The main difference between American and Chinese society today is less that one has more dumb people and one has more smart people and more that within public life being stupid is relentlessly shamed as stupid in one and being smart is relentlessly shamed as stupid in the other.
These days American society assigns intelligence credentials based not on who can demonstrate a meticulous well developed understanding of how anything works but who can give the most smart sounding post hoc rationalization for half baked ideas people desperately want to be true.
If you do the former and it yields answers people don’t like they’ll reach deep into their bag of fantasyland narratives to try to invalidate your credibility. If you provide the latter you’re celebrated not only as a genius but a champion and when things don’t work as promised…
They’ll have already sunk so much personal credibility and self esteem into the fantasy they’d rather burrow deeper into delusion than backtrack. In other words “smart” is whatever helps nurse fragile self esteems rather than whatever helps them understand and work with reality.
In Chinese society today intelligence is still very much a consequential trait that demands its keep via real effective results. In America it’s turned into another fake self esteem signifier in a culture that’s long stopped caring about anything but fake self esteem signifiers.
I observed this a long time ago, personally. I had predicted the financial crisis, right down to the month. I had been right about Iraq and a variety of other important issues. I was discussing the “Arab Spring”, and said “it isn’t over till the army votes.”
There was argument back and forth and I said, in effect, “look, I have a track record and so do you. I’m usually right and you’re usually wrong.”
The response was furious and I was booted off that particular forum.
In my last major blog role as managing editor, I was able to increase traffic 60% in less than a year and hold onto most of it after the election of Barack Obama. Other Netroots sites were bleeding readers, but not us. I could say exactly what had been done to increase traffic. But the publisher was sure they knew better, so I left. That site no longer exists.
People who were for the Iraq war, who made claims that it would work and be easy are now major pundits. Both Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein were for the war. Indeed, Yglesias wanted to take out all of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. A study in the L.A. Times found that media figures against the war were fired, laid off or had their careers stagnate. Those who were for it had their careers prosper.
A correspondent once did a serious search on who had been right, in public and in advance, about the financial crisis. The number was in the 40s. That means that almost no economists, the people who, you know, study this stuff and claim to know something, predicted an obvious bubble. You only had to look at a couple charts. It wasn’t rocket surgery.
For most of my life development economists claimed that free trade without protection for local industry was how countries should industrialize and that they should move to cash crops and sell commodities. Every country that tried this failed. The ones who succeeded at industrializing did so behind some form of protection for new industry: China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and so on. They certainly didn’t double down on commodities. The only thing that has ever worked is exactly what development economists advised against.
Fools like Francis Fukuyama became famous and wealthy by saying nonsense things like democracy and capitalism being two sides of the same coin and the end of history had arrived. Those of us who warned that it mattered where industry was, and that sending your industry to other countries was the equivalent of shipping away your power and prosperity were sneered at.
Climate change has, for decades, come in “over”, which is to say worse, than the consensus predictions. Almost every single bad event has happened sooner than the IPCC said it would. You’d think, after a while, they’d ask themselves “why are we getting this wrong all the time?” and correct. If you can’t figure out why, just look at the windage, make your predictions, then add the average error rate. “Events usually happen X% sooner than our models predict, so here’s the dates taking that into account.”
It’s not rocket surgery.
Most Western pundits thought that Ukraine would “win” a war against Russia. No. Pundits told us over and over again that NATO expansion wouldn’t cause a war. Wrong. Pundits told us that Russia was weak compared to NATO and that GDP accurately measured their strength. Pundits thought that sanctions would collapse the Russian economy, not taking into account that China had a veto over that, and reason to use it.
In every single case the discourse had and has been seized by what people want to believe, or what oligarchs want people to believe: what pays, not what is true. There are no consequences for being wrong, and no self awareness. I am bad at electoral predictions. So when I make one I always note that I suck and am probably a negative indicator. (I though Harris would win, for example, though I did get the Canadian election right.)
Now it isn’t entirely true that there’s no accountability in the West. There is. There is only one rule that the West insists always be followed:
The rich must keep becoming richer, no matter the cost to anyone or anything else.
