
The American Dream Is Alive in China - johnny313
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
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pascalxus
It's a mistake to say we're rich because our GDP or even GDP per capita is
high. What matters is PPP - purchasing power parity with a basket of goods
weighted towards the essentials of life: housing, transportation, food, water,
child care and medical insurance. By that measure, I don't think the US is as
rich as we think we are. but i would like to see things measured and quoted in
that regard, it would be more relevant and accurate for comparing wealth.

Such an analysis would also be useful for comparing the rich and poor within a
country. here in the US: someone earning 100k in the midwest is much wealthier
than someone earning 150k in palo alto. Of course, if your basket of goods
comparison is how many apple cell phones they can buy, it's not gonna be an
accurate comparison

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contingencies
I have been telling people this for over 15 years. Catches include: we
economic migrants have reduced access to the market, less progressive
regulatory stance, shifting and complicated bureaucratic visa/banking/tax
processes to deal with, and even difficulties getting capital out again. One
summary is: it's relatively easy to make big money in China, but hard to make
a liveable salary - this affects Chinese people more than migrants. Macro
economically, lots of cash was recently won on real estate (like in many
developed economies recently, such as my native Sydney), and prior to that
outright corruption, though both avenues are now closing and priority is being
placed upon technology IP by the government (read: free government handouts
for local competitors, foreign companies generally excluded).

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tabtab
Most people judge based on their life-time experience. Being the average
person is about 40, they typically judge based on the last 4 decades. China's
history is full of violent revolutions. A big economic slump could snowball
into political and social catastrophe. The gov't could grow complacent and/or
out-of-touch and try to solve social unrest with ham-hands, making it worse.
As the investment disclaimer says, "Past (near-term) results are not a
guarantee of future results."

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canada_dry
Give China another 20 years and they will surely have overtaken the USA in
world leadership.

Consider their new Silk Road initiative. 3rd world/developing countries and
America's numerous enemies alike are lining up to ally themselves with China.

Meanwhile the USA shits on its closest allies.

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axaxs
People have been saying this for 40ish years, if not more, and it's never been
close to happening and still isn't. China's relationships with developing
nations tend to be predatory/parasitic, not an alliance.

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statguy
At least those relationships don't involve carpet bombing rich and thriving
places back in to the stone age.

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dikei
Not yet. As the last country to go to war with China, we know full well that
they won't hesitate bombing former allies should the circumstance calls for
it.

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statguy
Let's reserve judgement until China actually orchestrates a Fallujah scale
bombing.

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csense
This isn't a surprise. Back in the day, a kid fresh out of high school in the
US could get a job that supported a house with a yard, a car, children, and a
non-working spouse.

Factories were both directly paying good wages for non-high-skill positions
and fueling a myriad of local businesses where those workers spent their
money. Then globalization happened, and those factories went to China. Entire
local and regional economies collapsed and a lot of them STILL haven't
recovered.

Great opportunity for Chinese people, not so good for American people.

You might think from this that I hate the Chinese, or the poor, or something.
That's not true. I just think we need to find a way for regular Chinese people
to have hope and opportunity, that doesn't involve taking hope and opportunity
away from regular American people.

Billionaire Ray Dalio said in a recent interview that 8 of 12 times there's
been a rising power situation like the current one with China, it's turned
into a shooting war.

My own opinion: If people's hope and opportunity are taken away, they start to
get into the mood for a shooting war with the people they think took it.
Bringing hope and opportunity back to regular Americans could prevent World
War 3.

How do we do it?

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kkarakk
>How do we do it?

space, humans have been stagnating since the 60s. the earth cannot support all
of us anymore,it's breaking down

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pxtail
> the earth cannot support all of us anymore,it's breaking down

Of course this is overly dramatic and just wrong but you have a good point, in
very very very long time frame this is viable option and provides big "goal"
to achieve. Latest NASA promo video mentions Moon, Mars as next goals, I'm
wondering if they are not setting narrative/preparing ground for more efforts
targeted towards space.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeA7edXsU40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeA7edXsU40)

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lalos
It would be great to compare the growth China kicked off in the 80s with the
growth the USA kicked off after WWII. See if its the same trend, feel weird
comparing growth of a country with another that had a 40 year head start.

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g9yuayon
One thing important that many people ignored about China is its K-12 education
system. It is _much_ better than the US in a number of ways, especially for
the ordinary students, which accounts for the majority of the student body,
myself included.

\- For starters, teachers in China are responsible. They care about the
subjects they teach, and spend countless hours finding challenging problems
for students as well as grading students' solutions with detailed feedbacks.
Parents could just leave the education of their kids to school. They didn't
have to worry about tutoring at all, because they knew that their kids would
be sufficiently challenged in school. This is true equality, isn't it, as
financially challenged families did not have to worry about not being able to
afford tutoring. In contrast, teachers in Cupertino, a town known for good
schools, asked parents to grade students' homework.

