News

Excuse me, have you heard of the K shaped economy? It’s the everyday hellscape we now live in, where the rich can’t buy enough, and the poor can’t buy anything. Plane ticket sales down, first & business class have no inventory. Less people than ever can afford a house, and mega mansion sales are booming. We can’t afford groceries, but 5* restaurants have no reservations.

At some point, this shit comes to ahead. My pessimism suggests the rich want to figure out AI / robot security, so they can stop relying on any people at all.

Oh yeah, add in some sycophantic computers telling everyone they are perfect and every solution we have is paradigm breaking or revolutionary. Nothing will go wrong at all.

But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.

My favorite idea is that the Mainland regime -- then under Deng -- took their economic development ideas and business customs from Japan -- including industrial espionage -- and basically modified those for Chinese needs while addressing the problems which led to Japan's later bubble burst by the late 80s. That local corporations were given first priority, with a lot of incentives, tax breaks, programs to increase productivity and cut away inhibitions, hire young people from the far provinces who are willing to work for less, anything to have the world buy cheap from China. So they treated business like warfare, as essential for national survival and prestige where by 2049 the world must look up to Mainland China, never to be humiliated again.

However, China in its current state has its younger generations in urban areas having to deal with overwork burnout (996工作制 or 996 working hour system for example) and so creating basically its own anti-work culture. That there are godawful displays of wealth by tuhao almost everyday, while most others complain how it's so expensive to live in, say, Shanghai. I could try to go on, but I put it that it's still not a happy place as long as there is class conflict.

Over 90% of Chinese households would be below the US poverty line. Their GDP per capita is only $13k.

Sure, American productivity has zoomed ahead of that of its European peers. Only a handful of countries manage to produce more stuff per hour of work

Is that true? Productivity is usually measured in "value" created per hour worked, not in things that were produced. So if the US produces loads of overvalued crap, it will appear more productive, but isn't.