Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…In How Asia Works, Studwell makes the interesting point that because these countries are so overflowing with labor that it makes sense in these countries to have lots of peasants who can tend to the land instead of having a single landowners with a large tract of land. Mechanization is maybe not the best idea when you have so much labor that can actually do these things that are not scalable. Anyways, going back to Taiwan. The growth rate of modern day China is slowing because of zero COVID, less foreign investments, data intervention in the economy. I think consumers aren't spending as much. And also obviously because of demographics. Does this increase or decrease the odds of Chinese action on Taiwan? I honestly don't know. But I think a better way of looking at it is to look at consequences. It's guaranteed that if they go into Taiwan, it is a high consequence event without a doubt. What the odds are, I don't know. However, if you listen to their speeches, they tell you they're going to do it. They're consistent. The West learned that you read improbable speeches, right? People read Mein Kampf and said, “Oh, this is a nutcase. No one would ever do that.” Well, it quite accurately represented people. Even in dictatorships, they have to transmit messages to the population and they quite often very accurately tell you what they're going to do. Putin has been quite clear of what he's been up to. Stalin was very clear of what he was up to. So let's judge Xi Jinping at his word and he says he's going to go for it. Now, whether he's still in power, I don't know. But here's a problem for which we don't have a solution, that Chinese people have to figure out the solution. The Chinese Communist Party has clearly made the decision that it wants to maintain a monopoly of political power. And for a while there, during Deng Xiaoping, that worked because the reforms that they wanted to make for agriculture and things, they can maintain their monopoly of power but also do things that allow people to get much wealthier. So that went in tandem for a number of years. Now we're at the inflection point where you have a lot of educated people and businesses who are really integrated into the world and they want to make autonomous decisions. Also, you have some very large, very successful companies and they have quite a bit of clout. The Communist Party worries about this because what do people want at that point? It's probably some influence over political decisions. And the Communist Party said that's off the table. Okay, if it's off the table, how do you keep it off the table? All the things that you're talking about. This 24x7 surveillance state. Since you have a computer science background, you'd have a better understanding of this than I. Think about the cost if the United States had a 24x7 surveillance system where you're literally doing it down to who's jaywalking and who's not, in order to put it into their social security score. Whose kid in their classrooms rolling their eyes at their teachers, I kid you not, and putting it down as a ding on that kid's social score. And also, who knows what's accurate and inaccurate on the facial recognition stuff. So they start chalking up the wrong scores for the wrong people. The cost would be incredible. All the people power you're going to have to devote to this. And then all the false positives, which will be incendiary for the people who are falsely considered disloyal. This is where they're at. And now they’re doing the National Disappearing Act. We don't know where their minister of defense is. He's a non-person. And oh, by the way, what happened to the foreign minister? Give me a break. Yeah, and the cost is also so gruesome in comparison to the alternatives. There are so many cheap interventions like giving people iron supplements and folic acid or giving them 20-dollar eyeglasses, that could raise the childhood nutrition that is lacking in rural parts of China by so much that it would actually be worth it for the government if you think of the additional tax revenue that healthy people can bring in the future.…

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