Who’s trusted more, the US or China?

Edelman reports the US is trusted more globally than China, but not by much: 40% to 30%.

Internally, the Chinese report much higher levels of trust in their own government than Americans — but may not have a choice (some questions censored!)
This follows up an earlier tweet. I dug into the (surprising) study after comments from @Noahpinion @Molson_Hart @sprague.

I’d thought China might be more popular among poor countries, and that was shifting the result, but it looks like the figure was just labeled oddly.
Right before the pandemic, Pew reported that poorer countries tended to tilt in the direction of China and wealthier countries in the direction of the US. pewresearch.org/global/2019/12…
The Oct20 Pew study found that US allies tend to trust US more & China less…but not *that* much more, except for RoK & Japan, who need the US military.

Even allies said China was the leading economic power & the US didn’t handle COVID well (pre-vaccine!) pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020…
My general mental model is:

- Americans may think the US is more trusted globally than it is
- China is less popular in wealthier countries, more popular in poorer ones
- The EU won’t reflexively side with the US vs China
- Attempted US sanctions on Germany and India don’t help

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More from @balajis

31 May
What we need: a censorship-resistant inflation feed.

The on-chain, crypto oracle version of MIT's Billion Prices Project. No editorialization, just an undeletable history of prices.

Build it pseudonymously. Build it with an eye to a ban. Build it now so it's ready then.
All you need to look at is recent history in other countries, or the CDC on masks, or the censorship of the lab leak theory, to know that the centralized state isn't going to provide reliable inflation stats.

So, the decentralized network will have to do so.
If inflation censorship occurs the on-chain inflation feed would be the crypto flippening in several respects.

1) decentralized cryptographic truth would be more trusted than centralized emanations of press & state
2) an on-chain app would be one of the world's most popular apps
Read 9 tweets
31 May
It is also a technical innovation, just not on the dimension people think.

Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases. They support fewer transactions-per-second than a traditional database, in return for millions of simultaneous root users.
Public blockchains are massively multiclient databases, where every user is a root user. They're useful for storing shared state between users, particularly when that shared state represents valuable data that users want to export without fail, like money. balajis.com/yes-you-may-ne…
Agree with thrust of @RyanWatkins_' comment.

But I also think this a key point to articulate: rather than a few people with root access to PayPal's centralized database, anyone with the right public/private key pair can move funds on a public blockchain.
Read 5 tweets
29 May
This piece makes many good points. The US is in decline, people are in denial, and China is ascending economically.

But China doesn’t represent universal values. That’s why Crypto Capital may ultimately outcompete both Woke Capital & Communist Capital.
richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-most-chi…
No country is a monolith. Just like there are Woke Americans and Crypto Americans, there are Crypto Chinese and Communist Chinese.

In every country, there will be a tension between nationalists/socialists and internationalists/capitalists. The latter will go crypto.
America long portrayed itself as the neutral champion of a rules-based order, but after years of bailouts, invasions, sanctions, deplatforming it’s not trusted.

Edelman says even after COVID, the US is 24 points less trusted than China worldwide (!) edelman.com/sites/g/files/…
Read 5 tweets
29 May
I have no opinion on short-term price.

But this article is notable for another reason: one of the most important trends of the last year is the routine use of on-chain data as decentralized truth.
Hard news is now on-chain.

It’s machine-readable, globally available, cryptographically verifiable, financially valuable.

As the cryptoeconomy grows, on-chain data & crypto oracles first disrupt Reuters, CNBC, Bloomberg as sources of financial information. Then all information.
Inflation stats may be the on-chain flippening for financial news.

Historically, countries like Argentina engaged in censorship to try to hide the true inflation numbers.

The data for your Bloomberg Terminal may be similarly debauched.

But on-chain data won’t be.
Read 6 tweets
28 May
The propaganda is transparent.
It's true that US corporations advocate for censorship at home and a free hand abroad. They have no moral authority.

But the solution isn't to give up on either sovereignty or free speech. It's to embrace both national stacks and neutral protocols.
balajis.com/add-crypto-to-…
NATIONAL STACKS

What’s a national stack? It’s a suite of services, either government or private or both, that make a country digitally independent of American or Chinese companies like Facebook or WeChat. balajis.com/add-crypto-to-…
Read 7 tweets
27 May
Crypto people who need a steady salary might actually consider joining Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon.

Why?

Big tech only went south recently. A few principled voices internally can still shift the conversation. And you might get cancelled, but there’s a job on the outside.
All of these companies are going to need tons of crypto talent as the cryptoeconomy becomes the main event of the 2020s.

Crypto stands against censorship and surveillance, and for privacy, pseudonymity, transparency, open source.

Help them make money while becoming more fair.
Short of the return of Larry Page, I don’t think it’s doable to bring (say) Google back to what it was before 2013.

But these institutions aren’t as far gone as the state. And an infusion of principled crypto people may blunt the worst-case scenarios for abuse of surveillance.
Read 5 tweets

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