I think about the line in West Wing: "Free trade is essential for human rights...the end of that sentence is 'we hope because nothing else has worked.' ...Chinese political prisoners are going to be sewing soccer balls with their teeth whether we sell them cheeseburgers or not, so let's sell them cheeseburgers."
While war and human rights are different, they're also pretty correlated.
A recent study by the Democracy Perception Index shows that Chinese feel that their country is democratic. But this is ludicrous, how can this be? It's because Chinese define democracy by whether they believe their government works for their interest and whether they yield good results, not by how their government is elected. It's not just propaganda; this result is consistent with earlier studies by Harvard and York University, as well as by my own experience on the ground.
https://latana.com/democracy-perception-index/
The concept of 民主 is much more in line with the 19th century definition of democracy, when the concept was brought to China. It was only in the latter half of the 20th century that (in the west) democracy became synonymous with electorialism.
So, not commenting on any other countries. But in case of China, Chinese view democracy and human rights differently. I think we should let them.
Please don’t buy the government propaganda that legitimizes everything from stupid to evil as a price that has to be paid to raise people out of poverty.
- economic freedom is an equally valid form of freedom.
- societies can make up their own minds on what sort of freedoms they value most.
As for "erosion of freedom in the last 10 years in China": this is the mainstream western narrative, but the Chinese people don't view it that way. By and large, they view China as way better off now than 10 years ago. All the data and on the ground talks show this. What else is there it argue about?
It sounds like you are like me, born and raised in China but having lived in the west for a long time. If you live in the west and all you hear is liberal thought and western ideas on political freedom, then after a while it seems like that is all there is that matters.
But I am saying no: what we think here don't matter at all, what the people there think is all that matters. We here can consider China's government illegitimate for whatever reason, but that doesn't make them illegitimate. The Chinese people have way more right to consider what sort of government is legitimate, for whatever reason they want, even reasons that we don't agree with.
Really? My girlfriend and her friends would strongly disagree with that statement. From my understanding they grew up in a time when internet in China was a lot younger and they actually had an ability to discuss political discussions, or items that highlight the government in a negative manner.
Now everything that isn't the government's view is incredibly censored/filtered online. It might hard to not see the erosion of freedom when it's being prevented from being communicated online.
Fwiw I'm not disagreeing with your statement on economic freedom and I find the amount of people lifted out of poverty and the growth China has gone through in the last few decades to be incredible but it seems a bit disingenuous to say certain "freedoms" haven't been eroded in the last 10 years comparatively.
The data from decades of research is very clear on this. People like your girlfriend and her social circle, who value freedom of speech the most, are a minority in China. A decreasing minority even. By and large, people are happy with the direction of China. Even if various groups may disagree with specific parts of policy, overall satisfaction is quite high. Freedom of speech is considered a nice to have, not a must, and ranks below many other things such as freedom from poverty, freedom to get quality education, freedom from disease, freedom from anarchy, freedom of security, etc.
Freedom is not about the freedom of the well-off and the majority. It's always about the freedom of the minorities, the oppressed, and the different. Only their opinions matter. You can only determine the degree of freedom in the society by asking those who don't fit in.
I know many people who come from small towns and rural areas. Places where everyone knows everyone, everyone is part of the community, and everyone helps those in need. Places that are toxic to people who are different. For many of those people, freedom started when they moved to a big city. A city where nobody cares what you are and what you do, where you can safely be yourself, and where you can find other people like you.
The hard data from a decade of research is very clear about the fact that Chinese people are overall very satisfied about the direction of their country. No matter what rhetoric you employ, you argue purely from your own perspective and your values. That is fine — for your own country. The Chinese people should have a right to disagree with you on what they value in their own country.
This is only possible peacefully if you have political freedom.
The Chinese people have no right whatsoever to consider what sort of government is legitimate. The CCP deliberately, systematically deprives of them of exactly that right. Hence the total censorship of thought and expression and the repression of any group that might remotely offer an alternative to the CCP, even non-political religions.
The CCP is like the Model T of political parties - "You can have any government you want, as long as it's the CCP."
Don't think joining a party with clear views and goals would let you have any significant effect on its trajectory without decades and lots of luck.
You might be able to become a social policy research professor or something, or where you study Communist/Marxist/Leninist/Maoist/Jinpingist/etc thought and try to develop new applications of it to the modern world. But you won't get to change anything from the Politburu, and could lose your career or worse if you try.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politburo_of_the_Chinese_Commu...