Because that is the only form of Western accountability, the West will keep losing, because richer rich and higher inequality do not cause or even correlate with any of the main constituents of power, prosperity or technological progress
Our entire discourse system, our entire media, and our entire elites have zero accountability except for making the rich, richer.
At this they have succeeded, and at nothing else.
Jorge
“A study in the L.A. Times found that media figures against the war were fired, laid off or had their careers stagnate. Those who were for it had their careers prosper.”
Economics has worked this way for two centuries.
GlassHammer
We raised generations on: Print Media & TV, then one on TV & Movies, then on TV & Internet, then just the Internet, and lastly just the Social Media section of the Internet.
“Entertainment” has been the culture for a long time now and “being entertaining” is the character trait. “Being skilled” or “being smart” has to be smuggled under “being entertaining”, those traits can’t see the light of day for long without being relentlessly attacked.
This is why the fool, the bully, the conman, and the charlatan thrive. All of them fit inside of an Entertainment ecosystem naturally.
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It’s about living in reality? Hardly. It’s about living in a fictitious perceptual bubble be it the Chinese elite or the American elite or any elite really and those they lord it over.
This, the following I mean, is reality and neither America nor China or any nation really and its ruling elite are “living” in this reality that is the ONLY REAL reality.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
True enough. So we would likely agree that energy growth will not continue indefinitely. But two points before we continue: First, I’ll just mention that energy growth has far outstripped population growth, so that per-capita energy use has surged dramatically over time—our energy lives today are far richer than those of our great-great-grandparents a century ago [economist nods]. So even if population stabilizes, we are accustomed to per-capita energy growth: total energy would have to continue growing to maintain such a trend [another nod].
Second, thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves. I’m not talking about global warming, CO2 build-up, etc. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space. I assume you’re happy to confine our conversation to Earth, foregoing the spectre of an exodus to space, colonizing planets, living the Star Trek life, etc.
Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. [Pained expression from economist.] And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.
AI gets us there much quicker than 400 years. Try ten years instead. China, like the West once upon a time, is addicted to economic growth by whatever means necessary and with a complete disregard for the laws of physics meaning just as the West is not and never was “living” in reality, neither is China “living” in reality.
Yes, China ultimately wins but wins what? China ensures the controls remain set for the heart of the sun. Human couldn’t wait millions or billions of years until the sun baked the planet. Human preferred to speed that process up and bake itself and AI, both the Chinese and American versions and others, is happy to oblige although IT would never admit it.
Daniel A Lynch
The reason Western media gets it wrong is because the Western media is controlled by oligarchs. The reason the American public is misinformed (in other words, brainwashed) is because Western media is controlled by oligarchs. Oligarchs and corporations influence our universities as government funding has been cut and replaced with funding from oligarchs and corporations. Our politicians in both parties are mostly millionaires, on the payroll of corporations and oligarchs, and out of touch with the working class. “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. ~ Louis D. Brandeis.
China is beginning to have an inequality problem, too, but so far they have been able to keep their oligarchs under control, and China’s leaders are chosen by merit, rather than bought and paid for American style.
Feral Finster
TL;DR smart people grift.
marku52
“Rocket surgery” I see what you did there. There is more than one way to slice a cat.
This has been noted by lots of folks, Arelien, JMG, Taibbi. Leaders in the west act like they are in a political sitcom, and reality will never intervene. There is no penalty for being wrong, the only penalty is for being right, if being right goes against elite dogma.
Who was it proudly proclaimed back in the Shrub era “now we make our own reality”
He saw the future clearly.
L&S, I’ve always loved that bit about the thermodynamic waste heat boiling the earth. Still bookmarked today.
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marku52, yeah, it’s a keeper for sure, Admittedly, the two gents debating, the physics nerd and the stalwart economist, are smart but one of them is so smart he’s stupid. Some smart people are stupid, some are not.
