being corrupt.
It's paywalled. What does PPP have to do with the fraction of Chinese household income that goes to consumption?
Because those are the same issue.
In effect, if Chinese services consumed by the people provide 5-20 times more value than PPP calculations suggest, this straightforwardly means that Chinese people's "consumption" share of GDP is higher, because the volume of economic activity included in these services is larger relative to exports and government spending than it appears. We can directly estimate the value of their exports. The efficiency of their services and internally consumed goods is more opaque, so it's easy to say “oh just 2000 RMB, that's $285, adjust for PPP… $428”. It actually matters if it's more like $3000.
This feels like a misdirection. The price level of China vs the US doesn't matter for the question of how much of Chinese GDP is household consumption. In each case the ratio can be calculated in local currency without any need for PPP adjustments.
The article you linked is (apparently, based on your excerpts) discussing correct PPP factors based on household expenditures, which is really not the same question at all.
Put another way, my argument is that household consumption as % of GDP is low because a great volume of capital has been invested in making life cheap, in particular rent, healthcare, connectivity and education, via infrastructure and assorted social transfers-in-mind. The fraction of GDP that is “government spending” or “employer spending” goes towards increasing purchasing power of the average (and below-average) Chinese. Consider:
etc.
This is a separate strategy from either low-intervention market economy or “welfare socialism” with explicit gibs that boost discretionary spending. It can be criticized but it's internally coherent and it's not just “make people poor to have cheap labor to flood global markets”.
Sure, let's throw that in to the consumption number.
That brings us to 46% for China and 65% for the US based on the numbers above, once we apply the increase from the text you quoted. Still, the gap is fairly significant.
Yes, there is a big gap. But why does the gap to the US matter at all? You both have abnormal societies.. China is an outlier in its GDP bracket, you are an outlier in yours. Chinese household consumption is similar to its East Asian neighbors. We can quibble about specific datasets, but South Korea is under 50% pretty much no matter how one looks at it. Why is Indian or American ratio inherently better than Chinese or Swiss ratio? This is all a pretty facile discussion, different nations have different systems, your main problem with their system is that it's too internationally competitive, not that Chinese people are poor (and they aren't even that poor).
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Is this how you do all your argumentation?
No, as you can see mainly I rely on other means. But this Baumol-diseased "consumption" that Americans pride themselves on is indeed largely propaganda.
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