Great essay. The Chinese have been talking about Thucydides for quite some time. Trump renews the question. The problem is that the Chinese are actually quite bleak about their own prospects. At first they were eager for an economic ascension to Thucydides. However, America has a structural advantage. They can continue to replace labour shortfalls, particularly at the top of the talent pyramid, from international sources. The second Thucydides was technological. Unfortunately, Americas advantage in energy gives it a natural advantage in the AI race- an advantage which can only be thrown away through political mismanagement and unwarranted climate catastrophism.
I was watching Doomberg interviewed by Peter Boghossian this morning. Smart questions. Even smarter answers. I'm definitely going to have to read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.
Of course, a lot of this is conditional. China may find a way out of the middle income per capita zone and the 421 problem. They're actually really strong on innovation, although probably lag a bit behind on efficient capitalisation to monetise. The 421 problem is the big problem. It's a problem shared by much of the developed world. Robots will probably ease the problem. A key metric people should be paying far more attention to is robots per 10,000 workers.
Thank you. I'm certainly no expert on China's domestic prospects, but as an American realist, I see China as a civilization-state that knows itself and its unique flavor of destined statecraft. The West is scrambling to remember itself in this way after three decades of globalist misadventure. This delay matters and gives China an advantage that the US doesn't quite have at this time. US is recalibrating in a fundamental way whereas China has all that behind them and have been aligned with their long -game strategy for decades. The US / West is reinventing itself or rather remembering itself whereas China never forgot. I remember when Kurzweil's views were considered "out there" and nowadays not so much. I'll have to check out that interview, sounds interesting.
I had a Chinese student stay with us one Christmas. My brother was studying actuarial science and he was on the same course- interestingly there were only 3 British people in a class of 30, with most of the rest from higher performing Asian economies. He was lovely. Incredibly gracious and polite. I also spent three weeks in Hong Kong visiting family just prior to the handover in the 90s. Incredibly dynamic place, with buildings appearing from nowhere in the space of a single month.
One of the ways in which neoliberalism got it wrong was in imagining that anyone could be educated to do anything, the tabula rasa fantasy. In addition, there was a generalised belief amongst the economic class that although Chinese people could be high performing and were incredibly good in the technical educational sense, unless they were raised in the Western environment they weren't good at creative work. I remember a Hong Kong philosophy professor explaining that if you wanted an essay on Kant or Hume, then their answers would be better than Western students, but if you asked them to write an essay discussing the ethics of tipping they would be flummoxed.
Of course, this ignores the fact that cultural idioms are specific. What works in Europe or America, wouldn't work in China in terms of brand advertising. We witnessed this many years later, when the children of Chinese billionaires wanted a second Downtown Abbey wedding experience. They wanted everything picturebook. The only thing they rejected about the British culture was the wedding photography. British Chinese or Expat Chinese usually filled the role.
Anyway, back to neoliberalism. What the West failed to recognise was labour inelasticity. During the Learn to Code era, trying to retrain C2 coal workers had a close to zero success rate. Universities can train around 10% of Western populations to perform highly cognitive roles to varying degrees. They can identify a further 10% for high value add. Beyond that, the rest is credentialism. For the most part these are future workers who probably would have been meritocratic shop floor promotions in other circumstances.
The flaw in neoliberalism was in failing to recognise labour inelasticity. A fixed 20% percent of the population are Ds with some upward potential to C2s. A further 20% are D2s who have the potential to become high proles- plumbers, entrepreneurs and salesmen. The service sector is brutal in this respect. As credentialization increased sales jobs and access to finance for start-ups became increasingly limited to the blue collar class and the high proles in particular- unless of course you happen to be a trade professional with a marketable skill that bank managers can gawk at.
We should be kept more of our high and medium value manufacturing. The Chinese side of the equation was perfectly calibrated to help their own people. The question is why wasn't ours? Cheaper goods at the expense of labour long-term employment was a thoroughly Faustian bargain. I am not claiming there wasn't a need for offshoring, because there was. But the West should have been far more discerning in the family silver with which it was willing to part. I blame the Western propensity for faddism.
I should also add that the Western educational system isn't pedagogically optimised. Cognitive Load Theory should be central to every lesson plan and curricula. With this in place, there is genuine potential for uplift. It would, of course, require an unprecedented degree of socially conditioned change in smartphone usage. It's unfair to blame parents. Instead, we need to look at the social incentives at a group level and mitigate the fear of missing out.
