Angelica’s doctrine: a nation’s hard power increases as a function of electricity consumption. GDP can be padded. Currency can be printed. One kilowatt hour is worth one kilowatt hour. Power is power: embrace electro-realism.

OMG at the inventiveness of Canadian real estate developers appealing to Chinese buyers😂 Named their streets Harvard Way, Massachusetts lane (for MIT?), Chicago lane (U of C) and Imperial College lane. The connecting road? Tsinghua Road! (BTW Imperial College come up in the world against Oxford and Cambridge!)

Things that blow my mind: For years after the Plaza accord the Japanese invested crazily in domestic real estate and stocks. When the Soviet Union broke up ppl forreal believed a democratic Russia would superpower up again after a bit of shock therapy. Everybody…Chinese and American…just kinda assumed it was on this path to liberalization that wasn’t going to end until what…2012? It’s so important to grab an accurate snapshot of what ppl thought at the time. Otherwise it’s easy to fall into a narrative where one side is trying to snooker the other where big momentous decisions are often just YOLO’d into with the ultimate winner and loser hand-in-hand, both blissfully innocent of the outcome.

It’s truly incredible how obsessed Mao was with traditional Chinese culture given the fact that he became its destroying angel. He read Dreams of the Red Chamber 25 times! The best way I can describe that book is if Middlemarch was all about the decline of one aristocratic family and it got so long the writer became deceased before finishing it.

Angelica's conspiracy theory: The Anglo countries (US, Canada, Australia, etc) knows how to build housing perfectly well. They don't because they've relied on ever-increasing housing prices as a way to keep their voters happy. If a bunch of Singapore-style HBD apartments just appeared out of nowhere housing would crash 20% instantly as an asset class and you'll get a financial crisis nobody would know what to do with.

Another country signs on to China’s CIPS system as a supplement to the SWIFT system. The European Parliament have been calling for Georgia to be connected from the SWIFT system. This puts Georgia in a tough spot. It does not want to be disconnected from the SWIFT system. But it also needs to an alternative should the worst happens. I question the wisdom of weaponizing soft power tools to try and achieve hard power aims.

Hey @grok, scan through all my mutuals and find me a nemesis, thanks

BTW…I’m also curious (although I have far less bandwidth for) why the standard Econ prophets predicted doom for Argentina and things seem to be going quite well?

Lol…and I thought I got Chinapilled. NOBODY got Chinapilled like @adam_tooze got Chinapilled. Bro is like learning mandarin in his 60s! “Development of China is the master key to understanding modernity. And without it, you just don't have a hope of grasping what's going on.” But we are looking away, unwilling to face what should be blindingly obvious. There’s a kind of « mood ban » and the reason is obvious. “This is the material dethroning of the West as the central driver of world history, right? This is really what the provincialization of the West looks like.” Are we Chinaboos crazy? Or are we just crazy early?

If you define socialism as the state control of the means of production… Singapore is a socialist country. 18% GDP in public spending 37% GDP from SOEs 90% land owned by the state 80% living in social housing It’s socialism with McKinsey characteristics