Comment by 0_____0
3 days ago
That's the most obvious example of failure of Chinese central planning. That and one child policy were abysmal failures that resulted from shoddy science coupled to effective central authority.
Look at the 12/13/14th 5 year plan (the most recently passed). Do you think they achieved their goals?
If your headcanon is that the CCP is inept because they caused crop failures 60 years ago... you could stand to take a look at what they're doing today.
I guess the summary is as simple as: Good five year plans are great, bad five year plans are terrible.
There are sooo many variables in how one could go about making and executing five year plans. They must have figured out a couple of things that tend to work.
The big difference recently from the past is instead of philosophers its scientists who are making the plans and decisions in China so are willing to course correct instead staying the course despite bad out comes.
I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
UN birth rate projections have also been consistently wrong for the past decades.
I think even most experts did not expect fertility rates to follow the trend that it has been following for the past few decades.
>treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
Treating human resources like resources because 100s of millions of bodies ultimately subject to statistics. "Libtard" philosophers from small countries don't truly have to reckon with Malthusian pressure and law of large numbers.
And PRC family planning wasn't wrong, averted ~300m births, and bluntly PRC still left with ~400/1400m surplus mouths trapped in low-end farming and informal economy. Otherwise they'd have 1000m/1700m, more than 400+300 because every family with more kids is one that can't concentrate surplus/resources on tertiary/skill uplift. Now PRC left with TFR problem, but averted developmental doomsday scenario of too many subsistence peasants, aka where India trending towards.
A good read in this area is Dan Wang's book - Breakneck
One could probably summarize it as having engineering leaders solve engineering problems is good, but they can very efficiently implement very bad social policies. Likewise having non-STEM leaders in charge of things like agricultural planning is also bad.
That said modern China is less socialist/communist than a weird state capitalism machine with a dictatorship.
One big difference to modern China vs USSR for example is instead of having 1-2 car companies churning out the cars the state demands, you have more of a competitive local government subsidized market. So they have 50+ car companies all competing in the local marketplace for sales, and eventually some good car companies have surfaced. This was never going to happen with Lada.
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> I don't know if that tracks, senior leadership was heavily influenced towards implementing the one child policy by the works of Song Jian, who came from a rocketry background and presented a model whereby the population would grow to an unsustainable level unless corrective control was applied.
The problem wasn't the idea of modeling itself, it was to not be aware of what we know today from Africa - with more wealth and especially less child mortality, reproduction will drop in about one generation, even without punitive governmental intervention. Even 60 years ago, people tended to have anywhere from 3 to 5 children, just because the chance was so high that at least two would simply die before reaching adulthood.
But thanks due to better maternal healthcare, vaccinations and OSHA, that mortality rate dropped significantly, and so people adapted on their own - and that's before getting into women being able to control fertility on their own or housing/cost of living exploding in the same timeframe.
>I think it is unlikely philosophers would have suggested to treat population growth like tuning a PID controller.
We are talking about Marxist philosophers. These weren't some scholars of Christianity, who would have insisted on the inherent worth of human life and the injustice of state intervention deep into personal lives, these were the same "philosophers" who justified extermination programs based on the insufficient revolutionary spirit of the exterminated.
One child policy has brought a demographic problem today but has solved an existential problem in 70s
If your headcanon is "5 year plans are great because some chinese supplier has cheap DDR-4", I would submit a gentle introduction to history is helpful (i.e. we took a couple irrational great leaps forward from cheap DDR-4 => China owns the RAM market => 5 year plans are the way to go)
I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work. You can gut your competitors and then dominate. It’s the Uber strategy applied at the geopolitical level.
If you could figure out how to get your country to dominate the world economy without also allowing your leaders to commit campaigns of mass-internment and extermination, then maybe you’d have a decent political system.
It's not the Uber strategy, because there's a physical limit to how efficiently a human can drive another human around the city. The Uber strategy was to push out competitors then bring pricing back up.
Chinese PV isn't going to get more expensive. The massive subsidies seen by Chinese PV companies from 2005-2024 account for a whopping 3.2% of solar firm incomes. [1] Over that same 2004-2024 period, solar cells prices have fallen to about 4-5% of 2024 prices. Not a typo. It's not the Uber model if they win by actually making the product at a fraction of the cost.
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/subsidies-and-the-solar...
> I think it’s at least valid to conclude that a nation-level commitment to taking over a specific industry can work
From ONE supplier having cheap DDR-4 currently?
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You can only "gut" the competition if you're genuinely able to supply at lowest cost in a sustainable way. Selling at a loss and trying to make it up in volume is not a very good strategy. The Uber strategy was betting on having robotaxis everywhere, and then raising prices when they found out that this wouldn't be a viable solution in the near term.
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Notice the go-to for capitalists against communism is "Look at how many people they killed!!!"
No such metric is available for capitalist countries. Thats because its *always* an individual failure in capitalism, not political/societal.
You CHOSE not to have healthcare. (You work 1099, or work a job that doesnt provide healthcare, due to tying job and health.)
You CHOSE to go with UnitedHealthCare that denies 30% for baseless reasons. (The company chose your plan, you have no real choice here.)
You CHOSE to be homeless. (You can't force companies to interview or hire you.)
You CHOSE to eat the only food nearby (You live in a food desert).
Just from Hepatitis C, the company that makes Solvaldi makes a cure. Costs $84k, $1000 a pill for 84 days.
But we see more and more deaths from Hep C. But this is a "personal failure", not a systemic one in a capitalist country.
"Under capitalism, man oppresses man. Under socialism, it's just the opposite"