Westoids who sing the virtues of China's education system should note that their teenagers undergo multiple years of psychological torture like what you see in the video below. (the exception being the ultra-rich kids who go to international schools) The teens in the video are, in fact, the more fortunate teens in their school. Their parents have to go the extra length to do this for them. Most don't. You should be nicer to the angry, bitter Chinese people you see on the Internet, because they were likely traumatized by a childhood like this.

Blanchard and Zucman are two of the most conceited pieces of shit in American academia. They have spent the last 20 years establishing, through blatant ethnic nepotism I have personally witnessed, a network of French economists working in American universities. Which is not because they like America; they all continue to refer to themselves as French, never as "Americans", and if you have a conversation with them, they'll regularly tell you how much they despise this country and its people. These "French-American" economists are here to avoid paying the taxes of France, because they don't want to give €30,000/yr of their income to the French government, which is fiscally in more desperate straits than any jurisdiction in the U.S. Not only that, it was their policy advice (or lack thereof) to the successive French governments since 2000 which have led their country into the fiscal and societal trainwreck that we are seeing today. Barely five years ago, Blanchard headed a commission of economists which identified the most pressing challenges to the French economy as "climate change" and "economic inequalities", which of course demand more taxes and more debt. Apart from having provided a miniscule amount of pushback to French socialists on labor market policy, Blanchard has been content with letting his own country fall into fiscal collapse under the weight of one of the most absurd welfare-regulatory regimes in the world. Not even wanting to comment on their country which is burning down right now, these smug French economists are now asking why Americans seem to have different views than theirs. They never once consider that the Americans' "backwards" economic beliefs may, in part, explain the diverging incomes between the U.S. and France which they are personally taking advantage of. Most American centi-billionaires have developed, through personal experiences and professional advice, an intimate knowledge of charitable causes. Zuckerberg is one of the most prolific contributors to education in the world, constantly revising his targets to promote actual improvements in educational outcomes (unlike the Californian government). Brin is among the most generous contributors to medical research in the world, having personally spent years identifying the most pressing needs of the medical community. Brin and Page have also effectively implemented a wealth tax against Google itself (giving 1% of stock, and 1% of profits per year, to philanthropy). The "French-Americans" who have uprooted their own lives to live in a country they hate to avoid paying taxes, suggests that the American billionaires should simply hand this money to their government instead of evidence-based philanthropy. Not only that, but these French leeches will take it to the public platform to condemn and insult the centi-billionaires, who have contributed a thousand times more, in effort and resources, to helping the global poor than they have ever done. The most pathetic part is that it's clear Olivier Blanchard was discussing all this earnestly. It took him mere hours to reconsider his position after encountering such mundane criticisms as "Have you considered that the government would not spend this money as effectively as private initiatives?" He now goes back to equivocating about "elasticities" (though he would never bother to look at any empirical research on philanthropy, because that does not interest him.) That Blanchard's position collapses to basic online feedback shows a much deeper rot within the economics profession: Never once in his professional life has this oracle of retarded advice been challenged by his cowardly colleagues, who "just want to do economics and don't care about the politics". The result is that certain academics have spent their lives advocating for idiotic, radical positions which they have not reasoned through in a way that even an American hicklib who has never attended college is capable of doing. Newsom, whose political future depends on the farmers of Iowa, is desperately trying to stop the wealth tax. He might not understand the pitfalls of government wealth appropriation, but the farmers of Iowa do. And thus America, whose political system ensures that it must pay attention to the "un-educated" rural voters of the midwest more than its entire professoriate, continues to outperform France in every economic metric.

you know you've hit it right on the nail when Islamists and Islamophobes are both so upset by this observation. This is a good opportunity for you to argue out your differences in the comments.

The wumao are basically correct that China was nearly destroyed by the West. China's economic policies in the 1950s-70s was designed and implemented by a group of Western-educated communists - a group which doesn't include Mao, who was famously averse to discussing domestic policy. Mao considered his advantage to be mass movements and war, and throughout the 1950s-70s delegated domestic policy to other people in the core leadership, notably Deng Xiaoping (France), Liu Shaoqi (USSR), Zhou Enlai (France), Li Fuchun (France), Nie Rongzhen (France), Ke Qingshi (USSR). (your average Westoid Sinologist doesn't know this because they can barely read Chinese archives and have soaked up post-1980 Dengist propaganda which blamed all of China's 1950s-60s economic failures on somebody who can't defend himself.) In comparison, the economic policy of China in the 1980s-2000s was set by non-Western educated leaders from poorer backgrounds, notably Chen Yun, Hu Yaobang, Wan Li, Xi Zhongxun, Zhao Ziyang, and later Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao. All of these figures were educated in China, if educated at all. The notable exception, of course, is the reformed Deng, who unlike his French leftist peers was capable of reflecting on 60 years of economic disaster from socialist experimentation around the world. Nonetheless, Deng played a less direct role than is generally assumed. The story of China's success is basically that it decolonized itself from 19th-century Western leftism and relearned some actual economics (on which China itself has a rich tradition, though they did learn extensively from Friedman and Hayek as well). For some reason, this historical fact is a tough conclusion to accept for your average white Chinamaxxing LARPer, as much as they pretend to hate everything associated with the West. The white leftard doesn't reject "white saviorism", he just wants to narrow it down to his own academic leftist clique. Never mind that the influence of this clique has been uniquely disastrous to the third world.

I know a fair bit about both the U.S. and China, but I basically never talk about these countries in the same post. I'd go as far as to say any writer that compares the U.S. and China to make a point about policy is a complete retard. the U.S. is the most successful developed economy in the last 50 years, and China is the most successful developing economy in the last 50 years. by comparing two economies situated on the possibility frontier, you are minimizing the number of actual Pareto-improving policies that can be found. all major differences in socioeconomic indicators you can find between U.S. and China are likely a combination of (1) predictable macroeconomic differences between economies at different stages of development (2) liberty-order tradeoffs reflecting differing cultural preferences of the population; (3) things that can be predicted at a r=0.9 level by demographic makeup. every actual difference that can be attributed to policy, even if it is valid, can be illustrated better by comparing successful governance with bad governance. - compare South Korea (success) with Japan (failure). - compare China (success) with Brazil (failure). - compare U.S. (success) with Canada (failure). trying to do comparative economics/politics with China and U.S. as your sample is only justifiable if: (1) you know a lot of institutional details about both countries; (2) you know next to nothing about any other country on Earth. And I'm not sure if even 0.001% of the population actually satisfy condition 1.