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Grand Fromage posted:My dumb question, China's been growing ridiculously rapidly. Whatever the official numbers, the state of the country proves that well enough. So let's say it's been over 10% since Deng's reforms and it slows down to 2%. What's the big deal? 2% is a pretty good normal growth rate for a country. I get why zero or negative would be bad but I don't get what would be so bad about normal growth instead of insane growth. I know a lot of CCP legitimacy is their promise to make people's lives better, but that would still be true as long as the economy is not negative. I do not at all buy that people would be rising up if growth was just normal, the average person here is way too nationalist and pro-CCP for that. Part of it is a lot of people (inside and outside of the country) have been banking on that growth continuing. If you're building 40 widgets assuming that 40 widgets are needed to make the 80 whatsits needed for the 30 thingies that'll be used by the doohickey corp to make goods meant to be consumed by the Chinese market, well, no you're SoL, since the economy doesn't actually support that many doohickeys. Meanwhile everyone who invested in your company (and, indeed, in any company along that chain) expecting returns this big are only going to make returns that big. And that can be big. Lying about economic statistics is bad because somewhere somehow meat meets the metal and the whole mixed metaphor collapses like a house of called bluffs.
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Aug 22, 2015 04:43
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Grand Fromage posted:Makes sense, thanks. Aren't some of those people being paid by the detergent companies to steer you towards their companies product? Which, to be fair, is a pretty straight forward way to REALLY reach that target market. https://hbr.org/2010/08/chinas-in-store-wars The fourth one in the article. This is just what I pulled up googling, I'll see if I can find a more current/in depth look at the phenomenon.
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Aug 22, 2015 05:11
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Arglebargle III posted:But if 10% of the population captures 60% of the growth, 3% growth is a big problem for the most-of-the-people economy growing at 1%. With 7% GDP growth the laobaixing might not be happy but they're still getting ~3% growth. Wasn't this basically the phenomenon looked at by Piketty in that book last year that caused all that drama?
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Aug 22, 2015 05:31
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Murgos posted:For pretty much all of recorded history China has had an enormous population, only rarely has their economy been really outstanding. Lol. The Chinese economy was an enormous weight dictating the flow of the world's goods for a good couple of millennia even though it was mostly inwardly focused. All the gold and silver from the New World merely stayed over in Europe, it went to live in China. (When it didn't go straight there by way of the Philippines.) It wasn't until some assholes in Manchester really got their heads around steam and spinning jennies and took a good look at the putting out process that this changed. It doesn't look like GB had the economy or natural wealth to turn that into a real runaway lead, and maintaining a colonial empire to try and secure that proved too costly once the locals decided to agitate. Plus they pissed away a lot of their head start in Flanders, that doesn't help. Good old US of A has stepped up with a big population and a lot of resources and a good per capita output. Inertia give the number 1 a certain self-reinforcing advantage, though per capita increases in productivity do have powerful multiplier effects. I think long run China's going to run into the One Child, 8 Grandparents generation though, that's going to be an anchor on per capita productivity for a while. Squalid posted:What people under a dictatorship don't want consumer goods? It's not that they don't want, it's that the market can be slower to react. In a true command economy, only the govt. is dictating what gets built, and tend to look more at direct metrics (food, infrastructure, dachaus for party leaders, tanks for with to crush the dissidents). I think it's unfair to call China that, a big part of the 80's reforms was an attempt to let a market form, and there are clearly some products in China that have worked in that regard. But the government and general structure of the country do make it a lot harder to get things off the ground.