I'm going to be thinking about this sentence for the rest of my life
They constantly fall short, even of the narrow interests of whatever their particular constituency is. But there's kind of a floor where we just throw up our hands and say "WELL THEY WERE VOTED IN"
Do our officials receive less psychic pressure? Does the Chinese government work harder to align the populous' desires with their actions?
Pretty fascinating rabbit holes.
Their study took data from nearly 2000 public opinion surveys and compared it to the policies that ended up becoming law. In other words, they compared what the public wanted to what the government actually did. What they found was extremely unsettling: The opinions of 90% of Americans have essentially no impact at all.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...
E.g. In such a system, if a state has 50 seats and a party manages to win 24 of them (while the second place only wins 23 seats), that first party gets all 50 seats of representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
To be fair: My comment is mostly focused upon "Western" parliments, which includes two geographically non-Western places: Australia and New Zealand! If you look at the constant dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan... look _very_ closely... you realise there are many competing factions within the party. So LDP _acts_ like multiple parties and forces the Prime Minister to compromise to get things done. Not perfect, but many outsiders fail to understand this about the Japanese (national) political system.
It has been repeated a lot in the past decade because overall things improved but recently the population of Shanghai was put under a terrible lockdown, the government didn't have their best interest at heart and what happened? Nothing, because they can't change anything and because the party doesn't care about their best interest. The party only cares about itself.
Making the populace happy is a lever amongst many they use to stay in power but when their interest and the people's interest doesn't align they have other, brutal means to enforce their policy.
Yes the Shanghai mess was gigantic. But even so, by and large, the Chinese people are supportive of lockdowns even if they protest against specific logistical problems, fuck ups and the overall strain placed on their lives. The Chinese government doesn't lock down because they are an evil oppressive regime, they lock down because the public is at large still very supportive of lockdowns as a measure (especially given the fact that vaccination rates in China are relatively low, and that Chinese people fear COVID much more than people in the west do). If they don't lock down and they let millions of people die through COVID, that's when you will see mass protests and riots.
That "they don't have recourse" is false, this is a stereotype. Protests are commonplace in China. There are literally thousands of protests every year, and often the government is responsive to such protests. Not every single protest is respected, but many are. The Chinese government performs a lot of polls and surveys to elicit feedback and to gauge satisfaction. There's a reason why hard data from a decade of research has shown that Chinese people increasingly believe that the government represent their interest well.
All this stereotyping of the party "only caring about itself" doesn't even make sense when you consider that the party consists of 95M people, or about 5% of the population. Everybody has some extended family member that's a party member. That's a big amount of representation.
I'd say most of the ideas about China come from some sort of reasoning on what a stereotypical authoritarian regime looks like, as opposed to actual facts on the ground. Is China actually authoritarian? From a western perspective, I guess so. But even so, what's underappreciated is that China is a very atypical "authoritarian" regime with a lot more grassroots representation and feedback than one might expect from a stereotypical authoritarian regime.
Making the populace happy being a lever to stay in power — sure, agreed. That's not a bad thing, that's how it's supposed to work in China — the party derives legitimacy from doing good work, and if they stop doing good work then all hell will break lose and the country will plunge into a civil war, as China has seen time and again in the past 2000 years. The government knows this, the people know this, thus the government knows it better do a good job, or else their heads will roll.
That being said, I think there are limits to this philosophy. It's pretty clear by now that not everyone in China is getting a fair shake, to the extent that perhaps it is time for other countries to evaluate their relationships with the output of those in China who are experiencing something that goes beyond the pale in terms of human rights violations i.e. the Uyghur population and the work that they are being "voluntold" for as well as the "re-education" they are experiencing.
I think that for as much sense as it makes for China to do whatever it does, it makes sense for Western countries to do something about the obvious misalignment of values between the two groups. The West not accepting / becoming dependent on economic conditions that result from violations of their views on human rights or democracy is a very reasonable action to take from an ethical and moral standpoint, just as an example.
> When you're poor, you're not free.
I appreciate someone 'qualified' making this point. Whenever I tried to argue this in the past, I inherently got dismissed as being in a privileged European position not knowing what I am talking about, (even as an Eastern European), so thanks for your post.
