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The reason Chinese workers retire in their mid-50s is a result of a deliberate policy. Grandparents are expected to leave the workforce to be the primary adults raising their grandkids. Their adult children -- ostensibly in their working prime -- are thus freed up to work harder and longer, secure in the knowledge that Grandma and Grandpa have the kids covered.

Raising the retirement age would mean the country would need to seriously up its number of child care workers. It would also dismantle the strong family ties and cultural continuity inherent in the current system. The timing seems particularly bad now that the one-child policy is nearly a decade in the past, and Chinese families are having more kids, which means they're more reliant on this system, not less.

This policy doesn't exist in a vacuum; and the reason it exists needs to be accounted for in any discussion of changing it.

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That's a good point.

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"and Chinese families are having more kids"...they are patently/clearly not...

I don't see how a retirement-age structure that predates the one-child policy was a) in any ways deliberate on account of cultural considerations and b) how raising it will lead to some additional cost that could potentially minimize the net gain.

And I really don't buy the argument that more care workers is going to all of a sudden weaken 'strong family ties' and 'cultural continuity'...as if those are tangible, measurable traits as opposed to amorphous labels that the commentariat (both Chinese and non-Chinese) have already been obsessing over fruitlessly for the past of decades.

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Compared to the one-child era, yes, Chinese families are now far more likely to have two children. (I was actually in China eight years ago this month when the first stage of this repeal took hold. Every single-child parent I talked to was eagerly anticipating having another, now that they could. The ones who had girls on the first go were especially keen to try again for a boy.)

I'm guessing you're speculating here; your rebuttal is not based on any actual experience in China. If it was, you'd know that this was a) indeed deliberate and b) was in firmly in place during the one-child policy. Even then, the weekday streets of every major Chinese city were packed with retirees with toddlers in tow while parents worked. Now that they're having bigger families, that's even more true.

This policy was obviously a product of a strong cultural belief that it's more desirable to have kids socialized by respected elders than have them raised in day care. If you un-retired those older workers, you'd end up hiring a lot of them back as day care workers -- since that's what they're doing now anyway, for the price of their pensions.

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Ok...let's ignore the anecdotal evidence, have you seen the live birth figures? Because I think they speak for themselves...

But isnt that exactly what you're doing? Speculating? Only doing so without firm empirical evidence

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There are also some people who think China will be able to raise their TFR again. The argument generally goes that just like they were able to crush fertility rates due to their strong social control and heavy handed one child policies, they will be able to leverage their agitprop to generate a pro-natal society, and if that doesn't work they can just fall back on policies that are equally as heavy handed as the one child rule, such as restricting abortion or placing taxes on childless adults.

I am skeptical. Western interventions have shown that pro-natal policies can work, but even wide ranging support structures have surprisingly limited effect. Tax rebates and free kindergartens work and are important, but can only do so much compared to other economic trends and societal expectations. "Negative" policies such as restricting access to abortion have probably little to no effect (though that may help with the gender balance). They obviously can't ban contraceptives. Banning after school online courses could help let's see how that works out.

Using their control over societal opinion isn't going to be very effective either. By now having one child is the norm, and the opinions I have heard from pro-natal advocates are essentially conservative boomeresque ramblings that are entirely divorced from the reality of young Chinese couples. Few young chinese women are interested in playing an entirely subservient role to their husbands and place their career on hold to bear and raise more children.

To raise their TFR to more manageable levels, China needs, in that order: happier mothers, happier families, and a happier society. That means more affordable homes, more support for families, and a more equal society that doesn't delay the career of mothers. It currently pulls sone of the right levers, but simply not enough of them.

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Non-coercive pro-natalist policies seem to be able to achieve at most about a .5 variation in TFR.

2019 figures (to avoid any COVID influence):

Sweden 1.71, Denmark 1.70

Italy 1.27, Spain 1.23

France is about 1.80, but the difference is mostly attributable to having more ("first-generation") immigrants than the Nordic countries, and immigrants generally have a TFR intermediate between their country of origin and the TFR of their country of residence, while children of immigrants ("second-generation immigrants") have a similar TFR to the rest of their country.

