@admitsWrongIfProven Yes. That’s a real danger. Ultimately countries that develop power and prosperity and provide for lives and cultures that seem attractive will be emulated. In the 1990s, everyone emulated the US. Going forward, countries will increasingly emulate China — including its authoritarian aspects — unless and until more liberal societies become more competitive at offering an aspirational model.
@admitsWrongIfProven yes. all manufacturing industries get subsidies one way or another, whether by more direct programs or government tolerance / encouragement of consolidation and market power.
china has found a form of subsidy that is often terrible in many respects (make bad loans and pretend they are good pretty indefinitely), but encourages rather than limits competition.
the US like Germany subsidizes in ways that do not encourage competition. i argue we should reform that. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven China sells EVs for lower than the cost of the cheapest internal-combustion-based vehicles available in the West. Tens of firms actively compete. BYD is biggest and best known, but had nowhere near the dominance marquis firms from Germany or the US have relative to their markets. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven There’s a broader critique about car culture generally (and I think China has made a terrible mistake by following in Western footsteps and embracing it). But conditional on that, China’s EV market is as competitive, including on price, as any automobile market except perhaps the very early, preconsolidation, days of Western industry.
@BenRossTransit Or, alternatively, fixed capital can be subsidized, all costs can be rendered variable, enabling firms to remain solvent even under a close approximation of perfect competition. https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/09/04/income-driven-repayment-of-fixed-capital/index.html
@StryderNotavi Granted on the data security aspect. Of all contemporary vehicles, not just China’s.
But on the rest, China’s capitalism — long on competition, light on profits — is the most successful, and therefore should be taken as the normative form of contemporary capitalism, rather than as some aberration from true Western rentier capitalism.
Sure, state-imposed incentives shape it. All capitalisms are embedded in states. China has simply stumbled upon a superior approach.
“Beijing has directed several key state-owned automakers, including VW partner FAW Group, to prioritize technology and market share over profitability. That’s hardly an option for Germany’s publicly-listed carmakers.” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-14/bmw-mercedes-and-volkswagen-bmw-mbg-vow-evs-struggle-to-compete-in-china
// rents to shareholders are simply unaffordable under a dynamic, competitive capitalism
Text: “The mission of the Russian people is to realize social justice within human society, not just in Russia but in the entire world” (my translation). The salvation is accompanied by destruction. The two elements, as in John’s apocalyptic writings, go together. There can be no salvation without the destruction of all that is false, rotten and built on lies. Apocalyptic thinking is, Berdyaev writes, the most important part of the Russian idea. It is characterized by asceticism, dogmatism, and acceptance (or perhaps, search?) of suffering.
every plutocrat is a temporarily embarrassed alpha warlord.
[new draft post] A Westphalian order is project enough https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/10/15/a-westphalian-order-is-project-enough/index.html
a close run thing, this one. https://zirk.us/@interfluidity/113307160431520875
@BenRossTransit (i find the second point interesting and potentially persuasive, i’ve made a similar point in a link i’ll add. i find the first point not so interesting or persuasive, “changing Israel” would not be not anyone’s objective, it would be preventing profound suffering that Israel is willing to inflict but that many of the rest of us think ought not be tolerated. Israel should want to change, but that’s on it.)
( the link https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/05/08/the-long-fistbump/index.html )
@wim i think before October 7, you could credit the Biden administration with having begun to resuscitate it, in its handling of Ukraine especially. but then, naaah.
@John I think Netanyahu is deposed the second the United States makes clear our continuing special relationship depends on new leadership. Of course, that’d be “foreign meddling in Israeli politics”. Yes. It would be. Sometimes the superpower has to discipline the client, if it is to remain a superpower. I think we may have fatally sacrificed our capacity to act as a stabilizing global power, which has to rely on soft power backed by distant threats much more than by force.
@John The “we” here is not the electorate. It’s you and I, people who follow and intervene in politics and the shape of social institutions. The electorate has no view independent of the institutions by which we constitute it. If the way we constitute electorates is inconsistent with functional and virtuous choices, we have to reform those institutions. Holding institutions constant, political leaders and other intervenors are our locus of evaluation and accountability.
@John (the US guarantees the existence of most other countries, or it did during the period perhaps now ending. we guaranteed the existence of Kuwait. existence is not the issue with Israel policy. different choices by Israeli and American leadership would have left Israel’s existence far less imperiled than it is now.)
@John I guess I’ll reiterate, I think there’s pretty much never any point to attributing stuff to the electorate. An electorate can impose incentives and constraints that make good choices difficult for leaders. In fact, it always does. We judge leaders by virtue of how well they navigate these constraints, not defy them, but reconcile them with wise action.
@John Maybe. Polling elides preference intensity. A tiny fraction in the US is likely to vote on the basis of Israel/Palestine, and it’s not at all clear numerically, among that small population, that electoral incentives tilt toward Israel. Further, the choice is far from binary. No one expects the US to “choose” Palestinians over Israelis. But to use leverage to encourage Israel to exercise restraint is far from unprecedented.
@John Oh yes. But our willingness to tolerate settlements was not. You can argue that Trump polarized the issue, in that he acceded to Israeli asks no other President did or would have, raising the stakes for what being “pro-Israel” means.
Sure, US politicians are bound to open with generic expressions of support. But they have + can behaved quite differently. I have hopes, if Kamala is elected, there will be a sharp change, but for now all her communications are boilerplate.
@John I don’t buy it. Barack Obama, George H.W. Bush, Ronald Reagan all drew hard lines against Israelis, under circumstances and asks much more benign that what Joe Biden has acceded to. “The American people” don’t and can’t own anything. We/they are not a meaningful locus of accountability. I don’t think it’s at all true “any US leader” would have behaved as Joe Biden has behaved.
@John this question isn’t about what Americans think. it’s not about the election. “a catastrophe for liberal internationalism and American soft-power hegemony” has to do with how non-Americans perceive America, its role in the world, and the legitimacy of that role.