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Jack Cargill's avatar

One of the best Tooze commentaries. Yes, authoritarian regimes can maneuver policy more quickly and powerfully than democracies, for better or worse. Even when employed for the good, China's resource allocations are behind the curve in a most worrisome fashion, and the rest of us are mostly sidelined by our preoccupation with present concerns and political stalemates. We did not evolve to be concerned with survival of the species, rather the reproduction of ourselves. Sublimation of those drives has its limits, and we are constantly coming up against them...

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jbt1980's avatar

To put the following in perspective let us start with the generally agreed fact that China’s GDP in current dollar terms is roughly the same size as that of the EU and considerably smaller than that of the US.

How meaningful is China's GDP in dollar terms? Are the solar panels and windmills installed in China bought and paid in dollars? With de-dollarization of critical energy and materials supply chains, soon enough not even the energy (almost exclusively from fossil fuels) or materials (extracted using energy from fossil fuels) that go into them will be paid by USD. Looking at PPP, Chinese economy is already quite bigger than US:

https://www.worldeconomics.com/Indicator-Data/Economic-Size/Revaluation-of-GDP.aspx

Solid analysis based on PPP premises also explains why Russia's economy is not anywhere near the much predicted collapse:

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-russias-economic

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