Comments by "Persona" (@ArawnOfAnnwn) on "VisualEconomik EN" channel.

  1. Neither BRICS nor Europe has expressed any interest in doing this. You guys are just tossing out provocative ideas for the views.
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  2. Shipbuilding is another industry that China dominates, and the west doesn't. They are the worlds' largest shipbuilder, while the US' shipbuilding industry is practically non-existent (Europe still has one, but only for cruise ships). This will be particularly important in the years to come, for reasons that shouldn't be hard to guess...
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  3. India did NOT develop purely because we opened up in 1991. A lot of the base for that development was set up in the early years of independence i.e. in the 1950s and 60s. Without it the country would've been cleaned out had it simply opened up the to the world economy immediately. Maybe India should've opened up in the second half of the 70s or 80s, but opening up immediately upon independence would've been a disaster. You need state investment to set up infrastructure, both physical and social (health, education, etc.), as well as heavy industry and a financial base. Only after a strong domestic base is established can a country have the strength to take on the world.
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  4. "India was also a colony of Britain only until 50 years ago, but they didn't dwell on scapegoating the British" - I'm Indian, and what you call scapegoating, we call holding to account. We very much still hold Britain responsible for ruining our country. Don't even try using our success to wash your hands off of the damage you did. We can and do blame Britain while simultaneously doing our best to develop and repair the damage they did. The two are not mutually exclusive. You want everyone to just 'move on', which is really convenient for you.
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  5. This video is clearly trying to play the same 'both sides' style here made famous by media reporting on climate change. It even misreports in order to do so. For instance, the video claims the British prevented famines in their later years, such that they stopped being a thing. Literally one of the biggest famines in Indian history - the Bengal Famine - happened close to the end of British rule. The unalive count is comparable to the atrocities committed by the very enemies they were fighting in Europe. The chart that Indian manufacturing wages went up in the last few decades exactly coincides with the end of the first world war - when the Indian govt. was given a little more devolution due to their freedom struggle making the most of the war to extract concessions. In other words, that was India taking back some power over their own administration, and benefiting therein. And so on. There isn't actually much debate over the deleterious effects of British colonialism among either historians or economists, there's just a holdout of mainly conservative British and American historians (most famously Niall Ferguson) who like to argue that it was good. There are unalive count estimates that make even world war 2 seem small - like upto 165 MILLION between just 1880 and 1920. There are calculations of how much wealth was extracted of over 45 TRILLION dollars. Etc. It is well accepted in the field, just as it is with scientists on climate change, that colonialism did a lot of harm. Not just in absolute terms, but even compared to the standards at the time or the times that came before it. Via taxes, tariffs, trade restrictions and much else India fell from a QUARTER of the world economy to a hundredth of it. And no, that wasn't just the west going ahead, it was India falling apart.
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  6. India has been independent for less 100 years. It's already the fourth largest economy in the world, soon to be third. India was left poor by the British, and it's important to recognize that. Not as an excuse, and it's not even about the past. India is growing, but many in the west still believes their empires were great services they did for the world. That ego isn't the past, but the present. It's important to puncture that ego. India is and will grow on its own, and hopefully the stereotypes the west built (including for Latin Americans) break down as more and more of the people they ruined rise up once more, as they stagnate.
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  7. And on the flipside, BRICS has never asked for Europe to join it either. Its entire purpose is partly aimed at weakening Europe's influence. This is purely VE being provocative for the sake of views.
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  8. India is NOT buying it at a 'steep' discount, they're buying it at close to market prices when shipping and handling costs are included. Cos that shipping and handling is being done by Russian firms, and Russian ships. The actual discount is around a fifth of your $30 figure after shipping and handling is included, according to India's own ports. China is likely a similar situation.
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  9. real answer - the OP didn't watch the video, and just spat out their pet ideological reason.
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  10. India was poorer BEFORE socialism, cos it was left incredibly poor by the British. Nehru and his socialism may have run its course by 1991, but India DID recover under it. Education and health improved greatly, food self-sufficiency was achieved and the country even built its own heavy industrial base. Even the IITs and IIMs powering its post-91 explosion into the global service sector were established by Nehru i.e. the socialists. Oh and contradicting this video India had one of its biggest famines AFTER the period during which they claim the British worked to prevent famines - the Bengal Famine of 1943. But it hasn't had any major famines since independence, despite being desperately poor at the time.
