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2025 Letter

danwang.co

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Re: 2025 Letter

#301

Post by maxglute »

deaux wrote: post #198
NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

again, how is it a disaster if nobody else managed to do better? and it's kinda stupid to say "even deaths" on the background of Italy, India and even million dead in the US

China's statistics on COVID deaths are entirely unreliable. In reality, in all likelihood China was the least successful in its region of East-Asia, less successful than Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Note that I'm not including the large-scale suffering caused by the way it was executed besides deaths - if you include that, it's beyond any doubt they did worse than the countries mentioned above, and it's not even close.

Most successful if you pick the reasonable excess death estimate, i.e. not PRC official stats that only counts respiratory failure, or mainstream western excess death estimate extrapolated from applying obese murican fatality rates. TLDR typical using east asian health profile, PRC excess death rate per 100k like 40-80% lower than JP/SRK/TW, ~20-60 per 100k vs ~100-150. It's not even close. TBH would have been a sweep if PRC actually went full authoritarian and mandated full vax dose, but TFW even PRC respects body autonomy more than west. PRC chose body autonomy over freedom of movement and just so happens to be very good at maintaining freedom of movement, i.e. 3 years of normal life in exchange for like 4-8 weeks of lockdown, with plurality of cities barely experiencing any. Unless one insists PRC aktually has 40% obesity rate or Chinese aren't east Asian, then it's beyond doubt PRC did best globally, while top performers in east asia not even in PRC league.

Re: 2025 Letter

#302

Post by stephen_cagle »

UncleMeat wrote: post #260
snake_doc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

This is sealioning.

I had never heard of this term and I thought about it for a good 30 seconds before looking it up (my best guess was it had something to do with the sea lion's "owrk" "owrk" noise when it asks for a fish at water parks). :]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Re: 2025 Letter

#303

Post by hdgvhicv »

ben_w wrote: post #279
hdgvhicv wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Vienna ration housing - social or otherwise - if not via price?

Your reply suggests you're thinking inside a very strange (to me) box. Have you considered… not rationing housing? As in, you can actually pay people to build more houses, houses are not a fixed resource. Likewise roads, schools, shopping centres etc., they're all things you can just pay to get built. Only thing a little harder amongst the usual talking points is hospitals, but that's because medical qualifications t…

Except we know it’s not possible to just provide the required supply

Re: 2025 Letter

#304

Post by hdgvhicv »

ben_w wrote: post #275
piker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Roughly the same with sales tax, it's just 1/3rd of that number. > But buy a £50k Rolex and yes there is vat. This is wildly ignorant of how less fortunate people live. They are hit with VAT on many daily expenses. Ignoring that fact and "tsk tsk"ing them for being frivolous is the [British] way.

Many daily expenses, yes. Before I left the UK, IIRC there was some campaign about tampons. But "majority" just means half. Between "The standard rate of VAT is 20 per cent, with around half of household expenditure subject to this rate." - https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/... And Figure 10.2 on page 6 of https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05... I'd say it's very clos…

Tampons, toothpaste, soap. Yes it’s all crazy, but that’s maybe £5 a week in vat.

Compare to £250 a week in rent and £100 a week in food and it’s peanuts.

Re: 2025 Letter

#305

Post by ehfeng »

gen220 wrote: post #266
jdross wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t afford to buy a home because the current owners vote to restrict new housing through zoning and expensive regulation on construction permitting, so supply is limited in the places you’re trying to live (a higher income region?). The government also subsidized mortgages for the prior generation to increase asset values and now that time is up. Subsidized demand = inflation Finally, you likely want a bigger h…

Supply and demand doesn’t just work in terms of raw housing supply, but in terms of housing that is “on the market”, which is a critical distinction that economists’ arguments deliberately ignore. In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error…

Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.

"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.

Re: 2025 Letter

#306

Post by maxglute »

riku_iki wrote: post #293
maxglute wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tremendous growth is still happening on sector by sector basis, and arguably west only holds edge in few extreme frontier niches while PRC increasingly dominating rest. Relevant PRC joke: If China can't make something, it's considered high tech. Once china makes it, it's no longer high tech. PRC makes high tech products into low margin commodities. That's what happens when they have roughly oced combined in stem…

unfortunately, your comment consists of many loud hand-waving statements without much substance, so there is no much to discuss. > The point is when PRC makes >50% of global stuff materially but charges and could you provide source of >50%?

