[cjbgkagh]

I keep trying to tell people this, the quality coming out of China keeps getting better and this is generally how things go. Japan was cheap crap, then became quality. Korea as well. It's pretty standard practice and should have been expected.

For my inputs the same goods at the same quality from China are less than half the price than from elsewhere. That is an absolutely huge difference - and those margins often makes the difference between a viable venture and an unviable venture.

Now there is Temu, Alibaba, Bangood, Vevor, etc. There is a local hardware store that only sells one brand from China but that brand has everything, super cheap, and really decent quality. Western companies were making a lot of money selling us cheap Chinese goods at large markups but now those companies are able to sell to us directly and the consumers can keep that surplus. If everything ends up both made in China and sold by China with Chinese brands what role does that leave the rest of us. I used to argue that the west was good at quality control with reliable and fair laws but those are rapidly fading away. Without that we only have finalization and real estate left, and how do we keep that ponzi scheme going without something fundamental and concrete to base it on.

[rented_mule]

I agree, and want to reiterate from slightly different angles.

It drives me crazy to hear people say, "Is that made in China? Because I won't buy cheap Chinese crap!" Are they happy to buy "crap" from elsewhere? The implied causation between Chinese and "crap" is just not there. There has historically been a correlation, but so many people have made the leap to causation in their heads.

The vast majority of Apple's products have been made in China over the last couple of decades. It's easy to question some of Apple's design trade-offs (e.g., gluing batteries in to make things a fraction of a mm thinner), but those tradeoffs are part of the "designed in Cupertino" that is stamped on their products. The fit and finish is much harder to question, and that is done by Chinese hands. It's excellent because Apple, and Apple's customers, are willing to pay for that.

Chinese manufacturers have proven they are excellent at building to whatever price / quality tradeoff their customers demand. For goods sold in the US, it's US companies and/or US consumers setting the price / quality tradeoff.

To the extent there is a correlation, it comes from China being able to build to the cheaper, and therefore crappier, standards that consumers want. When China loses that edge (as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan did before them), they will move further upmarket and others will step in to fill that market need (Vietnam? India? Various African countries?). This cycle keeps repeating... one of the funnest parts of watching "Back to the Future" today is that the line "all the best stuff is made in Japan" went from sounding so unlikely in the 1980s to prescient in the 21st century. And that line makes no sense to young people, whose experience is that the "best stuff" has always been made in Japan.

[throwawaymaths]

Are we living in the same universe? Byd is the car company that has had 10 showrooms catch fire. Temu was caught selling children's jewelry with 10x the acceptable level of lead.

Foreign manufacturers are laying off like crazy in China.

Sure, Chinese quality may be getting better but it's a race. Will the quality improve before demographic collapse and over leveraging destroys the economy? And beyond that horizon, is recovery even possible given how much toxic material china dumps into it's own environment, impacting cancer and fertility rates?

[cjbgkagh]

"demographic collapse" ah a Peter Zeihan fan I see, well I guess that answers it, we do live in different universes. I don't disagree that China will on average become older but that's not as devastating to China as it would be in the west. The elderly Chinese will die much more cheaply than those in the west and there will still be plenty of Chinese remaining.

"Byd is the car company that has had 10 showrooms catch fire. Temu was caught selling children's jewelry with 10x the acceptable level of lead." - sounds like they're moving fast and breaking things. I don't like what they're doing either but that doesn't mean they wont be successful at it. If I was running the world it would be a lot cleaner and more efficient but I don't get to make that choice. The real questions is, short of a war, can the west effectively punish China and since the continued economic wellbeing of our middle class requires access to cheap Chinese goods I think that answer is no. So while a fuss will be made people will continue to buy things from China.

"how much toxic material china dumps into it's own environment" I don't like that either, but I think you're overestimating the cost of the deaths on the Chinese economy. I hate that toxic shit ends up in food that is not labeled as coming from China and that's a big part of why I go to great expense in buying food where I can be certain of the source. But I don't buy the assumption that the Chinese economy requires a middle class to be financially and physicality healthy to survive.

I think the financial implosion to over leveraging economies will disproportionally affect the west more than it affects China since China still has a large and competitive manufacturing to fall back on. The west had fanciful notions of being able to sell all of China a toothbrush - I think that was Nixon? For a long time expansion into Asia was where corporations imagined their future growth to come from - now they can't compete there and are finding it increasingly difficult to compete on their home turf.

