The U.S. shed factories and the skills around them, while China accepted inefficiency to build complete industrial systems and long-term manufacturing power.
Within U.S. politics, a longstanding divide has existed between progressive leaders who emphasize distributional policy—welfare, equality, and redistribution—and those who argue that economic growth itself must remain a central objective. Critics and supporters of Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 2025) converge on a key claim: without robust growth and sustained supply expansion, redistribution alone … Read more
In the United States, the growing prevalence of ALICE households—asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed—represents not merely a social welfare challenge but a structural failure in talent mobilization. High living costs, pervasive legal and regulatory risk, and an expensive failure environment constrain individuals’ ability to pursue technical training, tolerate career risk, or sustain long time horizons. These … Read more
“Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE) describes U.S. households that earn above the Federal Poverty Level yet lack the resources necessary for economic security. ALICE is neither a conspiracy nor a moral failure; it is a rational outcome of interacting systems optimized for self-protection in a society that has lost its stabilizers. U.S. over-financialization and … Read more
The United States persistently confuses moral conviction and procedural authority with substantive material strategy, a pattern evident in its unplanned decoupling from global dependencies—a deliberate echo of habits ingrained since the Cold War’s end. To effectively vie with China in the technological arena and avert recurring pitfalls, the U.S. must confront its fundamental errors and … Read more
The fall of General Electric, as chronicled in Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric (Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann, 2020), offers a sobering yet instructive case study for China’s manufacturing sector. Rather than a cautionary tale of inevitable decline, GE’s experience serves as an analytical framework for examining how structural weaknesses … Read more
A recent Bloomberg article, “Give Up on ‘Winning’ Against China” (16 Dec 2025), argues that the United States should acknowledge China’s growing influence rather than cling to the hope of its decline. Over the past three decades, Western misconceptions—rooted in orientalist thinking, Cold War binaries, and ideological assumptions—led many scholars to view China as a … Read more
China’s rise over the past several decades was neither accidental nor the result of conspiracy or simplistic authoritarian control, but rather the outcome of pragmatic governance, long-term state coordination, and sustained investment in human capital, industrial capacity, and applied technology. Western observers have often misunderstood this trajectory by interpreting China through rigid ideological binaries—free versus … Read more
Shenzhen’s rise as a shopping and consumer paradise reflects the effects of freer markets, open competition, and rapid supply expansion. By contrast, persistently high prices in Hong Kong—and similarly in the United States—stem from institutional constraints, including restrictive land-use policies, labor barriers, professional monopolies, and protectionist regulations. These mechanisms limit entry and suppress competition, driving … Read more
In Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever (2022), Nomi Prins advances a structural rather than a purely ideological explanation for the West’s retreat from the real economy. She does not argue that this shift was driven primarily by Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis or by the confidence of a Pax … Read more
Since the Asian Financial Crisis, China and Western economies have followed sharply diverging paths in the relationship between finance and the real economy. As Peter Nolan argues in Finance and the Real Economy: China and the West Since the Asian Financial Crisis (2020), China has consistently deployed finance to support infrastructure, production, employment, and productivity, … Read more