China is having a massive glow-up in the West because it can build things and we can’t. It can build infrastructure at unprecedented speed and seemingly conjure entire new economic sectors within years. The entire country is in a state on continual reinvention, and I, staring at decaying 110-year old Victorians in my part of San Francisco, look on jealously.
In this article, I analyzed the experiences of American and Chinese industrialization. In both cases, the massive change caused temporary declines in quality of life for various groups, and those declines were unsuccessfully resisted. The resistance failed and we did eventually benefit, but that’s no comfort to the people mired in industrial misery for 2-3 generations before the benefits were diffused through society. I think the difference today is, in America, the affected groups can effectively defend their interests in the way the late-19th century artisan and smallholding farmer classes could not. And because of that, we won’t experience the reinvention in 2026 that we were undergoing in 1926.
The result is inevitable decline. The template for this is Western Europe, which ceded the future to America after WW2. Now, it seems, we’re doing the same to China.
GreatnessToTheMoon on
We need to go back to the pre EPA days where we could destroy the environment for growth and then worry about it later
MajorTear1306 on
it’s hard to have a stomach for growth when most of that growth is just corporate landlords buying up every single family home in sight lol. people don’t hate progress, they just hate being priced out of their own lives while the skyline gets taller and their bank accounts stay the same just saying..
LightningController on
> If you were an Ohio farmer in 1898, you would resist your crucifixion on a cross of Gold.
No, I have a room-temp IQ.
> Mass democratic participation thus became the avenue to arrest dynamism. Those set to lose from socially disruptive growth now had the power to prevent it.
That’s why true liberalism actually requires some limit to democracy: the right of the individual against the tyranny of the mob. While the two terms are mostly treated as going hand in hand, true liberty requires the right to say, “I will do as I please, and my neighbor may cope and seethe.”
> The left supports immigration on compassionate grounds but not strategic ones
This is a fair point. The left in general seems allergic to making *self-interest* arguments. They cloak all their rhetoric in zero-sum compassion, and are surprised when people accept their premise but vote to take a bigger piece of the pie for themselves.
4 Comments
China is having a massive glow-up in the West because it can build things and we can’t. It can build infrastructure at unprecedented speed and seemingly conjure entire new economic sectors within years. The entire country is in a state on continual reinvention, and I, staring at decaying 110-year old Victorians in my part of San Francisco, look on jealously.
In this article, I analyzed the experiences of American and Chinese industrialization. In both cases, the massive change caused temporary declines in quality of life for various groups, and those declines were unsuccessfully resisted. The resistance failed and we did eventually benefit, but that’s no comfort to the people mired in industrial misery for 2-3 generations before the benefits were diffused through society. I think the difference today is, in America, the affected groups can effectively defend their interests in the way the late-19th century artisan and smallholding farmer classes could not. And because of that, we won’t experience the reinvention in 2026 that we were undergoing in 1926.
The result is inevitable decline. The template for this is Western Europe, which ceded the future to America after WW2. Now, it seems, we’re doing the same to China.
We need to go back to the pre EPA days where we could destroy the environment for growth and then worry about it later
it’s hard to have a stomach for growth when most of that growth is just corporate landlords buying up every single family home in sight lol. people don’t hate progress, they just hate being priced out of their own lives while the skyline gets taller and their bank accounts stay the same just saying..
> If you were an Ohio farmer in 1898, you would resist your crucifixion on a cross of Gold.
No, I have a room-temp IQ.
> Mass democratic participation thus became the avenue to arrest dynamism. Those set to lose from socially disruptive growth now had the power to prevent it.
That’s why true liberalism actually requires some limit to democracy: the right of the individual against the tyranny of the mob. While the two terms are mostly treated as going hand in hand, true liberty requires the right to say, “I will do as I please, and my neighbor may cope and seethe.”
> The left supports immigration on compassionate grounds but not strategic ones
This is a fair point. The left in general seems allergic to making *self-interest* arguments. They cloak all their rhetoric in zero-sum compassion, and are surprised when people accept their premise but vote to take a bigger piece of the pie for themselves.