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

China

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 317 posts

Re: China

#201

Post by rodgerd »

api wrote: post #77
atom-morgan wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably the single biggest factor that's keeping me from moving out to CA. There's a lot of great companies out there and I think I could learn a lot but I also don't want to go broke. Edit: How are people making it without a really high salary or living with three other people?

I call real estate the "evil sponge." As a region becomes more affluent, the price of real estate appreciates at least in step with this. Due to the leveraged debt financing of RE, the reality is often that price appreciation is a multiple of wage appreciation. This takes pretty much all the surplus capital in a region -- among everyone but the rich -- and locks it up in an inert asset. Think of it this way: a starte…

> I call real estate the "evil sponge."

There is a reason that successful, fast-developing nations such as Singapore have enacted tight controls over the ability of a zero-value-add rentier class to extract all the value from a growing economy.

Re: China

#202

Post by adventured »

tdees40 wrote: post #113
kirse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's growth has long since been an organism that feeds on the back of the gorilla of US growth. If the US economy would hit a major recession, China would come crashing down with it. On the other hand, if the Chinese economy would have a major collapse, the US would suffer, but still be able to re-route core-value manufacturing processes to new countries (or back home). I agree with your cheating note, many of the…

The US economy did hit a major recession, and Chinese growth slowed marginally, but generally did okay.

China's economy crashed big time in fact. They took on upwards of $30+ trillion in new debt in just six or seven years to continue faking the old levels of growth, trying to buy time. They pulled a Japan, at warp speed.

In other words, China took on nearly twice as much debt as they gained in GDP expansion over that time. Since the later part of the previous decade China has seen a plunge in the return on invested capital when it comes to GDP growth - the situation is so dire now, they have to add over $1 of new debt per $1 of new GDP they get out of it. The party is over. China is already the most indebted country on earth (while half a billion of their people live on $2 per day), and their pace of debt accumulation isn't slowing down. The outcome of that financially toxic situation is obvious.

To keep faking 7% growth, China has to take on $20 to $30 trillion in new debt in just the next five or six years. It's a scale of debt the world simply has never seen before.

Re: China

#203

Post by nostrademons »

olalonde wrote: post #27

I look forward to the day where nationalism is seen as an anachronism. I know this probably wasn't the primary message of this post and that YC has funded a number of non US startups but if you swap US and China in this post, I wonder what kind of reception it would get.

That'd also be an interesting thought experiment. The modern nation-state as a concept is barely a century old; before WW1, a number of prominent countries (Russia, China, Austria-Hungary, much of Africa) thought of themselves as empires or kingdoms, and people's daily allegiance was more toward local municipalities and neighborhoods than the abstract concept of a nation.

I wonder if at some point in the future we'll see pseudo-corporatism as a social organizing principle, much like in Neal Stephenson's books.

Re: China

#204

Post by chiph »

melling wrote: post #184
chiph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a ratio between them based on how productive your workforce is. German workers, for example, are thought to be very productive. But expressed as a GDP-per-person ratio, not as productive as US workers. China is far behind in productivity, yet their enormous population means they're ahead in total dollars. And as Chinese workers move from low-productivity work such as family farming to industrial farming & fa…

How about India? They will soon be the most populated country in the world? Indonesia has about 250m people? Brazil, Pakistan, and Nigeria? All these countries have large populations. They probably have a lot of "growing room" too. In short, this claim is meaningless: "China has 3 times the population of the US. As soon as they started growing a middle class, it was inevitable that this would happen."

That gets into the societal aspects - after working for their basic subsistence, how much time in the day is left for working on other things that they could sell. In the US, the creation of industrial-scale farming meant that food became plentiful and cheap enough so that there was capacity & time left over for work that could then be used to create a profit.

There are other factors at play of course. India has an enormous bureaucracy that soaks up much of their excess capacity and stifles innovation. The remains of the caste system also means that some of their most productive people aren't working effectively. Nigeria is doing much better these days, but still suffers with a large amount of corruption. Pakistan & Brazil - I don't know enough to comment - perhaps you can fill in why they aren't growing as fast as they might.

Re: China

#205

Post by threatofrain »

tdees40 wrote: post #118
Afforess wrote: post #55

I disagree with a lot of this. The Chinese value the appearance of working hard, not actual hard work. Cheating among Chinese students is pandemic. Chinese companies regularly publish misleading or outright fraudulent earning statements and quarterly reports. While the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to reverse these trends, it will take a long time to undo their culture of corruption. Contrast this with…

There's a billion people! You can't make any generalizations about "hard work". It's just overly broad stereotyping at that point. Do Uighurs value hard work? Tibetans? Subsistence farmers? City-dwellers? I don't really know what people mean when they say that the Chinese "value hard work". Which Chinese?

Why is something overly broad stereotyping?

People don't treat populations and individuals as the same thing; the population is its own entity with its unique properties, and, obviously differences. The question is whether those differences are sufficiently exploitable. This is how policy works. If you are saying that you can't generalize over a population, you're saying that there are roughly zero between-population differences that are exploitable for strategic policy. Random things are unstrategizable.

I think that the Chinese and Japanese value hard work more than Americans and Canadians, and I think so because Americans and Canadians have an unfortunately true belief that intelligence is highly predictive of performance, and also that intelligence is not meaningfully improvable. On the other hand, I think that Chinese and Japanese people have the belief that effort is a far better explanation to performance.