And here is the crux of China's zero-covid policy. Follow the Western lead and run covid run its course? That would be millions of deaths even with Omicron being not as deadly, simply because Sinovax is nowhere near as effective as the mRNA vaccines are. It's too late (and politically unwise, given how CCP propaganda praised its selfmade vaccine) to mass-rollout mRNA vaccines, so the only option that prevents millions of deaths (and so, keeps the "social contract" of freedoms vs. wealth) is to brutally suppress Covid.
The interesting thing will be when the Chinese public deems the zero-covid policy "not good enough"...
The "Chinese vaccine don't work" talking point is a bad faith myth created by western mainstream media, which misrepresented this study by comparing single- or two-dose Sinovac with 3-dose Pfizer. This sort of misrepresentation is unfortunately common practice in mainstream western media.
What is true however is that Chinese population has less immunity against omicron due to lower vaccination rates, especially among the elderly. For one, the Chinese don't see vaccination as really necessary because lockdowns work. Second, the Chinese worry a lot more about vaccine side effects. Here in the Netherlands, vaccines are sold as "100% safe, everyone should get it", whereas in China doctors would recommend against getting a vaccine if you have another medical problem such as heart problems. My other grandparents in law choose not to get vaccinated because they have many other health problems due to old age.
Finally, the Chinese public is by and large very supportive of lockdowns despite the Shanghai mess. Rather than "don't lock down" they now just believe "lock down earlier, don't turn into the next Shanghai".
Unlike mainstream Chinese media, which always represents facts objectively and doesn't use a headline generator to deflect attention whenever there's some trouble in the country.
I always see this amusing sentiment of "evil Western xyz doing things and stuff", meanwhile it's just something that happens all around the world, and usually even more so in other, less developed places. Maybe the main difference is that I don't get much media from, say, Zimbabwe, but I sure do from the US and even Canada, even if I don't particularly care about the happenings in either place.
The cry over whataboutism is funny when you're sharing a paper funded by the Chinese CDC, and taking that as gospel. I'm not excusing Western media anywhere, I'm simply saying "Western" is a pointless qualifier when the problems you are describing apply to media driven by profits and/or vested interests, which is almost every news source.
You are throwing "Western media" under the bus, but in contrast to what? Not Chinese media, which the discussion was about, so I'm curious what your reference point for good media is in this case, that happens to be better than "Western media". Keep in mind that quality levels differ, and if you only follow Murdoch rags, obviously you're not getting quality reporting of any sort.
This isn’t true, and if you look at table 2 in the paper you link it is obvious. With equal dosing, SinoVac is less effective than Pfizer in basically all categories.
SinoVac doesn’t start to have _any_ protection against mild/moderate disease until 3 doses, and even then, it’s significantly worse than Pfizer. It’s hard to know how that relates to disease transmission, but it’s probably fair to guess that less protection against mild/moderate disease means increased viral loads and faster disease spread.
Back when there were fewer variants, the Janssen vaccine only required 1 dose; was Janssen "better" than mRNA, and did "mRNA vaccines not work very well"?
Here in the Netherlands, once Omikron arrived, the Dutch CDC advised everyone to get a booster (third dose). Nobody here counts on Pfizer having enough protection with just 2 doses. Why would anyone then compare 2-dose Pfizer with 2-dose Sinovac?
What matters is the eventual efficacy after sufficient boosters. Besides, we already live in a "booster subscription" reality. Here in the Netherlands, the elderly are encouraged to get a booster every 3 or 4 months. In light of all this, I'd say it's very disingenuous to compare based on number of dosis instead of eventual efficacy.
And you say "even [after 3 doses] it's significantly worse than Pfizer". Where in table 2 do you see that?
Severe/fatal disease:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 99.2 for 60-69 yr, 99.5 for 70-79 yr, 95.7 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.5 for 60-69 yr, 96.7 for 70-79 yr, 98.6 for >= 80 yr
Mortality:
- Three-dose BNT162B2: 98.9 for 60-69 yr, 96.0 for >= 80 yr
- Three-dose Coronavac: 98.7 for 60-69 yr, 99.2 for >= 80 yr
I'm sorry, these numbers look nearly identical to me? They're all >= 96% for the elderly.
I think you're looking at the "mild/moderate" section. Yes the numbers there are lower for Sinovac. But so what? Protection against severe/fatal disease and mortality is the most important. That it's less effective at mild/moderate disease prevention doesn't make "Chinese vaccine don't work very well".