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  11. ​ @kf8228  No. Shashi Tharoor actually suggested what Britain should do once at Oxford. Pay India 1 pound a year, not even adjusting for inflation, for the next 200 years. Just 200 bucks total, to make up for the $45 TRILLION it's estimated they stole from us. But with one CRUCIAL difference - the money would be marked as reparations, NOT aid. We don't care about the past, this is about the present. Around HALF of British think they did us a favor, and only a minority see their colonial past as having been bad. THAT is what matters, and why an explicit and lasting admission by the British govt. that colonialism was harmful, coupled with a yearly reminder of that fact, is what we'd like. It isn't about the British of the past, but those of the present and future. It's about breaking the giant ego that the west has built up as intrinsic to its identity over the course of the last half a millennium. We don't need the money, in fact we've already told the UK we don't even want their aid. But we do want their pride. We want them to admit, like the Germans were forced to after WW2, their myriad crimes and guilt. Ditto for all the other former colonial powers. The west needs to learn shame, and humility.
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  12.  @Madame702  Stop exaggerating lol. 'Most men are in their 60's going into their 70's'. Do you know what 'most' means? Cos that is certainly not it. Just cos you're hearing about demographic decline in these places doesn't mean they're just filled with old men. Hell two of them even have a similar median age as the US. They still have millions - in China's case hundreds of millions - of young people to last them for many years to come. Don't just read the headlines and then let your imagination fill the rest.
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  13. The West likes to boast about capitalism and free markets as the key to prosperity. Yet as Ha-Joon Chang (economist at Oxford and author of Kicking Away The Ladder) points out - none of them followed that themselves when they were developing. Rather they all had highly protectionist tariffs and extensively used what's now known as Industrial Policy. Which as usual they're returning to after seeing China use it so successfully to outcompete them (and China is only the latest to do so - they practically lifted the idea from South Korea after all). As Chang himself puts it, 'Govts. CAN pick winners'. Open markets are more of a luxury once you've already made it. For poor nations they're more of a gateway to exploitation and ruin, as Africans found out the hard way when they were forced to do it by the IMF Structural Adjustment Programs. For those interested, in economics circles this idea is known as the Infant Industry Model i.e. you build your capabilities first, only THEN do you try to compete globally.
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  14.  @willthecat3861  How many Taiwanese universities do you know of? And yet who makes the most advanced chips in the world?
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  15.  @willthecat3861  Btw ironically China's Tsinghua ranks higher than any Taiwanese university. So they've even got that over Taiwan, besides a sheer numerical advantage of engineers. Basically if Taiwan, Korea and Japan have been able to do it, without any of them having MIT, that just makes China's case stronger, and the US' case weaker as it failed despite having MIT
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  16.  @elmunecohumano4609  It had one of the largest populations on the planet even during British rule. Didn't stop them from reducing it to a nearly insignificant portion of the world economy. So either its population discounts the size of its economy now, or it accentuates how incredibly harmful the Europeans were. You can't have it both ways. If the size of the population matters so much, then it only increases the scale of the damage the Europeans must've done.
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  17. Eh, this isn't economics. Don't you guys already have another channel for political stuff? Why is this posted here?
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  18.  @OnlineEnglish-wl5rp  'China's copied everything' - lol no. China is winning at electric cars, which is a new segment where your great '100 years of developing the car industry' means nothing. Watch the video.
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  19.  @kronos7110  As the saying goes - first they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win. Guess you're at stage 2..
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  20.  @OnlineEnglish-wl5rp  Nah the Americans threw Japan under the bus when they saw it gaining on them a generation ago. The Plaza Accords are a key instance of that. They were worried when Japanese cars started outcompeting their own back in the day as well. Korea was fine cos it was never as successful as Japan.
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  21. At the beginning of the video I said it was 'catering to rich people', and I'm gonna say I was half-right. I didn't think of their extensive port investments, but most everything else falls under the umbrella of what I meant. They're not as decadent as, say, Monaco, but it's the same basic idea - make your country a paradise for individuals and companies with tons of money. Personally I'd rather nations develop by actually making shit and doing stuff of general utility, but I can't deny that facilitating billionaires works for these places. As regards entrepreneurs, I'm fairly certain very little of the entrepreneurship in Dubai corresponds to the romantic image of an entrepreneur starting a company in a garage with very little money. Most new enterprises will be multinationals expanding their footprint, or extremely rich people breaking off from said multinationals and starting supporting firms with their plentiful wealth, which they can even afford to fail and still be extremely rich after. Dubai may be a rags to riches story as a city, but it didn't get that way by encouraging rags to riches businessmen, but by encouraging the global elite.
