sgentle 4 days ago

Market cap and it's not even close. Turns out financialisation is the classic you-get-what-you-asked-for-not-what-you-wanted of capitalism. We told the optimiser to make number go up, and number has certainly gone up. China's number? Not as up.

I think it could have gone differently if we gave our economic system something to optimise other than itself, but then we wouldn't have centibillionaires, so... swings and roundabouts I guess?

  • direwolf20 3 days ago

    Who cares which country has a higher market cap? That's a capitalist concept, of course the capitalist country has more. I'm talking who has the more advanced technology.

throwawaypath 4 days ago

>Maybe capitalism was a failure.

China is hyper-capitalist. They're living proof that capitalism has won.

  • pianopatrick 4 days ago

    China is a mixed economy with some capitalist parts and some socialist parts just like us. Their mix is just a bit more effective than our mix than our mix and they have higher scale.

    • peterfirefly 4 days ago

      It's more effective at depressing wages and at shovelling other people's money at whoever the politicians want to win. They are also much better at hiding debt -- in manufacturing companies, in banks, and in provincial governments. A lot of their successes lose money but they are awesome at hiding it and they might well outcompete Western companies and thereby cause a lot of harm.

      • pm90 3 days ago

        What do you mean “hiding it”? Are you suggesting Chinas manufacturing capacity is entirely fraudulent or cooking the books? Or that the state is providing subsidies? Because if its the latter… have you seen the brouhaha over Amazon HQ2? Or seen the number of tax credits/incentives doled out by US cities to companies that “promise” jobs but don’t even deliver them? (but keep their subsidies).

      • tacticus 4 days ago

        > They are also much better at hiding debt

        Through bonds? or SVPs to fund the building of datacentres?

    • nick49488171 4 days ago

      China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.

      In China, I imagine that if your company does something relevant to the five year initiative then you get a lot of red tape cut for you.

      • overfeed 3 days ago

        > China is capitalist on a state level, that's where they are winning. The US lets things get mired in red tape and special interests because nobody wants to take responsibility for growth.

        i.e. in China, the government controls capital; in the US, capital controls the government.

  • mayama 4 days ago

    > China is hyper-capitalist.

    China is one party system, where CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.

    • incr_me 4 days ago

      > CPC controls and owns production, policy, finance and even consumption levers.

      These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.

      > China is one party system

      This is also relatively uninteresting. There have been many countries where a single party has nominally remained in power for about as long as the CCP has. That Deng Xiaoping's coup occurred without nominally dismantling the party makes the "one party system" distinction a superficial one.

      • mayama 4 days ago

        > These terms are useless for distinguishing anything -- what you said can be said about literally any capitalist state.

        CPC mandates and gets seats on highest boards of companies, combines IP research across civil military, is both producer and consumer of products etc. Look at China's civil military fusion policy on the latest iteration of how they are doing this. In china there is no separate 3-4 branches of govt like in most places. CPC controls all legislative, executive, judiciary, military and private company boards and financial capital.

  • xiphias2 4 days ago

    It's not like US is not capitalist in anything: it's still state-of-the-art in software, which preoves that the problem is not with capital markets.

    It just probably overregulated hardware manufacturing out of existence with unionizing and other too strong regulations.

    • oblio 4 days ago

      Agreed. The children yearn for the mines and the 12+ hour shifts in factories.

barbazoo 4 days ago

Or in a more charitable light maybe capitalism just isn’t the only system that’s capable of reaching certain technological development.

tonyhart7 4 days ago

You acting like china isn't capitalism

  • Ray20 3 days ago

    But that isn't capitalism. It's socialism, which uses many market mechanisms to manage the economy.

ruszki 4 days ago

Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones. They are not there yet. Of course, the general populace doesn’t really care, and the vast majority of the market is not driven by this, but still.

  • theshackleford 4 days ago

    > Making good cars. They can make cheap ones, maybe acceptable ones, but not good ones.

    Did you just get out of your Time Machine from a decade ago?

    • ruszki 3 days ago

      No, I drove them, and also knowing how they sacrificed safety for example by integrating a lot of safety critical systems for the sake of price.

  • jansper39 3 days ago

    That's why the whole NCAP safety table is topped with Chinese vehicles then.

  • evanjrowley 3 days ago

    My experience in a BYD is they'd be in very high demand across the U.S. if it were possible to buy them here.