In the early 90s, maybe 91 or 92 I saw deliveries of coal by donkey cart in Kunming. They were heating the buildings with the coal, big blocks of it. A city of maybe 4 million. Everything 3 or 4 stories tall, bicycles, quiet streets. By 95 and 96 there were high rises going up everywhere in town, streets full of cars, no longer much able to ride a bike.
The waitress at the tourist cafe had an engineering degree, the two guys operating the photo copy store both had multiple engineering degrees. From key universities too, I'm not talking about just pieces of paper, very well educated highly intelligent young men and women. Key universities the credits are transferable anywhere worldwide.
I thought what is China doing with all of these engineers, their talents are wasted. I guess they went ahead and got jobs after all. By 01 the 12 hour bus ride to Dali often on dirt roads was now either a train ride or on a modern Boeing 737. The pace and rate of modernization is hard to convey.
In Taiwan an exec at Mitsubishi explained it like this. They can take an engineer, and if he has an aptitude for leadership or sales or whatever and might make a good executive, they send him to business school. The reverse is seldom possible, few business grads or in the case of the US few lawyers, can handle the grind necessary to take and pass difficult math, chemistry, metallurgy etc classes. Engineers can still write poetry in iambic pentameter, how many poets can understand discrete mathematics?
I think China will figure out how to loosen up on things like the suppression of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and they'll have a modern thriving country too.
Interesting insights based on personal experience. What they have going for them is authoritarian decision-making that avoids the "messiness" of popular debate. What they don't have is freedom of speech, religion, and political choice. I would certainly wish that they would become more "liberal" internally while abandoning their aggressive foreign policies, but I don't see much chance of it happening, and support U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military policies that deter their foreign aggression.
I find this commentary especially interesting because I had a career as a civil engineer, but also had a degree in economics and a personal interest in environmental protection. As such, I avoid over-generalizing about the desirability of more mega-projects in the U.S. such as mass transit systems.
A big advantage to life in the U.S. is the opportunity to own a single family home, which is not limited to "the rich" except in certain densely populated metropolitan areas. This relates to the widespread ownership of automobiles, supported by a network of highways and roads, and an abundance of airports, that enables much more freedom of travel than any rail system.
On the other hand, the fact that this system is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant land that is desirable for residential and recreational use creates the problem of sustainability, especially with a population that continues to increase due largely to immigration. My overall take is that the U.S. should be emulating countries like those in Scandinavia, which have achieved a high and sustainable quality of life with modest consumption of natural resources, rather than emulating China, with its authoritarian control over people living in crowded, often polluted conditions.
In everyday life there aren't many restrictions, corruption as in all of Asia is maybe the biggest pain. They do allow some religion, just not anti CCP, people can participate in politics within the CCP, there is even a democratic party within the party.
GDP growth and wages have averaged 10% per year, that's double in 7 years, and again in 7 more years, etc.
Obviously I like it better here, I do wish though that we were able to build stuff again. Our people are becoming more poor.
There are many measures of "standard of living" that include not only the "average" net national product per capita, and the "real" average per capita income (adjusted for inflation). All of these "average" indicators of economic well-being indicate a large and relatively consistent gain over the past decades. As provided by my CoPilot AI, for example (God bless it 😉) the average per capita real income in the U.S. increased from $16,000 per year in 1950 to $75,000 per year now. Although China has made remarkable economic gains, that is from an abysmally low starting point, and its average income per capita now is about $13,000. A lot more of that is in the form of public works like high speed intercity rail than in personal items such as houses and cars.
And then, there is the important issue of how this income or wealth is distributed. A common measure of that is called the "Gini coefficient." For the U.S. it has shown a modest increase in inequality over the decades, from about 37 in the early 1960s to about 42 recently. But that modest increase has not been sufficient to wipe out the gains in real income to lower income people -- especially after government income transfers are considered. The truth is that the poor in the U.S. are still gaining in real terms, even though by some measures (which most people fail to understand) the "super rich" are gaining faster.