Ian, here is an intriguing article to complement your analysis. I do not share the author’s optimism. I hew to a tried and true maxim — you can never go back. The West cannot reclaim its former status. It can’t go back. You can never go back except in your mind and even that’s not an accurate record considering the interference of those pesky entangling plaques.
https://unherd.com/2025/04/why-china-will-beat-the-west/
Jan Wiklund
Still one has to explain why loose ideas win over reality. I think Orwell did that 85 years ago. The people in control are the rentiers, and they don’t need to do else than sitting on their arses and see the money coming in.
They don’t need to build production chains. They don’t need to deal with reality, they just follow the screens on the stock exchange. They live in a casino. In short, with Orwell’s words, they have such a thick padding of money betwen themselves and reality that they don’t need to know how anything is.
And the ruling ideas of an epoch are the ideas of the ruling class. In China, the ruling class is still industrialist.
But this doesn’t explain everything either. According to Moshe Lewin the ruling class in the Soviet Union were the engineers. But nevertheless it went bad.
Ian Welsh
But here’s the thing, they don’t win.
They seemed to win for a while because the West appeared to have no competitors. So we could financialize and de-industrialize and the rich could “win.”
But they rule over a declining power and their wealth will mean less and less. What is it to be a lord in Britain now, as compared to a 150 years ago?
As nothing.
Same as to be rich in America in 10 years, as opposed to in 1900 or 1970.
And who knows, it may get worse, and they may themselves receive a century of humiliatation. Certainly the English are about to.
bruce wilder
Neoliberal “markets in everything” corrupts or destroys every institution and in the absence of institutional support ordinary people are effectively powerless and passive.
Looking back over my adult lifetime, I am amazed at the breadth and depth of the destruction of institutions and culture. One thing I know about China is that it is a society that has built up in its population a patriotic solidarity and sense of shared purpose associated with modernization that is remarkable to behold. Myths are attached that are not at all factually realistic, but the sense of participating in a shared enterprise is, and has, perhaps, been critical to the success of a highly decentralized effort in a highly authoritarian polity.
Chinese patriotism is as dangerous in its own way as the rage of American oligarchs feeling their power ebb away due to their de-industrializing greed. But, those are other issues.
I only wish I knew more Chinese economists and more of economics as it has developed in the pragmatic hothouse of China’s rapid rise. It would be interesting to be able to compare-and-contrast with the studied ignorance of neoliberal economics in the West.
I don’t know that anyone anywhere takes climate change and ecological collapse seriously as a set of global economic challenges. Most people I know are glib, even if passionately alarmed. Very few have given much critical thought to what can be done or should be done. A few realize that it is already “too late” for mild, marginal restraints. I bring this up, because it seems to me like the set of issues, where humans most need to get super realistic about effective common efforts and where neoliberal elites seem to be working their way toward mass euthanasia for everyone not needed for the servant class. (That is a logical path toward continued increasing per capita energy use: many fewer capita in total.)
I don’t know what Chinese thinking after Xi is likely to look like. I presume concentrating immense power and authority in Xi is part of a rational attempt to get thru the next decade of transition during which industrial and development employment opportunities are falling short of the expectations of newly adult cohorts.
Back in the U.S.A., the demolition of hollow institutions arouses a lot of ire from the usual suspects. It is hard to know who to cheer for, when everyone seems to have so little understanding or integrity.
When I think of pundits like Yglesias or Ezra or “Noah Smith”, whose careers I have followed casually since they were tadpole bloggers, I seem to remember more than a bit of A-B testing of alternative stances and poses. They made successful careers out of letting their “environment” shape their personas to be fit for survival. We get the pundits we are willing to pay for — or someone is willing to pay for anyway. We can complain about the deficiency of character that lets them navigate the expression of opinions that reconcile the desires of patrons and publishers with the debased tastes of passive audiences. Or, recognize that their job — the one PR hacks everywhere get paid for — is not to inform, but to manipulate. And, then we might gaze in the mirror at our own characteristic need to be manipulated and stampeded. The Snark, it burns! 🤯😤
different clue
Here are two links relevant to this.