[throwawaymaths]

There's a lot to criticize in peter zeihan but the demographics stuff is pretty ironclad. Like I dunno man do you not know how fucking biology works. The CPC is absolutely freaking out about it because they know they are boned -- within a handful of years not only repealing one child but trying to incentivize three and four children families, illegalizing divorce, etc. it won't matter. It takes about 20 years for a newborn human to become productive in modern society.

>cost of the deaths on the Chinese economy

If the economy is what you care about, it's not the deaths so much as the infertility that will hurt china in the long run.

The (likely under-)estimated infertility rate in China is at 16%, compared to US at 8%.

[cjbgkagh]

You don't think it's weird that I knew where you got your info from? Peter Zeihan uses an overly simplistic model which allows him to be very confident about his findings and convincing to those who listen to him. He also tells those in power what they want to hear and makes them feel smart while doing it. He seems to believe what he says so he comes across sincerely. These are all great qualities for a charlatan.

One of the problems with the simplistic models is that GDP is often conflated with wealth, GDP is money spent so many things which are damaging to wealth show up positively in GDP. I once did GDP models for people working on HIV vaccines and the result of the modelling was less HIV -> less GDP. I tried to get permission to model wealth instead but those in charge only cared about GDP because that is the only number policy makers care about. We can all safely assume that HIV vaccines are good for an economy ravaged by AIDS but there was a limit to how much I could contort the models to have that presumed positive effect show up in the numbers. Because my assessment didn't show what they wanted to see the report was buried. Someone else redid the report and basically just made up the numbers which was good enough for those interested.

The world has changed tremendously and irrecoverably in just the past few years and will continue to change very rapidly in the years to come. Entire careers are being wiped out by AI and this is sure to continue. How can we both need more people and be facing a likely surplus of people to such an extent that a UBI appears like a political necessity? It must be one or the other, they can't both be true.

I'm firmly in the camp that as the useful skill threshold keeps rising more and more people will find themselves under that threshold and will no longer able to contribute value to society. I'm also of the view that policy makers will promise UBI to stymie opposition and then not deliver UBI for the same reason. There are many people who see a society based on equity as their only hope for survival and I think they've made an accurate assessment.

Tools that increase efficiency exacerbate inequality, there is the idea that the consumer surplus from such efficiencies show up as a general wealth across the board so even the poor will see their wealth increases. In my view once inequality has cross a certain threshold that is no longer true and the poor will become poorer due to being pushed completely out of the market.

Better tools beget better tools, it's a self reinforcing and accelerating cycle. It's my view that the productivity increased from better tooling will dominate the economy much more than losses from deaths or infertility. So much so that even with a massive loss of population there will still be the problem of an unproductive underclass.

I think the CCP is prepping for war and wants a mass of relatively disposable soldiers which means having families with more than one kid is especially important. It would also make sense for them to appear to be panicking over population loss to hide this real reason. I don't hold this opinion strongly as it is a bit too conspiracy theorist even for my liking. I can certainly believe that the CCP thinks population loss will be devastating to their economy and I would still disagree with them.

[throwawaymaths]

Why do you think I "got it" from Peter zeihan? I was aware of this long before I found out about Peter zeihan, because I have been watching china. And like I said, when pz entered my algorithm, I identified that he was getting some things very right and also many things wrong.

Look, if you are so convinced that China has shit figured out, go put 10,000 on a china index. The markets just collapsed a bunch so it "should" be on an upswing. You can't lose!

I think you toss around a lot of glib shit like "move fast and break things" without really thinking. Look man china really breaks things a lot, like bridges, or whole ass crumbling luxury residences. In the end, "breaking things" alone is not enough, you must also have the introspection to learn from your mistakes. I do think the Chinese in the small are quite good at learning from their mistakes but it's clear that societally there is a problem that policy is reactionary, often driven by goodheart's law, and there is little to no introspection or incentive to "do better".

But by all means, don't let me stop you from putting your bets on that sort of a system.