Great essay. The Chinese have been talking about Thucydides for quite some time. Trump renews the question. The problem is that the Chinese are actually quite bleak about their own prospects. At first they were eager for an economic ascension to Thucydides. However, America has a structural advantage. They can continue to replace labour shortfalls, particularly at the top of the talent pyramid, from international sources. The second Thucydides was technological. Unfortunately, Americas advantage in energy gives it a natural advantage in the AI race- an advantage which can only be thrown away through political mismanagement and unwarranted climate catastrophism.
I was watching Doomberg interviewed by Peter Boghossian this morning. Smart questions. Even smarter answers. I'm definitely going to have to read Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.
Of course, a lot of this is conditional. China may find a way out of the middle income per capita zone and the 421 problem. They're actually really strong on innovation, although probably lag a bit behind on efficient capitalisation to monetise. The 421 problem is the big problem. It's a problem shared by much of the developed world. Robots will probably ease the problem. A key metric people should be paying far more attention to is robots per 10,000 workers.
Thank you. I'm certainly no expert on China's domestic prospects, but as an American realist, I see China as a civilization-state that knows itself and its unique flavor of destined statecraft. The West is scrambling to remember itself in this way after three decades of globalist misadventure. This delay matters and gives China an advantage that the US doesn't quite have at this time. US is recalibrating in a fundamental way whereas China has all that behind them and have been aligned with their long -game strategy for decades. The US / West is reinventing itself or rather remembering itself whereas China never forgot. I remember when Kurzweil's views were considered "out there" and nowadays not so much. I'll have to check out that interview, sounds interesting.
I had a Chinese student stay with us one Christmas. My brother was studying actuarial science and he was on the same course- interestingly there were only 3 British people in a class of 30, with most of the rest from higher performing Asian economies. He was lovely. Incredibly gracious and polite. I also spent three weeks in Hong Kong visiting family just prior to the handover in the 90s. Incredibly dynamic place, with buildings appearing from nowhere in the space of a single month.
One of the ways in which neoliberalism got it wrong was in imagining that anyone could be educated to do anything, the tabula rasa fantasy. In addition, there was a generalised belief amongst the economic class that although Chinese people could be high performing and were incredibly good in the technical educational sense, unless they were raised in the Western environment they weren't good at creative work. I remember a Hong Kong philosophy professor explaining that if you wanted an essay on Kant or Hume, then their answers would be better than Western students, but if you asked them to write an essay discussing the ethics of tipping they would be flummoxed.
Of course, this ignores the fact that cultural idioms are specific. What works in Europe or America, wouldn't work in China in terms of brand advertising. We witnessed this many years later, when the children of Chinese billionaires wanted a second Downtown Abbey wedding experience. They wanted everything picturebook. The only thing they rejected about the British culture was the wedding photography. British Chinese or Expat Chinese usually filled the role.
Anyway, back to neoliberalism. What the West failed to recognise was labour inelasticity. During the Learn to Code era, trying to retrain C2 coal workers had a close to zero success rate. Universities can train around 10% of Western populations to perform highly cognitive roles to varying degrees. They can identify a further 10% for high value add. Beyond that, the rest is credentialism. For the most part these are future workers who probably would have been meritocratic shop floor promotions in other circumstances.
The flaw in neoliberalism was in failing to recognise labour inelasticity. A fixed 20% percent of the population are Ds with some upward potential to C2s. A further 20% are D2s who have the potential to become high proles- plumbers, entrepreneurs and salesmen. The service sector is brutal in this respect. As credentialization increased sales jobs and access to finance for start-ups became increasingly limited to the blue collar class and the high proles in particular- unless of course you happen to be a trade professional with a marketable skill that bank managers can gawk at.
We should be kept more of our high and medium value manufacturing. The Chinese side of the equation was perfectly calibrated to help their own people. The question is why wasn't ours? Cheaper goods at the expense of labour long-term employment was a thoroughly Faustian bargain. I am not claiming there wasn't a need for offshoring, because there was. But the West should have been far more discerning in the family silver with which it was willing to part. I blame the Western propensity for faddism.
I should also add that the Western educational system isn't pedagogically optimised. Cognitive Load Theory should be central to every lesson plan and curricula. With this in place, there is genuine potential for uplift. It would, of course, require an unprecedented degree of socially conditioned change in smartphone usage. It's unfair to blame parents. Instead, we need to look at the social incentives at a group level and mitigate the fear of missing out.