[mmaunder]

In China, authority overcomes any friction and drives a project forward. In the US there is no authority and there is no common purpose or enemy. So thousands of self interested parties abuse the system in a very time consuming way.

If a major war was to break out, that would provide powerful common purpose and mountains would be moved in weeks, as history has shown. Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.

Encapsulating innovation inside a corporation is the one way in the US to create a common purpose and shield a group from bureaucratic capture.

[nicbou]

The risk with the first method is that if the authority is wrong, no one can correct its course. One unlucky dice roll and you have 30 years of a dangerously incompetent maniac. Some will only judge such countries by their lucky rolls.

While a war unites a nation, it’s offset by the waste and destruction it creates. The cold war didn’t build more school and hospitals. All those resources went elsewhere, with the occasional dividend for civilians.

Mountains do get moved quickly when you sign blank cheques, but at a greater cost, with more waste and corruption. We put way too much faith in crash programs.

[karpierz]

I think this is why authoritarian governments can be more effective at economic growth when they're behind; they just follow the path that a more economically advanced power did, but with more focus and less concern for individual welfare. Hence China's rapid industrialization.

If that's true, then it'd fall apart when the central authority either becomes too inept or corrupt and the path to follow becomes less clear. Essentially, when the low hanging fruit is gone, the corruption/inepts of the authority would become clear.

[kingkawn]

The idea that working people weren’t ruthlessly exploited in the West’s industrial development is a historical fiction.

[nwah1]

Indeed. Quite a lot of Chinese slave labor was used.

[whimsicalism]

Sure, like how when the US let a million people die from a pandemic and China followed along by... averting what would have been 3-4 million deaths.

[seanmcdirmid]

If China only had higher standards for its wet markets and disallowed the wild trade all together, this whole pandemic would probably never have happened. At some point, Chinese medicine (which the wild animal trade supports) is doing much more harm than good (if pseudo medicine does any good at all).

[secondaryacct]

Yes what s ironic is that they now try to push traditional medecine as a remedy caused by a virus maybe originating from abusive use of traditional medicine material.

However now I think they just fucked up at the lab, importing bats from all over Asia as a mad rush towards cataloguing everything. The end, then, justified the means and safety was secondary.

Whatever hypothesis anyway, this tendency we have in China only to care about the goal, will end up in tears. Taiwan is prob our next fuckup.

[nicoburns]

My understanding is that the lab studying coronaviruses situated in close proximity to the wet market is the much more likely source than the wet market itself. And as labs in western countries have had similar leaks (see for example Foot & Mouth disease in the UK), I'm not sure we can really blame the Chinese.

[seanmcdirmid]

The best info we have is that it was a bio lab release, just an unusual transmission from wild bats to humans in a wild animal market. And really, for all the authoritarian power they seem to have, sanitation standards are shockingly low, and with their density, these kinds of things will keep happening until they basically go with Japanese level cleanliness standards.

Given its situation, china really had no choice but to go with a zero COVID policy. If they tried to handle it like the Americans did, 10s of millions of people would have died, if not more (because their density is higher with lower hygiene standards, not a good combination).

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

> more waste and corruption.

Does the waste and corruption cost more than the checks and balances though?

Looking at government IT projects, it feels like the overhead and paperwork make everything 10x more expensive, and taking a risk that some of the projects will end up "stolen" would still be cheaper. Especially if particularly egregious cases of corruption would be prosecuted after the fact.

[dotancohen]

  > Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe.

I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.

Sure, when earthquakes level bridges the US pulls out the shovels and starts collectively digging. But mention climate change and suggest that V8 daily drivers might need to change their habits, and they double down on hurting their progressive neighbors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgT1Sjo6u34

(I'd never actually encoutered this video before, I just googled "rolling coal" and saw that the title mentioned Tesla so clicked it.)

[unfocussed_mike]

> I disagree. The current major environmental catastrophe is unfolding right before our eyes. But because there is a lag of years between cause (positive and negative) and effect, the United States has been an example of how to do absolutely nothing substantial.

Right. This is a major failure of US and British culture in particular: the failure to understand how to grasp future exponential disastrous consequences and the exponential impact of our small individual actions in combatting them.

At the beginning of the Covid pandemic I spent a lot of time trying to explain to people that "but it's been weeks and there's only been a few hundred cases" is not a sufficient guide to what is going to come or how to respond to it.

Trying to urge people that they should be more concerned when they have not been taught about things like survivorship bias, the small-world experiment, have never heard of grains of rice or wheat on a chessboard, and were so rushed through school biology that they've missed key demonstrations of exponential growth, etc., is very difficult.

It was not long before we had people and even politicians saying that people like us were over-blowing things when we worried about Y2K, not out of any wise retrospective assessment of real risk but because "after all that, nothing really bad happened". And that is before we in the UK get to the B word.

Basically people need to see real world consequences for themselves or for those they love before they are galvanised into action, and then they galvanise themselves into action in part by blaming those people who tried to warn them and were not listened to, for failing to act pre-emptively to save them.

Edit to add: I don't mean to say that other cultures don't fail at imagining consequences. And indeed in the Covid situation it might be that some of the cultures that did significantly better had more exposure to SARS or bird flu and learned from that. But there is a general lack of cultural understanding of the risks of severe outcomes in the UK and USA

[raldi]

The common purpose is that we're about to ruin the planet's climate if we don't allow more people to voluntarily live in cities and live less car-dependent lifestyles but still we prohibit apartment buildings in many urban neighborhoods and can't build transit projects anymore.

[seanmcdirmid]

The USA has an adversarial political system: half the people associate with Democrats, half associate with Republicans. But in China, you are either for or against the CPC, and being against it almost means being a traitor. The other political parties exist just for appearances. Unity then is just the default.

[dataexporter]

I don't think a country like the US is capable of making any concrete decisions anymore. America's response to COVID-19 is an example of that.

[myth2018]

> Same would apply in the case of a major environmental catastrophe

I used to believe in that. After COVID-19, not anymore.

[a0-prw]

If a major war was to break out, the only mountains there would be, would be mountains of dead.