Re: Science And Technology Of The Near-ish Future
Posted: Thu Jan 06, 2011 4:25 pm
Yes, essentially all you've pointed out that odd things can happen, but none of them speak towards the Chinese situation. The lend no support to the argument aside from the lame, "Well, stranger things have happened." If you're going to argue that the second largest (or is it 3rd?) economy in the world is about to collapse into irrelevancy in a decade you need a better argument than weird things can happen.
A lot of people might have believed Europe was too intertwined to go to war but they would have been idiots. Europe has been going to war with one another for millenia. Even back when "War wouldn't happen," they were all building up armies, forming alliances, and glaring at one another across their borders. Anyone who thought war wasn't possible was obviously very, very high.
Yes, the UK lost its grip on its colonies but it didn't happen in a decade. The UK losing it's grip on its colonial empire had been going on for a solid century. It wasn't like things just went away in the blink of an eye. It was a long ongoing process. A long slow decline doesn't really apply to a situation where someone is in a meteoric rise and you're predicting total collapse in a decade.
There weren't a few people claiming Versailles was a bad idea, people actively involved in the treaty thought it was a bad idea. There were plenty of people thinking it was a bad idea. The Russian revolution wasn't scaring the rest of the world to the point where Germany was ignored. Hell, by that reasoning a strong Germany would have served as a buffer to the rest of Europe if Russia got antsy. Versailles was purely about the French trying to screw the Germans.
Germany was the geopolitical center of the world at the time and it stayed that way until WWII. The problem with the analogy is that WWII was a major shift in how things worked. There's no prediction that we're going to see a huge shift in how things work WWII style to bring China to its knees. Just the prediction that the course they're on is going to ruin them in short order. Also, people weren't assuming that Germany would forever and always be the geopolitical center of the world. People knew that a war was coming. Hell, the period of time when Germany controlled Eastern Europe, most of France, and was still friends with Russia was measured in months and at that time you had Lend-Lease rolling and American's going to Europe to fight the Nazi's specifically because the government wasn't getting into it.
As for Japan, again, look at your time frame. 50's to the 80's. That's 30 years, and people paying attention in the 60's and 70's would have seen Japan's economy making huge strides. It's a long steady trend. What's being proposed in China's position is that the long steady trend is not only going to come to a screeching halt but it's going to completely double back on itself.
You're doing better with the German and USSR analogies in 1980 but again there were serious issues with the USSR that were well known, namely that a command economy like theirs isn't stable and their rampant military spending was choking them. Reagan's defense spending of the 80's wasn't done to win a war with the USSR, it was done to give the USSR a choice. They could either back down and try to salvage their economy or they could keep trying to keep up and wreck it. They chose the later and the inevitable happened. You still have a huge problem. The Chinese aren't spending themselves into a hole for their military, they've loosened the control of their economy enough that it's self-sustaining and not only being propped up by the threat of violence, and in the end the Chinese are communist in name only. The Chinese regime has shown itself to be imminently capable of adapting and keeping itself in power.
It's not just my "feeling" that the Chinese are on the rise and the US isn't keeping up, it's the reality of the situation. All the data and metrics of the last two decades have had China closing the gap and making huge strides. Even if their economy is awash in bad debt they still have their trump card, at the end of the day the guys in charge have the ability to say do this and it happens and they have the balls to stick by it. Our economy got into trouble because we had short sighted idiots sharing power and bickering over things. They've got a dictatorial style that will let them enact swift and broad changes to deal with a crisis.
If the claim was being made that the Chinese economy was going to slow or they'd be facing some rough transition times ahead it would be far easier to take seriously than claims the Chinese economy is going to collapse and the country Balkanize in the next decade making them irrelevant.
A lot of people might have believed Europe was too intertwined to go to war but they would have been idiots. Europe has been going to war with one another for millenia. Even back when "War wouldn't happen," they were all building up armies, forming alliances, and glaring at one another across their borders. Anyone who thought war wasn't possible was obviously very, very high.
Yes, the UK lost its grip on its colonies but it didn't happen in a decade. The UK losing it's grip on its colonial empire had been going on for a solid century. It wasn't like things just went away in the blink of an eye. It was a long ongoing process. A long slow decline doesn't really apply to a situation where someone is in a meteoric rise and you're predicting total collapse in a decade.
There weren't a few people claiming Versailles was a bad idea, people actively involved in the treaty thought it was a bad idea. There were plenty of people thinking it was a bad idea. The Russian revolution wasn't scaring the rest of the world to the point where Germany was ignored. Hell, by that reasoning a strong Germany would have served as a buffer to the rest of Europe if Russia got antsy. Versailles was purely about the French trying to screw the Germans.
Germany was the geopolitical center of the world at the time and it stayed that way until WWII. The problem with the analogy is that WWII was a major shift in how things worked. There's no prediction that we're going to see a huge shift in how things work WWII style to bring China to its knees. Just the prediction that the course they're on is going to ruin them in short order. Also, people weren't assuming that Germany would forever and always be the geopolitical center of the world. People knew that a war was coming. Hell, the period of time when Germany controlled Eastern Europe, most of France, and was still friends with Russia was measured in months and at that time you had Lend-Lease rolling and American's going to Europe to fight the Nazi's specifically because the government wasn't getting into it.
As for Japan, again, look at your time frame. 50's to the 80's. That's 30 years, and people paying attention in the 60's and 70's would have seen Japan's economy making huge strides. It's a long steady trend. What's being proposed in China's position is that the long steady trend is not only going to come to a screeching halt but it's going to completely double back on itself.
You're doing better with the German and USSR analogies in 1980 but again there were serious issues with the USSR that were well known, namely that a command economy like theirs isn't stable and their rampant military spending was choking them. Reagan's defense spending of the 80's wasn't done to win a war with the USSR, it was done to give the USSR a choice. They could either back down and try to salvage their economy or they could keep trying to keep up and wreck it. They chose the later and the inevitable happened. You still have a huge problem. The Chinese aren't spending themselves into a hole for their military, they've loosened the control of their economy enough that it's self-sustaining and not only being propped up by the threat of violence, and in the end the Chinese are communist in name only. The Chinese regime has shown itself to be imminently capable of adapting and keeping itself in power.
It's not just my "feeling" that the Chinese are on the rise and the US isn't keeping up, it's the reality of the situation. All the data and metrics of the last two decades have had China closing the gap and making huge strides. Even if their economy is awash in bad debt they still have their trump card, at the end of the day the guys in charge have the ability to say do this and it happens and they have the balls to stick by it. Our economy got into trouble because we had short sighted idiots sharing power and bickering over things. They've got a dictatorial style that will let them enact swift and broad changes to deal with a crisis.
If the claim was being made that the Chinese economy was going to slow or they'd be facing some rough transition times ahead it would be far easier to take seriously than claims the Chinese economy is going to collapse and the country Balkanize in the next decade making them irrelevant.