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Even neoliberal economist Paul Krugman admits China is not only ahead, but US is unlikely to catch up even if the GOP loses power in 2028. (paulkrugman.substack.com)
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by to c/economics@lemmygrad.ml
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[–] 6 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

It's not a prescriptive approach to the problems though. The author basically is saying the US is so fucked and Trump made it more fucked.

Americans have had this neolib strategy for the past few decades of climbing the value chain leaving manufacturing, privatization, moving into services, allowing tech bros to cook/break stuff etc.

Now he wants to do a backflip and be like China and wondering why it's hard to catch up. Is he a neolib or what?

If he is focusing on doing everything then that's actually being unfocused. Tech bros don't want universities doing the research. They want to own it. The whole point of outsourcing to the 3rd world was to bring cheaper goods in rather than expensively manufacturing it domestically. Privatization was meant to improve services. These are the neolib strategies.

These neolib dumb fucks don't make sense.

This is like Bessent & Lutnick saying importers will just eat the tariffs. Why would local manufacturing ever take off if the imports are still coming in?

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  • [–] [S] 10 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Right, the whole thesis is incoherent because it doesn't really address the root causes for why things are the way they are. I find this is a typical thing with libs where they just think everything is just a matter of will. They don't look at systems in terms of contradictions as a Marxist would. I mean you don't even have to be a Marxist, anybody who understands systems thinking would understand the concept of selection pressures, and how effective behaviors that are rewarded by the system end up dominating.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Your reply here mostly describes my thoughts on the Sachs/Mearscheimer debate vis a vis "spheres of security". Neither party seemed to me to be engaged in systemic analysis. Sachs' thesis is normative and idealist and fails to take into account why the u.s.' belligerence is increasingly unrestrained (decohering economic base). Mearscheimer kind of trots out his standard realist analysis which imo is mechanistic and can't accommodate factors which don't fit into the behavior of imperialist powers, i.e. also idealist.

    That whole thing was kind of hard to listen to for me. Both of those two are useful in different ways but I thought that discussion simultaneously highlighted their limitations.

    For ref https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9465503?scrollToComments=true

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    I find this is a typical thing with libs where they just think everything is just a matter of will. They don’t look at systems in terms of contradictions as a Marxist would.

    There was another article in Krugman's substack, "No, Trump Can’t Make Manufacturing Great Again". (Behind a subscription wall)

    Subtitle was"We’re a service economy now — and that’s OK".

    A service economy doesn't need the electricity generation capacity of China - something that, in the original article, he was using to point to China being economically ahead of US. China uses the power for manufacturing and has a greater population. Why does he want to point to that statistic?

    There's no direction to the strategy just dumb and dumber.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 10 months ago

    It's honestly hilarious to watch just how dumb these people are. These things should be obvious, and yet here we have a well respected western "intellectual" spewing incoherent nonsense.

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