Fertility crisis is not that mysterious. Everywhere in the world young adults are uncertain they can maintain a job and decent lifestyles long term as they’re constantly reminded their livelihood is provisional to the market and finance, and you expect them to think about kids? Young adults today live much better lives than farmers but farmers had much more certainty about what they could support in their future than young adults today. Kids are a 20 year investment. Do you expect people to make 20 year investments when they live unsure of the next 3-5?

At a cafe in Silicon Valley listening to two seemingly very well connected technologists (one might be VC) doing big name drops of people and orgs they’re connected to while talking “Omniuse technologies”, “Species ending event”, and “Building the future of western civilization”. More snippets if people want to get a sense for the flow of this conversation:

“Meeting the pope next week as part of a group to advise on AI…we need guardrails”

“Europe is dead man walking”

“Western civilization vs authoritarianism”

“China is in the process of collapsing”

The main difference between American and Chinese society today is less that one has more dumb people and one has more smart people and more that within public life being stupid is relentlessly shamed as stupid in one and being smart is relentlessly shamed as stupid in the other. These days American society assigns intelligence credentials based not on who can demonstrate a meticulous well developed understanding of how anything works but who can give the most smart sounding post hoc rationalization for half baked ideas people desperately want to be true.

A lot of people don’t realize the only reason they think debt puts hard limit on growth is because they’ve habituated belief that repaying bankers must be privileged ahead of any all interest of public social good. They don’t register what it means for banks to be state owned.

https://twitter.com/kyletrainemoji/status/1918409064020943118

Financial crises don’t cause permanent damage or impose growth restrictions once we recognize money is not a scarce limited factor but a fictional quantity we can make out of thin air as needed. But normalizing this view would drastically impair the power of financial elites.

Going to rip off some bandaids here but Pettis’ main audience are people who feel deeply insecure about the US’s position in competition with China but prefer to answer anxieties by doubling down on self soothing delusions that China must be doing something wrong and *wrongful*… Which means they must change to conform to US desires or see blowback because some kind of divine natural law of economics, rather than realize maybe those insecurities are telling them China has been doing something right and the US is the one that’s been doing something wrong.

What if China isn’t overinvesting. What if China’s high savings rate is from Chinese households preferring property over other goods, and savings over debt.

Tbh a few years back I tried to write longer more considerate thoughts about how Tiananmen remembrance isn’t really relevant to China’s current context anymore, but never quite figured out how to say what I wanted to say. Then yesterday night as I was walking back to my hotel…

https://twitter.com/gonglei89/status/1797699955450351846

I saw a bunch of college aged kids goofing around on their bikes having the time of their lives. Then I got back to my room, showered, opened Twitter, and saw that the annual wave of Tiananmen remembrance posts had already started, and was suddenly struck by the absurdity…

Another way to put it is China investing in their own production at China size and scale destroys profit opportunity for western businesses. They want China to switch to a consumer economy because then it’s the govt financing buyers rather than financing upstart competition.

https://twitter.com/gonglei89/status/1765199789506113930

This isn’t as much about what’s good for China’s own growth and welfare as fear of what a China that can produce at scale sufficient for itself does to western global profits. If everything was made in China but owned by America they wouldn’t complain about investment glut.

To demonstrate just how much urbanization China still needs and how deceptive national level urbanization % can be I decided to pick out some cities most people haven’t heard of with ~5-10 million people and highlight their “metro” population numbers. Might interest you @GlennLuk


Some more here. Note that some of these are not from poor provinces. On one hand this spells out just how much further China needs to go but on the other it shows that there’s still a lot of low hanging fruit in China’s development trajectory.

Only “partly” true. Demand for real estate as housing *is* driving construction. It gets crowded out some when speculation drives up prices forcing those who want new houses for living to save even more just to keep up with price inflation. Meanwhile those buying multiple houses

https://twitter.com/jakecahan/status/1669011623275536386

Are indeed buying partly to acquire investment assets, but that doesn’t mean they keep houses empty. They are also buying for their kids, their parents, or other family members, especially if one member in a family has favorable hukou as starting point to pull other families in.

The semantic definition of totalitarian is usually that all/most people are experiencing this kind of repression and not just some. Otherwise we’d consistently be saying America is/was a totalitarian state because of how it actively repressed black people and socialists.

https://twitter.com/timeswang/status/1668237155616043009

Some people are going to parachute in and say that America is in fact a totalitarian state. I don’t agree with this claim but I think at the very least people should be consistent about how they apply concepts. If America is totalitarian then so is China. I think neither are.