\- Second, they believe in their students. No no no, I'm not talking about
this "every student is unique and therefore it's okay to not doing well in
academically" crap. When I grew up, my teachers were tough, but they were
tough by being honest, by telling me that I didn't do well in exams because I
didn't try hard enough, because I didn't use the right techniques to study, or
because I didn't focus on the right things. In other words, we truly believed
that I could excel in school work. They didn't give up on me or other kids
just because we did poorly in homework or in exams. They were truly happy if
their students did well in school, and then they told the students that they
could do even better by assigning more challenging problem sets. That is, they
believed that their students could grow by keeping themselves in their
discomfort zone. In contrast, Why did the US schools keep lowering their
standards just to keep students happy?

The K-12 education systems in the US are great for two types of students:
those who are really challenged academically, and those who know how to push
themselves. For the former, they enjoyed the love from teachers or the
policies like "no kids left behind". For the latter, they got excellent
resources, such as taking advanced classes in universities, and participating
in all kinds of competitions. It is the students in the middle, the majority
of the students like me, who will lose, big time. The students in the middle
will not be challenged enough, who will falsely believe that they are good at
STEM and then get shocked or even defeated by not-really-so-hard courses like
calculus or organic chemistry, those who could've had a wonderful career in
STEM but bail out because they didn't get enough training in high school. How
sad is that?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that Chinese K-12 did everything right. I
spent way too much time preparing for the national entrance exam. I spent way
too much time mastering all kinds of problem-solving skills that are not
needed in college. I didn't learn advanced subjects like calculus or stats
until college. That said, my teachers truly prepared me, like they did
millions of other ordinary students, for advanced STEM subjects. They injected
passion and a sense of pride of studying STEMs. I wouldn't be able to do what
I do today without my teachers' dedication and caring. That's what matters,
isn't it?

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flukus
Correct me if I'm wrong and/or out of date, but isn't rote learning still the
heart and sole of their education system? That's great if you want to churn
out factory workers but it's not going to cut it if you want to lead in
technology and innovation.

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g9yuayon
True for liberal arts. The K-12 education in the U.S puts a lot of emphasis on
critical writing and research in liberal arts. I see much less rote learning
there. And China's education on liberal arts, especially history and
economics, resort to a lot of rote learning.

I feel sorry to say this, but there is really not much rote learning of STEM
subjects in Chinese K-12. How can you rote learn when you need deep and
intuitive understanding of fundamentals to excel in your math exams? That's
what my teachers tried hard to instill in us every day. On the contrary,
there's a lot of rote learning in that of the US. The reason is simple:
students resort to rote learning because it works, and it works only because
the problem sets they deal with are so simple and mechanical. That's not the
case in China.

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cityzen
I love the irony of this headline so much I want to make a poster of it and
put it in my office.

I think my favorite critic of The American Dream™ is our old friend George
Carlin: "The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be
asleep to believe it."

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calebm
That data visualization showing the morphing of China from being heavily poor
to heavily middle-class made me go "Wow!" That's quite something to note.

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nitwit005
I'm not sure why picking the American seemed obvious in the choice at the
begining? A poor country seems far more likely to see a large economic upturn.

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joefranklinsrs
These flurry of NYTimes favorable articles on China, the last few days,
is....fascinating. It's almost like those with vested interests knew a huge
crash is about to come to China in 2019, and is trying to unload some
investments.

However, the ever connected world is not blind, and can see the dramatic fall
China has suffered in the last 2 years in terms of stock market, yuan
weakness, capital outflow, human rights, massive debts, international
relations, factories leaving, fake GDPs, and much more. $250B in tariff on
Chinese imports in January 2019, followed up with potentially rest of the
$600B in tariff on Chinese imports in 2019, will crash China.

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Jyaif
FYI, China is investing in the long run (20 years+).

A couple of points that leads me to think China will dominate the world in the
next decades (if it has not started already):

* With the Belt and Road initiative China is building deep relationships with half of the countries of the world.

* Their industry is not slowed down by regulation, so they iterate and learn quickly. For example, some people think they'll be the first to widely deploy self driving cars. Yes there will be a ton of accidents because their technology will suck at first, but they'll be able to improve faster than any company in the west. An other example is everything related to medicine (e.g. gene editing).

* Their culture values hard work. If it were not for the quotas MIT would be 70% asian.

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joefranklinsrs
Belt and Road: Malaysian government stopped a $20B project. Maldives just
called it one-sided. India refuses to have anything to do with it. So do most
of the EU members. Media around the world is calling it debt trap

Regulation: deadly vaccines. deadly milk powder. Their citizens then choose to
buy foreign goods only

hard work: they are at their job 60 hours a week. but only working 20.

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kkarakk
why are people downvoting this-the only illogical point is the hours worked
thing-sure a poorly trained chinese person may only be productive for 20 hours
but they can afford to put 6 people on a task that people in the west would
pay a single person for apart from software manhours do scale and even in
software the majority of the world gets by on "good enough"

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NicoJuicy
No it's not, the world speaks English, not Chinese

Doesn't mean the destination is America though.

Ps. Why would big Chinese companies translate their open source in English and
have research hubs outside of China

