Lmst

@tk @devopscats 😆

@ZDL yeah for sure, it's a lot more about rampant racism in US driving scientists away than China doing anything to "lure" people in

Yogthos boosted:

The Eta Aquariid meteor shower is about to peak. Here's how to catch it from Australia

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-05-04/eta-aquariid-meteor-shower-2025-australia-halleys-comet-debris/105207196

Alan MacLeod @AlamRMacLeod

The existence of this headline is about the best proof I've seen that "the economy" usually just means "rich people's bank balances".

the headline: Economy to recover strongly, but wages and jobs will not

#china #technology #industry

@kevbob indeed, anybody who knows even a modicum of history realizes that the whole narrative of entrepreneurs driving growth and innovation is pure nonsense.

The lesson here is that propaganda must work in support of the material conditions as opposed to attempting to replace reality with fantasy. When the gap between rhetoric and the material world grows too wide, even the most sophisticated narratives collapse under their own contradictions.

Yogthos boosted:

A reminder: The reason so many firms on their websites constantly urge you to install and use their apps instead of their websites is that the apps typically give them access to VASTLY more data about you and your activities. Don't fall for it.

At its core, an economy should organize human effort to enhance societal well-being, reduce toil, and ensure access to necessities. Yet under capitalism, economies are structured to prioritize the enrichment of an investor class whose wealth grows not through productive labor, but through financial speculation and rent-seeking. This systemic distortion, where money begets more money for those already holding capital, divorces economic activity from its original aim of improving human life.

In the end, the West’s technological stagnation underscores the limits of an economic philosophy that privileges ideology over reality. China’s success lies in its ability to align policy with material forces, proving that growth and innovation thrive when economies serve the working majority.

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By clinging to the myth of the entrepreneurial individual, they ignore the critical roles of state planning, collective investment, and structural equity. That’s the key reason why China’s model, centered on material conditions and collective progress, is now visibly surging ahead of the West.

Western economies, by contrast, devalue labor through wage stagnation and anti-labour policies, eroding the very human capital needed for innovation. The marginalist framework’s refusal to engage with class analysis or systemic factors has left Western economies ill-equipped to address crises like the 2008 financial crash or the economic disaster that’s currently unfolding.

Marx and Smith both identified the working class as the primary driver of productivity and growth. China’s system operationalizes this insight, recognizing that technological advancement depends on skilled labor, collective organization, and state coordination. Xi Jinping’s emphasis on “common prosperity” and “innovation-driven development” aligns with the material reality, ensuring that workers’ skills and state investments in education and infrastructure fuel progress.

Empirical data confirms this disconnect. Total Factor Productivity, often cited as proof of “entrepreneurial creativity”, accounts for a tiny percentage of growth in both advanced and developing economies. If individual entrepreneurship were the decisive force, TFP would dominate growth statistics. Instead, its minimal contribution reveals the marginalist framework’s failure to align with reality.

For example, its National Laboratory system and Huawei’s state-backed R&D have outpaced Western firms in critical areas such as 5G tech, while US corporate R&D spending as a share of GDP has stagnated since the 1970s.

Western economies are fixated on short-term profit maximization leading to underinvest in R&D and infrastructure. Private capitalists prioritize returns over foundational research, leaving critical innovations to market forces. By contrast, China’s model treats R&D as a collective, state-guided endeavor. China accelerates technological progress by channeling resources into strategic sectors and fostering public-private partnerships.

The West’s dogmatic reliance on markets and entrepreneurship has led to myopic decision-making that prioritizes corporate profits over sustainable development. The ongoing tariff war is a perfect example of this problem. Rather than fostering innovation or bringing back industries, these tariffs have instead harmed the working class paving the way to a recession.

Western economics is dominated by marginalist theories that mythologize the capitalist class as the engine of progress. By rebranding capitalists as “individual entrepreneurs” who supposedly balance markets and drive growth through sheer creativity, this narrative serves class interests at the expense of truth.

The marginalist focus on supply-demand dynamics ignores the material forces behind real economic growth: socialized labor, circulating capital, and state-driven R&D.

China’s technological ascent over the West stems from a fundamental divergence in economic philosophies. Western capitalism, constrained by a theoretical framework that prioritizes ideological justifications for elite power over empirical analysis, has created a system divorced from material reality.

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#economics #economy #china

#economics #marx #AdamSmith

excerpts from China's Great Road

Why. therefore, did marginalist economics ignore not only Marx but the founder of economics, Adam Smith, as well as the factual evidence which Western specialists in this field had established?

The reason was that it was not in the interests of capitalism to know or tell the truth. Keynes concluded The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money with the statement that: 'the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.' Marx held the opposite view — 'vested interest', more precisely class position, would mean that the truth would be ignored favor of ideology. Marx was proved right, Keynes wrong.

The reason the findings of Smith, Marx, and modern econometric studies were unacceptable to marginalist economics is easily explained. To legitimize itself, capitalism necessarily has to claim that the decisive force in economic development is the capitalist class.

Since marginalist economics does not like to talk about class, the term ‘capitalist class’ is typically re-termed as the ‘creative role of the individual entrepreneur’, who allegedly plays the decisive role in promoting progress and ensuring that supply and demand balance.

The problem is not merely does the theoretical framework stemming from Smith/Marx theoretical framework, but also factual findings regarding economic growth, completely contradict this claim that the 'creative role of the individual entrepreneur' is the key force in economic growth.

In summary the findings of factual economic research lead to the conclusion established by Marx, and emphasised by Xi Jinping - that the working class is the most powerful force raising productivity and growth. As such a conclusion is evidently unacceptable to capitalism a 'theory' of economics instead has to be created which claims that it is the 'creative individual entrepreneur' (i.e. the capitalist) which is the decisive force in raising economic growth and productivity.

But the problem is that, as this theory is not in line with the facts, attempts to act on it become an obstacle to economic development. By concentrating purely on the shorter-term interaction of supply and demand and ignoring the more fundamental issue of how the economy develops when supply and demand are in balance, that is the issue analysed by Smith and Marx, marginalist economics deprived itself of the ability to accurately understand how the economy grew. The fact that marginalist economics creates an economic theory which is not in line with the facts helps explain, as will be seen, the inability of the Western economies to overcome the effects of the international financial crisis.

This theoretical issue may easily be stated formally and tested. If the 'creative role of the individual entrepreneur' were the decisive force in production, then this would be shown in a contribution to growth that was not due to inputs of capital and labour.

factors played no role in TFP growth - then the contribution of creative individual entrepreneurship would be a minority, indeed a fairly small, contribution to economic growth. The factual situation can be seen clearly even in US, which is normally held up as the home of 'creative individual entre- preneurs'. TFP growth does play a larger role in the US than the average for advanced economies - but it is still a far smaller role than growth of capital and labour inputs. Figure 33 shows that in the US in 1990-2016 capital inputs accounted for 48% of GDP growth, labour inputs for 31%, and TFP for 21%. This is in line with the findings for the entire post-World War II period, already analysed, which showed that the most powerful force raising US output was intermediate products, then fixed investment, then labour inputs and finally TFP.

@davidho what's happening in US is the inevitable product of decades of neoliberal dogma, the same pathology the rest of Western countries still clings to.

The US collapse is what the terminal stage of societies too arrogant to diagnose their own rot looks like. When you worship markets and continue to bleed the workers dry to keep the machine lurching forward, this is the only possible endgame.

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