Heck if we go back in time before there were so many variants, various studies showed Sinovac as having roughly 70% protection against mild/moderate COVID (depending on country; efficacy is context-dependent). That 70% was then branded by western media as "Chinese vaccines are junk, they don't work at all, because our mRNA vaccines provide 90%+ protection against mild disease". And now Pfizer has only 70% protection against mild omikron but it's still represented as "mRNA vaccines are much superior, the Chinese are fscked until they get their hands on mRNA". Yes, what's wrong with that narrative?
For some reason, outside of the context of comparisons with China, everybody agrees that Pfizer works kinda "meh" against omikron; it's merely "good enough to get the job done". But when comparing with China, all sorts of people are suddenly inclined to represent mRNA as the holy grail that can end the pandemic, which the Chinese unfortunately don't have.
I have not paid attention to COVID-19 recently and I recall that Chinese vaccines were problematic against Omicron.
If it is so efficient then why the hell they have this security theater in China?
Not sure why you call it "security theater". The lockdowns in China work, even against Omicron, even if it has become way more difficult. Shenyang, Guilin, Shenzhen, Guangzhou all defeated omicron without the Shanghai mess.
As for why they don't push vaccines more, that I don't know. Possibly because they are more cautious about vaccine side effects than we are. As I said, doctors in China recommend against getting vaccinated if you have other health problems. The same elderly in the Netherlands would just get a recommendation to get vaccinated because "vaccines are very safe", as we are officially told here.
A similar notion existed in Taiwan until they got overwhelmed by Omicron. Lockdowns worked and they were able to keep COVID out of the island, so people weren't interested in vaccines hence low vaccination rates.
Western societies view lockdowns as draconian human rights violations, and don't take COVID very seriously relative to "freedom", but not all societies look at things that way. Chinese people are very afraid of COVID, much more so than westerners, and see lockdowns as an inconvenient but absolutely neccessary measure. Chinese society values responsibility more than freedom.
Yes, the Chinese state has made some remarkable positive material achievements for most Chinese. No, it does an absolutely shit job for many of them. Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
What would it take for a national government to get more passable results on the veil of ignorance test? Try the thought experiment!
What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
> Imagine being Uyghur, critical of Xi, religious, lgbti+, black or a combination of the above.
Those are very visible examples, but if you're applying the veil of ignorance test you have to weight by how many people they actually apply to. (I wouldn't be surprised if all of them put together represented a smaller proportion of the population than incarcerated Americans, say). Every government system has some fraction of the population that it "gives up on", that much is unavoidable.
I am deliberately applying an individual level test to the social level. This is not fuzzy utopian everything-should-be-perfect idealism though. Think of it as an extensive test suite to run against a government's policies.
> What about somewhere like Singapore (nominally democratic, but with a single party in power for decades and widely seen as authoritarian)?
EHARDFAIL: active lgbti+ prosecution.
OK, but that doesn't answer the question. What's the pass/fail criterion for your test suite? For China to be such a particularly bad case, it seems like you must be focusing on those particular groups and weighting them more highly than in the actual veil of ignorance test (where one assumes an equal chance of being anyone), no?
In the West the words for referring to someone formally are words that used to refer to the nobility exclusively (Mister, Misses in English comes from 'Master, Mistress', Monsieur, Madamme in French, Señor, Señora in Spanish, derive from 'My Lord, My Lady' respectively).
So in the West, the cultural transformation was more than mere equality of political voice, but more, that 'we are all nobles', and (domestic?) political history in the West is the ever expanding circle of this inherent nobleness of all (arguably right down to trends in current American social issues).
'Rights' was something that, in the West, was first contested between the nobility and the King, then in the modern period between the wealthy merchant class and the nobility/royalty. James Madison, one of the American Revolution leaders, writes explicitly about how the masses are incapable of the requirements of absolute democracy. So there's definitely something to it when you point out that 'Democracy' in the West wasn't immediately interested in conferring a voice onto every Tom, Dick, and Harry (we'll just set aside the status of women and slaves)
You might be off about 'latter half of the 20th century' bringing electorialism to bear, rather the late 19th century/early 20th century was when, finally, the proletariat started demanding its rights, e.g. The Mexican Civil War that saw the establishment of collective farming lands, the struggle of labor and unions in America and Europe to secure worker's conditions backed by the threat of socialism (which, from Marx himself, is about endignity [ennoblement] of everyone's time), all of which, funny enough, have been desolving since the 90s (NAFTA eradicatd collective farming in Mexico).
