pull down to refresh
24 sats \ 11 replies \ @SimpleStacker 10 Mar \ on: Parent’s Corner: my son, the trilingual preschooler alter_native
China is gonna eat Americas lunch.
@Coinsreporter will disagree. India has youth on its side
reply
Not unless they get some better institutions. Outcomes follow incentives, after all.
reply
True, but they've been pretty well incentivized to become educated and productive (in some ways financed by American money printing), while Americans have been incentivized to become lazy consumers looking for government handouts.
reply
I'm not sure they are incentivized to be productive. They're incentivized to be hard-working, but bad incentives misalign effort and productivity.
reply
Yeah, guess we'll see. It's hard to get a good read of what's going on in China, since everyone only sees a small slice of it. My interactions with Chinese, for example, are mainly from academia but that's obviously a highly selected group of people.
reply
My experience in China is very limited, but it did support the general idea that Chinese people are very entrepreneurial and generally disregard official rules. That's super bullish, but it mostly exists on a fairly low, sole proprietor level. They need more freedom and property rights protections in order to make big transformational productive changes.
reply
My main worry about China as an adversary is that they know how to build things and they know how to do it well. THis is human capital that we've forgotten. Maybe their society is organized in a way that can't flourish in the long run, but in a war that productive capacity and human capital is very dangerous.