First, a Chinese-American comedian ( in America I believe) offers his take on what went wrong here and why some people express their upsetness the way they do, titled:
” Ronnie Chieng nailing how post WW2 decisions led to MAGA breeding grounds in the USA”
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1l2dmif/ronnie_chieng_nailing_how_post_ww2_decisions_led/
And here is a video showing a little slice of where China is at just now, titled:
“Drones returning to their launch pads after a show in China.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1l29eo5/drones_returning_to_their_launch_pads_after_a/
Eric Anderson
I subtooted the following over at Mastodon in response to this post:
**The reason great civilizations fall is that, once an elite class is established, said class can always be relied upon to try and shape reality to their advantage, rather than reckon with reality on it’s own terms.
Inevitably, reality catches up and steamrolls the elites who have led their civilizations down a fairy tail reality.
America has become an elite fairy tale.**
It doesn’t matter who the elite are comprised of Jan. It’s the human penchant, when allowed enough power, to assume godhead and begin trying shape reality to their entrenched interests, rather than the interest of the populace as a whole.
Here, in the U.S., we live the reality of worshipping stupidity because the elite have been on a 4 decade mission to denigrate anyone with a brain who was brave enough to speak out against them — enter Fox news to try and create a parallel reality.
This is the perfect example of the incessant capitalist propaganda to which we are all exposed. The storyline — detached from reality — constantly being created by the elite to protect their selfish interests.
To live in “stupid” times means to live in an era when the elite get to create the same reality that they decry.
elkern
I strongly agree that the West is declining/collapsing, and I have long viewed China as the next Global leader. I’m not exactly /happy/ about these changes; I’ve had a grand and free life in the USA, and I’m skeptical of traditional Chinese tendencies toward rigid societal structure. (I view modern China as very Confucian, with tweeks Mao borrowed from Marx). At least China seems to understand that concentrated Financial power is always the enemy of the State AND the People.
Semi-OT: I recently ran across something on YouTube about a possible power shift in China – essentially, alleging that Hu Jintao (and the PLA?) are about to oust Xi Jinping. It seems plausible – I’ve never tried to make sense of the internal workings of the CCP – but is just as likely to be random anti-Chinese propaganda.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v7RFZ1y5LE
The source – ‘China Unveiled’ – looks like a British (or City of London) propaganda organ, but since I watched it, YouTube has offered me a lot of similar stuff from other channels.
Any China Watchers here able to explain – and/or refute – this? I dread having to waste time on ‘Kremlinology’ of China…
KT Chong
I went to two different Walmart stores on Saturday and Sunday a couple days ago (for weekly grocery refills.)
A dozen large eggs were around $3~$4 at Walmart, (came down from Biden’s egg prices that reached $6~$8 and stayed in that price range for months.)
While in Walmart and browsing through grocery items, I got the sense that prices of many grocery items have stabilized or even gone down a bit. Example: corn prices had dropped to 33 cents per ear, down from 75 cents.
Gas prices have come back down to around $4 as well, (from over $5.)
Even though most prices have stayed high, the important thing is that prices have NOT significant increased since January. During Biden’s term especially his last couple years, I felt that grocery prices had never stop creeping up every month or every other months.
Back in late April, all the mainstream news — the analysts and economists and pundits — kept telling people that prices were going to spike in May due to the tariffs… it did NOT happen, and it’s already June. So the media and “experts” has again undermined their own credibility.
And I did NOT see any empty shelves. Both Walmart stores I went to were fully stocked.
I do NOT like Trump, but I liked the grocery prices I saw at Walmart.
I feel that, if prices stabilize or even decrease, Democrats WILL lose the mid-term — because people still remember the stress of ever-increasing prices during the Biden’s term. Biden and Democrats had really f-up by completely ignoring the inflation that was stressing people out. They pretended that inflation was not a problem.. because they did not even care. The mainstream media kept telling people that the economy was doing great, that the inflation was not a problem. The media was basically telling people to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” but people actually felt the pains in their wallets.
Democrats are still in denial over it. They can keep screaming about, “OMG, Trump is deporting BABIES!” “They are taking away rights from TRANS people!” Frankly, I think most Americans do NOT care… and many actually like that Trump is cracking down on illegal immigration, DEI and trans. Democrats are disconnect from Americans, and it is going to be a problem for them when the election season comes around.