Note that the package that the Nordics and France have adopted is a pretty bracingly liberal one - 50% of births are to unmarried parents in France, fertility technologies are available free of charge, childcare is cheap, state-supported and widely available, maternity leave is universal, well-compensated, and lengthy, culturally, working mothers are entirely accepted and supported by employers, maternity discrimination may still exist but it's very much looked down on and even the RN doesn't say things supportive of it. Adoption and surrogacy are acceptable, and there are plenty of gay parents using surrogacy or donor insemination.

That's a pretty strong pill for even the US to embrace - both the cultural and the welfare aspects of this are tough sells politically. China might be relatively comfortable with the welfare side, but accepting gender equality on this sort of scale is a long cultural change from where they are.

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As you noted, these aren't just policies but also differences in culture. In the more culturally conservative countries (more patriarchal and Confucian, conservative Catholic, Orthodox, and in the future, Muslim and probably Hindu), when TFR collapses, it collapses hard. Probably because out-of-wedlock births are frowned upon. So I don't see China being able to avoid being stuck in the range of the Japan/SKorea TFR.

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I'm very much inclined to agree, but it's worth pointing out that France was absolutely a conservative Catholic culture well into the 1970s in a way that Denmark or Sweden was not conservatively Protestant, but has managed to achieve that sort of cultural change in a way that Italy and Spain (which, notably, neighbour France) have not.

While I think that many countries would regard Sweden or Denmark (or Finland) as being too big a cultural divide to cross, France does not seem like a hugely liberal culture in the same way.

What it has done, though, is cultural acceptance of not just women working, but (relatively new) mothers working and acceptance of out-of-wedlock births (though a lot of those are probably pre-marriage*).

* France has what is probably the most popular civil union system in the world, called PACS, while it also one of the highest average costs of a wedding in the world, so lots of people get pacsé before they have kids and then only get married much later after saving up for the conventionally lavish ceremony. 224,740 marriages and 196,370 PACS in 2019 - about 330,000 marriages in 1998 before PACS.

The traditional French marriage in a small town starts with the legal ceremony at the Hôtel de Ville, and then a procession through the town (with the streets closed) to the church where there is then a full nuptial mass, and then they move on to a suitable venue where there is a large party and meal. While these are fabulous events - all of the neighbours will line the streets to cheer the wedding party proceeding from town hall to church - they certainly don't come cheap. PACS involves going to a government office and signing a page or two of paperwork; most people don't have any sort of ceremony.

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1. The PACS law was relatively recent, though.

2. Even by the '70's, the French elite were not very socially conservative even by the standards of world elites. Will we see that soon with any of the low TFR countries? Certainly not China.

3. Most importantly, French TFR is being kept relatively high by immigrants. Will we see that in any of the low TFR countries? Certainly not China.

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PACS was 1999. It resulted in marriages dropping by about a third over the last 20 years; marriage rates have dropped by far less in other countries. I think does explain France having a much higher out-of-marriage birth rate than most comparable countries. Would be interesting to see the rate for those who are pacsed.

My point was that France was not, or at least not much, more conservative than Italy in the 1970s but had a very divergent path. How much of that divergence was subject to government policy, I don't know, but it seems like a question worth considering.

IIRC, isn't the TFR for French-born women something like 1.7, which is still pretty high?

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Yeah, but my point is that if anything, Chinese culture on marriage and childbirth is closer to Italian than French (no culturally progressive elites that I see).

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May 6, 2022
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White French people have a similar high TFR to white Danish and Swedish people (all between 1.6 and 1.7). France's overall TFR is higher because it has more immigrants (note: children of immigrants have very similar TFR to the white populations of European countries - even as culturally isolated a population as Muslims of Algerian descent in France is less than 0.1 higher than the white population).

Roughly speaking, you can divide non-Eastern Europe into three

the France/Denmark/Sweden/Iceland/Ireland/UK group at 1.6-1.7

the Belgium/Netherlands/Norway/Germany/Austria/Switzerland/Finland/Portugal group around 1.4-1.5

the Italy/Spain/Malta group around 1.2-1.3

Note that 1.3-1.4 and 1.5-1.6 are pretty much unoccupied.

France was not exceptional in the 1980s/1990s, which is why I attribute quite a lot of this to PACS; encouraging young people to get pacsé and have kids before they marry seems to work quite well at getting people to have kids at the point they reach adult financial stability, rather than waiting a few years to ensure they really are stable.