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Jan 20, 2016 19:46
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Fojar38 posted:The notion that China was the centre of the world for most of its history is a fallacy. "The world" as a concept which we recognize didn't exist until the last few centuries. China has literally never been the centre of the world. To be perfectly frank only the USA can really claim to have ever been so central. Not center as is there was a global cultural centering, but certainly center of gravity, and the moment the market starts becoming global (e.g. New World) China's* demands dictated where and how trade was flowing. Anyway, the point is that the "gently caress it, more people doing more poo poo" was the way to have a bigger economy** until coal lifted the sort of 'natural' ceiling on that and made setting up factories (another multiplier) worth the societal cost. I think the question is whether the current leaders (US, Germany et. al.) will hit a ceiling before China does. I certainly think the CCP's need to fake good news while embezzling the poo poo out of each other isn't helping, but it's not like the West hasn't hosed itself by gross incompetence before. *At least, the demands of the market in what is now geographically China. Certainly the state (or states lol) in area weren't always able to tap that. Aligning state with economic interest and vice versa is a super weird process but... yeah. **If that matters in anyway...
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Jan 20, 2016 20:47
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Fojar38 posted:That's not actually a statistic that anyone can know for certain. GDP is itself a hard to measure statistic even today, and declarations that China is historically the world's largest economy are usually based around China's population. And even then if you use the same measurements the Roman Empire at its height probably had a larger economy than its Han Dynasty contemporary which itself challenges the notion that it's China's historical destiny to be the world's largest economy. Oh sure, the historical destiny is bullshit. The historical fact that the-entity-known-as-China* had the worlds largest economy is pretty well loving attested to. I agree that the sudden rise of the British economy in the face of that is a great argument against historical destiny bullshit.
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Jan 20, 2016 20:50
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Fojar38 posted:This isn't true though. Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans couldn't have cared less about what China was doing for most of its history, if they were even aware of China's existence at all. Even if trade wasn't direct it still happened. It isn't remembered as 'trade with China' since it went through intermediaries but the Eurasian markets were pretty well liked up with regards to a lot of goods. The linkage between Iberia and, say, Austria was a matter of distance, but as is was Austria to Anatolia, Anatolia to Persia, Persia to the Indus Valley, and so on. It's not like there was an uninhabited waste between the two. Roman's stole silkworms, statues of Vishnu turn up in Pompeii, Manichean Christians had a quarter in the imperial capital in, like, the 4th Century or something. Even then the relatively isolated backwater that was Europe was a smaller relatively isolated backwater than China for most of that time. Of course 'Europe' and 'China' are pretty arbitrary. It gets a bit funkier if you break it down by, say Greco-Semetic intellectualism vs. Confucianism (roughly linking the Islamic world plus Christendom vs. China, Korea, Vietnamish, the Japanese when they can be arsed to pretend to be civilized.) or Indo-European vs. whatever the gently caress is going on in China linguistically vs. Turkish vs. Semetic vs., for giggles, Basque.
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Jan 20, 2016 21:39
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Vladimir Putin posted:China wasn't the center of the world, but you have to look at the historical context. The opium wars started because the British were consuming large amounts of cultural products (the eponymous 'China', tea, silk and other goods) while China really wanted nothing from Britian which they considered from a cultural/artistic standpoint to be inferior. Fashion and artisans in Europe also mimicked the Chinese style in various crafts. Things like the civil service exam were admired and copied throughout Europe. Britain's trade imbalance led to a series of consequences which included a large amount of formerly British silver in the hands of the Chinese which could only be resolved by the trafficking of opium via their colonies in India. Thus began the opium wars and the annexation of HK and subsequent humiliations for China. I'd shy away from terms like 'advanced culture.' Bacteria in a petri dish is an advanced culture. Everything, is, by virtue pf still being here, highly evolved. Better to say that the Chinese {economy/culture/state/society/ethnicity/nation}* hit a point of local optimization relative to Great Britain. The greater British engagement with the outside world (often at gunpoint, of course, but often not) helped for sure. But I really think it's hard to overstate the importance of breaking the Biological Old Regime as a productivity multiplier on a per capita basis. *Again, we're running into a problem of conflating some poo poo.
