Key Insights:
* The Chinese Communist Party is very like an aristocracy—or maybe it isn’t…
* If it is, it will in the long run have the same strong growth-retarding effects on the economy that aristocracies traditionally have…
* Or maybe it won’t: China today is not Europe in the 1600s…
* We probably will not be able to get Noah to read Franklin Ford: Robe & Sword: The Regrouping of the French Nobility After Louis XIV <https://archive.org/details/robesword0000unse_g7d2> to dive more deeply into analogies & contrasts…
* Southeast Asia’s future is very bright because of friendshoring…
* India’s future is likely to be rather bright too—it looks like a much better economic partner for the rest of the world over the next two generations than does China…
* You can get pretty far by just massively forcing your society to build lots and lots and lots of capital…
* Especially if you have an outside country you can point to and say “give me one—or five—of those!”…
* But quantity of investment has a quality of its own only so far…
* We think of technology as the hard stuff…
* But actually the hard stuff is institutions, property rights, government—people actually doing what they said they would do, rather than exerting their social power to welsh on their commitments…
* We are surprised and amazed at China's technological excellence in electric vehicles, in battery and solar technology, in high-speed rail, and so forth…
* But those are relatively small slices of what a truly prosperous economy needs…
* For everything else, we have reason to fear that the logics of soft budget constraints and authoritarian systems are not things China will be able to evade indefinitely…
* Is that a middle-income trap? It certainly functions like one…
* Hexapodia!
References:
* Brad DeLong: DRAFT: What Is Going on wiþ China’s Economy?:
* Daniel W. Drezner: The End of the Rise of China?
* Daniel W. Drezner: The Rising Dangers of a Falling China
* Daniel W. Drezner: Can U.S. Domestic Politics Cope With a Falling China?
* Arpit Gupta: What's Going on with China's Stagnation?
* János Kornai, Eric Maskin, & Gérard Roland: Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3217457>
* Adam S. Posen: The End of China’s Economic Miracle <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/end-china-economic-miracle-beijing-washington>
* Kenneth Rogoff: The Debt Supercycle Comes to China <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/country-garden-shows-debt-supercycle-comes-to-china-by-kenneth-rogoff-2023-08>
* Noah Smith: Real estate is China's economic Achilles heel
* Noah Smith: Why is China smashing its tech industry?
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part I - Authoritarian impasse?
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part II - Posen v. Pettis or "authoritarian impasse" v. "structural dead-end”
* Adam Tooze: Whither China? Part III: Policy hubris and the end of infallibility
* Lingling Wei & Stella Yifan Xie: China’s 40-Year Boom Is Over. What Comes Next? <https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-debt-slowdown-recession-622a3be4>
+, of course:
* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up>
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Inflection Point