Eastern European countries tend to be about 1.5-1.6 (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia), but there are some outliers - Poland is low (1.44), Greece, North Macedonia and Albania are even lower at just over 1.3, Montenegro and Romania are over 1.7 and probably higher than the white French population.

I think that genetic explanations on just one or two generations of selective pressure are expecting way too much from natural selection. You'd need a big genetic variation that didn't express itself before the demographic transition, and that seems to be asking more than the data can provide.

My inclination is that the key features are cultural and economic. If women can work, TFR falls, if women can have kids and still work (because of childcare availability), it comes back up.

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I do think that a big factor is very simple though: Does having three kids make you weird? If it does, then you're going to struggle to get TFR over 1.5. If not, then you can get up to the 1.7-1.8 range. In a society where childbirth is optional, a lot of women will choose not to have any kids, or only one; you can't compensate for them with just the women who choose to have two.

That means you have to get enough three-child families for it to be culturally noticeable. Go look at things like family discount tickets (e.g. for museums and public transport): are they two adults and two children or two adults and four children? What sorts of cars sell, do they have a third row of seats, or at least a decent middle seat to transport three kids? How hard is it to get a fourth bedroom in a house - is that just a little more expensive than three, or is it the transition from family home to McMansion? These aren't causative - they are signs that the culture accepts three and four child families; changing them directly through state action would not change the culture.

You need to get into the economic weeds, but you also need to be culturally OK with blended families (ie lots of divorces and half-siblings and step-siblings) and pre-marital childbirth, and all of that sort of thing. I think that PACS has got a lot of pretty conservative French Catholics to accept a lot more unmarried parents than they would have done otherwise. "elle n'est pas mariée, mais elle est pacsée" (she isn't married, but she is in a PACS) is acceptable to, like, most Catholic priests and congregations.

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https://www.cairn-int.info/journal-population-and-societies-2019-7-page-1.htm

This seems to suggest native french TFR is 1.8. Atheist Czechia also achieved 1.8 TFR with a basically non-existant non-western immigrant population this year. Secular israelis also have 2.2 TFR.

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Yes, I too am quite skeptical.

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Oh, and the demographic are locked in for the next ~20 years anyways, because if you want a fresh college grad in 20 years, they need to be already born now. If you look at a 40-60 year timeframe, things could be really ugly though, demographics wise.

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The cultural expectations for parents (and grandparents!) are still calibrated for the one child era. Investing so much time and money in multiple children looks exhausting or impossible, but *not* investing so heavily looks like being a bad mother.

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Raising TFR doesn't help the economy. If the birth rate goes up, the proportion of the population that is working age drops *sharply* because kids can't work in.a developed economy. Then it *slowly* climbs up but takes about 35 years just to reach the level it started out. But even after that the proportion working is only *slightly* more than it would have been at the old birth rates. So there's a huge hit on productivity now for a slight benefit starting after 2060. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

What supercharges growth is *reducing* the birth rate. Then you free a lot of adults from the substantial burdens of childcare and education, and you can get a huge boom; exactly in the reverse; huge benefits now; slight losses decades in the future. That has underlaid all of the Asian tigers' booms; certainly not the only cause of their successes but a big player. But there is a limit to that when population gets so low that current infrastructure will get wasted; and China has roughly reached it.

Basically China got its huge boom largely through the one-child policy and now it's best course is to accept a slightly worse employment-population ratio. It really is much better off than it would have been otherwise. Creating a baby boom would just put their engine into reverse.

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I suppose it comes down to whether you are thinking in terms of decades or centuries.

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well, I wish you were right. Romania under Ceaușescu was an opposite example. Lots of babies born and abandoned during a natalist policy

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I don't think a comparable policy could be implemented in China. When contraceptives and abortion was banned in Romania, both were relatively new things and there was no deep seated society wide expectation that birth control was a normal part of life. In China it will soon be the third generation of birth control using women who will be new mothers, it would be impossible for the CCP to explain why you/your daughter/your granddaughter has no access to birth control when this was the norm for more than 50 years.

Romania was also a much more closed of, poorer and more repressive regime than China is now. Some things that were possible behind the Iron curtain simply wouldn't fly in modern China. This would actually be something big enough to bring down the government if they tried it (likely by other high to medium ranking CCP members, this policy would likely be incredibly unpopular for everyone who isn't a 65 year old man)

It should also be noted that while birth rates were highly elevated for a few years, they quickly came down again too. Romania couldn't enforce the policy, because it was just too much.

