Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.
i’m a trained economist and i don’t know what this means
Comment on take their money and arrest those responsible
TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 3 hours agoEverybody’s economy is different, China is no snowflake.
Actually it is. The trajectory of other peripheral countries is quite different. Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.
But I am not going to debate whether China’s capitalism is “good capitalism” or not, that feels like pulling hairs and is a digression as you yourself said.
You can’t debate the topic at all, clearly, but sure want to continue making the claim that it simply switched to capitalism. Maybe don’t say things your can’t bc defend?
How much should China regulate? At the very least enough to stop the growth. I think that’s a simple enough answer.
It doesn’t address the obvious trade-off I laid out. Why are India’s Paris commitments currently greater than zero?
So, what was China’s target for peak emissions? What does peak emissions mean? How are they doing regarding that target?
Not true. The US and EU have been lowering emissions for the past 20 years.
If you focus solely on production you can eke out such numbers, but it ignores the basics of imperialism and the aforementioned offshoring where industry doesn’t just magically become green. Shuffling around where industry is located didn’t decrease emissions by itself. Emissions targets do not stick exclusively to production and, I have to repeat again because you keep ignoring it, the US and EU are failing to meet their commitments. Yet you focus on one of the few countries that is. I wonder why. I wonder why you ignore 80% of what I say. Perhaps you should take a little break.
If you include consumption the plots look very different. And I’m not aware of easily available stats that track based on industry ownership.
Compare to India, look at poverty stats when China is removed.
i’m a trained economist and i don’t know what this means
Various global poverty stats produced by major entities, e.g. below $x per day by the World Bank (which keeps changing its metrics but that’s a different discussion). Capital apologists like (incidentally Epstein-tied) Pinker attempt to claim improvements to human development and well-being for capitalism, but these statistics are highly sensitive to exactly which countries you include as well as what metrics you use. But a trend re: global poverty alleviation is that China is responsible for most of it, sometimes the vast majority for certain statistics, and trends can reverse when you remove it from the equation.
India is a good metric for comparison. Similar population size, similar location, formerly colonized and formally liberated around the same time, but two very different paths. Capitalist economist Amartya Sen estimated tens of millions of deaths in India alone every decade in comparison to China.
World Bank (which keeps changing its metrics but that’s a different discussion)
i call that discussion the “the best macroeconomic model that doesn’t fuck up the quantification problem is only 60% accurate and my magic 8 ball gets better predictive results”
hirihit640@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
The reason I’m not debating China’s flavor of capitalism is because it’s irrelevant. They don’t get a free pass on carbon emissions no matter what economy they have.
And yes there’s a trade-off, regulating fossil fuels increases production costs. That’s the trade-off everybody makes.
Bottom line is that China’s emissions are huge and still growing. They are meeting commitments because those commitments were low in the first place. For example China only commited to peak emissions by 2030. The US and EU never needed to make such a commitment because they had already reached their peak in 2005.
And yes they perform a large portion of the world’s manufacturing, this “shuffling” of industries that you mentioned. But their lower regulations on emissions is precisely one of the reasons why manufacturing moves there. If they regulated more heavily, then some manufacturing would move out, but at least total global emissions would go down. Every country needs to participate in raising the cost of fossil fuels, in order for it to work.
TheOubliette@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
You brought it up (and are reasserting it in this quote), same as how you bring up China unasked. Clearly you thought it was relevant, you are just trying to avoid responsibility for your claims.
Which part of “meeting or exceeding their Paris targets” reads as “get a free pass” to you?
Oh so the decision of what to target isn’t just “no increases immediately”? Glad we agree and can stop pretending it’s so simplistic. Though I see you neglected to acknowledge India’s targets.
The commitments of China were nearly an order of magnitude higher than the EU and US actually. By the way the US withdrew and is going hog wild.
And they are meeting their commitments, even exceeding them, despite being the primary seat of global production while the EU continues to deindustrialize.
In production, yes. They are deindustrializing. Their targets are much easier to hit, they follow the global capitalist economic trend re: imperialism, offshoring. It is actually much harder to reduce emissions while taking on the industry that’s being outsourced.
It’s really not. You move production to China because overall it is vastly cheaper, primarily due to the much lower costs of labor reproduction and how tightly integrated industries are and can be due to infrastructure and colocation of technical ability. If you want to make something in the US something like half your cost goes to maintaining the humans doing it, and they’re expensive due to massive economic leeches: real estate, finance, insurance. When 80% of a paycheck goes to having a place to live (just renting), going to the doctor, and eating, your labor costs are just subsidizing rent seeking and finance.
Every country needs to meet their climate commitments. Is yours?