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Jan 20, 2016 22:23
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Vladimir Putin posted:Well I'd say that the Chinese developed ways to make beautiful poo poo while the British developed ways to blow poo poo up. In the end, knowing how to blow poo poo up mattered more. This discordance and the fallout have haunted China in the last century until now and will probably follow them for many decades to come. Well, a. beauty is subjective, and it's not like beauty in one place diminishes another. As for technology for blowing poo poo up well... I've got some bad news about the origins of gunpowder. Also, it wasn't blowing poo poo up tech that tipped the scales, it was - to simplify hugely- making cotton tech that mattered. e: and what really mattered wasn't the tech, it was a state that could tap the economy and administrate poo poo.
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Jan 20, 2016 22:38
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Vladimir Putin posted:Given that opium is so addictive I don't think it's a major surprise that the trade imbalance started reversing. Opioid addiction is a problem that modern society still faces. It's also instructive to note that the British understood this and outlawed the use of opium at home which was a point brought up during negotiations by the Chinese. Of course nobody cared. Also China had a huge internal economy more or less agnostic about the presence of opium and was more affected by a. the Brits not needing to buy their poo poo anymore thanks to cheaper British knock offs manufactured in fuckoff factories and then b. starting to actually turn that poo poo around. The Opium Wars were hammer blows to the Chinese state but, as wars go, not hugely damaging to the people or the economy. Well, not directly. Not compared to the various civil wars that followed, or the Japanese occupation .
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Jan 20, 2016 22:44
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Vladimir Putin posted:It's probably all of the above. But in the end it's the ability of the British to sail up the coast and bombard Chinese targets with impunity and the inability of the Chinese to respond. The background on that is many contributing factors. But probably, and this is the important part, that's neither a reflection of a Chinese National Characteritic predilection for beauty nor the result of a British choice to eschew aesthetics in favor of war.
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Jan 20, 2016 22:47
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Vladimir Putin posted:I guess the irony is that now China makes the knock off poo poo and the U.K. probably has a huge trade imbalance with China which it can't relieve with opium or another war. Things don't change much, old men continue to send young men to die so they make that money. What war is China sending young men off to die in? I mean, you're right (coming the long way 'round) in that China has been cutting away at manufacturing and in doing so increasing it's per capita productivity and thus maybe 'catching up' to the US. Which is sort of where this derail started. Capital still lives it up in the UK though, so they still have that going for them. That's the inertia thing. I guess part of why I've been yammering away about what we mean by 'Chinese' or 'British' or whatever (Nationally? Socially? Culturally? Etc. etc.) is that all these distinctions are kinda bs. There are a lot of Chinese new rich who are doing fine, plenty of rich Brits in London, plenty of poor and oppressed in both as well. British capital is powerful right now but their navy is not. These systems interlock in ways that don't actually fit our conception of nations very well. Because nations are a Dumb Idea and Bad. My Imaginary GF posted:Shame, Chinese, for killing the elephants! Shame! Shame! Mhmm. That's nice dear.
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Jan 20, 2016 23:05
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Fojar38 posted:Yeah, the fact that Eurasian markets were actually pretty well linked means that historically, whoever dominated the Middle East would also have the continent's economic centre of gravity swing to them. The Persian, Greek, Roman, Islamic, and Mongol Empires all dominated the continent's economic center of gravity at some point. The Chinese got a few centuries at the helm because China was the crown jewel and socio-economic center of the Mongol Empire and that lasted for a while even after the Mongol Empire disintegrated. But even then it never translated to domination of the entire landmass although the Mongols came very close. China, like various other empires from all over Eurasia, got a turn at the helm for a time but it was hardly something uniquely Chinese. I think essentially you're weirding out over the term 'center.' China was the biggest market, it's demands did the pulling. It pulled silver out of the New World, pulled European traders into the Indian Ocean, and all that jazz. If it helps, I was using it as center of gravity. Maybe it was inaccurate to put that in 'China,' but I think the studies have it more or less in the Himalayas until 1800 or so. You're also dancing around goalposts and vastly oversimplifying the dynamics of Mongolian Empire. Pax Mongolia was nice for the trade and all, but there was a time when you could walk from Beijing to Lisbon and cross only two borders. It's vastly overstated, trade, as I've said a bunch, barely now and certainly then never did particularly care for our modern delineations of state or nation. Overall the point is that that's fungible and conditional on historical conditions and meant gently caress-all 50 years later, and so really doesn't have too much bearing on today.