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Is there a consensus about the impact of democratization on South Korean and Taiwanese growth rates? I don't have a guess about which direction this would go (assuming there was any impact at all).

Democratisation seems highly unlikely for China given the political trend under Xi's leadership. However, I feel it's worth including in speculation about hidden reservoirs of potential growth.

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Great article. I think large, continental countries always struggle with creating a common prosperity. Of the world’s most populous countries, the USA is really the only one which has a modicum of prosperity across the board. I think smaller polities tend to be better governed and more prosperous. This is largely due to costs of sustaining huge populations.

A great writer on this topic is Michael Beckley from Tufts University. One of his main arguments is that analysts need to look at net value produced by an economy. Large economies produce a lot at scale but they also consume a lot leaving little surplus.

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Most countries struggle with creating common prosperity.

1. There aren't many large continental countries (unless you're counting Australia and Canada, who have done just as well as the US).

2. The small prosperous ones stand out only because you notice them. There are plenty of small nonprosperous countries in the world. Just look outside Europe.

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Richard,

Let me clarify, I mean countries like the USA, Russia, Brazil, China or India—that is, large populous places.

I do concur with your overall point though, most countries struggle with poverty. If we rewind about 200yrs we could say the default human condition is physical poverty with few ever reaching what we in the West would consider a normal lifestyle.

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It may be that the Chinese population peaked in the early 2000's. according to offical source, their population was supposed to halve by the end of the century as of early last year, but new data suggests that the population will havle by 2070. 2070 is fairly soon.

Peter Zeihan says that China has overcounted their populatin by about 100 million, all born after the one child policy and probably mostly women.

Yi Fuxian is also a good scholar to follow about Chinese demographics.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-2020-census-inflates-population-figures-downplays-demographic-challenge-by-yi-fuxian-2021-08?barrier=accesspaylog

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Zeihan is fascinating analyst. I think he is sometimes a little off on the finer details of his analysis but the general thrust of his arguments seem rather sound.

I have noticed he is very bearish towards China and not just because of its demographics. He likens its financial system to a scaled up version of Enron.

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The real-estate debt crisis is significant and now a youth unemployment problem. Many issues in China, but they are building a Neo-Surveillance Capitalism essentially nobody will be able to compete with over the next 30 years. As they boost up their PhDs in very specialized domains, they will essentially start to lead innovation at scale. However it will take some time before this is evident to most people.

As a writer in A.I, quantum computing and futurism, I can tell you China's ascent is well underway due to their long-term strategy and planning in technology and integrating new forms. That their CBDC alone is so many years ahead of other central banks is evidence of this.

China's 'common prosperity' and social credit campaigns will continue and it will be a very modulated form of capitalism with access to far more data. If data is indeed the new oil, China's A.I. will be king in the second half of the 21st century, whatever their other problems and obstacles may be.

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I live in southern China, and this post seems right to me, but...

The experience of living in a nice part of China at the moment is that the cities are very futuristic. Zero cash, much more delivery of food & groceries than in the UK (I'm British, so that's my developed country reference point). Lots of electric cars on the roads.

On that level, it feels like there's lots and lots of space for growth: spreading the innovations that are present in the big cities out to the rest of the country will create a lot of value.

Similarly, there are a bunch of glaring holes in the market, that *could* create growth, though there are significant political problems. Things like film and TV, games, writing... cultural production in general is vastly underpowered at the moment, because of the dead hand of censorship. The hope is that as China gets richer and more confident, its leadership will no longer feel so much paranoid need to control what we think, and can gradually relax the censorship, creating a virtuous spiral of increasing productivity and freedom. Obviously that's an optimistic case, but living in hope is nice!

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The fact that the commentariat shift their position seems less a sign of intelligent people reacting in a cogent manner to events as they pass and looks a bit more like people who don't 'get' the Chinese economy shifting from one extreme (excessive optimism) to the other (Eyore-like pessimism). In times like this, I find it infinitely easier to respect the opinions of scholars like Tooze or Pettis (if you want a less bullish opinion), who have a clear paradigm for how they view the Chinese economy that goes beyond getting caught up in cyclical market theatrics.