Lord help this person. Who could have foreseen where this conversation would end up when it starts like this 😒

The reason pieces like this never age well is because they do supplier analysis based on current level of foreign adoption, don’t bother to observe state of available domestic substitutes beyond marketshare.

Also, German and US suppliers themselves often have Chinese suppliers.

https://twitter.com/ChinaEDGEnews/status/1653070462111342592

One reason trying to hit the whole supply stack down to the last screw doesn’t yield meaningful effect is that at some point you’re chasing down simpler and simpler subassemblies that are easy to reproduce, and it turns out China already supplies most of those to Western firms.

Okay. This is the part of the narrative that is completely incoherent to me. Throughout 2022 critics were fervent about scrapping 0 Covid. Not “gradually”. Just let it happen logic. But when govt does what critics recommend suddenly everyone complains about being not prepared?

https://twitter.com/dakekang/status/1638121077933998080

The “Omicron is unstoppable we should just let it happen” argument is completely at odds with the “we should have opened slower” argument. Literally the reason people cited for “we should just let it happen” was “you can’t slow omicron”. You can’t have it both ways.

Earlier I said this management model sounds a lot like how the Chinese political system works. But I think the far more profound takeaway is that this model is what it looks like when platform aggregation theory gets applied to internal organizations. hbr.org/2023/03/how-ch… Network effect aggregated digital platforms allow for a new form of centralization completely different from common conception. Instead of a one directional centralization in the structure of a pyramid they allow multiple node hub and spoke structures, a circular centralization.

Issue here ultimately is whether people want to risk a footing to war for the sake of driving further confrontation. If you don’t want the possibility of war you should listen to canaries. If you don’t care and welcome war as possibility you should stop dancing around admission.

https://twitter.com/dericsayers/status/1633804317139279872

But what doesn’t suffice is to pretend endless confrontation ratchet won’t lead to greater odds of war, or that you can intimidate and threaten away challenges China poses to US interests, or that endless ratchet is the only option to deal with those challenges,

Answer here is Japan didn’t fail on the technical side. They couldn’t secure a market shrinking from cost challenges because they had a less appealing service model so they cut tail rather than support an extremely expensive technology that would have trouble securing customers.

https://twitter.com/francoisouell15/status/1632189849003491331

This is one of the biggest errors that most people make when trying to gauge progress and position in technology contests. It’s often not the technical challenges that decide whether some country or another has a tech lead in a market, but the business dynamics.

The crux of the issue I have with standard mainstream macro views of development is that it think the deficits of poor regions are institutional as the first order issue when they’re actually second order. The first order deficit is actually technological and and human capital.

https://twitter.com/michaelxpettis/status/1630804506563985409

Cultivate human and tech capital, give it time and room to incubate, and institutional factors that stabilize and sustain development naturally emerge. Trying to “fix” institutional factors first is scooping water out of sinking boat. Order is hard under material deprivation.

Agreed. This is a wholly new set of structures in the Chinese political and governance system, one of the most consequential since reform and opening potentially. But also think it’s worth noting that current state of this change is probably not a fixed or equilibrium condition.

https://twitter.com/zhangtaisu/status/1624956797248307200

Increased power of local committees coupled tightly with coordination from central govt was hinted as a reform item from a few years back, but as seen during Covid performance and practice varies widely even within municipal jurisdictions. Local relational terms are fluid,

My criticism with this piece is it partially misattributes who is saving to buy property as well as partially misplaces some causes behind high vacancy. It’s true a big source of the market’s problem is wealthier savers are buying multiple properties to hold as financial assets,

https://twitter.com/jerometenk/status/1624406815403347968

*But* that doesn’t mean those are the only people saving to buy property. A very large share of potential buyers market are lower income people saving at even higher rates to try to upgrade their housing, but aren’t accumulating income fast enough to keep up with price inflation,

Both bulls and bears are out in the woods on this. Having an ideology is not inimical to being practical. One is about where you orient goals and the other is how you get there. This is not a hard point to understand if “ideology” isn’t treated as some kind of maniacal boogeyman.

https://twitter.com/dtiffroberts/status/1618040313381277696

Directly casting possession of a particular ideology in diametric opposition to practicality is itself a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. All people have implicit ideological beliefs motivating their POV. The charge implies one POV has default claim to being more “practical”.