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One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet com
by natechols 3y ago
One thing that has been constant for at least a decade or more is that every time a lab in China publishes even an incremental advance, a legion of internet commenters descends to declare the end of US hegemony because Americans didn't discover it first.
- lost_tourist 3y agoYep "it's the end of science in the barbaric Western nations" crowd.
- andrepd 3y agoWhich is not to say that science in the capitalist western nations is not going through rough times, because it is?
- CPLX 3y agoIs your argument that China’s increasing technical prowess will not inevitably result in the US hegemony ending?
- bobthepanda 3y agoPeople said the same about Japan. The '80s and '90s was a bunch of media-fueled "the Japanese will run the world" hysteria. Japan is a technical powerhouse but that doesn't inevitably lead to ending hegemony. It requires a lot of other work too.
- whimsicalism 3y agoChina has 1.2 billion people, I feel like it is basically an inevitability at this point.
- evgen 3y ago1.2 billion _old_ people. While quantity has a quality all its own, in this case the demographics are not what you want to see if you are predicting long-term Chinese growth just based on population.
- missedthecue 3y agoMedian age China, 2022: 38.5 Median age USA, 2022: 38.9
- pizzalife 3y agoLook at the actual age distributions rather than collapsing the data into a single number. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
- whimsicalism 3y agoI see a country with triple the young people we do.
- robot_no_421 3y agoYou should be measuring that population as a % of their total population. Not sure why you're comparing absolute numbers. China has triple the young people we do, but quadruple the old people that depend on the young people.
- whatshisface 3y agoDepend on them for what, the cost of a bowl of rice? What is it exactly about 80 year olds that will collapse a country with a brutal government like China has?
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- ajuc 3y agoJapanese and South Korean increasing technical prowess didn't, why would Chinese be any different? China has serious fundamental problems and if you account for its gigantic population - it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world. It's fashionable to talk about China taking over, but it's far from guaranteed. China is pretty much confirmed to be falsifying its economic stats for example [1] [2] but people just take them at face value anyway. I don't understand why. [1] https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators-lies-about-economic-growth/6813119.html https://www.voanews.com/a/satellites-shed-light-on-dictators... [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of-chinas-national-accounts/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-forensic-examination-of...
- whimsicalism 3y ago> it's seriously underachieving not only compared to US, but even compared to the rest of the developed world. This statement would have been viewed as absolutely obvious and ridiculous 2 decades ago. The fact that it even needs to be said now is indicating how fast they are advancing.
- ajuc 3y agoThey were underachieving for 2 centuries, ceasing to kill their own citizens by millions and imprisoning anybody who tried to think for themselves is enough to grow if you did so for a long time. But it does not make you a new hegemon. I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization. Once they return to the mean - they will very likely slow down. Arguably they already did (3% official growth last year + people accusing them of falsifying data for 1-2 percentage points of growth each year would make them already grow slower than some western countries, including the US).
- scrlk 3y ago> I highly doubt they can preserve their pace of growth for next few decades without significant changes to the regime and liberalization. "Demographics is destiny" also comes to mind. Note how the era of "Japan Inc." during the 1980s was also the time when the post-war baby boom population were in their 30s-40s (i.e. peak productive worker population). As this cohort has aged and are now in retirement, Japan's economic performance has tailed off. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/File:Japan_animated_population_pyramid.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F... If you look at the Chinese population pyramid, we could already be at the point of maximum Chinese economic growth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_population_pyramid_from_1950_to_2022.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F... From the geopolitical standpoint, this may also explain why China and Russia have become more belligerent - they will lack sufficient numbers of young fighting aged men in the next few decades.
- natechols 3y agoThe only argument I'm making is that it's insane to draw sweeping geopolitical conclusions from the fact that Chinese scientists posted their attempts at reproducing a Korean lab's result on Twitter before the Americans did.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI guess this is what happened after "the bomb" was developed ? The US could hold the world at ransom.