Your annual reminder for the past ten years that "China is about to collapse any day now"
Closely followed by, “Trump is in trouble this time” articles that we’ve been getting for the last 6 years.
Per the article:
Now, these problems have been fairly obvious for at least a decade. Why are they only becoming acute now? Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.
This is a well known feature of all complex systems. How they change is "not at all, and then suddenly".
Yet people always insist they must change slowly and steadily.
I don’t understand this take. Comments like this suggest collapse happens overnight. Which means if china didn’t catastrophically collapse in the last 24 hours it means it isn’t happening at all or never.
The reality is collapse happens very slowly. There is no question that the health of the economy both in china and the rest of the world is steadily getting worse year by year.
Collapse isn’t going to happen. It’s already happening. It’s just a steady and slow march to the bottom.
Yeah, it's a believe it when you see it thing at this point. They might stagnate out economically or have internal supply issues, but there's a world of difference between that and actual regime instability.
Case in point: Zimbabwe is still run by largely the same group of guys that ordered the 100-trillion dollar bills made.
Yep you can definitely build lots of skyscrapers, then just demolish them without any financial repercussion.
"Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"
"Easy, just stop reporting it. If we don't know what it is then it's not a problem we have to deal with"
Brilliant
Works for America
We just change the calculation. If 25% are unemployed, what if we added a stipulation that they also received a survey from the last job they applied to on whether they were employable. See? We can drop unemployment by calling people unemployable and ignoring those that didn't apply for a job! Math!
Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"
If iirc, unemployed chinese youth below 30 yo, were considered " Students " now. Don't know if that's still used though.
Feels like I’ve been reading headlines like this for at least 3 years now. If it all finally comes crashing down, it’s gonna be a big one I guess.
That's because its GDP growth has been hit hard in that same time period. Lifting Covid restrictions didn't make it come back.
It may not crash, per se, but Japan went through an era of general malaise, and that might be what China gets.
I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.
My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.
Economics and politics are not spectacles shock-jocks and media can ride and clickbait you on. It's numbers moving very slowly in one direction or another. (I mean actual politics, where people do things, debate and make laws, not where people tweet things. Despite the spectacle around politics, how many people watch legislative proceedings?)
I lived in Hungary, and it was like that with the "healthcare is going to collapse" thing. There was a loud cry that it was going to happen, and the government was always saying it doesn't, as it's still working. But year after year it got worse.
Hospitals look more and more dilapidated. In more and more places you have to bring some supplies like iodine and toilet paper because hospitals are running out. Wait times went up slowly, urgent surgeries might be scheduled so far out that you'll die by the time you get care. Unless you know people, or your case is treated as an actual urgent case, then you get in the "red notebook" that officially does not exist, and you get care earlier. Hospital infections are killing thousands. My GP went from having to wait 30 mins, to having to wait hours, to having to schedule days in advance to not picking up the phone for weeks.
It's a slow boil, and even now, when you can hardly get care for a traffic accident, and most semi-respectable big companies offer private healthcare subscriptions as a benefit, and the government is telling people that they should budget some money away for medical expenses (tax you pay specifically for this is 11% of your income by the way), even now people are saying that "see? Healthcare didn't implode!". I guess the hospitals didn't burn down yet. I don't know what they expect to happen.
If it makes you feel better, that's about the tax than I pay in America for health insurance that I don't get. I still pay $500USD per month on top of the taxes for private insurance too.
Japan calls it the lost decade or something similar.
Economists have predicted 50 of the last 5 recessions.
But they missed the 6th
This and the better battery are always a headline away
Better batteries do happen. Every headline you've read is only a part of the solution. Battery research advances by trying ten things, but only one of them pans out.
Cure for male pattern baldness has joined the chat.
Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing.
But if we ever cracked it - everything, that is - conservatism would be the only correct system.
Small c, maybe. "Conservative" these day can actually mean "extremely reactionary".
Reactionary in the sense of maintaining the status quo, would actually be a good thing under those circumstances! Although I'm very much economically left-wing, I try to recognise that. Makes me understand why the rich skew conservative, because obviously to them everything is already good.
"Reactionary" specifically means trying to go back to a (often imagined) previous state.
reactionary <-> conservative <-> progressive
Okay, I'm used to people on here thinking it means "acting in reaction to something", e.g. bigotry.
Yeah, I kind of wish there was another word for the idea, because it's a bit confusing. I think originally it was "in reaction to progress".
Big and small c conservative is sometimes used to make the distinction in commentary, with big C being the reactionary stances that are common in right-wing parties that call themselves "Conservative", but I don't think everyone gets that either.
Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.
President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.
Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.
To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.
And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”
Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So basically they are saying China should become capitalist and it will fix their problems 🤣
Um, no, that's not at all what it's saying. It is saying China should ease off the cronie capitalism and try a little socialism for ordinary people.
When they suggest "freeing the market" they mean neoliberal capitalism. There aint a universe where opening markets means "more socialism".
Also crony capitalism isnt a thing, its just regular capitalism.
I'm actually going to go a step further and say regulated, non-crony capitalism would also be better than what they have. The party has no incentive to bring either in as they are the cronies, though.
Good.
"Yay, one billion people are gonna suffer!"
Fucking libs smh
?
So we should give Winnie hostage money then?
Oh nice, follow up with a racist remark, kkkeep up the good work 💀
Did OP edit their comment? Because calling Xi "Winnie" is not racist.
Your annual reminder for the past ten years that "China is about to collapse any day now"
Closely followed by, “Trump is in trouble this time” articles that we’ve been getting for the last 6 years.