Regarding demographics, your point on whether people really do leave the workforce after 60 or just downshift to lower-quality jobs probably isnt relevant in this instance. China and Japan are too different socially/culturally/economically for us to make assumptions on the former based on the experiences of the latter. On the overall point Re retirees: Raising the retirement age pushes back the deluge another decade and potentially staggers it in such a way that the pension pot could last a bit longer. Is it a 'fix'? No. But its a comparatively low-cost remedy that comes with outsized gains.

I think we also need to be careful of Ozimek's analysis. China isn't the US and the Chinese 60+ cohort is not the same as America's 60+ cohort. On average, they dont occupy equivalent positions, they don't have have similar levels of net wealth and nor do they work similar jobs to their respective younger counterparts. The average Chinese 60 year-old was born in 1961-62, entered the workforce pre-Deng (or at the 'turn-of-Deng' if you like) and is far less likely to be in a senior corporate or teaching position. Sure, Ozimek's findings might hold over the coming decades as more skilled generations ascend the ladder but we'll have to wait until at least 2050 to see how the post-1980's cohort adjust. In the medium-term, however, this is not relevant as the average 60 year-old street-sweeper and/or assembly-worker is hardly going to be passing on much knowledge to or (inversely) stunting the growth of your new, zany, 25 year-old corporate drone.

Re 'young' workers, I would keep in mind that over the coming decades, each cohort is likely to be far better educated than the last. You said something along the lines of "some of the biggest gains in China’s educational achievement came at times when its productivity growth was...slowing", which ignores the obvious lag effect. A kid going into tertiary education in 2010 entered the workforce after 2018, needs 5-10 years to find their feet and can't start 'contributing' to the lifting any TFP level until at least the middle of this decade! A bit funny to try and pin the productivity deficit of the 2010s on his/her shoulders. Let's, again, wait a while before we start casting aspersions on the Chinese education system.

All in all, the point Re demographics is quite simple. A workforce of 600m uneducated laborers and 100m 'professionals' (2015-20) is infinitely less efficient/productive than a workforce of 300m laborers and 300m professionals (2040). There's not a lot to unpack here and whilst one can try and chip away at the margins of the picture ('but how skilled will these new engineers even be?'), the image is irrefutable ('a hell of a lot more skilled than the assembly-line workers they are replacing').

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See my post just below of a chart by Tanner Greer showing that the contribution from human capital is pretty insignificant regardless and TFP is down quite a bit. The main driver of China's growth in recent years has been capital spending, but they can't keep up those types of rates forever.

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Relevant to this discussion, Tanner Greer posted a chart showing where China's growth comes from:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Scholars_Stage/status/1522602152803323905

You can see that TFP is down as is population growth. Human capital just isn't a big contributor. A massive amount is from capital spending, but how much more infrastructure and capital investment can they do? There's just no way for China's annual growth to stay close to 5% for more than another decade at most.

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You mentioned how older workers tend to lower the productivity of firms and industries in China. Could you attribute any of that to how that generation grew up? A 62 year old would have been born during the tail end of Mao's great famine. Generations of younger Chinese kids are growing up to be a lot taller than their parents and grandparents because of better childhood nutrition. I think it could be possible that the lower productivity of the older generation can be attributed to this lack of nutrition, and that in the next 20 years the old people that were acutely harmed by these economic traumas at a young age phase out of the workforce.

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Education probably a bigger factor, and yes, that's the optimistic argument for China. The one tailwind going against several headwinds.

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You're probably right on that front. And yes, that doesn't make up for all the other challenges that'll ramp up in the near future

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Basically, there's the tailwind of increased tertiary education/education in general (Chinese and all other East Asian families are culturally inclined to invest a lot in education) vs the headwinds of everything else. (I don't think TFP in the economy tells us much about the efficacy of developing human capital at the moment; there is a lag where more human capital should lead to better productivity later.)

And that assumes no big eff-ups, which authoritarian dictators are wont to misstep in to (see Putin's crazy invasion of Ukraine, the current COVID lockdowns in China, and even the 1-child policy itself).

Anyway, I think that China's economy will top out about equal to the US or maybe a little bigger, but then fall behind in relative terms. For both the US and China, the biggest threats to continued growth are internal (eff-ups by the head in China; tearing itself apart and stopping immigration in the US).