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Jan 21, 2016 00:05
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Fojar38 posted:I think that "center" is dictated chiefly by geography rather than sheer size, hence why I think that historically the Middle East was Eurasia's "center of gravity." Sino-European trade always had to go through the Middle East in some fashion, so whoever dominated the Middle East tended to benefit the most from Eurasian trade, and what's more they also tended to make the rules. One of the reasons Europeans began to scout the Atlantic more is because the Ottomans seized control of the Middle East and hence controlled East-West trade. China's prominence in that the demands of the Chinese market had a substantial influence on the global economy is also a recent phenomenon that wasn't really seen until Europeans showed up wanting to trade directly. Prior to that, when most trade occurred via an Indian Ocean-Middle East-Mediterranean corridor there were so many proxies that the only group whose demands dominated global trade was whoever had the most influence over this corridor. Often this was multiple states, sometimes it was only one or two. Okay but that's literally not what center of gravity means. I think it's also telling that, by your own narrative here, Europe wasn't desperate to trade with the Middle East (I mean, it was nice, and they did it a bunch) but getting at that sweet sweet China market without needing to go through intermediaries is why Europeans flung themselves across the globe. The whole thing is that, despite the number of proxies, a->b->c->d... z the only reason there's profit in the arbitrage is because a and z want poo poo the other has. A larger number of proxies simply means that the price can get jacked up more along the way, indicating a high level of demand. And for the most part it was goods going west, metals going east. The intermediate is their but, as you so rightfully point out, that's entirely conditional on the end points and the middleman, by definition, is someone who can be cut out. quote:The various powers that be at the time definitely cared about trade that was going through their realms because you could tax trade, and if you didn't tax trade you were a massive sucker who probably wasn't long for the world. And unless you were going to hoof it through Siberia or Central Asia like a suicidal retard you'd go by the ocean, and ocean trade requires ports, and ports require infrastructure, and infrastructure is supplied by states who levy taxes for use of their port. The Mongols weren't really any exception to this, although their control of the Persian Gulf was mostly via proxies. The point is that up until the mid-14th century Persia was controlled by the same dudes who ruled from Karakorum and later Beijing. In my opinion it's this fact that allowed China to dominate Eurasia's economic center of gravity during the Ming Dynasty and if there was any notion that China was ever "the center of the world (read: Eurasia's) economy," it was at this point. So here's an analogy. I have (metaphorically) just told you that petrochemicals are an important part of anthropogenic warming. You respond that fire is hot. While true, this means nothing about your thesis regarding the Yuan Dynasty. Now, plenty of hoofing was done in Central Asia (a good deal less through Siberia, but occasionally, I'll grant you) and people got fabulously loving wealthy along the way. The Mongols followed those trade routes along their way, looting a great many of them. Later on they set up shop and got on doing the taxing trade poo poo, as one does. However, that had gently caress all to do with China 'dominating' the center of gravity. For one, the Mongols were terrible administrators* and that whole Pax Mongolia disappeared as fast as, well, any other fleeting empire. For another, one does not 'dominate' a center of gravity. A thing is or is not, and China, by about any metric, had a larger economy than any classification you chose to use save perhaps China v. Rest. This had some effects, notably, pointing flow of trade vs. flow of currency etc. etc. Remember, this conversation started with who might have the bigger economy (in this metaphor, I suppose, dick, since it does mean dickall compared to certain other matter.) The question was 'does China have the biggest dick' (no) perhaps 'would it have the biggest dick if...' (possibly, but of course you'd have to meet those conditions) The point I'm making is that the region now know as China did, in fact, have the world's biggest dick for a while, and how that dick, uh, affected dickonomics in other places of the world** but in between being just plain wrong about history you're yammering about condoms and dicksheathes and going on about the exploits that these different dicks got up to, but ultimately you're wrong because we're not talking about dicks we're talking about economies but you're wrapped up in epistemologies that are about as useful to this conversation as an extended dick metaphor. *Or, more accurately, the first generation wasn't great at it and they outsourced a lot of those tasks, it took them a while to get good at it. We're talking ~16th Century. In India. ** All good metaphors breakdown eventually.