That doesn't mean that more shouldn't be done to improve the income and wealth of "poor people" -- especially with the realization that many of them are poor because they are young and just starting to earn money. My main emphasis on that is in encouraging more appropriate education that develops practical skills -- not necessarily in "manufacturing" of physical products, but in operating and maintaining the public infrastructure and private belongings of Americans -- wherever it may have been manufactured.
We have streets full of the homeless, no statistic can hide that fact. Things have gotten much worse for many people. A great cell phone is a good thing, a roof over your head is also important. Wages at the largest employer in the US used to be around $50 in 24 dollars. Now our largest employer is Walmart and they start at $15. No vacation, no holiday, etc. Government transfers are only for people plugged into the welfare system. The 10% is doing very well, the 40% below them is doing ok but worried, and not wanting to slip down to the half of America that is actually poor.
Chinese people are mostly not wealthy, but they are doing many many times better than they were. We ship them raw materials and treasury bonds, they sell us manufactured goods. Common sense says it won't work out.
Just a comment on your gross over-generalization about the extent of "homelessness" in the U.S. -- implying that it makes life for the vast majority of people in the U.S. inferior to that of people in China.
Up front, I acknowledge that "homelessness" is a tragedy for the tiny fraction of Americans who are affected by it. Most of those affected on a long term basis are mentally ill, and would formerly have been involuntarily confined in state "mental institutions." Now, they are essentially "free" to move to mostly-urban locations throughout the U.S. where they "camp" -- mostly with others experiencing their circumstances that are tragic but probably less common than in the past. (Ever hear of "hoboes" and "drifters"?)
Unlike you, I approach problems like this by acknowledging the statistical evidence as to the advances in the overall standard of living that have been made in the U.S. by a COMBINATION of market based economic policies and government programs. I also recognize that the higher overall standard of living creates the potential to allocate more (though not unlimited) resources to mitigating the distress of "homeless" people.
To do that I think that we should apply these policies:
1. Adopt a "tough love" policy of prohibiting "camping" in public and private spaces, while providing alternate spaces that provide BASIC shelter and access to employment, with
2. Involuntary incarceration of illegal "campers" in facilities that provide humane medication and counselling.
3. Federal grants to states and localities to fund these programs.
Although I am very skeptical of the way that unethical "grantsmanship" distorts the cost-effectiveness of grant programs, the justification here for federal funding is that "homeless" people talk to one another and will migrate to those localities that provide the most "benefits" of all types. That creates a rational disincentive for any particular locality to spend is local funds to attract ever more "homeless" people.
So, that's my "take" on things as a true centrist who cares about the welfare of all people and appreciates not only the realities of "what is," but also the economic, social, political, and physical constraints on what "should be."
As to your complaints about the alleged "exploitation" of Walmart employees, for the benefit of the few open-minded people following this discussion, I offer this quote from you above:
"Wages at the largest employer in the US used to be around $50 in 24 dollars."
REALLY? The "largest employer" has been the federal government. But assuming that this was a "private" employer, who was it?
In any case, those unbelievably high wages would have been paid not mainly by the "plutocrats" running the company, but by the people consuming the products of the company in their roles as consumers and/or taxpayers.
For reasons too complicated to detail, I recognize their interdependence and try to explain it in posts like this for the sake of "showing the flag" for the few truly open-minded people (like Ruy Texeira) who may be following.
I would not waste too much time worrying about what China is doings China builds empty buildings, and has a huge problem producing sufficient numbers of jobs for its population.
As a former U.S. Army officer and political centrist, I regard this as gross over-simplification.
At the risk of over-simplifying myself on an extremely complex topic, what the U.S. needs to do is to reject the authoritarian "woke" policies of the Biden/Harris administration, while also rejecting the authoritarian "backlash" of the Trump administration.
American and the world need a credible centrist third party.
I am referring mostly to economic policy. We kept the Breton Woods Global Order going too long. We completely effed up in 2001 allowing communist China in the WTO.
I think worrying about Trump authoritarian response to the previous 4 years of Democrat authoritarian hell is like worrying about the allies going authoritarian on the Germans after WWII.
