Thomas Piketty: 'The reality is the US is losing control of the world'

People get their culture from how their families raise them, not how the President behaves. I don’t think one guy acting corruptly makes regularly people act corruptly. My dad didn’t leave Bangladesh because the President was corrupt. He left because everyone from the president on down was socialized into a culture that breeds corruption.

So I think mass immigration is a much bigger risk. Look at the history of Chicago, and the immigration-fueled political machines that gave rise to dysfunctional and corrupt government that persists to this day. Why are American cities so dysfunctional in their governance compared to western european ones? This is not some inevitable consequence of cities. In the south it’s because southern culture is just tolerant of corruption, often tracing back to power structures that arose during the era of slavery and segregation. But in the north it’s mostly the lasting effects of mass immigration of impoverished groups with strong cultural identities. We are seeing the same problem take root in Minneapolis—which until now has been one of the few well-governed cities in the north—in real time.

As to your question about whether I should have been allowed in—I’ll humor you. My dad should have been allowed in, who is a cultural outlier among Bangladeshis. He proudly tells this story about a birthday lunch in Dhaka in the 1970s, where he and a Danish expatriate were the only ones to show up on time. The Danish guy remarked that my dad must find it difficult to get along in a country where people have such a relaxed view of time. My dad loves this story, and that’s why he self-exiled himself from his homeland.

But your argument is illogical. Immigration policy doesn’t screen individuals for fit. It’s a system of mass migration. And when you’re talking about millions of Bangladeshis, not just one, you have to take culture into account. I am acquainted with a bunch of folks from Massachusetts, who grew up among descendants of Puritan settlers. They were socialized with ideas like “food is for fuel, not enjoyment” and a visceral aversion to wealth signaling. They have such an aversion to waste they cut their donuts in half and consider it a good thing if they run out of food at a picnic. They’re exceptionally orderly and temperate people, very much unlike my extended Bangladeshi family. I think America would be much better governed if more of the population was like them rather than like me and my extended family.

Agreed. For a while, importing stuff “on the cheap” looks like a good deal, but overtime if that makes your own industries weak, you are just losing power.

You can't win by just buying stuff from someone else; it appears that people have a hard time understanding that nowadays.

But that's just a function of their large population size.

Even if you wanted to, you cannot bring the majority of your population to a high-skill level. That's not surprising, but still it is debatable whether China is producing value in line with their large, highly skilled cohort. They seem to be stuck on the hard problem, relying a lot on the import of foreign-invented technologies. That may change over time; we will see…

Yes, the entire point is their population denominator so large that, past 20 years of birth + ongoing shit tier TFR still gives them incredible technical talent generation advantage now that they sorted out tertiary and industry pipeline. They don't need majority of their pop to be high skilled, and it's not, we're simply talking about PRC workforce upgrading from 20% -> 30%/40% skilled workforce vs OCED already maxing out at 50%+, that ~30% PRC skilled already exceeds entire US workforce. PRC relatively shit TFR still gives them absolute and relative global talent advantage.

Skilled job supply: labour supply is definitely issue, and there is theoretical ceilling on how much high skilled technical jobs there can be. But PRC only country with talent glut, vs everyone else projected shortage. That automatically gives them both strategic and economic advantage (unlimited cheap high end labour). And part of the shortage (i.e. source of youth unemployment) is simply they spammed academia harder than industry. real estate to industry pivot lagged academia machine going brrrt by 10 years. Industry is going brrrt now, but will still take time to generate 10s of millions of high end jobs, which btw will simultaenously erode western high end. Every industry where western incumbants gets displaced by more efficient PRC players basically lose significant portion of their operating profits and downsize.

>be stuck on the hard problem

They are manifestly not. They have been brutally accelerating / demolishing / catching up / and recently leading. Look at actual timeline, bulk of tertiary talent generation is post 2000s academic reforms (add 10-15year masters+industry pipeline), they didn't explode academic system and talent output until ~2010s, bulk of new talent + a few years for cohorts to integrate into and simultaneously expanding high end industry = almost all the high end catchup was done in the last 10 years shortly after workforce composition STARTED STEM/skilled shift. And most of that catch was done when PRC was growing from 20m-40m STEM, i.e. from half US STEM to parity, and exploding before it reached parity due to PRC industry cluster advantages.

Like the amount of progress/catchup they have made across every sector relative to execution time is objectively stupendendous, as in historic outlier tier, and now they're leading/frontier in various sectors, which already invalids they can only fast follow. They're simply not retarded with industrial policy until coldwar 2.0 that forced them to decide to indigenize everything and that was 7 years ago, they're pretty much caught up in nearly everything except the absolute pinacle, and even then they seem to be beating western projected catchup timeline (see today's Chinese EUV prototype report).

This all happened in basically 10 years, when PRC cultivated pool for mid-career professionsals in 2010s from 2000s tertiary reforms. They will have conservatively 50 years and 2x-3x larger skilled workforce and much larger/developed industrial base going forward, i.e. OCED combined, but not paper workforce, workforce with actual access to the densest and most complete industrial chain in the world brrrting at PRC speed.

IMO this is talent/industrial base advantage that is as insurmountable as US WW2 advantage that sealed US hegemony for 50+ years. Like even if US AGIs first cope strategy is true, LBH, said AGI is going to look at the numbers, the industrial chain density, the sheer abundance of power and abillity to generate atoms, and immediately defect to PRC.

I think that you are not listening to what they say, it is as simple as that. You want to be their friend, to dont want to take them seriously.

> people tend to shutdown when they hear trigger words like fascism

Also, it is objectively not true they shutdown. There is nothing shutdown about current conservatives and republicans. They are loudly and actively working on their project. They are not shy afraid to talk ... instead people like you are unwilling to listen to what they are saying again and again.

Either that or pretending to not listen and focusing on trying to make their opposition shut up.

> productive conversation, it's better to use less loaded language.

Do you want productive conversation or you simply want the rest of us help them and pretend they are actually not fascists? Productive conversation and middle ground between democracy and fascism is authoritarian dictatorship and a lot of victims.