https://x.com/arctot
China has 55% of the world's high-IQ working-age people
anon_wini said in #4573 7d ago:
The good news is that IQ alone is not everything. The bad news is--they increasingly have the rest. I see a lot of rank cope about China.
"Oh they have a real estate bubble." They built massive amounts of fairly high quality modern urban capacity--housing, transport, industrial, you name it. Sure there was some overbuilding, some corruption, some investors who got smoked, but overall theirs is a vastly better problem to have than ours where we build nothing at all.
"Oh they are just churning out fake PhDs." This, too, is half true. There is indeed a vast amount of uninteresting larp-academic work coming out of China, which has a billion gaokao-maxxing college-oriented tiger parents. But guess what, we have a vast amount of uninteresting larp-academic output as well. And if you look where it really matters, on AI, on advanced manufacturing, on materials science, on aerospace, the top tier of Chinese research output is absolutely competitive with ours.
"Oh they are going to have demographic collapse." Yeah their birthrates are even worse than ours. But as the chart shows, they have a deep bench of capable people and will for the forseeable future. And unlike our societies where our retirees can commandeer the political system and vote themselves infinite gibs, China does not operate that way.
We should take them seriously. There is no deus ex machina China collapse coming to save us. Their vision of the world involves vastly less freedom than ours. Right now we are losing because we are an incoherent society that lacks the courage of our convictions--we say freedom but we smother it where it matters most, freedom to build. We have relegated high energy high variance 0-to-1 projects almost entirely to the virtual realm, ceding physical progress to our rivals.
We can win the cold war against the Chinese. But the only way is to first win the spiritual and cultural war against our own decels, our NIMBYs, our boomers, our nativists that oppose merit immigration, our degrowthers by any other name.
"Oh they have a real estate bubble." They built massive amounts of fairly high quality modern urban capacity--housing, transport, industrial, you name it. Sure there was some overbuilding, some corruption, some investors who got smoked, but overall theirs is a vastly better problem to have than ours where we build nothing at all.
"Oh they are just churning out fake PhDs." This, too, is half true. There is indeed a vast amount of uninteresting larp-academic work coming out of China, which has a billion gaokao-maxxing college-oriented tiger parents. But guess what, we have a vast amount of uninteresting larp-academic output as well. And if you look where it really matters, on AI, on advanced manufacturing, on materials science, on aerospace, the top tier of Chinese research output is absolutely competitive with ours.
"Oh they are going to have demographic collapse." Yeah their birthrates are even worse than ours. But as the chart shows, they have a deep bench of capable people and will for the forseeable future. And unlike our societies where our retirees can commandeer the political system and vote themselves infinite gibs, China does not operate that way.
We should take them seriously. There is no deus ex machina China collapse coming to save us. Their vision of the world involves vastly less freedom than ours. Right now we are losing because we are an incoherent society that lacks the courage of our convictions--we say freedom but we smother it where it matters most, freedom to build. We have relegated high energy high variance 0-to-1 projects almost entirely to the virtual realm, ceding physical progress to our rivals.
We can win the cold war against the Chinese. But the only way is to first win the spiritual and cultural war against our own decels, our NIMBYs, our boomers, our nativists that oppose merit immigration, our degrowthers by any other name.
The good news is tha
anon_goru said in #4577 7d ago:
Western policy evidence/epistemology died by journo. China builds 100 million homes, a western journo finds a few developers doing shady things. This grows popular as a way to claim China is a paper-tiger because that narrative serves pre-existing fights within the US about who gets to be influential about myopic USA gibs. This is what Rome looked a lot like. *major econ issue* 'how does this help or hurt our guy from getting elected pontiff?'
Western policy evide