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Jan 21, 2016 08:09
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icantfindaname posted:Voltarie used Confucianism as a rhetorical stand-in for idealized rationalist liberalism, in polemics against the political and religious structures of his day. His 'Confucianism' had very important differences with real Confucianism and arguably doesn't resemble it much at all. I think we're in agreement here, mostly? I've said a bunch before that that economic size is all I'm talking about. Which, btw, your chart helpfully illustrates. Check that shifting scale at the bottom; China + India are casually sitting at twice, literal double the size of Europe and the Middle East. That pattern holds steady regardless of fojar's precious Yuan or not. That stays more or less the same until Europe claws up in 1500 by looting the gently caress out of the new world and slowly poking at trade in the Indian Ocean. Even then most of that growth is coming out of them loving the poo poo out of the Middle East by, holla, cutting them out of the India/China trade. The point is, unless your markets are literally-ocean-apart-no-trade seperated (so, pre-Columbian America) then the simple laws of supply and demand mean that things happening in {zone with more economic activity} are going to mean bigger 'things' for the global economy than {zone with less economic activity.} For example, since everyone is so wrapped up in this power-of-a-state nonsense, a state that could pass (and, rather importantly, impose) a law that could effect that zone has relatively more effect on the economy of the world than a power enforcing laws on an economy half that size. For example, the Chinese decision to collect taxes in silver. The delightfully named "Single Whip Law" demanding that their economy suck up an assload of silver and move it into circulation since now every Tom Dick and Jerry needs to be able to convert his kind into silver currency at least once a year) had huge effects on the world's economy because it was a mandate enacted over a huge proportion of the market. Note that, long term, this wasn't great for the state that enacted the law. The inflation was bad for the Ming, it helped Spain deal with it's own inflation by sucking off a lot of the excess, and it made direct trade with China a lot more lucrative. Then in 1800 Europe goes absolutely-loving-meteoric because, hang on, let me quote my first few posts in this dumbass derail: quote:some assholes in Manchester really got their heads around steam and spinning jennies and took a good look at the putting out process Suddenly population doesn't mean nearly what it used to. It's not that China's economy disappeared at this point, steam power just loving rewrites the fundamental loving rulebook of how the world works. As you helpfully note, this happens largely due to changes in per-capita GDP and not because of a mass cloning incident in Lancaster or something. That's something I've been hammering. This also, as you have pointed out, meant gently caress all as far as the capacity of whatever states happened to nominally be ruling over the area in which this action occurred to 'dominate' or 'conquer' or 'demand' anything if the states in question couldn't tap that power.
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Jan 21, 2016 09:53
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tekz posted:Uhhh...where did you learn history exactly? Mughal Empire: 1555 – 1857 British Raj: 1858–1947 RIP poor fuckers couldn't even make the century. Your epistemologies are bad and you should feel bad.
