@kentwillard i think more decoupling than war. industrial countries (really blocs) are all going to protect strategic industries. is that a trade war? it’ll look like it in nonaligned, open consumer countries (to their great benefit). but it’s also a kind of trade peace. the question is how companies survive in an era of redundancy and global overcapacity. the answer is subsidy, whether overt as i propose, or covert as consolidation and pricing power (really bad imho).
@PRW excellent point.
cf Hamlet
@kentwillard i think Xi has played geopolitics terribly, but i am more sanguine than you are about China’s economic trajectory. China builds to overcapacity and then seeks foreign markets for its excess, but i think its industrial policy is no longer shaped by trying to win foreign markets, just making crap. China increasingly focuses on industries it considers important, either domestically or strategically, and uses foreign markets to help pay for that. 1/
@kentwillard so i don’t think China is focusing on exports in fact. Western economists always say so, but that’s because Western industries don’t like the combination of Chinese overcapacity and “free trade” market access. we accuse as their “strategy” the side effects that trouble us, but i think they are side effects, China will do much the same when their market access is cut off. (they’ll still export to the the less industrial, nonaligned world!) 2/
@kentwillard China is suffering now from a real-estate bust and sluggish domestic consumption. But China’s authoritarian opacity means it can selectively bail out or punish real estate investment funds without political blowback about corruption and moral hazard. It is already doing this. 3/
@kentwillard Western economists have been predicting Western style financial crises in China for years. They don’t happen. China “foams the runway” by recognizing investment losses only at the time of regulators’ choosing, when punishing them won’t be destabilizing, or by never recognizing losses after quiet bail outs. 4/
@kentwillard Domestic underconsumption is really only a problem for China if it comes with political discontent, if the public is unhappy with reduced consumption in ways that threaten “stability”. Xi is very resistant to stimulus or welfare state support of consumption, but he does have those options, deflation is the current concern, inflation not a binding constraint. If domestic underconsumption / citizen discontent becomes a problem, the state will (however reluctantly) support demand. /fin
the most depressing way to start your day is waking up.
@kentwillard yes. China needs to accept that its own economic model demands subsidy, and not expect outside markets to cover that cost. China is working hard on self-sufficiency in production terms. but they still depend upon the foreign sector to make their industries pencil financially, and they hope that foreign dependence on their manufactures will give them leverage geopolitically.
@kentwillard i think the cause of peace is better served by more “national self-sufficiency” between US and China than by mistrustful interdependence. so yeah, i definitely want industrial policy to support that. ( i can’t recommend Keynes’ talk on national self-sufficiency enough: https://jmaynardkeynes.ucc.ie/national-self-sufficiency.html )
@kentwillard thanks!
the proposal is not motivated by any desire to compete with China, but rather to learn from China.
in practice, though, the US adopting a more China-like economic approach will create tensions with China. China recoups much of what would otherwise become subsidy (opaquely embedded in underperforming loans) by international sales. our becoming a net overproducer reduces our role as customer and creates new competition for products in third markets.
some days it seems like everything new is old again.
@BenRossTransit oh yeah, consensus is what i’m apologizing for, to whoever the real author of the quip is (usually attributed to Twain, probably apocryphally). it’s my mischief.
the usual version of the quote is “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
“It ain’t what you disagree about that gets you into trouble. It’s when you find consensus on things that just ain’t so.”
~with apologies to (probably apocryphally) Mark Twain
“Texas has sued to block federal rules that prohibit investigators from viewing the medical records of women who travel out of state to seek abortions where the procedure is legal.” #MichaelWines https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/06/us/texas-abortion-medical-records.html ht @Atrios
// it's weird times we are living in
just because a claim is often made disingenuously doesn’t imply the claim is always wrong.
Winner-take-all markets make first-to-market the only thing, which means best-to-market may never come at all.
None of Trump’s corruption, #DavidFrench?
Florida under #RonDeSantis is a cesspool of patronage, from Ben Sasse to Richard Corcoran and the people they hire to do minimal, mediocre work at exorbitant salaries.
from https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/08/opinion/maga-movement-trump-election.html
Text: If Trump loses, there is no ready heir to his MAGA crown. Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential nominee, would be saddled with at least partial responsibility for Trump’s loss, and the American people already view him unfavorably. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida seemed poised to offer a perfected version of MAGA to Republicans — all of the Trump culture war and none of the Trump corruption (and he actually substantially outperformed Trump’s 2020 Florida margin in his 2022 re-election). But he’s a diminished figure after his disastrous presidential primary performance.
@artcollisions appropriately a kind of less representational, modern-art version, maybe with some Robert Mapplethorpe influences…
“This is, to me, a Rosetta Stone for early 21st-century liberal politics, an impossibly perfect symbolic object. A bunch of young idealistic Millennials who tweeted all day about intersectionality and dismantling patriarchy worked for an organization that thought nothing of exploiting its internal culture of immense professional pressure to compel vulnerable interns to drink piss.” #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/you-dont-have-to-be-a-try-guy
@avi @dubroy @recursecenter you’ve done your part!
@mister914 gun culture is no excuse. the point would be to set a strong, sharp norm. if you let your kids have access to firearms, you are responsible for what they do with them. even if a kid seems super sane and responsible, it is your duty to regulate and supervise their use. 1/
@mister914 if you don’t think you can do that, don’t let them access and use firearms. it’s not too big an ask. if a kid gets access to firearms without - parent’s knowledge, despite exercising reasonable care to prevent that, a parent would not be liable. but as a parent, you have certain duties, and regulation of firearm access and use would be far from the most burdensome. 2/
@mister914 will there be sad cases where nice well-meaning people go to jail for what their kid did? yes, just like nice well-meaning people go to jail for drunk driving. like with drunk driving, you have to balance the harm of punishment against the harms that result from failing to deter. in both cases, i think the harms that result from failing to deter overwhelm the harm of punishing people who have in fact done something wrong but still intended and meant no harm. /fin
whatever else might happen this election, we should all take some solace that #RichardHanania has finally fallen in love. with a black woman. who had that on their bingo card? the film, a kind of coming of age, will be so inspiring. a bit bittersweet, as she’s already taken. https://x.com/richardhanania/status/1832537875369619559
@marick (it’s interesting just who it is complaining about the tactic of playing up “censorship” now.)