A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.
Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.
Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.
Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.
> Your wiki link for inequality has China ranked 98, not 71, putting it much closer to the USA at 107.
I’m not sure if you understand how a ranked list works: you can invert the ranking order and the relative difference is identical. Whether you say China is 98 and USA 107 (a difference of 9) or you say China is 71 and the USA is 62 (a difference of 9), the relative difference is the same (it’s 9). The only difference is how you interpret which is better, which I didn’t do. My point was they’re similar and middling in the ranking.
> Also notably, the Gini index has a very long list of nominally “capitalist” countries ahead of China, which meet your criteria for a sustained fight against inequality and taking care of the poor.
This is irrelevant to the point I was making. My point wasn’t that China is uniquely positioned with low income inequality. My point was twofold: it is middling in its rankings (i.e., not the most unequal), and it’s decreasing. The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans. You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”) in part because the issue doesn’t address itself in a capitalist system, and intervention has to be taken to address the problem. This is what China is doing, too: their income inequality problem isn’t magically going away on its own free will, it is going away because of government intervention in the economy.
> Forgive me as you’ve written quite a bit here but this seems to be the only concrete policy to discuss vis-a-vis capitalist vs communist systems. The rest is subjective language about “working for the people”. Every politician gets up on stage and talks about how they’re fighting hard to give people better lives. No one really gives those statements any credit.
The difference is that Western politicians rely on selling a promise and not delivering. Yes, they get up on stage and talk, and then do nothing. With the CPC, they actually show results. They make plans and publish them, they implement them, and they publish update reports that show whether or not they stuck to what they said they would do. This is not another situation with empty promises; if it was, they either wouldn’t publish update reports or the update reports would show that they aren’t doing what they said they would. You’re confusing form and function: both CPC and Western politicians make promises, but the Western politicians do not deliver and the CPC does. There’s a reason CPC support in China is so high, and it’s because the party truly works for and benefits the people; if it were empty promises that never benefited the people, they wouldn’t have so much support for the party.
(Edit: I was wrong in the direction I had sorted when I wrote this comment initially. I have removed the now irrelevant part. My point still stands: the two countries I compared are similar, and China is middling in it’s ranking; inverting the sort order doesn’t make the countries less similar, and since they’re middling, inverting the sort order means they’re still middling. I didn’t make a claim that one was better than the other).
>To get the 98 rather than 71 figure, you would sort by Gini index descending.
You literally have it backwards:
Sort Gini index by ascending: China is #98 at 38.2, US is #107 at 39.4
Sort Gini index by descending: US is #62 at 39.4 and China is #71 at 38.2.
It seems you’re right. I will edit that part of my comment. But I will point out: I wasn’t making a statement that one was worse than the other. I made the point that they’re similar in ranking and like I said, even if you reverse ranking order they’re still just as similar. And, since they were middling in their ranking like I originally said, if you invert the sorting, they’re still middling.
> You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”)
There’s no truly free market. Every country has some level of regulation. In the US, many people point to tax rates as the cause of (and solution to) inequality. I think they’re correct but that’s also really stretching the definition of “regulation”.
> The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans.
Every government bigger than a village generally does this. Every politician talks up what they’ve done because they want to keep power. China should be proud of its accomplishments but I’m sorry, there’s nothing unique or special to what you’re saying here.
If there’s a failure to follow through on campaign promises, it’s because the legislation failed to pass but that’s more about democracy than economics. I politely suggest we not go down that road in this thread :).