Just a little weekend reading and viewing

From Thematic Markets, a long piece suggesting that China’s industrial overcapacity is deliberate and the country’s economy is incompatible with much of the rest of the global economy…

…contrary to another popular myth, China’s rise has little to do with efficiency or productivity.  China’s ascent results mostly from beggar-thy-neighbor industrial policies.  China’s total factor productivity (TFP) growth – growth in output not resulting from adding more labor or capital, i.e. efficiency and innovation – has been negative for nearly a decade (Figure 1); i.e. more than all of China’s growth since 2013 has come from increasing capital, even as efficiency subtracted from output.¹³  As a middle-income country, China should offer higher returns on investment than an already rich country, yet the marginal product of capital in China had fallen below that of the United States (Figure 2).  Put another way, China’s economy now is so inefficient that it requires an extraordinary $11 of investment to create $1 of incremental of output.  Furthermore, these figures likely understate China’s inefficiency since they are based on reported Chinese GDP growth that probably is overstated.

…For nearly 30 years, Chinese political, military and diplomatic doctrine has been to use economic development to raise China to a position where it could challenge and displace the US-dominated world order.  President Xi has been unabashedly clear in his desire to create a new “multipolar” order that returns China to its historic role as the ”Middle Kingdom.”¹⁷  He has been similarly blunt that he expects and is preparing for war with the West that he aims to win.¹⁸  Mr. Xi’s top international and domestic policy priorities – the “Made in China 2025” and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) – aim to make China as self-sufficient as possible while placing it at the center of a new international order based on dependencies to China that guarantee the domestically unavailable resources. 

Hot on the tails of the SCMP’s article on why people like decent affordable food outlets, the BBC asks why locals in places like Barcelona hate tourists.

From Ars Technica – how conspiracy theorists think they’re normal…

In 2015, Pennycook made headlines when he co-authored a paper demonstrating how certain people interpret “pseudo-profound bullshit” as deep observations. Pennycook et al. were interested in identifying individual differences between those who are susceptible to pseudo-profound BS and those who are not and thus looked at conspiracy beliefs, their degree of analytical thinking, religious beliefs, and so forth.

They presented several randomly generated statements, containing “profound” buzzwords, that were grammatically correct but made no sense logically, along with a 2014 tweet by Deepak Chopra that met the same criteria. They found that the less skeptical participants were less logical and analytical in their thinking and hence much more likely to consider these nonsensical statements as being deeply profound. That study was a bit controversial, in part for what was perceived to be its condescending tone, along with questions about its methodology. But it did snag Pennycook et al. a 2016 Ig Nobel Prize.

..Take the case of the Sandy Hook conspiracy, where adherents believe it was a false flag operation. In one sample, 8 percent of people thought that this was true. That 8 percent thought 61 percent of people agreed with them.