[cjbgkagh]

I think the markets in China are subordinate to the government so I wouldn’t use them as a proxy for how well China is doing. I see markets as a proxy for financialization which I consider in general to be a net negative. The supposed benefits of efficient allocation of capital seems to always give way to Ponzi schemes and those are very inefficient. There are some that argue that the frenzied investment in boom part of the boom bust cycles pays off in the long term, e.g. investment into telecoms. But I’m not one of those people, it’s hard to AB test it.

My example of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was not an endorsement, I was making the general point that your example is not necessarily a sign of a things going bad.

It is hard to bet against a Ponzi economy as there are no limits, but my general thesis that there will be a crushing of the middle class and with that a transition from a high trust society to a low trust society. The society will still largely function but will be less efficient because of the increased security costs. So I’ve been investing in private security ventures which as you could imagine are booming.

[thaumasiotes]

> If everything ends up both made in China and sold by China with Chinese brands what role does that leave the rest of us.

No need to speculate; that's not a thing that can happen.

Gains from trade still occur when one party is superior to the other party at everything.

Not to mention that if you're not producing anything to give to China, you won't be able to buy any of the things they sell.

[cjbgkagh]

That correction occurs when the currency collapses and the newly impoverished continue working at massively reduced real wages and living standards. The inability for Spain, Italy and Greece to inflate their currency is one of the things leading to high unemployment. If this was to happen the trade with China will still be beneficial - the question is how much loss of wages and living standards could the west tolerate. And since much of our current living standards is based on continued access to cheap Chinese goods then there will be a loss of living standards either way.

China is still a big importer of raw materials so there will always be that. But it's not like we can all become farmers and miners.

[thaumasiotes]

I can't really see what you're saying, and I tend to suspect that's because you don't know either.

But here, look at it this way:

The worst-case scenario is that "the rest of us" continue producing the things we already produce, and the Chinese aren't willing to buy them, so we have to use them ourselves.

Is that what you're afraid of, or did you have something else in mind?

[cjbgkagh]

I thought you were eluding to an idea from Macroeconomics where two countries can both benefit from trade even when one country is more efficient that the other. But you have now entered into a nonsensical realm so I'm starting to consider that maybe I misunderstood.

So I will address your most recent comment directly; that's not the worst-case scenario - we produce the things we already produce but our customers would still prefer to buy from China instead and we are now no longer able to sell our same goods to the same people.

Let's say I'm a cobbler and I make shoes. New efficiency gains in China mean that the exact same shoes from China can be bought by my former customers for below the cost of my production. Who would continue to buy shoes from me at my necessarily higher prices? I can't sell them to China. I can't sell them anywhere as China sells the same shoes everywhere. I already have more shoes than I need and I can't use the shoes for other things. Even if I could, it would be cheaper to buy the shoes from China than to make them myself.

There is no option to keep things same, we can't stop China from becoming higher quality and or cheaper, the best we could do to try is to increase tariffs, but that would apply to local customers we would still lose the international ones. Sure we could try to race them in efficiency gains we should have been doing that anyway and whatever we're currently doing is not working as we are losing ground.

[thaumasiotes]

> Let's say I'm a cobbler and I make shoes. New efficiency gains in China mean that the exact same shoes from China can be bought by my former customers for below the cost of my production. Who would continue to buy shoes from me at my necessarily higher prices? I can't sell them to China. I can't sell them anywhere as China sells the same shoes everywhere. I already have more shoes than I need and I can't use the shoes for other things. Even if I could, it would be cheaper to buy the shoes from China than to make them myself.

In order to make this paragraph work, you're assuming that your customers, and you, are producing things that are valuable to China. (How else are you going to pay for their stuff?) This already contradicts your premise that Chinese superiority will mean you and your customers have nothing valuable to do.

If you don't want to start with contradictory premises, the most that Chinese superiority can mean is that you and your customers can't afford to buy Chinese products. That really can shut you out of consuming Chinese products, but it can never shut you out of consuming what you produce yourself.

[cjbgkagh]

“New efficiency gains” suggests a before and after. We are talking about china becoming more efficient from a previous state where they were less efficient. As circumstances refer to different times there is no contradiction.

What is a cobbler going to do with a bunch of shoes that will cost him more to make than it would cost to buy. What good would it do him to be able to consume his own products - are we still talking about a cobbler or have you somehow mixed in the notion of a nation state? Are you suggesting the cobblers consumption needs are met by his own production? Is he to eat his shoes?

Even if he was, he would still be better off buying them than making them.