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Jan 21, 2016 09:57
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icantfindaname posted:So you agree that China is not meaningfully 'dominant' or 'central' to the world economy at any point in history? Define 'dominant' or 'central.' Or, for that matter, 'China.' The economy occurring in the geographical vicinity of the modern state of China was, for most of recorded history, one of the largest, more than double the size of the economy encompassed by the zone now known as Europe. As such, effects there had a big 'weight' on the market. The market there did a lot of dictating, and access to it was a primary motivator for some world changing events. Generally, any entity comprising 25-30% of a market can be said to 'dominate' it, especially when compared to, as was at the beginning of this conversation, an entity sitting at roughly 12%. That's about all I've been saying this whole time. icantfindaname posted:And arguably the jump in European per capita wealth has more to do with the Black Death and the search for agricultural productivity in the face of labor shortages than anything to do with the New World. America is almost solely important as a giant silver mine You're underselling the value of New World sugar here. The capital and mercantile seeds to kick start the IR start there. I also agree that per capita wealth is way more important than absolute wealth when judging, say, where I'd like to live or societal end goals or what have you. But that's not the question at hand, so the Black Death was still (knock on effects aside) a net loss for the European economy. quote:The Mughal Empire's power is completely broken by the year 1740 from that point until 1857 the Mughal Emperor basically has control over a city block in Delhi. In addition it never really secured control over the southern half of the country and was mostly limited to the northern heartland By the metric you yourself proposed two posts ago, judging an empire by it's length of tenancy: You're bad model posted:Mughal Empire imploded almost as quickly as it formed You're saying that one city block had more power than the entire Raj. Sooooo was that one city block more significant than the British Raj, or are you using a bad model for understanding history? I'll let you pick. e: Or hey, you made a snap judgement on what you thought history was like based on biased assumptions about how history really happened, and then, after a trip to wikipedia, you doubled down instead of trimming sails. Call it option 2b. the JJ fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 10:27
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icantfindaname posted:And what I've been saying this whole time is that it doesn't make any sense to call something 'dominant' if it doesn't have any agency. The Qing state didn't, otherwise it would have been able to control its own trade policy. And the market didn't either because 'the market' is a composite of countless individual actors which does not have independent agency on a collective level See, the color blue in the Starry Night doesn't have any agency in the painting. Sure, it's mostly blue. But it doesn't control its own trade policy. Like you're still coming at this from a position of state power and, as the CCP is finding out everyday as they demand that the economy and the state move in lockstep, that's just not how the market works. Like... clearly the NYSE isn't a dominant force in the global economy because... people get pickpocketed in Times Square? The market is countless actors taking countless composite actions accruing countless tiny bits of utility and value and, for most of recorded history, a hell of a lot of that utility and value was happening in China. Sorry bruh, just the facts. icantfindaname posted:The Mughals go from their political zenith right around 1700 to having Delhi sacked and tens of thousands of its inhabitants carried off as slaves and all their territory taken over by Marathis by 1740 or 1750. Seems pretty fast to me. As for the south of the country it's only controlled for 50 or 70 years, the empire is expanding right until the decline starts. Again, I'm going to give the side eye to the British Raj and ask you to tell me that that didn't mean gently caress all because Ghandi chased them out by waving his walking stick at them. quote:And this isn't really a derail, it's very relevant because of the narrative that because Asia was dominant economically and politically at some point in the past, it's destined to be again. Besides the fallacious historicism and past-is-prologue thing, it wasn't actually dominant, unless engaging in trade while while having no effective state control over trade policy automatically makes you dominant I agree that the 'past-ergo-future' argument is hella stupid and have pointed to the gigantic middle finger textile producers in Manchester gave to the old order as both a tremendous example of just that and a tremendous example of the fallacy that size-of-economy = power-of-state because that several millennia run of biggest baddest market meant dick all when the gunboats came sailing in. Or the Japanese invaded. Or, for that matter, when steppe nomad flavor of the month came screaming over the hills. I also think that China- as an economy, note the thread title- regaining top seed if we assume that a. there's a ceiling on per capita productivity that the USA, Germany, et. al. have hit. This was the case way back, the Biological Ancien Regime was kinda a bitch. Note the relative stability of the old order in your chart, how much that had to compress that to fit in the goddamn wild growth in the 1800's. Note too, it's relative agnosticism to any changed not potato or coal related. If per capita production in China were to then hit that hypothetical productivity cap, ipso facto by way of math the old order would reassert. That's a poo poo load of ifs and I don't think that the CCP is competent enough to manage that in this modern-by-the-historian's-definition-of-a-modern-state-modern age when state policies maybe matter more. quote:Do you have any sources for New World capital making a meaningful difference to European industrialization? I've read it was not, although I do not have sources handy. And the Raj... oh yeah, RIP, couldn't even make the century. Scrubs. That Alexander guy. Died after like 30 years. Wasn't even king for most of them. Must have been, like, the least significant monarch ever. 150 years is actually, as far as states go, not a bad length of time to be on top. Like, it's no Steph Curry, but it's pretty drat respectable. Maybe, I dunno, Carmelo or something.