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  22.  @orboakin8074  You obviously don't know the difference between conquest and settlement, and colonialism. The Mughal empire was in India, that is VERY different from a colonial empire sucking wealth out for a distant homeland. Conquest is normal in history, colonies not so much. Mahmud of Ghazni is a better comparison to the British - he invaded India to loot it over a dozen times. And yes we see him as evil. By contrast the Mughal Empire at its height was prosperous - and that was OUR wealth. The Mughals enriching their empire meant enriching India simply cos the empire was IN India i.e. this was its home base. The British are more akin to Ghazni, except systematically so - they sucked wealth OUT of their colonies to enrich their little island.
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  23. ​ @e.t.291  You don't know the first thing about what colonialism even is. The Ottomans conquered and incorporated, like most empires, not colonized. That's why we can speak of their golden age to begin with. Conquest is common, colonialism is not. Most empires build after they conquer, colonizers just drain. Colonial holdings existed for the benefit of a distant home, the colonizers never made their conquests their home except in cases where they near fully displaced the local peoples (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the USA, etc.). Unsurprisingly they did invest in those territories that they had come to settle in. The rest of the world they just drained.
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  24.  @chrislee5685  The criteria is based on GDP per capita. Generally speaking developing countries are those with a GDP per capita less than $20k, under which China definitely still falls as its GDP per capita is still only $12.5k.
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  25. That's cos the title is clickbait meant to draw in the ideologues who don't really care about how SK modernized. All they want is anything to dunk on Chi with. It's an easy way to get views.
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  26.  @chongdi6140  I find it hilarious how all the reasons given for why Japan would do well are the SAME things China has been doing/using, which the US complains about but is apparently okay with Japan doing lol. Depreciated currency? Yep, the US has been complaining about the Chinese doing that with the Yuan for years. Low wages, paid in a lower value currency to an army of engineers? Check, all the same in China. Industrial agglomeration wherein you have all the suppliers together in one place? Check, this is why China still dominates manufacturing despite it not having the lowest wages in the world anymore. Ease of construction and lax environmental laws? Double check, hilariously the west actually uses that second fact to criticize China lol! And finally public support lmao?!! This is the biggest talking point that the US and now Europe are raising a stink over wrt China, yet apparently welcome from Japan? Talk about hypocrisy..
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  27. The 'work' that entrepreneurs make that this video is talking about is decision making and negotiation, facilitated by personal connections. When people criticize them for exploitation, they aren't suggesting that they literally do 'nothing', but that the actual manufacturing the product is done by others. Everyone knows the CEO takes decisions and that connections give rise to contracts. That 'work' just seems a whole lot cushier than actually working the factory floor or coding in the office. And yet it gets paid a whole lot more than either. Secondly, an interesting thing to note about entrepreneurs and risk - the rise of major corporations historically coincided with the invention, by state decree, of the concept of the Limited Liability Company (LLC). Before that, you could still start your own business and even raise funds for it, but if it went bust you stood to lose everything - including your private wealth. There were even what were known as 'debtors prisons' - people jailed not for committing crimes, but simply for not being able to pay back their debts. It is only AFTER those risks were abolished that large private enterprises began to form. Which is ironic, considering how much they're celebrated for taking risks, since that only started when the level of actual risk was substantially reduced. Indeed the MOST RISKY investments even today aren't taken by companies at all, but by the govt., when it invests into fundamental research and long term infrastructure projects. Mariana Mazzucato has written extensively on this.
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  28. And cold makes us stay at home to begin with. Also lowers our immunity. And lowers food production, lessening energy available for work. Etc. You can make all sorts of arguments for either side. And they're all highly speculative.
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  29. It doesn't make you feel happy at all. Rather it makes you feel exhausted.
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  30. The title is nothing but clickbait, meant to appeal to politically charged sentiments like yours. Cos apparently just talking about how Korea modernized isn't interesting enough to draw in the ideological crowd who just want to dunk on their chosen enemy.
