Interesting Links for 25-08-2019
Aug. 25th, 2019 04:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- The grandmother who loved Dungeons and Dragons
- (tags:dungeonsanddragons age cancer family ViaDrCross )
- Empty trains on the modern Silk Road: when Belt and Road interests don't align
- (tags:china trade subsidies economics )
- What parents want from a hospital when their child is dying
- (tags:death children parents )
- Capitalism, elasticity, and coercion
- (tags:economics society land capitalism viaFanf )
- Greggs plans to release vegan versions of all top-selling products
- Clearly the market is now big enough. I wonder how long until it's the majority.
(tags:vegan food UK ) - Witness a crime against food! (Although I would totally eat something not that dissimilar to this)
- (tags:food wtf cooking video )
- Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Scoring New Pixar Movie "Soul"
- (tags:Pixar TrentReznor music movies )
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 06:36 pm (UTC)https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/vegans-uk-rise-popularity-plant-based-diets-veganism-figures-survey-compare-the-market-a8286471.html
Not sure how reliable that is though.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-25 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-08-27 09:45 am (UTC)The China Railway story is interesting, combining, as it does several of my China-watcher things of interest.
1) Journalism in China
2) Massive, but perhaps not well thought through infrastructure
3) Infrastructure as a foreign policy tool
4) Gaming of incentives
5) Official corruption
6) Poor national statistics
7) The impact on Central Asia
It's rare for a paper to critisise senior officials or officiadom generally. 3 in 4 chance of ending up on a gulag if you do. So interesting to see a domestic newspaper running this story. I wonder if they have been put up to it by some senior figure.
I think the plan to unwind the subsidies over a couple of years is the right place to start. An implicit subsidy will remain in the form of misapplied capital as things like rolling stock and loading bays and cranes all exist in the future based on a view of the future with large subsidies.
The Chinese seem to be throwing money at infrastructure and not doing a great job of allocating it properly or controlling the project costs. That's probably okay in the last couple of decades and probably okay in the next decade as a) they had low levels of capital infrastructure so the marginal benefit of even expensive and not well placed infrastructure will be positive b) they haven't hit their demographic bump yet so they have plenty of spare money c) the economy is growing at double-digits. That is less true in the 2030's and 2040's.
They are definately using capital infrastructure projects or the financing of them to exert influence on other countries. Partly explicitely. If Country X agrees to do as China asks, China will provide Country X with soft loans and direct investment. Partly it implicit by tying those countries in to China economic web. I don't think that's awful or immoral. Perhaps a bit difficult for usin the West as we're not currently in the business of spashing cash around for foreign policy gains. I think it will come undone in the same way that it has done in the past. The host country will get fed up of China telling it what to do, there will be some more muscular foreign policy, a small guerilla war will break out and eventually one of them will escalate in to a big insurgency and China will end up bogged down in it's own version of Vietnam or Afghanistanor Suez or perhaps all three at once.
The fundamental problem with infrastructure as a foreign policy tool is that the port or railway or power station or bridge is physically located inside the host country and so long as the host country thinks its own people can run the infrastructure they can nationalise it
China has for a while been wrestling with how to centrally manage their economy without getting bogged down in a central planning nightmare like the Soviets. They seem to keep a central master plan and devolve actions that deliver that down and out by using non-market incentives. Which seems to sort of work (see points above about misapplied infrastructure) but when it doesn't you end up with ghost towns and bridges to nowhere. Lots of opportunities to find incentive arbitrage or money pumps and not great oversight because it's difficult to spot fraudulent manipulation of the incentives and it's hard for the Communist Party of China to enforce discipline because it's supposed to be perfect and everyone is a shareholder, I mean member.
It's also an opportunity for official corruption, both at home and abroad. Anywhere where there is huge amounts of money sloshing around, poor governance and obscure metrics is just asking for someone to divert some of the money.
Sitting right in the middle of China's governance problems are the poor state of national statistics. They are very unreliable and prone to being falsified. To the point where I don't believe any Chinese national statistic and I'm not sure their own governance processes do either.
Meanwhile, lots of trains and lots of railways running through Central Asia which will bind them in to the world economy at both ends of the railway and give them plenty of opportunties to grow their own economy and export things. I think one of the crunch points for China's foreign policy will be when the Central Asian republics decide that they sell exports at a better price to Europe than China and the Chinese tell them they can't do it along *China's* railway. Ultimately having these countries trading with us and with China is a good thing. There will be gains from trade and they will become more robust states with better institutions as a result.
But quite a few people are going to get caught up badly in the great corrupt foreign policy driven railway mania before then.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-27 09:54 am (UTC)I think the flip side of the question is about the relative bargaining power of the workers and how that can be enhanced through education, collective bargaining, taxation and labour laws so that the gains from holding inelastic capital don't land as a windfall with the owner of the inelastic resource.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-27 09:55 am (UTC)