[_DeadFred_]

Not sure "only the Chinese model can solve the normies pain" is a great look.

Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. The "bread" part of bread and circuses has shrunk dramatically, "but at least you're getting cheaper circuses" is what they've been saying.

Now you're saying only a heavily state-directed Chinese model is still willing to aggressively finance new fabs and meet demand to provide that? "Capitalism demands we don't expand capacity and don't meet demand' is kinda a tough sell after capitalism has been sold as expanding access. "Consolidation, maximal extraction, shareholder preservation, and AI" isn't going to be a winner. I get it makes business sense and wouldn't be a big deal in the past, but the rapidly changing dynamics hitting nearly every part of daily life across the entire economy feels destabilizing.

We're down to wearing dystopian sci-fi level cheap clothes, can't afford chips/sodas, candy/sweet treats have been enshitified to no longer be fulfilling, we can't afford to call an ambulance. Media is polarizing instead of mass media calming. Heck thrift stores are becoming unaffordable to the low end as the middle now resorts to them.

"You don't have the foods you are used to, decent clothing, shelter, health, or social cohesion but you have a sweet 6 year old phone and flock cameras keeping you safe". Jesus it feels... not good. Even cyberpunk dystopia understood you needed to at least jack people into something.

[MrBuddyCasino]

> Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach.

Who says this? The latter are heavily regulated and not exposed to market forces, which is why they didn’t get cheaper, unlike TVs etc.

[_DeadFred_]

The libertarians?

Cato https://www.cato.org/publications/trade-buys-goods-services-...

Cato “One of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.” https://www.cato.org/commentary/cheap-talk-cheap-stuff

The Adam Smith types: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/economic-nonsense-2... "Many consumer goods follow the same trajectory; most recently smartphones have done so. Far from being left behind, the poor are pulled along by the progress that initially caters for the rich."

[xg15]

The result of equivalent deregulation would be slums and shantytowns. But hey, cheap rent! I don't think this is s desirable outcome either.

Also, from the article:

> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.

That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.