Unfortunately, your reading comprehension can't parse basic argument, so there's not much to discuss.

For >50%, pick a manufactured finished good or intermediary good like steel, electronics, solar modules, batteries, shipbuilding, xyz components, and chances are PRC produces more than 50% of it by volume/units/tonnage, but not gross/value add. For more broad proxy indicator, look at share of global export TEUs, PRC ships out like ~50% of filled containers, OCED 20%, Row 30%. Emphasis on filled, i.e. take away empty container traffic that flows back to PRC to be filled. Hence western cope is PRC export only ~30% by gross/value (both $$$ figures) that underestimate how many sectors PRC makes more than >50% stuff in while capturing <50% in $$$. And this only considering PRC only exports 20% of GDP, i.e. a lot of manufacturing stays at home.

Re: 2025 Letter

#307

Post by riku_iki »

maxglute wrote: post #306
riku_iki wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately, your comment consists of many loud hand-waving statements without much substance, so there is no much to discuss. > The point is when PRC makes >50% of global stuff materially but charges and could you provide source of >50%?

Unfortunately, your reading comprehension can't parse basic argument, so there's not much to discuss. For >50%, pick a manufactured finished good or intermediary good like steel, electronics, solar modules, batteries, shipbuilding, xyz components, and chances are PRC produces more than 50% of it by volume/units/tonnage, but not gross/value add. For more broad proxy indicator, look at share of global export TEUs, PRC…

So, you don't have source, this was expected.

Re: 2025 Letter

#308

Post by ben_w »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #303
ben_w wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply suggests you're thinking inside a very strange (to me) box. Have you considered… not rationing housing? As in, you can actually pay people to build more houses, houses are not a fixed resource. Likewise roads, schools, shopping centres etc., they're all things you can just pay to get built. Only thing a little harder amongst the usual talking points is hospitals, but that's because medical qualifications t…

Except we know it’s not possible to just provide the required supply

On the contrary, we have plenty of historical examples where we did exactly that.

Home construction per year over in the last century in the UK: https://fullfact.org/economy/house-building-england/

And Germany since 1950: https://www.dba-bau.com/news/seit-1950-wurden-in-der-bundesr...

Note they were higher in the past.

Re: 2025 Letter

#309

Post by ben_w »

hdgvhicv wrote: post #304
ben_w wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many daily expenses, yes. Before I left the UK, IIRC there was some campaign about tampons. But "majority" just means half. Between "The standard rate of VAT is 20 per cent, with around half of household expenditure subject to this rate." - https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/... And Figure 10.2 on page 6 of https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05... I'd say it's very clos…

Tampons, toothpaste, soap. Yes it’s all crazy, but that’s maybe £5 a week in vat. Compare to £250 a week in rent and £100 a week in food and it’s peanuts.

Yes, but you're not contradicting anything here. £5/week in VAT is what I'd expect roughly bottom 5% by income to pay, because of limited disposable income.

If you eat in a restaurant, IIRC that's VAT-rated. A meal for two coming to £20? That's £3.33 of VAT you just paid. Poorest 5% can't afford to eat out basically at all, but it quickly adds up the moment you can start affording that.

Re: 2025 Letter

#310

Post by exceptione »

ineedaj0b wrote: post #180
siavosh wrote: post #76

I read the whole post. Really revealing - so much analysis but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration, and maybe how that might be an important dimension to reflect on. Its like using so many words to deeply analyze the speed differentials in a car race, but not looking up to see that all the drivers are racing towards a brick wall.

those articles were written a plenty about the Davos Elite - even precovid. It’s a tad lazy now. Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss. And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequa…

> wealth creation is not zero sum.

Entirely not the point. We know that monopolies and wealth _concentration_ reinforce each other, at the cost of wealth creation.

Every time a monopoly buys a company, a chance of competition gets eliminated. As monopolist have enough money to buy the government by regulatory capture or even state capture, competition cannot grow, stifling innovation and growth. Parasitism is the most apt way to understand, because the host will wither away from it.

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