Comments on: Urban Future (2.0)

By: admin

admin — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 14:00:25 +0000

“China is screwed.” — Do you mean something worse than ‘least screwed (large) patch of a totally screwed world’? If so, I need more in the way of de-compressed persuasion.

By: JB

JB — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 07:21:13 +0000

China is screwed. If China had not preemptively terminated its age of exploration – burning their impressive fleet of merchant ships – the Sassoon opium steam ships would have looked like kine pox compared to the small pox that would have been visited upon them. This time around, they are in for the full force of a much more highly evolved pathogen and they have very little resistance. Indeed, with their high male to female ratio, the conditions are nearly perfect for producing the vestigial male syndrome in China which has been an important ingredient in the recent extremes of centralization of wealth in the West. Their only hope is that Chinese leadership is heavy on engineering and they may just be able to see some of this before their brains are turned to soup, as happened to the leadership in the West during the 20th century.

The opium trade indeed may have provided some limited cross-immunity to what is now in store for them. I am not familiar enough with contemporary Chinese culture to see how much a part of their culture memory of that era is. However, it almost certainly isn’t enough.

The Chinese leadership is the kind that could, if it merely understood the evolutionary dynamics of horizontal vs vertical transmission, institute the kind of assortative migration by mutually consenting adults as a massive exercise in social science. They have demonstrated a willingness to engage in less disciplined kinds of such experiments in economics with various kinds of development zones. The big barrier to this is oil importation, not market availability. They can synthesize an internal market with a citizen’s dividend in a matter of a few years. At that point the various mutually consenting bodies politic would determine the degree of trade vs self-sufficiency.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 00:50:50 +0000

That is to massively exaggerate CCP control in my opinion. Deng Xiaoping released modernity in China, he didn't create it. Modernity makes cities. That's why today's leaders talk about "the objective laws of urban development" -- they don't pretend to be running the main current of modernization, but realistically see themselves adapting to it and guiding its course, at the margin. I'm sanguine about China (medium term) mostly for Lynn and Vanhanen reasons -- it's an anomalous outlier in terms of wealth/IQ equilibrium, and restoring equilibrium has been its basic motor of growth for 30 years, with plenty of fuel still in the tank.

By: John

John — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 23:09:50 +0000

Which is why I’m not sure why you’re so sanguine about China.

I’m not sure why you say that there’s no going back. The urbanization has been the product of centralized policy from the CCP.

By: admin

admin — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 08:11:15 +0000

Cities are like that, it’s true. But there’s no going back.

By: John

John — Sat, 22 Jun 2013 06:44:37 +0000

The massive ongoing urbanization will destroy China. Just as the urbanization over the past few generations has decimated America’s founding stock.

The Great Chinese Famine will be seen as having been trivial compared to this. Ultimately the Famine was just a case of over taxation of grain. It didn’t kill off the seed corn. This will kill off the seed corn.

By: admin

admin — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 14:05:27 +0000

“The future is so bright we’ll need shades,” Glenn Reynolds remarked recently. Not entirely convinced by that? The bad twin isn’t either …

By: spandrell

spandrell — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 13:45:21 +0000

The color scheme is too bright for me. I’ll rather stay here in the shadows.

By: Mark Warburton

Mark Warburton — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:38:52 +0000

Cheers for letting me know. Yeah, a UF review would be great.

I finished Gregory Clark’s book. Overall, good. Although I was a little disappointed at his tentativeness when it came to the three core theories regarding growth. The comparative work on England, Japan and China was super informative – it makes sense that the rigidity of class and population boom of the Asian countries set England apart – how the mighty have fallen.

After James Goulding repeatedly pointed to Moldbug and Szabo, I am now reading them in their (near) entirety, hence why I’ve slinked into the shadows.

Not to mention Lynda Gratton’s ‘The Shi/ft: the future of work is already here’ and Douglas Rushkoff’s ‘Present Shock’ are asking me to read them as they gather dust!

By: admin

admin — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 10:24:36 +0000

Hessler seems like a nice guy, and thus — of course — painfully politically correct.
It’s amazing to me that he could flit off from China to the Middle East — I don’t know whether to be impressed or horrified.
In any case, he doesn’t burrow into the time spiral idea remotely far enough, its potential for exploitation remains almost entirely untapped. He’s not pretentious enough to call himself a philosopher, and that’s required to get to first base.