A contrast in effectiveness — Xi Jinping's China versus Trump's United States

© 2017 Peter Free

 

24 October 2017

 

 

Theme — rising clout versus crumbling power

 

Let's contrast this week's news from China with that from the United States.

 

Our goal is to draw a tentative hypothesis about competing societal effectiveness:

 

 

In the People's Republic, the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party has been taking place. Its purpose was to get something substantively done (leadership-wise) about efficiently moving China into the 21st Century. Some of President Xi Jinping's focus was on reducing the government-sponsored corruption that plagues the PRC.

 

In comparison, in the United States, two supremacist white guys — President Trump and White House chief of staff John Kelly — beat on black Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, regarding details of the Sgt. La David Johnson (and squad-mates in Niger) Special Forces affair.

 

 

In hypothetical sum, we (arguably representatively) saw:

 

 

(a) societal focus in China

 

versus

 

(b) another example of the perpetual generation of lowbrow entertainment in the United States.

 

 

Things probably are — just as simple as they look (in this instance)

 

As of this writing, China has a population of 1.4 billion people. The United States, 0.323 billion.

 

That means that economically successful China has 4.33 people for every one of ours.

 

If we assume that the distribution of human ability is the same between both countries, China has roughly 4.33 times as many geniuses and talented people as the United States does.

 

That favorable ratio in talent should ultimately have a beneficial effect for the People's Republic, especially when Xi Jinping gets everyone pulling the same way under China's authoritarian political system.

 

 

The moral? — While the United States squanders its wealth by fighting strategically nonsensical wars and enthusiastically reenacting Civil War racial attitudes . . .

 

The People's Republic is autocratically corralling itself into a hoped for geopolitically dominant position. China's 4.33 talent superiority is (again debatably) tentatively showing itself.

 

 

Note

 

By way of parallel example, look at the huge proportion of Chinese authors in science and medical literature.

 

 

Meanwhile, in the United States, roughly half of the public is trying to foist (imagined) responsibility for the aftereffects of its own stupidities onto the Russian Federation. Which, you may recall, is struggling economically and has only 0.144 billion people — and poses no threat, except a self-defensive one, to the United States.

 

And I haven't even dragged bellicose, but existential non-threat, North Korea into this American-created Mess of Cultural Dumbness.

 

See where raw numbers take a — simplistically basic, but probably ballpark accurate — geopolitical analysis?