> That the favoured industry (or company) is doing well isn't necessarily a sign that the policy is overall good for the country's economy.
You are answering specifics with generalities.
If Taiwan didn't support and nurture TSMC so that today it's a national champion that prints money, what development path do you think they could have taken that would've brought at least the same economic success? Please be specific.
There's plenty of other companies in Taiwan already today, and that's without the counterfactual of leaving more money in people's hands.
I can't predict specifically what other things would have happened. If people could do these kinds of predictions well, maybe central planning would actually work?
You are saying planning never works without even the ability to point to any specific cases. Why do you swallow your own ideology so uncritically?
Does Soviet-style central planning work? It didn't seem to work well in the few societies that really tried it.
Dos all planning fail? Seems unlikely, given the amount of fairly centralized planning that went on (and still goes on today) in East Asian countries, countries that are the rare "success stories" of developmental economics.
In fact the original East Asian success story was Meiji-era Japan, basically the only society outside of the West that managed to industrialize itself during the 19th century. And if one sits down to read a history book one quickly realizes that what the Meiji government did was highly top-down and planned with the explicit goal to catch up to the European colonial powers. It did not resemble classical laissez-faire economics.
Huh? Where did I say that planning _never_ works? Please read more carefully, lest you argue against strawmen.
I said that planning and forecasting is _hard_, and that _I_ can't tell you on the spot what counterfactually would have replaced TSMC. Many different options are possible. Or perhaps TSMC would have still happened, but in a different way.
> In fact the original East Asian success story was Meiji-era Japan, basically the only society outside of the West that managed to industrialize itself during the 19th century. And if one sits down to read a history book one quickly realizes that what the Meiji government did was highly top-down and planned with the explicit goal to catch up to the European colonial powers. It did not resemble classical laissez-faire economics.
If I have an ailment and go to a chiropractor to fix that ailment, and later my ailment goes away, that doesn't necessarily mean that the chiropractor helped. In fact, those guys are dangerous and more likely to make things worse.
For another Japanese example, see how eg Sony had to fight and dodge the much vaunted MITI more often than not, especially in the beginning. (Sorry, I'm not up to date on all the Meiji-era stuff. It's a fascinating period of history, though!)
---
Just to be clear, central planning can 'work' up to a point; it doesn't necessarily lead to famine. Eg seen on its own East Germany was the most successful socialist economy ever. Out of the ashes of war torn quarter-country they rebuilt a reasonably high standard of living---the highest among all socialist countries, and pretty decent by global standards---all while paying enormous war reparations to the Soviet Union. (I was born in East Germany.)
Their system had many aspect of Soviet-style central planning. But over most of its life the regime wasn't nearly as totalitarian as Stalin's Soviet Union.
It's just that East Germany pales compared to more market oriented West Germany. (And West Germany pales compared to even more market oriented Switzerland.)
> The government support are a combination of low interest loans, import controls and financial subsidies.
There is a very well-understood formula on how to go for from an agrarian society to an industrial one, which has been used going back to the late 1800s:
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Get-Out-Way-Government/dp/193086... is an alternative view at development economics. The title is a bit provocative, (even the author wasn't really happy with it, when I had a chat with him about it). The main thesis of the book is that honest and competent civil servants are the most rare and precious resource a country has, especially a poor one, so policies should economies on their labour.
So eg you should privatise a state-owned company by auctioning it off in one piece to the highest cash-bidder open to all comers from anywhere, no questions asked. Instead of having your civil servants set up a complex system or worse trying to evaluate proposed business plans. Complexity breeds corruption in the worst case, and in the best case still takes up civil servants' limited time.
> On a trip to Turkey in 2018, I read How Asia Works, by Joe Studwell. Despite the fact that it didn’t get everything right, it’s probably the best nonfiction book I’ve ever read.
> As any longtime reader of mine will know, my favorite book about economic development is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works. If you haven’t read this book, you should definitely remedy that. In the meantime, you can start with Scott Alexander’s excellent summary.
The book goes over what actually happened: it's not theory, it's history. What worked in each country (often the same/similar things), the variations, and where things were tried but went badly (often with analysis on why).
> The book goes over what actually happened: it's not theory, it's history. What worked in each country (often the same/similar things), the variations, and where things were tried but went badly (often with analysis on why).
Alas, in the absence of randomised controlled experiments, it's very hard to infer causality purely from observations. You need a theory to guide you. But observations are still extremely useful, of course.
Just because countries did X and Y happened later, doesn't necessarily tell you X causes Y. In addition to the usual causation vs correlation dilemma, in economics you can even have what looks like reverse causation that goes back in time, because intelligent actors anticipate the future.
