What Fueled the 'East Asian Miracle'?(theatlantic.com) |
What Fueled the 'East Asian Miracle'?(theatlantic.com) |
1. A local government friendly to the US. Gov type did not matter.
2. US Workers starting to want medical benefits, by the late 60s, hardly anyone would take a job without benefits. This includes sick time.
3. Environment Controls starting in the 60s. I think this is a big one.
4. High Wages in the US
5. Improved intercontinental flights and cheap shipping. I think in the 60s the US merchant was quickly being outsourced to cheap countries.
6. An of course corporate greed and the rush to make Wall Street happy.
You just need to look at ROC in the 90s, lots of companies started moving manufacturing there because Japan and Taiwan was getting too expensive.
Now I think they are slowly moving out of ROC to places it SE Asia like Vietnam.
ROC is Republic of China, which is the government that started in 1911 and currently has its actual seat of government in Taipei, ruling over all of Taiwan province and some parts of Fujian province (Kinmen, Matsu). On paper, ROC still claims all the other provinces of China.
PRC is People's Republic of China, which is the government that started in 1949, currently has its seat of government in Beijing, and rules mainland China and most of Fujian province. On paper, PRC claims all provinces of China, including Taiwan province as well as the parts of Fujian province that are currently part of ROC.
Western outsourcing to ROC occurred much earlier than the 90s.
None of the bullet points you laid out are specific to East Asia.
(that last trait is a bit more contentious than the former ones)
[0] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3834612/
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01918...
[2] - https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-...
They're only talking about the last 100-200 years. That's significant on the American time scale, but insignificant on a Chinese one.
It's interesting to me that older cultures like the Chinese, Japanese, and the Maya view history as cyclical, while Americans tend to have more a narrative of "linear progress", or even "manifest destiny" (a term I heard in grade school but probably didn't really understand until being an adult)
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I think Ray Dalio's explanation is the most concise and takes into account the cyclical nature of history (and wow this video has 55 M views now)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
Roughly speaking, [edited] China and India likely had most of the world GDP for more than 1000 years [1] ... you can think of it as a miracle for them to rise again, or just part of a cycle.
And there are absolutely cycles in history, just ones that are longer than any "news" article tends to talk about
I also think Americans are now waking up to a cyclical view. Everyone is talking about how this is the "first" generation to make less money than their parents, or the "first" to have shorter life span
But it's only "first" if you don't recognize the cycles! That's understandable because of America's history, but it is a limited analysis
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[1] edit: I looked deeper into this, and I agree it's flimsy, as mentioned below. But I think the larger point still stands -- it's a only a "miracle" if you're looking at a certain time frame, and n=1
For a continuous duration of nearly 1700 years from the year 1 CE, India was the world's largest economy, constituting 35 to 40% of the world GDP.
https://archive.is/kQNT4#selection-1577.155-1581.525
Although there are problems with the analysis that are mentioned in both articles:
A major caveat: If you looked at the chart in any depth, you probably noticed a big problem with it. The time periods between data points aren't equal -- in fact they are not close at all
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So, one way to read the graph, very broadly speaking, is that everything to the left of 1800 is an approximation of population distribution around the world and everything to the right of 1800 is a demonstration of productivity divergences around the world
But the analysis for China is equally flimsy, so I edited my comment to say "China and India" and "likely"
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TBH now that I see this data, I think both claims are a little flimsy. I was more referring to Dalio's analysis, which covers the last 500 years only, and probably got a few claims mixed up.
For some reason Dalio does not include India much in his analysis -- it is mostly focused on China, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and the USA. That could be his bias, or perhaps a definitional issue with what counts as "India" (and similarly what counts as "China"), which is a difficult question over 500-1000 year time frames
China and India between them counted for at least half of humanity during that period, and probably more. No wonder they were the largest economies.
I don't think I believed this until 2017 or 2020 or so, but it seems clear that the USA is on a natural downcycle and probably will be for several decades
I think the causes are pretty well laid out in the book - basically having the global reserve currency is kind of an unfair advantage, and it leads the population to become decadent and unproductive, it leads to institutional decay, etc.
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That brought to mind the tweet/slogan "what if your whole personality depends on low interest rates?", and now I see that something similar was discussed on Hacker News too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33946342
Basically people live in a particular part of a cycle, which lasts longer than their lifetimes
(but there are also non-cyclical changes / progress, and yeah there are big flaws with trying to go back 1000 years)
c) Having lots of ships, sailors and powerful army (many in Europe)
d) Being a trading hub (Italy)
e) Having access to lots of valuable metals, salt, gold (richest person in history was Mansa Musa, King of Mali)