In the early 90s, maybe 91 or 92 I saw deliveries of coal by donkey cart in Kunming. They were heating the buildings with the coal, big blocks of it. A city of maybe 4 million. Everything 3 or 4 stories tall, bicycles, quiet streets. By 95 and 96 there were high rises going up everywhere in town, streets full of cars, no longer much able to ride a bike.
The waitress at the tourist cafe had an engineering degree, the two guys operating the photo copy store both had multiple engineering degrees. From key universities too, I'm not talking about just pieces of paper, very well educated highly intelligent young men and women. Key universities the credits are transferable anywhere worldwide.
I thought what is China doing with all of these engineers, their talents are wasted. I guess they went ahead and got jobs after all. By 01 the 12 hour bus ride to Dali often on dirt roads was now either a train ride or on a modern Boeing 737. The pace and rate of modernization is hard to convey.
In Taiwan an exec at Mitsubishi explained it like this. They can take an engineer, and if he has an aptitude for leadership or sales or whatever and might make a good executive, they send him to business school. The reverse is seldom possible, few business grads or in the case of the US few lawyers, can handle the grind necessary to take and pass difficult math, chemistry, metallurgy etc classes. Engineers can still write poetry in iambic pentameter, how many poets can understand discrete mathematics?
I think China will figure out how to loosen up on things like the suppression of minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, and they'll have a modern thriving country too.
Interesting insights based on personal experience. What they have going for them is authoritarian decision-making that avoids the "messiness" of popular debate. What they don't have is freedom of speech, religion, and political choice. I would certainly wish that they would become more "liberal" internally while abandoning their aggressive foreign policies, but I don't see much chance of it happening, and support U.S. economic, diplomatic, and military policies that deter their foreign aggression.
I find this commentary especially interesting because I had a career as a civil engineer, but also had a degree in economics and a personal interest in environmental protection. As such, I avoid over-generalizing about the desirability of more mega-projects in the U.S. such as mass transit systems.
A big advantage to life in the U.S. is the opportunity to own a single family home, which is not limited to "the rich" except in certain densely populated metropolitan areas. This relates to the widespread ownership of automobiles, supported by a network of highways and roads, and an abundance of airports, that enables much more freedom of travel than any rail system.
On the other hand, the fact that this system is highly dependent on cheap fossil fuels and abundant land that is desirable for residential and recreational use creates the problem of sustainability, especially with a population that continues to increase due largely to immigration. My overall take is that the U.S. should be emulating countries like those in Scandinavia, which have achieved a high and sustainable quality of life with modest consumption of natural resources, rather than emulating China, with its authoritarian control over people living in crowded, often polluted conditions.
In everyday life there aren't many restrictions, corruption as in all of Asia is maybe the biggest pain. They do allow some religion, just not anti CCP, people can participate in politics within the CCP, there is even a democratic party within the party.
GDP growth and wages have averaged 10% per year, that's double in 7 years, and again in 7 more years, etc.
Obviously I like it better here, I do wish though that we were able to build stuff again. Our people are becoming more poor.
There are many measures of "standard of living" that include not only the "average" net national product per capita, and the "real" average per capita income (adjusted for inflation). All of these "average" indicators of economic well-being indicate a large and relatively consistent gain over the past decades. As provided by my CoPilot AI, for example (God bless it 😉) the average per capita real income in the U.S. increased from $16,000 per year in 1950 to $75,000 per year now. Although China has made remarkable economic gains, that is from an abysmally low starting point, and its average income per capita now is about $13,000. A lot more of that is in the form of public works like high speed intercity rail than in personal items such as houses and cars.
And then, there is the important issue of how this income or wealth is distributed. A common measure of that is called the "Gini coefficient." For the U.S. it has shown a modest increase in inequality over the decades, from about 37 in the early 1960s to about 42 recently. But that modest increase has not been sufficient to wipe out the gains in real income to lower income people -- especially after government income transfers are considered. The truth is that the poor in the U.S. are still gaining in real terms, even though by some measures (which most people fail to understand) the "super rich" are gaining faster.
That doesn't mean that more shouldn't be done to improve the income and wealth of "poor people" -- especially with the realization that many of them are poor because they are young and just starting to earn money. My main emphasis on that is in encouraging more appropriate education that develops practical skills -- not necessarily in "manufacturing" of physical products, but in operating and maintaining the public infrastructure and private belongings of Americans -- wherever it may have been manufactured.
