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And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
Wow it’s a proper word for software engineering and platform complexity over the last 30 years.
I'm surprised that article doesn't reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race
What I love about the Chinese is how incredibly aware and self-reflective they are about the wheel of suffering they are building for themselves.
Jeez, what an asshole.
Has it been measured? Or is this more of a qualitative critique?
In western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution. The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici... There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that litera…
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
内 "inside", 卷 "roll".
>When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible. A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.