Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

If that's the argument it's fallacious. China and USA is not an apples to apples comparison. China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator, while the USA is struggling with the "what now?" question of advanced nations. All the easy stuff is behind us and there is nobody for us to just copy.

View on HN

>> All the easy stuff is behind us and there is nobody for us to just copy.

Healthcare? Education?

At what point does the economy serve the people instead of people serving the economy?

> China would need the kind of explosive growth we have seen just to get everyone a refrigerator

Not sure if you meant that literally but I've been to some pretty poor places in China and they do have refrigerators...

Yeah, but they're new, and there's still a culture of food preservation that we lost here at some point.

US fish buying: Buy a pleasant-looking filet off a bed of ice, get it into refrigeration asap

China fish buying: Bring a plastic bag, put live fish in bag of water, transfer to a short-term tank at home. It's actually superior, you can't get any fresher than "I killed this fish 5 seconds ago".

And then there's all the salted food around spring festival. Plain cabbage has never been so appealing.

A fresh fish killed and put on ice is a lot fresher tasting than a half-dead fish limp but alive in a home fish tank.

I’ve been to some places where they don’t have refrigerators. Well, it was 5000 meters up in Tibetan territory and they didn’t exactly need them.

The larger point still stands. China needs a high rate of grow just to be able to catch up and afford things taken for granted in the developed world.

In an example related to the parent, China's cold chains while rapidly improving are well behind what would be acceptable in the developed world:

> While between 85 percent and 100 percent of fruit and vegetables sold in the U.S. are transported in refrigerated conditions, in China, only 20 percent of those perishables are shipped in such a manner, resulting in a high spoilage rate of up to 40 percent. In the U.S., that rate is closer to 5 percent.

http://www.livingstonintl.com/freight-transportation-updates...

There was never "easy stuff". Thinking of "developed" versus "non-developed" nations is setting up "developed" nations as a place of stagnation and no improvements. That maybe have happened in the hippy controlled west since the 1970's, but their generation is on the wain. Tech progress outside of computing is making a comeback. I think some people are now trying, with a lot of hard work, to get the tech of atoms improving again. Elon Musk being the most high profile example.

This is the fallacy of looking at a first or second order derivative to say something is better. Also, assuming that the derivitive will stay constant (at china’s rate of growth, they will quickly be richer than the USA....isn’t something many will take seriously).

China has 3x the population, so they ought to end up with 3x the GDP in the end. Per capita is the question.

Everything being equal, sure. China is still in danger of hitting the middle income trap. They’ve tapped out almost all of the easy growth, now to make it to a high income country, it gets harder, growth is already tapering off obviously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com