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  31. Given VisualPolitiks' open biases, I can guess what the judgment of this video is gonna be. Now time to see if my guess was right. Edit: Yep, as expected the video was quick to dismiss the positive data and try to spin everything negatively. I particularly liked how it jumped to the conclusion that optical and metallurgical products are somehow all weapons lol! Like what, is Luxembourg a major arms producer now? Or the Netherlands? It also ignored its own graph showing all the sectors that fell down following the opening hostilities are now rising again. But most tellingly, the video plays up Ukrainian claims of Russian losses, while making no mention of Ukraine's own losses of western equipment, and more generally how the war is affecting their adversaries economy. Ukraine even changed its offensive early on precisely because of how much equipment it was losing. They're mostly not even fighting much of an armored war anymore, but an infantry one, and that looks set to continue. To be clear Russia has losses, but to pretend their enemy has none is grossly biased. The side on the offensive typically loses more in the attempt, and right now that isn't Russia, who're mostly just sitting tight and letting Ukraine throw as much as it can at them. Meanwhile the Ukrainian military and economy is at this point entirely dependent on western support. Russia is holding out not just without extra support but with active exertions by the west to undermine it. Lastly I love how the goalposts of the sanctions has shifted just like people point out the Russia's war goals did. Only difference being that Russia shifted goalposts early on and since then has held them steady, while the sanctions goalposts continue to be shifted to this day.
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  32. Amazing how much westerners react angrily on being told how horrible they were. As the other guy said, we did turn around. We're not asking for reparations, apart from maybe symbolically. All we're doing is telling you guys that your colonial regime was horrible. But apparently even that is too much for you. You have to do anything to protect that fragile ego of yours. This isn't about excuses, it's about setting the record straight. About not letting you write the history. It's not even about the past, but the present - about the ego that you still carry with you, based on your interpretation of that past as glorious and magnanimous.
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  33. You don't know what colonialism is if you think any of this is at all comparable to it. Look up what colonialism did to the Congo for example. Nothing China could even try to do there today could EVER compare to what the west already did.
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  34. It isn't theft when you've agreed to work with a local partner. They went in knowingly and profited massively out of it.
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  35. ​ @xiphoid2011  "US workers are.more expensive so for maximizing profitability" - the previous holders of the title of largest shipbuilders were South Korea and Japan, neither of whom are cheap places to build ships. Even China doesn't have the lowest wages. If it was about labor costs, it ought to be places like India or maybe central America if you want to be close to the US. But neither is close to being the case. Shipbuilding is a very large logistics heavy industry, where all the nations that have dominated it are ones that have built out a large integrated domestic supply chain. It takes a lot of investment to set it all up. If the US wants Mexico to do it, it had better be prepared to cough up a lot of cash, rather than endlessly argue over migrants. China is a major investor in Mexican manufacturing btw, albeit not in ships. They've been offshoring their low end manufacturing to cheaper places to do it for years, much like they themselves were.
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  36. Wealth breeds complacency. They think they're untouchable and that the worlds needs them more than they need the world.
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  37. The really irritating thing about the Laffer effect is that business taxes are taxes on the rich, while consumption taxes generally fall hardest on the poor. So the Laffer phenomenon provides a justification (a sound one imo) for taxing the rich less and the poor more. While that may hold economically, it's a bitter pill to swallow for anyone who cares about fairness and justice.
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  38. Excuse colonialism, because 'than' you don't have to take responsibility for your heinous past. And I don't even mean paying reparations, I mean even just admitting it and issuing a formal apology. Cos the west loves the giant ego colonialism gave it.
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  39. This video continues to peddle the idea that Chin is totally dependent on exports. Let's be clear here - exports make up less than a fifth of their gdp. Germany is a better example of a truly export dependent economy, where it's nearly HALF their gdp. They aren't counting on exports to fix their woes. In fact that isn't even their priority. As the vid notes, they aren't gonna actually collapse and they know it. Their economic woes are a concern, but imo their bigger concern is national security. They see the writing on the wall and are investing heavily into advanced industry so as to make themselves fully independent of the west asap. That's what their focus is on, even if it lengthens the duration of the slump. They aren't investing for exports, they're investing into capabilities.
