Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

carnegieendowment.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 121 posts

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#71

Post by Muromec »

PeterisP wrote: post #68
ekianjo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's all about being practical. The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine i…

The examples you give are not examples of mistakes or unexpected outcomes. Regarding killing of kulaks, it's not like they wanted to achieve prosperity and the chosen measure failed; they intended to eliminate kulaks as a social class with loss of prosperity as an acceptable price to pay to get that outcome, and mostly succeeded in their goal. Regarding Holodomor, again, there's no mistake, the starvation was intenti…

>These are prime examples of harsh large scale practical actions that were reasonably effective in achieving political goals through mass murder among other means.

Yes, but it was effectively half measure anyway - they bought some time at expense of poverty and got nothing in the long run - the union is gone, poverty killed what nationalism was not able to and with fall of the union nationalism came back with 6 more millions of reasons to prove it.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#72

Post by coldtea »

ekianjo wrote: post #26
Nokinside wrote: post #10

Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has more room to act in crisis. China has extractive institutions that will ultimately be a growth limiting factor, but I don't see it limiting their crisis responses. * There will be no political gridlock between left and right that can be solved only with half measures. Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence. * T…

> It's all about being practical. The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine i…

>The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions.

Yeah, but a planned economy wasn't the reason. The reasons were:

(a) they wanted to establish their elite rule (and that required a big show of force and getting rid of potential enemies)

(b) ideology was at play (ethnic tensions, coming up with a BS "elite class" to get rid of in the form of kulacs, etc)

(c) they started from very poor rural economies very fragile to weather, famines, and such

(d) they improvised their decisions with much incomplete data from ad-hoc established regional bureaucracies.

Those are not problems with a "planned economy", but more of those particular historical circumstances.

Neither (a), (b), or (c), or (d) are the case anymore (I mean, they still need to enforce their party rule, but not establish it from nothing).

In fact China's growth in GDP the last 50+ years has been phenomenal, so it's not like "they made very, very poor decisions" for their economy over this span.

Besides, today China's economy is not at all planned the same hard way Stalin's Russia or Mao's economy was.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#73

Post by bitxbit »

baybal2 wrote: post #57
bitxbit wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can go through a simple two-stage exercise. But it comes down to how China can churn out tech and this is exactly why they are not allowing the Big Silicon Valley to do business there (and understandably so). To be honest, the tech baton will stay in the US until someone can put up a comparable education and research ecosystem. I don’t see that happening for at least another 50 years. China is at a crucial point…

>To be honest, the tech baton will stay in the US until someone can put up a comparable education and research ecosystem. ... US in my eyes, evidently scores much, much, much less than China when it comes to public education. Both secondary and undergraduate tertiary level. Only graduate school does well in US, just because high profile academicians tend to like working in high profile universities

Disagree. The best high schools and undergraduate programs are all in the US. No contest.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#75

Post by icebraining »

pk3469 wrote: post #50
seibelj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are seriously arguing that consuming sugar is equivalent to mass murder ordered by the government, and that a totalitarian regime might be better than democracy? I think you have some errors in your logic.

If a totalitarian regime is not better than a democracy, then why is China outpacing the western world by every meaningful metric? Why are more and more governments increasingly shifting to the totalitarian side of the spectrum? I think it's pretty obvious by now that individuals' feelings of being 'free' are not relevant to the big picture of what nation states seek to achieve. If you tasked an AI with controlling a…

why is China outpacing the western world by every meaningful metric

On what meaningful per capita metrics is China outpacing the Western world?

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#76

Post by ksec »

joeyo wrote: post #66
ksec wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long That is where surveillance and big data comes in. And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

> And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china. It's not the absolute number that's the issue it's the age distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...

Yes and there are nothing wrong with that distribution. Death rate are lowered life expectancy are higher. Their working population, even though a decrease of 20% is still huge.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#77

Post by crwalker »

Nokinside wrote: post #35
crwalker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...they can take as big hammer as needed to fix it." If you believe complex economic systems follow simple, well-known control laws, then yes. But I haven't seen much evidence for this.

Just study the War Economy in different countries during the WWII. Government can simplify and direct the economy if it has total control over it. For lighter control look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan and Korea. Tight control of the economy worked just fine to stabilize the system.

If WWII policies seem to be evidence that "tight control of the economy worked just fine to stabilize the system," consider that centralized economic decisions (German war finance, treaty of Versailles, war reparations, Weimar Republic hyperinflation) paved the way for WWII. Early 20th century Europe is an odd example to choose to demonstrate a stable, well-controlled system.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#78

Post by pas »

Nokinside wrote: post #35
crwalker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...they can take as big hammer as needed to fix it." If you believe complex economic systems follow simple, well-known control laws, then yes. But I haven't seen much evidence for this.

Just study the War Economy in different countries during the WWII. Government can simplify and direct the economy if it has total control over it. For lighter control look at the post war economies in Europe, Japan and Korea. Tight control of the economy worked just fine to stabilize the system.

Tight control to produce armaments is one thing. Tight control to compete on cost and efficiency is another.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#79

Post by sseth »

ksec wrote: post #63
sseth wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of truth in this. However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long. Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ag…

>However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long That is where surveillance and big data comes in. And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

In 2016, they put an end to the one child policy. In 2017, they are offering women free removal of IUDs. Under the one child policy, women were forcibly fitted with IUDs after the first child, and were forced to undergo sterilization after two.

This has led to a ridiculous situation highlighted in the New York Times, where a woman forcibly fitted with IUDs in 2012, is now being offered free removal of the same IUD.

This is what happens when policy is made centrally, detached from ground realities. I don't know whether there are enough people or not in China - the point was more about the issues with central planning.

Similar U-turns can be seen in the stock market. The government was exhorting people to invest in the stock market as a patriotic duty, creating a huge bubble. When it burst, they tried to manage the stock market by punishing investors who were selling shares! No wonder the stock market has tanked - would you put your money in a stock market where you could be punished for selling?

I agree the Chinese government with its Orwellian-like control of the population can get away with a lot. But they get a lot wrong as well.

Re: Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

#80

Post by dang »

ekianjo wrote: post #26
Nokinside wrote: post #10

Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has more room to act in crisis. China has extractive institutions that will ultimately be a growth limiting factor, but I don't see it limiting their crisis responses. * There will be no political gridlock between left and right that can be solved only with half measures. Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence. * T…

> It's all about being practical. The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine i…

Please do not take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. They lead to boring ideological flamewars, which say less and less the larger and angrier they grow.

https://hn.algolia.com/?amp;sort=byDate&dateRange=all&am...

Post reply on HN