Comment by mrtksn
14 days ago
Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.
According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...
Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.
US is stil ahead in some stuff but the list is getting smaller as the market caps getting bigger and people "richer".
>Obsession with pricing the stock is not healthy.
I'm not claiming it is, just that it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.
>According to western reports, China is at least 15 years ahead of US in Nuclear for example: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-many-15-years-beh...
>Or public infrastructure, or transportation, or electric cars etc.
Arguably all of those is more due to government intervention than the companies themselves. Nuclear is impossible to build in the US due to overburdensome regulations, infrastructure/transportation is impossible to build due to NIMBY-friendly planning rules, electric cars are massively subsidized by the Chinese government.
The economic case for nuclear is mostly what keeps it from being built in the USA. The USA built a lot of nuclear power plants in the 70s/80s, and they didn't really pay off even with the government providing free insurance coverage. Likewise, today it is even harder to make the case for a new nuclear power plant since renewables are much cheaper on a kW basis.
Chinese regulation is neither too high nor too low. It would be impossible to build a nuclear plant if the government didn't firmly back it, otherwise there are no barriers that it can't ignore.
> it's far more objective and far less fudgeable than the alternatives.
It's not objective in the least. Stock markets are pure speculation.
Right, China achieve all this thanks to its libertarian low touch low regulation small government and only if the stock prices of the American companies go a bit higher and the government is a tad less regulated they will do even better than the Chinese.
Not all regulation is bad, but also, not all regulation is good. Regulation is meaningless in a vacuum. I support more consumer protection regulation, but also, I support YIMBYism [0] which is a deregulatory model that wants to remove restrictions on housing, which were largely made by corporations and NIMBYs who don't want their property values to go down if new housing is built. YIMBYism is actually very similar to how Europe builds their housing, via mixed zone development.
It is the same with your comment, saying that it's only libertarians or those who want low regulation is a strawman, it depends on exactly which type of regulation. China can achieve some things with its big government ways, but it can't achieve everything. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YIMBY_movement