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I'm a little unclear about the effect of investment in education. I get the impression from friends in grad school that there are tons of Chinese students in every western grad program, but they often don't interact with other students and are just there purely for the degree. A lot of these programs are also much closer to credentials than technical degrees, and are expensive to foreigners to boot. I worry that a lot of US investment in education is wasted, but shouldn't this be an even bigger concern for China?

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What their motivation is may not matter if they increase their skills/human capital.

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Right, my only point is that these degrees might actually be producing little in the way of skills gain and might be deceptively portraying more human capital accumulation than is actually occurring.

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Eh. Probably produces as much or more skills gain/human capital accumulation as the large number of American kids who go to college primarily to party, drink, and screw around.

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May 5, 2022
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The common argument here is that rich countries exploit poor countries by forcing them to sell their natural resources for low prices. But China gets the same natural resource prices that the U.S. or Europe or Japan does, so if exploitation is the story of development, China should be benefitting equally.

(Note: I do not believe that natural resources are being sold for low prices. Most resource exporters tend to overvalue their currencies. But this is an argument for another day!)

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May 6, 2022
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Eg: how much aid and charitable giving does the PRC do vis-a-vis the US, Europe or Japan?

I think we need to re-center back to the baseline understanding that humanity’s natural state is grinding poverty. Prosperity is an artificial state of being for the human race. As is peace.

A place will be naturally poor unless it can provide a value added product or service at a globally competitive price. Otherwise it will always be depending on external largesse or loans to sustain prosperity.

Blame richer countries for others being poor is good rhetorically but I am not so sure it does anything to solve the problem which is overcoming the human state of nature, which again, is generally extreme poverty.

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May 7, 2022
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You are name-dropping different scholars (I assume?) but what are their arguments?

Survey the human condition prior to about 1900 and you will find most people lived brutally difficult lives. In fact, the past 30 years have been the best possible time to be alive from a material standpoint. Wealth and abundance is not normal, it is artificial.

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Not sure where we would see this exploitation show up in the economy-- the stuff that tends to drive developed economies to grow are stuff like high human capital, innovation, and entrepreneurship, which are pretty removed from material exploitation. Adam Smith actually wrote The Wealth of Nations in part to try to explain why Spain, with its massive overseas empire that it extracted tons of bullion from, was not particularly rich compared to Britain. Besides, most exploitation is within-country, not between-country, and especially exploitive countries don't seem to do better. China itself is very exploitive of its working class.

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May 5, 2022
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Right, but the problem isn't figuring out how local elites got their money-- in many cases it's obviously via exploitation. My question is why the average person in, say, Ireland or Poland, both targets of colonialism within Europe, are so much richer than the average person in e.g. Ethiopia or Thailand. At the very least it doesn't seem like especially exploitative countries do very well.

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The people who claim this tend to think all white countries are colonialist exploiters, including Ireland and Finland, and if pressed claim we only think Nokia is worth more than an African country providing the raw materials for chips in cell phone towers because we're racist. It's not very believable, is what I'm saying.

You can also tell they've overdosed on IR because they're still saying "Global South", but that's not a valid group anymore - several African countries are richer than eg Ukraine.

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I think there is more nuance to it than that. Many of the rich countries occupy some of the best geography conducive to modern commerce. They also sit upon some of the best farm land in the world with navigable waterways and good deep water ports.

Many of them have also been direct beneficiaries of the First and all subsequent Industrial Revolutions. They have the accumulated benefits of industrial leadership accrued since the late 1700s.

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tankies heard from.

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Even in that case, still isn't an argument for China eventually catching up.

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May 5, 2022Edited
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Eg: the problem is that industrialization, much like modern science and medicine is an invented institution, an artificial process. The natural state of humanity since time immemorial has been grinding poverty.

What we really need to focus on is why certain countries did industrialize.

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All of the Asian tigers and Japan had much higher TFR at the same level of relative prosperity as China is at now. China's TFR is already close to those countries and its nowhere as wealthy per capita. They all have high human capital levels too but I don't think anybody is expecting their TFP to be drastically higher than the US's going forward.

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There is a difference between "good" and "sufficient". They need to raise their retirement age, but that is not enough to make the problem go away.

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Raising the retirement age will help, but the point is, not that much. In Western countries, it's more to cut pension costs, not to raise output. I don't think China really provides much in pensions anyway.

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