Democracy in the West is more than a mere political configuration, its also the cultural precept (however divergent in interpretation), in stark contrast to what you're describing is the history of this idea in China, where, dare I say, the idea of ennoblement stops at a hard boundary unlike in the West.
P.S. I don't know a Chinese language so it may be that the words for formally addressing someone also share this genealogy of descending from terms formerly meant exclusively for nobility.
This was a hard concept for my Thai wife to grasp at first. I described it this way.
In America, each person represents their own kingdom. The government exists to serve (and be subservient) and protect us to keep the peace. I always try to remind myself that government by the people, for the people means that the balance of power lies solely with the people.
As a German believe me if I tell you that being under a totalitarian regime can backfire pretty quickly. It took Hitler only 6 years. Putin took longer but hundreds of thousands are dead for just this year alone.
They know about murderous totalitarian regimes!
The Mao background may also mean they appreciate even minor progress more than us.
It's a deep area of research with conflicting results [1][2].
[1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.85...
[2] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oRbfdWw4ozUC&oi=...
On the other hand, the cost of significant armed conflict is already very, very high.
Polls show little interest in making McDoubles and tons of interest in healthcare and education jobs.
Somehow there’s always financing for cheap consumer jobs while costly jobs face more uncertainty: https://twitter.com/sama/status/1505597901011005442
The market is unfalsifiable like a religion now. Free trade is captured by rent seekers who believe past success in one special context makes them the best person to handle any context. The memes are no longer based in historical religion, but the lack of critical challenge and blind allegiance to normal humans self aggrandizing story, being dictated at by they who live privileged lives far away is as traditional as it gets.
I’d like to see a rescope of political power that better conforms to where all this value comes from: https://www.unlv.edu/news/article/future-american-city-state
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the...
Coddling certain sensibilities and foisting nostalgia driven politics on the masses, tacit ageism towards youth through hand me down gossip and schooling of industrialist owners who need cheaper labor, are hardly hallmarks of a free society.
We moved manufacturing into rural areas a century ago seeking cheaper labor, then overseas for the same reason. Human agency is dictated by financiers empowered by political tradition. There’s no theory I know of that concludes they are absolutely making sound choices for anyone but themselves. The blind faith in grand schemes thing has got to go.
Sometimes, when it doesn’t touch you, you have some fancy theoretical poetry about it; the closer you are, the more you notice how the other is, indeed, wow, gruesome.
Not all cultures can mix.
I'd start the 19th century after the Napoleon wars for this argument, of course.
In the (absurd) limit: There was no war between Australia and the Roman Empire in 100BC.
More practical: existence of a Cold War in the 20th century.
The theory of comparative advantage (David Ricardo) means it's worth specializing. But the counter argument (local resiliency) is also important -- but it may mean less efficiency in the short run, as a kind of investment against risk.
All that is fine, but it opens up the opportunity for short-sighted decisions (basically a mercantilist view that exports = good and imports = bad) like tariffs to protect local mfrs (which removes incentives for them to be efficient).
In short, like everything in life, there's not a sharp decision.
Trade needs to be fair and mutually beneficial.
Without those sanctions, it is quite conceivable that a troubled war effort would not be nearly so much of a problem, but because of the trade dependency Russia feels quite threatened by the consequences of war. Not enough to have prevented it in the first place, but they overreaced.
https://www.npr.org/2022/05/16/1099079032/mcdonalds-leaving-...
Perhaps it will(as it seems now, also) be seen as catastrophic mistake. Like Russia selling Alaska to US. My point is, it is way to early to tell and even if we knew the outcome: we have to have few events/outcomes like that for them to become an example of mistake to not make.
Generally countries can do whatever, despite all. It is more important we deter them and have tools to do that as broader "world" community. Otherwise we would have to forcefully own "other" countries to secure such peace.
not absolute 0 % chance of war
What evidence do you have to make this claim? A simple thought experiment proves the counter. Let's say there is a population on one island, and another population on another island, and these populations have no way of reaching each other or even knowing of each others existence. These not-connected populations are guaranteed not to go to war. However, give one of them the means of reaching the other population, and most assuredly the chance of war has gone up not down.
