(08-30-2022, 10:48 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(08-29-2022, 03:35 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:Quote:The demographic and agricultural conditions you and your author assert are flat-out false.Just because the 1 child policy is gone does not mean the effects on previous birthrates are. After all, it takes 20 years and 9 months to grow a 20yo worker, 40 years and 9 months to grow a 40yo manager, etc. Government programs cannot add more people to a given generation the way they can add to the bank accounts of those impoverished by bad policy.
The 1 child policy is gone
The 1 child policy has been gone for almost that time, at least regarding the "20-year" part. And it was not a bad policy. Overpopulation is a threat to human life and to all life. China's population is not decreasing; it is stabilizing, as all countries need to do. As countries get more prosperous, they need to breed fewer children. And if what you say is true that they don't have enough arable land, then reducing or stabilizing their population would seem to have been the right move.
I recall seeing a NOVA program a couple decades ago in which the one-child policy and its effects were mentioned. China is a good geographic analogue for the United States, and pressure upon the land will make life miserable at some levels and outright dangerous at others. Admit it: life was probably much more pleasant in America when we had only 200 million people and not the 330 or so million that we now have. Crowding and high rents are not fun.
Whatever the ideology, the Chinese recognized that 1.5 billion people is close to the maximum for food security -- basically everything must go right with the political system and the economic order must be sane. 2 billion people creates a society on the brink of famine. 2.5 billion people means famine. Such would be just as true under 'socialism' as under free-wheeling capitalism. China cannot approach countries like the USA and Japan in living conditions under any circumstances, but it can be on par with countries like Indonesia.
Unglamorous as agriculture is, it is still the cornerstone of a healthy economy. There is no technological fix for hunger. The countries that have high GDP per capita despite a weak agricultural order are typically selling off energy (typically petroleum) or gems and minerals to support imports of food and whatever luxuries those countries can get away with importing -- Saudi Arabia with oil, Namibia with diamonds. A country whose agricultural system cannot feed its own farmers is in deep trouble, as it will be unable to feed those who do any other work. Although agriculture is low in economic rewards for laborers and peasant farmers, it is necessary for those people who do anything else from commerce to manufacturing to creative activities.
There is no technological fix to hunger. This is a fair warning to anyone who trivializes the necessity of a viable agricultural sector in any society. Food crops and forage eat energy, as does the distribution of these in edible forms. I remind people that pressure upon food supplies will be the great first danger of global warming.
Quote:Quote:and most Chinese are still farming.farming with less than 1/3 the arable land per capita than the world average, and less than 1/5 the arable land per capita of the United States and insane reliance on imports of fertilizer from foreign nations (namely Russia and India).
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-inf...per-capita
Chinese have been farming their land with a huge population for centuries and millennia. China is a big country. Such figure-playing is nonsense. China is not on the verge of a food shortage.[/quote]
Inundation of the rich alluvial lowlands in which the great bulk of Chinese agriculture is done will create extreme distress through the annihilation of the food sources that feed China's industrial sector. I can say the same of many other countries.
China seems to be efficient in managing its affair. Its arable land has been going down, but maintained a level beyond state targets.
"SHANGHAI, Aug 27 (Reuters) - China's total arable land amounted to almost 1.28 million sq km (490,000 sq miles) by the end of 2019, down nearly 6% compared with a decade earlier, according to a once-in-a-decade survey of the country's land use published on Thursday.
The number - amounting to 13% of China's total area - is higher than the state target, which aimed to keep 1.865 billion mu (1.24 million sq km) of arable land off limits to urban encroachment by the end of 2020, the Ministry of Natural Resources said in a briefing."
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chin...021-08-27/[/quote]
The United States actually has the inefficient agriculture due to policies that foster the waste of water resources and the under-application of labor to farming. Both are political in cause, as they reflect the policies that large-scale corporate farmers promote.
Quote:Quote:China has plenty of minerals, coal and solar power.Coal they primarily get from Australia and their solar power is not nearly sufficient to meet the needs of their population.
China has its own coal and lots more solar power. Saying solar power cannot supply our needs is just to first delay the transition (by supporting Republicans), and then complaining that there's not enough.
China has huge desert areas, including the Takla Makan and its share of the Gobi. With the right technlogy, solar farms could provide plenty of energy to the more populous parts of China -- if, of course, the technology of transportation of energy becomes efficient (and hence cheap) enough to provide it as far away as southeastern China.
