How China Fell Off the Miracle Path

China is now a threat to the United States not because it is strong but because it is fragile.

.. The economy is now slowing and will decelerate further when the country is forced to reduce its debt burden, as inevitably it will be. The next step could be a deeper slowdown or even a financial crisis

.. If China were eating America’s lunch, its people would not be rushing to buy safe-haven apartments in New York or San Francisco. Far from conspiring to cheapen its currency, as Mr. Trump charges, Beijing is struggling to keep the weakening renminbi from falling more

.. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in the United States, tipping the global economy into recession. Demand collapsed across the world, crushing export growth in China. The leadership in Beijing panicked, apparently fearing that if the recession reached its shores, social unrest would follow.

.. Mr. Wen reversed course and doubled down on the old industrial model — fueling investment in factories with trillions in state lending and spending.

.. But this spree spread on conviction that Beijing, obsessed with hitting its growth target, would not let lenders or borrowers fail.

.. That 80-percentage-point increase is also more than three times the increase in the United States before its bubble collapsed in 2008.

.. It ordered people not to sell or even to speak critically of stocks.

.. The sputtering global economy is one shock away from slipping into recession. In the postwar period, every previous global recession started with a downturn in the United States, but the next one is likely to begin with a shock in China.

What the hell is going on?

The contemporary world is not very well built for a large chunk of males.  The nature of current service jobs, coddled class time and homework-intensive schooling, a feminized culture allergic to most forms of violence, post-feminist gender relations, and egalitarian semi-cosmopolitanism just don’t sit well with many…what shall I call them?  Brutes?

.. For American men ages 18-34, more of them live with their parents than with romantic partners.

.. Aren’t (some) men the basic problem here?

.. The sad news is that making the world nicer yet won’t necessarily solve this problem.  It might even make it worse.

.. If this is indeed the problem, our culture is remarkably ill-suited to talking about it.  It is hard for us to admit that “all good things” can be bad for anyone, including brutes.  It is hard to talk about what we might have to do to accommodate brutes, and that more niceness isn’t always a cure.  And it is hard to admit that history might not be so progressive after all.

What percentage of men are brutes anyway?  Let’s hope we don’t find out.

Remembrance of Booms Past

Yet the Clinton-era expansion surpassed the Reagan economy in every dimension. Mr. Clinton not only presided over more job creation and faster economic growth, his time in office was also marked by something notably lacking in the Reagan era: a significant rise in the real wages of ordinary workers.

.. by the late 1990s, brought America truly full employment. And full employment was the force behind the rising wages of the 1990s.

.. Mrs. Clinton is currently proposing roughly a trillion dollars in additional taxes on the top 1 percent, to pay for new programs. If she takes office, and tries to implement that policy, the usual suspects will issue the usual dire warnings, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that her agenda would hurt the economy.

.. there are many ways policy makers can and should try to raise wages, the single most important thing policy can do to help workers is aim for full employment.

.. We desperately need to repair and upgrade our infrastructure; meanwhile, the federal government can borrow money incredibly cheaply. So there’s an overwhelming case for a surge in public investment – and one side benefit of such a surge would be full employment, which would help produce another era of rising wages.