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by gwern 4136 days ago
Let us wait until Chinese per-capita PPP has equaled, never mind passed, the USA or other major Western countries before we start singing its hosannas about how wise and effective the Communist Party is at overseeing an advanced highly-efficient capitalist economy.

We've heard this story before, and it didn't work out well for the USSR.
2 comments
TazeTSchnitzel 4136 days ago
The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

Also, you don't need to meet Western development to be a success. China has incredibly high growth rates and Deng Xiaoping's "Socialism with Chinese characteristics" (i.e. the mixed economy) basically saved China.

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gwern 4136 days ago
> The USSR wasn't really capitalist.

The PRC isn't really capitalist either, consider how much of the economy is still state-owned enterprises. In any case, the reference class here is more 'fast-growing industrializing economies starting on a primitive agricultural basis', where regularly you see impressed people (and flacks) declaring that This Time Is Different and perhaps Western-liberal-democracy-plus-capitalism has been rendered obsolete. USSR, Japan - China?

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mcguire 4136 days ago
No, but during the middle of the twentieth century, the USSR grew from a mostly rural, agrarian country to one of the major world powers. (Modulo, of course, Russia, which was effectively European, in much the same way that the early colonies in the US were European and how parts of modern China are "advanced" and others are not.)

If we take these things to have a certain lifespan, I'd expect China to have a significant restructuring around 2030.

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VLM 4136 days ago
There is a simpler failure mode, the guy who decides what numbers to report, and how, decides the outcome, and the data from China is more corrupt than our own data, which in turn is more corrupt than the data from the USSR Pravda era.

On a small scale its fox guarding the henhouse corporate metric evaluations. You pick the winners and losers, and by how much, then you design todays metric to match the conclusion, then you use numerological processes to gather numbers for the metric. Thats the way the real world works.

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