immigration is a good thing, when you are getting high quality people. but when you are getting low quality food pickers. you just wont get very far. the us is the best country, because top talent from around the world come to us and adapt to our culture and feel a nationalistic bound. china is unable to do that. in fact the rich chinese, leave china for the us, and cant attract high quality immigrants from other countries as their culture is just not as accepting as the us.
Lee had some wisdom, but I like the story about when he lectured Deng Xiaoping on what China needs to do to improve, and Deng who was the president/premier of China at the time told him, thank you uncle, when I am mayor of Shanghai I will implement all of this.
china actually copied singapore or should i say deng actually copied lee. im paraphrasing charlie munger’s words, of course keep in mind munger’s idol is lee. but charlie is sharp as they come. only likes people worth liking.
I think Deng’s point was that what you can accomplish when you are running a city with a small population is different than what will work at the big country level. Although Hong Kong is demonstrating how you can mismanage a city…
China central government probably runs their cities like Shangai too. Just because they have a bigger country to run outside of Shanghai, doesn’t mean that they can’t apply Singapore-esque programs on the scale of individual cities.
In terms of importance, I don’t know how much of China’s GDP is concentrated in urban areas, but it’s probably a lot, and growing. Even if the majority of their population is rural, urban policy will still have a disproportionate effect on the country overall.
the idea behind paying farmers not to plant, is just a safe way to protect ourselves and keep agricultural industry flexible in case of a crisis or crop failures. you are actually paying them to protect that land and keep it safe. imo, its a stupid law. we can have crop failures here and still be able to trade with other countries. agriculture is one of the worthless businesses out there. they shoudl end all subsidies.