This is the ending paragraph. I put it at the top here to be clear I’m not suggesting the world adopt China’s tactics.
This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent. But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.
The important part of the headline is the “by choice” part. This should be standard economics by now. The conversation about lazy people causing their own poverty should be considered a joke. We have no excuse for the lack of investment in our own people.
I laugh when I make an extra to explain what I’m posting about and the first response is a reaction to the headline. Didn’t read the article, didn’t look up other democracies, didn’t even look at the history of this country.
The fact that they differ makes the comparison interesting.
If i sketch it.
China is a totalitarian state, with a state capitalism. His big worries are his demography, the birth of a middle class with needs, including political needs, and the balance to be maintained between low costs of production for exportation, and developing internal consumption.
USA are a liberal capitalism, where big business leads the show. Its worries are the need to stabilize the dominancy of big business and increasing profit, while appeasing the voters. Its solution is Trump who works for big business, while explaining that the true problems of USA are migrants and wokes.
Both countries fight for the world domination. Right now, USA has still advantages, but i would bet for China.
Somewhat simplifying, but, the US has a government that is dominated by capitalists, and China has some capitalists but they are controlled by government. The short term goals of business weaken the population so we are losing to the long term goals of a government that is providing for it’s people. Granted, neither one seems to care too much about those people or the future of the planet, so, there’s that.
I agree with this for the most part. Even though it doesn’t explain why the nations are so different.
It comes down to the fact China cares much more about its image and how others see it rather than actually making things better for its poor. The Chinese middle class is still worse off than the poor in America.
America cares more about letting people have the chance to succeed or fail for real, and we don’t care how we look doing it.
This is an odd argument. I’m addressing poverty, not some overall score of all the things we have or can buy at Home Depot or whatever it is you are referring to. If we are providing opportunity then why are we failing?
We aren’t failing -yet, we’re doing worse than we used to. But as I said before, the poor in America are still better off than the middle class in China.
And as I said from the beginning this isn’t about an overall judgment of “better”. That would be based on subjective standards that don’t change the more objective standard of poverty. The question is what are we doing worse than we once were? The answer is that it’s by design to prop up corporate wealth.