(Silly example, if there's a clear sky, and you see many people carrying raincoats and umbrellas, it's likely to rain later. But that doesn't mean that umbrellas cause rain.)
Many of the successful countries in 'How Asia Works' share some ethnic similarities. (Eg many have at least sizeable Chinese minorities or have outright Chinese majorities.) Many of the success stories also have some land reform in their past. The author decided that the latter 'worked' (ie was a causal factor), and ignores the former as perhaps a mere coincidence. Similarly, the author decided that the bouts of industrial policy and protectionism are praiseworthy causal factors.
He almost arbitrarily excludes Singapore as purely a financial centre, even though we have a pretty diversified economy these days, and in the past during the fast catch up growth, we weren't a global financial hub yet. That early development owes much more to the typical 'sweatshop' model that we see in many successful industrialisers, ie (light) manufacturing for export.
> 'How Asia Works' is not exactly economic orthodoxy, to put it lightly.
And yet it describes the historical record of several countries (in the case of Japan, how they did it twice: post-Meiji Restoration and post-WW2).
It goes over countries deemed 'successful' (Japan, Korea, etc), and others (Philippines).
What (particular?) "economic orthodoxy" would you suggest countries follow? What are countries (if any) have followed them, and what are the results? Are there book(s) that you would recommend on how to implement this/these orthodoxies, with case studies or historical examples of implementations?
Not a fan of where this is going. Just use Rust instead. All this is doing is making c++ even more unmanageable. When developers are pressed for time they will revert to what they are used to and know. What you get in the end is a mess of code with different ideas at different parts of the system because they are developed at different times by different people. Or you are going to put down very strict guidelines and redevelop everything according to these guidelines. Then you are back to rather use Rust instead. The guidelines is built in the Rust language.
I work in video games, most games use Unreal Engine, most existing toolsets and dependencies are built on C/C++, I have 17 years professional experience and nearly 30 years including hobbyist experience in C++. I often think I'd start new projects in Rust, but the last two large personal projects I started in C++, and one of them has been deployed in iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, WASM and RPi environments without much trouble. I haven't regretted that choice, even though I do really like Rust. In my contracting work, Rust just isn't an option. In my personal work, Rust is an option but since C++ has been getting better, I see less and less reason to use Rust.
But, you, please keep using Rust. It's a great language and I hope it someday eclipses C++. C++ was never designed as a cohesive language (Bjarne said exactly this in a talk I attended), it was designed as a grab bag of ideas, and I believe much of what's bad about C++ stems from that philosophy. Rust is built from the ground up with good ideas. But there's nothing wrong with improving C++ for those of us who it's really the best or only option.
EDIT: To be clear on this particular article, I agree it's not a great direction. But "just use Rust" is not helpful, and you may not have the problem this is trying to solve.
This is pointless for corporations with 40 years of code in production.
Changing all those 40 years worth of code to the safe subset is equivalent to a total rewrite. Especially since usually the really old parts of the code have never been touched or modernized, so are usually C-like and therefore very far away from the safe subset.
One might as well rewrite it in something properly memory-safe.
I agree that this proposal isn't great. But also that you're not responding to what the comment is really saying - it's responding to the "just use rust" suggestion. If Rust is a good choice, great. But that doesn't mean we should abandon all attempts to improve standardization of C++. And I mean "attempts" - production conversation should be around why something doesn't work and why it fails, "just use rust" is not really relevant here. It's perfectly fine to say when starting a new project or figuring out how to rewrite an existing codebase, but in a conversation about C++ standards it's just not relevant.
I like Rust and very happy it's being used more and more. I am just tired of it constantly coming up in any talks about C++ on HN.
Especially when building the Rust compiler, at least for the time being, requires C++, and many domains Rust wants to play only have C and C++ based industry standards like Khronos APIs, CUDA, consoles,...
That transition from C to C++ isn't really the same kind of transition. When moving over to C++ from C, you get to keep and use all your old code and gain new capabilities for the newly-written parts. Extending stuff like this is easy.
Moving to a subset is very hard, because you loose capabilities. And since this is about memory-safety, you either loose them all at once, or you aren't really memory-safe until you migrated all your codebase to the subset.
So while C->C++ takes 40 years, you get benefits in pieces during the 40 years of migration. With C++->SafeC++, you can only get those benefits at the end of those 40 years. Which usually means that it won't be done at all.
What might be a possible approach is to divide a huge codebase into smaller parts, isolate them from each other (microservices if you want to call it that) and then migrate those smaller parts to SafeC++. But since that would change the whole architecture of the codebase, the viability is always a very big "maybe".
> you aren't really memory-safe until you migrated all your codebase to the subset.
