You claimed things were getting worse. They aren’t. Things are getting better.
Honestly with so many horrible things happening in the US that I've never seen before growing up, I imagined things to be worse than this. 45 people looting a store in broad daylight didn't used to happen when I was a kid. Stores telling employees that they cannot obstruct looters from exiting or chase them outside wasn't a thing when I was a kid. People curled up on the street in masses from taking Tranq didn't happen when I was a kid. I went to San Francisco and had a great memory of it but now the pictures are unrecognizable and the homeless encampments look like a third world country. I saw videos of tenants using the law and the wait times for a trial to essentially force landlords to let them live for free, and the US laws are increasingly supportive of tenant rights; and then to my shock, I saw that the vast majority of comments sided with the tenants blaming the greed of landlords for why they're struggling in the first place. Essentially, they think landlords deserve to be squatted on because they're trying to make money while others are trying to survive. Reminded me of the Cultural Revolution in China where being rich was evil. I saw the news filled with young Americans lamenting that they could never afford a house like their parents because housing prices went up 300% and salaries grew 30% in the same time. This signalled to me that things are getting worse in the US, however, I don't count on it being true because America's absolute decline was never a necessity or even expected to be true for China to surpass it.
I still don't know if, through all this, American is actually improving very slowly as your data suggests or if it's some instance where politicians in need of re-elections are playing their hand (since different sources have different data as there are discrepencies between your sources and mine) but the data that you show me does sink in and cast doubt. It seems that COVID is a point of inflection in many graphs so I'd doubt the usefulness of comparing to pre-COVID times. I'm not dead set on a narrative that the US is in absolute decline; its GDP certainly isn't.
I'm of the general opinion that despite the recent pain and complaining from the less financially-rooted Americans, that the country, as an overall (instead of just the living standards of the people), is still slowly rising; it's just that it's divorced from the common people because due to rivalry from China, America has had to devote more and more resources to competition rather that things to improve peope's lives.
If you're also of the opinion that China is simply moving much faster than the US regardless of America's current actual speed, then there's not fundamental difference between us here.
Depends on the measure. By PPP, it's about double that in 2023, with America at about $80K. Varies between IMF and World bank too but this just shows that China has a lot of potential for growth because it is not, overall, a developed country with slower developed country speeds.
and is currently dealing with severely underdeveloped capital markets
Chinese markets work differently from American ones and it allows China to grow at its world-beating clip so I'd be cautious with any change.
and a real estate/financial crisis.
What crisis? The GDP grows over 5%. China's control over its markets means that often, what amounts to a crisis in the West is just an adjustment for China.
China is also growing slower than other Asian countries at similar levels of development.
There are no countries at similar levels of development to China; we are at a level of reaching autonomy while still charging to the forefront of technology. No other country has ever done this, especially not in Asia where Korea and Japan tethered their rise to subservience to America while North Korea's autonomy led it to become technologically poor. No other country can win a trade and tech war with the US and its Western henchmen and keep marching forth; there is no comparison to China.
The cross sectional data is also worse for China in most metrics compared to the United States.
I have no idea what data you are talking about but if you mean things like per capita income and personal wealth, then of course. The importance is that they are rising and China has much greater overall numbers.
Par the course for any developing country and of limited probative value
Unsure what data but if they are to conclude that China's just like any developing country, then yes, severely limited, crippled probative value.
but not evidence of super management you claim.
Well, if you're drawing evidence from things that you know are of highly limited probative value, then that's your error there. Rather China's management is shown through the fastest and largest proverty alleviation in human history and China, within a few decades, rising from a country that produced nothing worthy of mention to one that could challenge the highest standards of the world in basically every major technological field. Russia pisses the US off but there is no second country in the world that the US fears losing its title to other than China.
the U.S. and China are both reasonably well managed countries (key word, reasonably) with broad improvements in most policy areas; but since China is both larger and poorer, it will have faster growth as it converges to the technological frontier and catches up on physical and human capital formation.
The US is "reasonably well managed" compared to its other developed country peers in Europe which honestly don't set a high standard. In that sense, it's probably better than average. But China is the best-managed country in the world doing things no other country can, faster than anyone's ever done it before (of the things they have), and improving (I mean actually improving its cutting edge technology and economy rather than just its GDP by doing business and selling out to richer countries) faster than any other competition.
No. I don’t care. Whether the U.S. declares war on China or moves to accommodate China are irrelevant to the United States. That is my position.
Surprising, truly a live and let live American. Unfortunatly, the America you envision is not the America that most Americans and all American rulers envision, and so there must be struggle, self-harm and friction with China.