The problem is that performance must surely be at least a combination of effort and ability; a depressed person may have the bodily ability to pick up the phone for their friends, but they might not care anymore.

I thus say this: if you go looking for studies on cross-cultural pedagogy, I claim that you're going to find that American and Canadian students are significantly more likely than Chinese and Japanese students to avoid harder challenges, to pursue easier challenges, to practice mastered over unmastered material, and to avoid a problem after poor marks. Does this speak to all work? Of course not. But it's a window into culture, rather than just comparing mean hours studied or worked between populations.

Re: China

#206

Post by snowwrestler »

tdees40 wrote: post #118
Afforess wrote: post #55

I disagree with a lot of this. The Chinese value the appearance of working hard, not actual hard work. Cheating among Chinese students is pandemic. Chinese companies regularly publish misleading or outright fraudulent earning statements and quarterly reports. While the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to reverse these trends, it will take a long time to undo their culture of corruption. Contrast this with…

There's a billion people! You can't make any generalizations about "hard work". It's just overly broad stereotyping at that point. Do Uighurs value hard work? Tibetans? Subsistence farmers? City-dwellers? I don't really know what people mean when they say that the Chinese "value hard work". Which Chinese?

By this standard, no one could ever say anything about "China" at all. Sam Altman says that the Chinese economy passed the U.S. Was that the Uighur economy? Tibetan economy? Subsistence farming economy? City-dwelling economy?

See how these questions add nothing to the conversation?

If the conversation is about China collectively, then it's not invalid to make other statements about China collectively. If you disagree with the parent's assertions about China, then let's hear it, but just pointing out that China is really big does not tell us anything we don't already know.

Re: China

#207

Post by [deleted] »

tdees40 wrote: post #118
Afforess wrote: post #55

I disagree with a lot of this. The Chinese value the appearance of working hard, not actual hard work. Cheating among Chinese students is pandemic. Chinese companies regularly publish misleading or outright fraudulent earning statements and quarterly reports. While the Chinese government seems to be taking steps to reverse these trends, it will take a long time to undo their culture of corruption. Contrast this with…

There's a billion people! You can't make any generalizations about "hard work". It's just overly broad stereotyping at that point. Do Uighurs value hard work? Tibetans? Subsistence farmers? City-dwellers? I don't really know what people mean when they say that the Chinese "value hard work". Which Chinese?

[deleted]

Re: China

#208

Post by kyllo »

cyorir wrote: post #171
kyllo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. American insecurities about China seem to come from people who don't understand how unenviable China's position is. The country is authoritarian, polluted, crowded, and corrupt. People in China work hard because living in China really, really sucks if you are poor. Members of the wealthy ruling class all own property overseas and send their kids to university overseas. They…

I think you are hitting the right point, that China's system has a lot of flaws that we don't want to pick up. However, you are casting this in absolutist terms, "NOTHING about China's economic system would be appropriate," and I do not think that is correct either. Just because China has some flaws, such as its inability to handle environmental and social problems, it is a fallacy to then say that every thing about…

Lately I have been trying to avoid using weasel words. I'd rather err on the side of painting with too broad a brush than weaken my statements with a bunch of qualifiers that add no meaning.

Having said that, I really can't think of one aspect of China's economic system that would be appropriate for the US to emulate. We're envious of their growth rate and insecure that their GDP will surpass ours, but that doesn't mean any of their actual policies are appropriate for the US economy.

Re: China

#209

Post by kyllo »

tsurantino wrote: post #101
kirse wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China's growth has long since been an organism that feeds on the back of the gorilla of US growth. If the US economy would hit a major recession, China would come crashing down with it. On the other hand, if the Chinese economy would have a major collapse, the US would suffer, but still be able to re-route core-value manufacturing processes to new countries (or back home). I agree with your cheating note, many of the…

I completely disagree with your notion that U.S. is less interdependent than China. The exchange is clear: U.S. needs cheap Chinese manufacturing to proliferate its innovation, and in turn, China gets direct access to U.S. blueprints, and is able to leverage and improve upon them to produce their own products. This is basic economics, not a question of "who is genuinely innovating". American companies need cheap manu…

China is huge but US imports are pretty well diversified at this point. Today we import a whole lot from Vietnam, India, Malaysia, etc.

It's mainly the consumer electronics sector that would be hit hardest. The lower-tech manufacturing has already moved away from China to a large extent.

Re: China

#210

Post by javiramos »

linkregister wrote: post #190
nostrademons wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, the U.S. got its start as a major industrial power by a major act of industrial espionage. (Francis Cabot Lowell went over to England for two years, worked in the textile mills, memorized all the details of their workings, and opened the first textile mill in the U.S. in Waltham, MA.) Large-scale American industrial espionage continued throughout the rest of the 19th century. American goods had the same reputat…

I dispute the assertion that American goods were considered cheap knock-offs by the end of the 19th century. By the mid 19th century, the "American Style" of assembly-line manufacturing with interchangeable parts was considered to be the most efficient form of manufacturing [1] and was thereafter adopted in Britain and the rest of Europe. This method was derived from various aspects of the English system and was not…

I really really recommend this book to everyone in this thread: http://www.amazon.com/Made-USA-Retreat-American-Manufacturin...
Post reply on HN