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Jan 21, 2016 11:19
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icantfindaname posted:Are you Tom Friedman IRL? ... no?
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Jan 21, 2016 12:00
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Murgos posted:For pretty much all of recorded history China has had an enormous population, only rarely has their economy been really outstanding. This was the goalpost the whole time. All I was saying was, hey, this wasn't true because, for most of human history, there was a cap on per capita production so, yeah, China by being a big and agriculturally rich area had a much larger and more active economy than most other arbitrarily defined zone. That changed when the British broke the sound barrier and went for broke. That's not a spin that's just the facts. My first comment on it (regarding whether or not China's population would Once Again Allow It To Rule The World) was that they probably wouldn't because multipliers to per capita output matter so much more and that CCP policies have hosed them so bad that it's unlikely they'd even reach absolute parity with, say, the USA, much less per capita output. But I did think it was worthwhile to challenge the Orientalist "oh China was never important despite its enormous population" because that's an Orientalist view point formed at a time when that was true (1850-1950sish) but isn't really true if you actually break down poo poo historically. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/daily-chart-19 Here's a nice break down of what I meant by center of gravity. Note the rock solid positioning there, the ever so slight drift for 1500, and then the bonkers push to London. We can see there's already been some correction, but I'd be the first (and was from the start) saying that that was the result of a bigass change in the basic human paradigm w/r/t the economy. Everyone else wants to layer on poo poo about state powers and control and poo poo about perfidy and moral judgements about aesthetics. And also making some weird ahistorical calls on size of economy vs. strength of states, or even, like, value of regions of some poo poo. I don't think it has much to do with perfidious Brits. I mean, slavery was lovely and they did a lot of underhanded poo poo to get the goods to fuel that growth, but it's not like agricultural economies never depended on cohersion or committed atrocities. I dunno, I guess I didn't think I'd have to spell out "Oh, btw, I don't judge the moral rightness of an action solely by it's effect on global GDP" but if y'all wanna approach the issue from a Randian perspective we can do that. e: Whatever, gently caress it, I'm done with Logos or whatever. Time to appeal to authority. Woo Columbia University. http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/chinawh/web/s5/s5_4.html Again, it's nothing to do with Chinese governments being great or anything. They needed the silver because they invented paper money but hosed up by printing too much. "Pesos were so familiar in China that they had cute little names for them. One of the kings of Spain, whose image was on the peso during his reign, looked to the Chinese like Buddha, so they referred to this as the "Fat Buddha" coin or the "Buddha Head" coin. And they were so used to this that, in fact, they drove world demand for this particular coin. Long after this particular Spanish king was dead, other people discovered that the Chinese wanted coins with this particular image on them, so the price of the coins rose. As a result, people such as the Dutch were making coins with the face of a particular long-dead Spanish king on them because the Chinese wanted them. (Much as people today make fake Prada handbags to satisfy consumer demand.) The Chinese market for coins, essentially, set the global standard." Or yeah, but they were these inscrutable Orientals and their economy wasn't linked to the world. "These coins were also so common in China that land contracts normally had a price in copper or some local medium, and then in a little handwritten note on the side next to the standard price, they told you how much that was in Spanish or Mexican pesos. It was just a part of life there." the JJ fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 21, 2016 23:44
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Krispy Kareem posted:Wait...they're announcing 2016 GDP? I thought those were 2015 results. No, it's the 2015 data. It's just that most places that don't make up all their data, collecting and organizing that information takes time.
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Jan 27, 2016 19:06
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