Per the article:
This is a well known feature of all complex systems. How they change is "not at all, and then suddenly".
Yet people always insist they must change slowly and steadily.
I don’t understand this take. Comments like this suggest collapse happens overnight. Which means if china didn’t catastrophically collapse in the last 24 hours it means it isn’t happening at all or never.
The reality is collapse happens very slowly. There is no question that the health of the economy both in china and the rest of the world is steadily getting worse year by year.
Collapse isn’t going to happen. It’s already happening. It’s just a steady and slow march to the bottom.
Yeah, it's a believe it when you see it thing at this point. They might stagnate out economically or have internal supply issues, but there's a world of difference between that and actual regime instability.
Case in point: Zimbabwe is still run by largely the same group of guys that ordered the 100-trillion dollar bills made.
Yep you can definitely build lots of skyscrapers, then just demolish them without any financial repercussion.
"Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"
"Easy, just stop reporting it. If we don't know what it is then it's not a problem we have to deal with"
Brilliant
Works for America
We just change the calculation. If 25% are unemployed, what if we added a stipulation that they also received a survey from the last job they applied to on whether they were employable. See? We can drop unemployment by calling people unemployable and ignoring those that didn't apply for a job! Math!
If iirc, unemployed chinese youth below 30 yo, were considered " Students " now. Don't know if that's still used though.
Feels like I’ve been reading headlines like this for at least 3 years now. If it all finally comes crashing down, it’s gonna be a big one I guess.
That's because its GDP growth has been hit hard in that same time period. Lifting Covid restrictions didn't make it come back.
It may not crash, per se, but Japan went through an era of general malaise, and that might be what China gets.
I know the general gist of the situation. Low spending from domestic households, real estate bubble, excessive government influence on industry scaring investors, and so on.
My problem with it is that most headlines make it sound like it’s all gonna implode spectacularly tomorrow. The articles themselves usually paint a more reasonable picture of the situation, similar to your comment. But most people don’t read the article. They just see the headline over and over.
Economics and politics are not spectacles shock-jocks and media can ride and clickbait you on. It's numbers moving very slowly in one direction or another. (I mean actual politics, where people do things, debate and make laws, not where people tweet things. Despite the spectacle around politics, how many people watch legislative proceedings?)
I lived in Hungary, and it was like that with the "healthcare is going to collapse" thing. There was a loud cry that it was going to happen, and the government was always saying it doesn't, as it's still working. But year after year it got worse.
Hospitals look more and more dilapidated. In more and more places you have to bring some supplies like iodine and toilet paper because hospitals are running out. Wait times went up slowly, urgent surgeries might be scheduled so far out that you'll die by the time you get care. Unless you know people, or your case is treated as an actual urgent case, then you get in the "red notebook" that officially does not exist, and you get care earlier. Hospital infections are killing thousands. My GP went from having to wait 30 mins, to having to wait hours, to having to schedule days in advance to not picking up the phone for weeks.
It's a slow boil, and even now, when you can hardly get care for a traffic accident, and most semi-respectable big companies offer private healthcare subscriptions as a benefit, and the government is telling people that they should budget some money away for medical expenses (tax you pay specifically for this is 11% of your income by the way), even now people are saying that "see? Healthcare didn't implode!". I guess the hospitals didn't burn down yet. I don't know what they expect to happen.
If it makes you feel better, that's about the tax than I pay in America for health insurance that I don't get. I still pay $500USD per month on top of the taxes for private insurance too.
Japan calls it the lost decade or something similar.
Economists have predicted 50 of the last 5 recessions.
But they missed the 6th
This and the better battery are always a headline away
Better batteries do happen. Every headline you've read is only a part of the solution. Battery research advances by trying ten things, but only one of them pans out.
Cure for male pattern baldness has joined the chat.
Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing.
But if we ever cracked it - everything, that is - conservatism would be the only correct system.
Small c, maybe. "Conservative" these day can actually mean "extremely reactionary".
Reactionary in the sense of maintaining the status quo, would actually be a good thing under those circumstances! Although I'm very much economically left-wing, I try to recognise that. Makes me understand why the rich skew conservative, because obviously to them everything is already good.
"Reactionary" specifically means trying to go back to a (often imagined) previous state.
reactionary <-> conservative <-> progressive
Okay, I'm used to people on here thinking it means "acting in reaction to something", e.g. bigotry.
Yeah, I kind of wish there was another word for the idea, because it's a bit confusing. I think originally it was "in reaction to progress".
Big and small c conservative is sometimes used to make the distinction in commentary, with big C being the reactionary stances that are common in right-wing parties that call themselves "Conservative", but I don't think everyone gets that either.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.
President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.
Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.
To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.
And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”
Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?
The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So basically they are saying China should become capitalist and it will fix their problems 🤣
Um, no, that's not at all what it's saying. It is saying China should ease off the cronie capitalism and try a little socialism for ordinary people.
When they suggest "freeing the market" they mean neoliberal capitalism. There aint a universe where opening markets means "more socialism".
Also crony capitalism isnt a thing, its just regular capitalism.
I'm actually going to go a step further and say regulated, non-crony capitalism would also be better than what they have. The party has no incentive to bring either in as they are the cronies, though.
Good.
"Yay, one billion people are gonna suffer!"
Fucking libs smh
?
So we should give Winnie hostage money then?
Oh nice, follow up with a racist remark, kkkeep up the
goodwork 💀Did OP edit their comment? Because calling Xi "Winnie" is not racist.
Criticising the Dear Leader is racist, probably.