Pull the other one, we saw how they went in the 20th century. Large centralised governments have never managed to systemically outplan democracies.
The issue is US culture has been giving priority to anti-industrialists. As a result they aren't the leader of the industrial world. This has been planned for a long time and a bunch of people were celebrating it the entire way along. You try standing up and saying "we should prioritise industry!" anywhere in the west - it is a bruising experience as soon as it gets to the specific policies that are likely to be successful.
Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations. That isn't bad planning, that was an explicit rejection of the outcomes China achieved.
What Moral Mazes lays out is the idea of the tension between the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of practicality (as seen by manufacturers), and the perception of manufacturing ethics as matters of purity (as seen by activists and lawyers).
It is a great book I would recommend to anyone, although being primarily an observation of the psychological processes at play, there are of course no solutions offered.
> Huge chunks of what China did are illegal. Running a successful industrial economy seems to violate a host of western employment & environmental laws as well as many regulations.
Come on. For the west to combat the “anti-industrialists”, you would have to suppress the choices and decisions of normal people, who don’t want to see others die for the sake of factory owners.
Just outright say that democracy doesn’t work, and that Chinese style autocracy does.
Get to the actual heart of the debate. Trying to replicate the Chinese economic model, while dodging the moral and philosophical choices that supports it, results only in deception and prevarication.
Anti-industrialists is arguing via classification and nouns; it just grants a short term win which fails to live up to its pomp when it hits an obvious counter point.
Seize the major question, have people accept and acknowledge the tradeoffs in all their misery and glory.
There is no evidence of that to date. Western liberal democracies are much nicer places to live than China and at some point the Chinese autocrats will probably collapse internally - they're gambling on the CCP being competent which isn't a winning strategy long term. The problems are a bit more subtle - things like security implications and rates of progress.