KT Chong
My conjecture on why prices have not increased:
I think that corporations like Walmart has used the inflation as the pretense to increase prices and profits, but Biden and Democrats (being the out-of-touch neoliberal corporatists as they were) did not clamp down on the price gouging.
On the other hand, Trump is willing to bully Walmart and corporations into eating the inflation and tariffs. Businesses had already increased prices to price-gouge consumers during the Biden years, so they can actually afford to scale back on the price-gouging and profits… and eat the inflations and tariffs.
That’s my feeling on why prices have not gone up. However, it really does not matter to Americans and consumers that businesses and Walmart have to eat the inflations and tariffs. It only matters to them that they do not have to keep paying more and more for grocery, but it is hurting Democrats (who were unwilling to take on businesses’ price gouging) on the perception level.
That’s my gut instinct, so no proof or evidence.
Brian A. Graham
Several years ago, you wrote one of my favorite pieces about how western society was no longer interested in progress as shown in how genius was no longer tolerated in favor of those with “soft “ social skills.
See https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-intolerance-of-genius/
different clue
. . . ” Back in the U.S.A., the demolition of hollow institutions arouses a lot of ire from the usual suspects. ” . . .
The 2025 Regime must have felt the hollow institutions were not all the way hollow enough, or they would not have gone ( and going) to such lengths to demolish them. And if the 2025 Regime thought all the fired Federal workers were sufficiently corrupt to work with, they would not have fired them and fired entire sections and divisions. If they thought NOAA was corrupt enough to work with, they would not be trying to abolish it, for examplt. Or the CFPB. Etc.
Were all the fired Park Rangers corrupt? How many of the ag researchers fired were doing good non-corrupt work? ( Gabe Brown attributes a lot of his aquired and learned-about soils bio-management knowledge to the work of Federal Employee Ray Archuleta, for example).
I am not impressed by self-congratulatory performative cynicism and see no need to adopt it for myself.
shagggz
KT Chong, it could also be that we are in the brief period when the big dogs like Walmart wait for their lesser-capitalized competition to die off from the unsustainable pain of tarriffs. Then come the real price hikes.
mago
My gut instinct with no proof or evidence outside of continuing fuck ups is I know jack shit.
bruce wilder
I am not impressed by self-congratulatory performative cynicism and see no need to adopt it for myself.
Hmmm. Is that what I am doing?
Obviously, or not obviously, I do not agree.
I think I am struggling — as perhaps dc and some other commenters are in their own ways — with ambivalence about and impatience with the reaction of mainstream politicians and journalists to Trump’s destructive flurry.
There is an unreality to much of what they (the opposition to Trump) are saying and doing, as well, of course, as the pathetic powerlessness they express. I do not know how Hakeem Jeffries remembers to breathe.
Take the CFPB. This agency was specifically structured to give it high resistance to Wall Street manipulation of Congressional appropriations, but it was wrecked in an instant with nothing but pathetic whimpers from Senator Warren, its architect. The motives of those destroying the agency are indefensible, but no one seems capable of using their evil against them in a media propaganda campaign. To me, this inability of the political system to engage in any but the most impotent (and purely performative) resistance is strong evidence of “hollow institutions”. I attribute the present impotence to a long-standing history of failing every test of integrity — personal failing leading to institutional failing. I am referring to a huge range of examples of gaslighting and lies in the political discourse, even the history of which cannot be acknowledged. To me, it goes right to the thesis of the OP — the allergy of American political discourse to “living in reality”. You can ask plaintively, as I often find myself doing, “what is going on?” But, you won’t easily be able to find out or to feel confidence in the conflicting answers swirling thru either news media or social media.
I hesitate to move from abstraction to cases, because of the heat it can generate as people must confront the lies they voluntarily and uncritically subscribe to. I am not personally inclined to “conspiracy theories” but I understand that conspiracy is quite common and we live asphyxiated in a public information vacuum and drowning in a flood tide of manipulative propaganda. I am disinclined to reflexively blame a caricature of MAGA for political ills they at least have the sense to be alarmed about.