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  40. No, that's just a popular excuse. First off, poor people have more children, not less. And no, it's not just free labour as this also holds in cities as well as in countries with mandatory state provisioned schooling. Secondly, cash incentives and other public policies to reduce costs have had negligible impact on birth rates. Thirdly, there are groups that have large families still even at the same income and expense levels. One is highly religious communities - they tend to have more kids than their peers in similar economic situations. Fourthly, the ultra-rich also have few kids.
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  41. The only thing you should find terrifying is how misleading YT videos can be. This one being a case in point.
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  42. That chart is misleading anyway, you don't even need to argue that China produces stuff for everyone else. China only pollutes the most if you look at CURRENT annual emissions. If you look at total emissions, China is just 12.5%, while the US is double that - literally a quarter of all carbon emissions. Europe is 22%. India? 3%. Etc. And then there's per capita emissions, which really make rich nations look bad. In reality poorer nations are developing in a much cleaner fashion than their rich nation predecessors did.
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  43. Man how old is this vid? It talks about that long range approval they were pining for, but which they received approval for about 2 weeks ago. Doesn't seem to have altered things much so far. The resources argument is like talking about how resource rich Afghanistan is - it doesn't mean much if you don't have a stable environment to extract those resources in. No one will invest in it. What were they doing with all those resources in the last 30 years then? Also keep in mind that they have to actually win back the east in order to access the minerals to begin with. They tried that last year, and it didn't work out. And that was with us support then. Pawning resources you don't control isn't gonna win anyone over. As for their forces, most of them just want to retire. They can't share a lot of men cos those men are already overdue for their service to end, and so a lot will take their leave if and when hostilities cease. They don't have a large standing force per se, but rather have mobilized the majority of them due to the emergency. If the emergency ends, most of will be allowed to demobilize.
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  44.  @ronch550  Lol coercion. You might as well say the govt. taxing companies or any other law is coercion. In fact you probably do. I'd bet you're one of those 'tax is theft' types. They were perfectly at liberty to turn down that rule and not operate in China. They chose to go in anyway, and they did VERY well for themselves out of the arrangement. Indeed the dumb IP theft rhetoric wasn't even being screamed by companies so much as politicians. ONE politician especially, who's currently under trial.
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  45.  @patrickt49  Bruh they're still growing at around 5%. That's far from being 'done developing'.
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  46. The question isn't who they'll choose, but how much that choice is going to hurt them. Cos it's going to hurt quite a bit.
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  47. This video is also very light on details, which matter. For instance, one common element between both India AND China is that neither country liberalized capital flows fully i.e. the freedom to move money both into AND OUT of the country. The latter is very constrained in both cases, for good reason. Other countries that have done that, due to heavy insistence on it by the IMF, have seen massive wealth extraction abroad as a result. So we put in place limits to ensure that when foreigners invest into India, they stay committed as opposed to just opportunistically jumping in and then pulling out with their winnings at the drop of a hat. It also allows govts. the freedom to take policy decisions with the interests of the country in mind rather than being beholden to capital investors.
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  48. ​ @winj3r  Lol no! First off both India and China (and even Japan, which literally even got US permission to do it) already buys Russian oil at above the $60 price cap, as even western media has reported and which western leaders like Janet Yellen (look it up) have acknowledged and allowed. Secondly you're still making the same mistake. Look up how much is being charged for getting that oil to India, it's much higher than the normal shipping costs for oil from other countries, precisely because Russian oil is being sold cheaper and so there's more room to charge more on other things when it's under their control (why do you think Russia bought a huge fleet of ships in advance of the price cap?). Put together the price paid by these nations for Russian oil is at a smaller discount than the sticker price that the west likes to harp on about. If the price cap was so effective, then why would Russia even care to try working with OPEC to raise oil prices still? It's cos every rise in oil prices is still a profit for them, just a little below the OPEC norm.
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  49.  @valeryivanishin483  Almost all the dead are civilians tho. Keep trying to pretend otherwise.
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  50. This video misrepresents US fossil fuels. It is NOT CHEAP. It never has been. So the claim that poor countries are affected by US curbs is complete nonsense. They mostly don't even have the facilities to accept US LNG, let alone to pay for it. Not to mention they use gas a lot less too, compared to richer nations. There's a reason first world Europe is the main target of these gas exports, not poor nations.
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