We have streets full of the homeless, no statistic can hide that fact. Things have gotten much worse for many people. A great cell phone is a good thing, a roof over your head is also important. Wages at the largest employer in the US used to be around $50 in 24 dollars. Now our largest employer is Walmart and they start at $15. No vacation, no holiday, etc. Government transfers are only for people plugged into the welfare system. The 10% is doing very well, the 40% below them is doing ok but worried, and not wanting to slip down to the half of America that is actually poor.
Chinese people are mostly not wealthy, but they are doing many many times better than they were. We ship them raw materials and treasury bonds, they sell us manufactured goods. Common sense says it won't work out.
Freebee https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/business/china-electric-grid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sk8.Hi3q.UGUD8CKeuFaA&smid=url-share
Just a comment on your gross over-generalization about the extent of "homelessness" in the U.S. -- implying that it makes life for the vast majority of people in the U.S. inferior to that of people in China.
Up front, I acknowledge that "homelessness" is a tragedy for the tiny fraction of Americans who are affected by it. Most of those affected on a long term basis are mentally ill, and would formerly have been involuntarily confined in state "mental institutions." Now, they are essentially "free" to move to mostly-urban locations throughout the U.S. where they "camp" -- mostly with others experiencing their circumstances that are tragic but probably less common than in the past. (Ever hear of "hoboes" and "drifters"?)
Unlike you, I approach problems like this by acknowledging the statistical evidence as to the advances in the overall standard of living that have been made in the U.S. by a COMBINATION of market based economic policies and government programs. I also recognize that the higher overall standard of living creates the potential to allocate more (though not unlimited) resources to mitigating the distress of "homeless" people.
To do that I think that we should apply these policies:
1. Adopt a "tough love" policy of prohibiting "camping" in public and private spaces, while providing alternate spaces that provide BASIC shelter and access to employment, with
2. Involuntary incarceration of illegal "campers" in facilities that provide humane medication and counselling.
3. Federal grants to states and localities to fund these programs.
Although I am very skeptical of the way that unethical "grantsmanship" distorts the cost-effectiveness of grant programs, the justification here for federal funding is that "homeless" people talk to one another and will migrate to those localities that provide the most "benefits" of all types. That creates a rational disincentive for any particular locality to spend is local funds to attract ever more "homeless" people.
So, that's my "take" on things as a true centrist who cares about the welfare of all people and appreciates not only the realities of "what is," but also the economic, social, political, and physical constraints on what "should be."
As to your complaints about the alleged "exploitation" of Walmart employees, for the benefit of the few open-minded people following this discussion, I offer this quote from you above:
"Wages at the largest employer in the US used to be around $50 in 24 dollars."
REALLY? The "largest employer" has been the federal government. But assuming that this was a "private" employer, who was it?
In any case, those unbelievably high wages would have been paid not mainly by the "plutocrats" running the company, but by the people consuming the products of the company in their roles as consumers and/or taxpayers.
For reasons too complicated to detail, I recognize their interdependence and try to explain it in posts like this for the sake of "showing the flag" for the few truly open-minded people (like Ruy Texeira) who may be following.
I would not waste too much time worrying about what China is doings China builds empty buildings, and has a huge problem producing sufficient numbers of jobs for its population.
China would still be 3rd world without the US. The US will be 3rd world because of China.
As a former U.S. Army officer and political centrist, I regard this as gross over-simplification.
At the risk of over-simplifying myself on an extremely complex topic, what the U.S. needs to do is to reject the authoritarian "woke" policies of the Biden/Harris administration, while also rejecting the authoritarian "backlash" of the Trump administration.
American and the world need a credible centrist third party.
I am referring mostly to economic policy. We kept the Breton Woods Global Order going too long. We completely effed up in 2001 allowing communist China in the WTO.
I think worrying about Trump authoritarian response to the previous 4 years of Democrat authoritarian hell is like worrying about the allies going authoritarian on the Germans after WWII.