That's true for every gradual migration, even to another language. At the limit any rust code that uses 'unsafe' is not really memory safe for small values of 'really'.
Perfect is the enemy of good. An incremental improvement to the status quo is still an improvement.
Although I'm firmly in the "I'll believe [the practicality] when I'll see it" camp, I'm all in favour of these experiments with memory safety.
It is still much easier to sell than throw away, rewrite in Rust, while the ecosystem is full of growing pains, and not yet taken seriously in many industry critical standards.
1. Interests: We are interested in certain categories(for instance finance and sport), but if you subscribe to a news organisation (say New York Times), you get the whole caboodle, but only their version of finance and sport.
What many people prefer is to have multiple sources of finance and sport, but that means that they need to subscribe to various news outlets to get it.
2. Short: We want the the short and easy digestible version (preferable video, but if you insists audio).
I would argue Australia suffers from a lite version of the resource curse. There's undue control over politicians and resulting political resistance to invest in things that would diversify economic complexity or go against mining interests. Norway however is a strong counter example.
The key is whether or not a country, it's people and their representatives, are in control of the deal making wrt the resources within their boundaries.
Australia and Canada are, their indigenous people less so, and we can argue about the quality of the many resource deals within Australian and Canadian borders - overall they do less well than Norway.
This is in strong contrast to many African countries, Papua, and elswhere about the globe where often the key parts of government are wholly in the pocket of outside transnational corps who frequently have small divisions of PMC's (private militay contractors) for 'security' and land deals are forced through with near zero compensation to former land holders and NSR (Net Smelter Returns) | leasing returns to the country and people are near non existant.
The reality of what another peer commenter in this thread decsribed as
> But this is a boon to a democratic light in ... Africa
is anything but. eg: US PMC's in Africa .. acting for multiple clients, including China .. but not for Africans.
> Australia and Canada are [in control of the dealmaking wrt resources]
It's not a binary. It's a spectrum. The capability of Australians to control the deal making is diminished by the control that the mining industry has over elected representatives.
Please don't incorrectly paraphrase | strawman my comments.
Your point is implicit within:
> and we can argue about the quality of the many resource deals within Australian and Canadian borders - overall they do less well than Norway.
"The mining industry" should include energy extractors who, IMHO, do more harm to Austrlia than mining - many of the mining operations (not all by any means) are majority Australian owned|controlled with that money staying within Australia (even if with individuals rather than spread out across the entire community).
Even significant energy extractors such as Santos are Australian companies .. it's literally an acronym of South Australia Northern Territory Oil Search, but they're no angels although perhaps arguably better than the non-Australian gas operators.
Repression of civil liberties is a common trait of dictatorships, but it does not define one.
Dictatorships require dictators. PW Botha was a lot of bad things, but he was not a dictator. China is considered a dictatorship because Xi has dictatorial powers.
Anyway this is all just semantics. The more important point is probably that it corrupts corporations to do business in countries with repressive governments, and to follow their repressive laws.
China is further along the repressive-government scale than many of us would like. I believe that Apple management are among the truly bothered, but moral complications abound, and ultimately their fiduciary-duty options are limited.
>And to clarify, those were bans. This is not. TikTok just needs to be sold to a non-foreign adversary country.
If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place.
> If TikTok were a Canadian, British, French, German, Korean, Japanese, or Taiwanese company, the US government wouldn't feel the need to intervene in the first place
This bill makes that explicit. TikTok doesn't have to be sold to an American. It could be sold to any of the above, and it would comply with the proposed law.
To clarify, those were not bans. They were decisions by companies not to follow the laws that every other company in that country has to follow as well.
I’m not referring to China, that case was settled long time ago. I’m talking about Europe and the rest of Asia, South America, Canada. If you think about it, allowing a foreign state unfettered influence over public opinion (as well as near total internet surveillance) is an utterly insane thing to do.
"Here are our rules we want you to follow. If you choose not to, you are banned from operating in our country"
"We cannot follow your rules because those rules are unacceptable
to us / would undermine our business model / would compromise our position in other countries we care about more / insert other reason here"
A ban means when you operate in a country, you violate their rule, or whatever they call rule, then you are banned.
In this case, you haven’t operated in this country, the government of this country tells you that if you want to operate, you have to follow rule a, rule b… Then you choose to not follow these rules, and quit.
These are different.
Another example is you are operating in a country and not violating any rule from the very beginning. One day when you are strong enough and the government of this country feels you’re threaten. Then they tells you that you have to sell your branch in their country, if not you will be banned.
With this kind of situation, a "threaten" company has no choice but to take the less bad option. And people will not understand the real reason or what actually threatening.