With all of these things, context matters. If memory serves, Austria being an independent state was one of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so if that had been the last act instead of the opening chapter, there still would have been hell to pay. Perhaps not on a par with Caesar crossing the Rubicon, but definitely starting something that requires a resolution.
So that's an easy example of how trade helps keeps peace.
One may as well argue if Taiwan didn't have the world's most advanced semiconducter industry, it would have voulentarely joined China.
I think the problem is, decision makers need to understand what interconnectedness means, and not just on an abstract level. If you make things, you're intimately familiar with just how many components come from China. You're deeply aware of the fact the machines you use are made in basically every country in the globe. That the materials you consume come from literally every corner of the planet.
People tend to think about globalization as a matter of buying discrete commodities from different places: bananas from panama. They don't understand that essentially all products today are amalgams from different factories scattered across the globe. That leads to crazy weird decisions like Brexit, silly trade wars, etc. People don't realize that cutting a country out of the system is less like not talking to somebody, and more like cutting out a big chunk of one of your organs.
1. It's reasoning a'la "It's economically inefficient therefore it's less likely to happen". In my opinions, governments are absolute experts in implementing economically nonsensical policies, international conflicts included.
2. Any link between nations can be weaponized, i.e. imposing tariffs, banning imports/exports, and so on. The greater your dependency on me the more ways I have to harm you.
3. Such weaponization will naturally harm your own citizens but you, as a decision maker, will bear very little cost.
4. The easier it is for me to replace you with an alternative the more likely I am to use that against you -- this is classic BATNA. You don't like my export quota? So what, I've got more interest than I can handle and you can build your batteries without lithium if you don't like that.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
Of course this only applies in a vaccuum. If there are any nations you don't attack and win, they can just build up their economy while you tank yours fighting and then swoop in to defeat you on the cusp of your victory.
Basic strategy in the game of Civilization. The rest of the world gangs up against a warmonger and unless they can promptly achieve world domination, ultimately self-destruct.
In this case, you don't want to be dependent on one geopolitically unstable island. If there is a war, it won't be the EU's decision to start/stop it. You'd want China to be dependent on EU and vice versa, to make it costly to start a war. But if China has nothing to loose by attacking Taiwan and the West would loose all advanced electronics... This is not going to bring any kind of stability. You might only be forced to buy those chips from China, giving the potential aggressor even more leverage (and money)
In March 2020, I made the following predictions:
1) National governments will do what it takes short to provide for their citizens, even if they have to print money to do so, and risk inflation. Check.
2) Supply chains will be shaken up, costs for most goods will go up. Check
3) National governments in Western countries will seek to have strategic industries moved back to domestic or friendly territories. Check.
4) International trust will detoriate, and international conflict will become more likely. Check.
5) As inflation goes up, central banks will try to raise interest rates, but too slowly and too little. Check.
6) At some point, interest rates will rise to a level that causes a severe recession, with rising unemployment, even though inflation still remains higher than the interest rate. As people take to the street, central banks are forced to lower the interest rate, and possibly resume QE. Still open.
7. As interest rates go down, inflation goes even higher than before step 5. It will remain like this for the best part of 10 years (with high volatility), before some countries are willing to take the Volcker medicine for real.
8. As the economic forest fire ends, debts are erased, retirees have lost their savings and the next super-cycle begins.
I don’t think the result is a net positive. It looks more like keeping a lid on justified dissatisfaction while preventing any upset of the status quo.
And of course, as you point out, if you only optimize on the local scale and ignore the global scale, you'll also create an unstable system. Hence the failures of extreme nationalism we've seen historically.
Both cases can lead to instability because of their relationship to one another (the global system is composed of localized systems). You need to look at balance across the entire picture, which means you can't just ignore your own country and its people but you also can't ignore the rest of the world, either. It's tough trying to create a good stable global system that isn't disenfranchizing some large segment of the population.
All of economics looks great on paper until basically any little happenstance quirk utterly breaks the whole thing.
> Geopolitically interconnected trade is all well and good in theory, but putting two superpowers at odds
obviously, as we have seen in the past 40 years, both within and without there has been alot of economic turmoil (economic crisis) instead of pure prosperity and it turns out politicians couldn't outsource their jobs to the market
countries and regions need to politically strive for peace, cooperation and friendship, the market and trade isn't enough imo
Multiple single points of failure is an oxymoron. Either there is one point of failure and it's "single", or there are multiple and by definition no longer "single".