| > Look at the treatment of Boeing after 2 airplane crashes for example Well, Boeing was taken to task not for trying to innovate and making mistakes but for lying (fraud) and regulatory capture of the FAA (something a smaller competitor can’t do and in fact likely prevents smaller competitors). As an investor, the former should make you wary and as a flier the latter should make you scared. > The US has particulate air pollution that is half of South Korea's and a quarter of China. It is a pretty reasonable guess that air pollution would be mostly industrial production that the US would shut down for environmental concerns. Considering the primary stated motivator by many industrial companies for outsourcing to China was labor costs and not environmental regulations, I wouldn’t be so confident in this claim. This is borne out by research which tries to compare environmental regulations across regulatory regimes: > In our newest research, we compared risk regulation in China and the United States, and we have also found a more complex pattern that does not support the longstanding conventional view of U.S. regulation being much more stringent than in China. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/12/20/xu-wiener-comparing-... > * US labour laws are an impediment. That new fab plant that TSMC was trying to build in the US seemed to be falling over because it was illegal to use skilled, experienced labour. I don’t know what you’re referring to but generally the problems with such endeavors are that skilled work in a different cultural and regulatory environment is challenging and this applies to European companies trying to enter the US market and US companies trying to enter other markets for the first time too, especially when it comes to complex technical projects. Also, the primary labor laws that tend to be an impediment are things like worker safety and compensation. The latter is a bit less important for highly skilled labor but safety is certainly not. I think the bigger problem is trade arrangements that have long ignored these rather than estimating the cost worker safety regulations impose and taxing products from regimes that don’t have good regulations. > The US is seeing declines in per-capita energy availability and flat actual production. That is almost certainly a policy choice linked to anti-fossil-fuel ideologies, Asia has been seeing seeing crazy growth. It is hard to do energy-intensive activities like manufacturing in an environment where securing energy is a battle. That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity. > It should be a literal embarrassment that we're being outdone at capitalism by nominal communists China hasn’t really been a communist country in anything more than name for quite a while and is actually pretty capitalist despite their own claims to the contrary (they still like to pretend): https://www.cato.org/policy-report/january/february-2013/how... You seem to like to state something that may be true but jump to a conclusion without any supporting evidence for making that claim. I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing (at least on the Lex Friedman interview as I generally find him an insufferable blowhard) and it’s quite annoying. |
One of the explicit points of minimum wage laws is that they prevent Chinese-style sweatshops. People bring that up less these days though since those sweatshops ended up bringing wealth to China.
2. If you pick one of the studies linked in that article, you'll see that Xu & Wiener conclude "the US written rules were more stringent for risks of toxic chemicals and most air pollutants, whereas China's written rules were more stringent for risks in agriculture" [0]. I think that supports my theory that US particulate air pollution is lower because of environmental regulation.
3.
> That seems like a leap when China is installing a lot of nuclear and solar energy. Yes they’re also still building coal plants but that’s intended to be as a backstop for solar until they build enough nuclear capacity.
The US has effectively banned nuclear power, so we're still talking ideology for that one. The vast, vast majority of China's energy comes from fossil fuels [1].
4.
> I’ve noticed Tucker Carlson does the same thing...
I don't know why you're criticising style but leaping straight to someone who is highly successful in his field as a comparison, but sure. If only millions of people would take my opinions seriously!
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/risa.13797
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/china