The ridiculous is US was always the freedom symbol for everything. I wonder if such kind of freedom only exists when US is the strongest one and others are far behind? But it's understandable that the US election day is coming.
It's a tragedy for sharing human knowledge. Say what you want about China, but there's a huge amount of amazing stuff there that the Western world just doesn't know about. Art, architecture, science, technology, etc.
Think about how much human knowledge in Discord servers is hidden from search engines --- in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
A lot of Chinese language content is hidden in domestic gated communities regardless of whether other countries ban access or not.
The original problem here is most Chinese tech companies behave exactly like Discord in order to entice people to use their apps and ecosystem exclusively. In fact, in my experience, trying to access information freely on the web is much more difficult in China than it is in many western countries, precisely because the companies are so aggressive about forcing people to install their apps.
> in China there's orders of magnitude more knowledge hidden in Wechat, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, etc.
I wouldn't refer to highly censored information, disinformation, and discourse controlled by the CCP as "knowledge".
Similarly for western social media. While they're not directly controlled by governments, each platform has its own biases and algorithms that enforce their values and beliefs on the information hosted on their servers. These are not public squares that protect "freedom of speech", regardless of what they may claim.
The knowledge found on these sites is of minimal value, and most of it is drowned by the noise produced by the vast majority of their users and bots.
What??? there's tons of valid information there about all sorts of topics not even remotely related to political stuff that would get censored.
There's food, technology, science, whatever. I mean sure there's noise in the form of memes like all social media sites, but calling it "minimal value" is pretty extreme.
To take one example, I use Xiaohongshu to read about camera lenses. There's a lot of good information that's not available on Western platforms (optical simulations, anecdotes about rare lenses, etc).
Perhaps "minimal value" is wrongly phrased. After all, if you find great value in these sites, I can't contradict your experience.
My point is that most content posted on these platforms is heavily modified to game and appease the algorithms that drive engagement. So you never really know if something is factual and honest.
Add to that the fact that these platforms promote content that is actively harmful to its users, and to society as a whole, and I doubt whether whatever valuable information is on them is really worth searching for and consuming. Chances are that you would be able to find the same information elsewhere, without risking your sanity.
That said, I do have an extremely negative view of all social media, and actively avoid it, so I concede that I may be missing out. :)
A better example than dedicated social media apps is perhaps Baike, commonly described as China's Wikipedia. Except it isn't, because it's not a non-profit organization with a mission to provide free and unbiased information to the world, it's a locked-down product of Baidu, one of China's major tech companies who once upon a time (much like Google) owned domestic search and maps, who also run Tieba (something like Reddit) and so on. This is the biggest difference I find on the "chinanet" - all of the top sites are owned by one of the major tech companies, and all of these companies have an interest in trying to keep you inside their ecosystem.
Outside of the chinanet this also happens, where Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft all try to keep you inside their ecosystems (to say nothing of the traditional media companies like Disney, WBD etc), but outside the chinanet there remains a small but influential "information wants to be free" movement that is unaligned with any government or corporation. So we have Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap and the Internet Archive... It's not much, but it's something.
From my perspective if people really want to see a free and open internet, where information is never hidden in gated communities, the only choice is to support non-profits with aligned missions. Then people all over the world - including China - can contribute.
God I wish Wikipedia wasn't banned by the Great Firewall.
It's kinda sad that stuff like Caltrain electrification, for example, has a huge and well-researched article despite not even being in service yet, just because of the large amount of Wikipedians in the Bay Area where the Wikimedia Foundation is headquartered. In the meanwhile, entire operational train systems both in China and elsewhere in the world that have vastly greater ridership, longer length, more advanced technology, etc, get nary a mention. I have nothing against Caltrain electrification getting a great article since I'm an inclusionist but it is just sad how little of the cool things, especially in China, are on Wikipedia.
Chinese topics are usually well-covered on the Chinese Wikipedia, the lack of an English-language article is more likely to be attributable to a shortage of English-Chinese bilinguals translating that information.
Chinese Wikipedia is mostly made by Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas Chinese people so they often are not as comprehensive for recent developments in the mainland.
MTG is bananas but she's right, why start at tiktok when there are battalions of military aged Chinese males crossing the border through Mexico, scores of Chinese tech companies operating in the US legally, and companies/politicians (like Microsoft and the Clintons) who sold America out to China decades ago. Tiktok ban is almost superficial
1. TSMC (supported by the ROC government[https://dominotheory.com/tsmc-and-taiwans-government-two-boa...])
2. Korean chaebols (Samsung, Hyundai, LG etc, supported by ROK government[https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/chaebol-structure.asp])
3. Japanese heavy industries (Japanese government support)
The government support are a combination of low interest loans, import controls and financial subsidies.
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