I had not heard that about Australian imports to China, but perhaps if China invades Taiwan, our Australian ally might cut off those imports. Maybe that foolish act could accelerate a crisis and a fall by China. But China is riding so high these days and has such a long and successful history that the sudden collapse you forecast just seems an outrageous prediction.
Quote:Still, China can stop using coal anytime it wants to, more or less. Lots more solar energy can be built, including on all their buildings. China is doing a lot already, but it's 2060 target is too slow and needs to be moved up.
That would be a good reason to not invade Taiwan.
Quote:Quote:In part, yes indeed, and also because Europe has progressed, and realized its mistakes.Quote:It seems you may be putting too much emphasis on the Breton Woods agreement. The internecene wars came to an end because the Allies put an end to them and because Europe could see what condition they left themselves in. Imperialist rivalries came to an end too as The West was stripped of its colonies in the subsequent years.A time of peace, cooperation and rebuilding following a time of war is not an historical anomaly for Europe (that's basically what 1Ts are). What is an historical anomaly is the way they have stayed at peace for well over half a century. This has virtually never happened in 2000+ years of European history, and it only came about because America put down her foot and kept old conflicts from reemerging.
Europe was widely considered to be at peace for a century after the Vienna Conference in 1815. Except for the reunification wars in the 1860s, and a few wars in the Balkans, this was true. The same sort of qualification is true for your assertion about the "well over half a century" you mention, since it had more Balkan wars in the 1990s.
Arrangements made in the previous Saeculum typically become irrelevant in or before the Crisis Era and, should they be revived, they appear in new form with different players.
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Quote:We will continue to need to do our part, altrhough it seems in your previous post that you didn't want us to do that. And this part will be larger than others because we are larger and more equipped to do it.Quote:It seems someone has to keep shipping lanes open, if we don't want greedy autocratic powers like China interfering with our global economy.We will likely see shared agreements to secure oceanic shipping routes, but without the hegemonic oversight of the United States, such measures will lack the consistency of the current order.
We Americans found that our infrastructure for importing stuff instead of manufacturing stuff has become overstretched. Corporate America sought to abandon most domestic manufacturing so that it could get around environmental regulations and union activity. Now that that capacity has been overstretched, maybe we would rather have investments put into job-creating plant and equipment.
The service economy once touted as an alternative to manufacturing because it would offer better work than the mind-numbing repetition of industrial work has largely failed in achieving its promises.. Sure, the service industries have created jobs, but many of them are as mind-numbing drudgery as industrial work. They also pay less. The hotels, service stations, retail businesses, and restaurants popping up after the Interstate Highways were built created many well-paying jobs for construction workers. Now that the construction of such places is completed, those places are full of low-paying work that fails to support a tax base for public service such as police and schools. Springfield, Missouri exemplifies what is wrong with the service-economy model: wages are abysmal, and so are the schools and police services. Crime rates are sky-high. Springfield is not a dying core city like St. Louis which once had a powerful sector of manufacturing that has largely vanished. Springfield never had a strong manufacturing sector. It is poor like St. Louis, if for very different reasons.
Quote:Quote: But meanwhile the military industrial complex set up after the Pearl Harbor attack continued to function, sending the USA to war in Korea and Vietnam and later to Afghanistan and Iraq. US interests and Keynesian economics were hurt by this. We should pull back from such adventures; on that we agree. It increases our debt, and adds this debt excuse to neoliberal/Republican demands for less social and environmental spending.
Quote:The worst part is that we never even needed the oil reserves of the Middle East (the US has always been far more energy independent than the general public realizes). Much of such escapades were done on behalf of our European allies
And we are more energy independent because of the potential of renewable energy. 100 square miles of solar power alone (to say nothing of wind onshore and offshore), spread out over the country and on rooftops, can supply ALL our energy needs. Coal is no longer an option, period! That, my friend, indeed needs to be shut down ASAP! Republicans and their Supreme Court resist this, and thus keep the climate crisis accelerating, which creates feedback loops to make the crisis worse and shut down our hydro power.
We long believed the domino theory, and we have operated the same way on autopilot without realizing that the cause is no more. Habits often outlast their appropriateness, which may explain a once-poor and now-rich entrepreneur picking up coins as he did when poor. Maybe when all our transactions are done on cards we will no longer pick up coins. When the vegetable-based foods taste as good as the meats that they substitute for we will become vegans and hardly notice a real difference.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.