[darkmighty]

Actually I'm not so sure if much would change (w.r.t. performance) if they switched to a more democratic regime.

In the end I were always a bit scared/reluctant about the US often touted ultimate justification for democratic capitalism that it is simply more efficient -- "Cultivate freedom -- after all, in the end it's just more efficient!". What if... it isn't?

China is turning the tables on this argument quite a bit. Heavy handed government control, aggressive state-sponsored corporate espionage, citizens surveillance and strict punishment of detractors, exploitation of workers, all combined with hand-picked aspects of market economy to lubricate the system. China is designing itself as an efficient economic machine with minimal regard for personal freedom or expression.

It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century.

[andygrovetheman]

The US has slid away from a free and fair market too. By moving to completely unregulated markets, they have given control to the biggest companies. In a totally unregulated market, inequality grows.

That’s bad for a society. Most free market economists (before “free market” was taken over by billionaires and plutocrats trying to increase their wealth) understood that regulations (anti-trust, anti-price fixing, anti-dumping etc) were needed to give small players and workers a fair shake.

When the US emerges from this national emergency, will it restore balance to markets as it did in the 1930s and 40s in reaction to the 1920s plutocrats? To me that is totally unclear. Let’s hope so. Let’s hope Europe joins it.

[hospes]

>> It's still unclear whether China will be able to achieve technological parity, but it's quite probable it will overtake the US as the foremost economy this century.

China is already #1 by GDP (PPP) with ~$23 trillions [1]. US is #2 with ~$19 trillions (numbers are from 2017). So here China already overtook US.

If you look at nominal GDP, then US is #1 with ~20 trillions and China is #2 with ~14 trillions [2]. With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.

Another metric that shows that China will continue having growth in near future is human capital. China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM. Yes, they have a lot of problems, but they have good human capital to solve them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[adventured]

> With the government and political system that US currently has it will take very short amount of time for China to close this gap as well.

That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship and the world's most indebted nation (before they even get well-off at the median, which bodes very badly for their future). Not to mention that the people of China have few rights at all at this point, the little progress they had made has been revoked by dictator Xi. That extreme repression is going to get worse with time, dictatorships only tend to get more violent and repressive (as witnessed by Xi's million person Muslim concentration camps, one would have to assume that's just the beginning of his reign of terror). Ultimately it will break China if they don't topple the dictatorship. The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.

> China's school education system is better, they have number of pretty good universities, state supports STEM.

The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Penn, CIT, Hopkins, Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, et al. China can't even match the second tier US schools. It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.

[hospes]

>> That's a pretty amusing claim given China is a wildly regressive Communist dictatorship.

That is true that China is a dictatorship and I am not suggesting that China's system is better than US's. Their dictatorship does not need to function as effective as US's political system, it can be pretty ineffective, yet they can surpass US and have higher GDP both PPP and nominal, and in a long run they can have higher influence in the world.

>> The system that Deng Xiaoping created that made the Chinese expansion possible, will not function under a Mao-like zero rights gulag system.

I agree, if they push too hard, they can reverse positive changes.

>>The US university system is vastly superior. The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20. China has nothing like: MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale... It'll take them generations to catch up in a best case scenario.

I highly doubt that it is going to take them generations to catch up. In past ~30 years China moved out of poverty close to 1 bln people. Number of Chinese students studying abroad is growing, for example look at number of Chinese students studying in US [1], it is 350K students annually and number goes up each year. They do not need to have MIT in China, instead they can send their students to study in MIT and meanwhile invest in their own higher education system to catch up. Also, with modern technological advancements soon every major university is going to have all the classes available online for a fraction of full tuition or for free. China's school system is significantly better than US's and when online world class education becomes more affordable, China is going to have vastly more students studying in top universities than US has. We always underestimate the speed with which world changes, since it is hard for us take in account what technological advancements will take place in the future. If China's economy keeps growing, I do not think it is going to take generations for their higher education to catch up, I think it will take 5-10 years. They have one of the best school systems in the world and it is a good framework to build on.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/372900/number-of-chinese...

[janeroe]

> The US has 45 of the top 50 universities on earth, and 19 of the top 20

Right, and North Korea is the second best country in the world according to the research of North Korean scientists.

[dash2]

Actually, the best known ranking of world Universities is produced in China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_Ranking_of_World_Univ...).

It broadly confirms the parent's point, though I disagree with the idea that it will take generations for China to improve.