Exhausted by the pressure to succeed as a photographer, Litsky Li accepted a better offer: quit work to become one of China’s growing legions of children paid by their families to stay home.

A thread yesterday had a variety of people asking if the unemployment is lower because the youth are well cared for.

Please click through and read for additional context. Families are helping. Parents age and are not a long-term plan except for the most unusually wealthy.

Please remember: China is nominally communist. Functionally, they are capitalists with an usual side of excess infrastructure spending. A strong central government doesn’t make a country communist.

Their land use rules… that makes them communist-ish. But that’s a small part of a far larger picture.

  • steltek
    23·
    1 year ago

    You’ll also notice that those capitalist countries which have less income inequality than China have more government intervention in the market (i.e., tempering the “free market”)

    There’s no truly free market. Every country has some level of regulation. In the US, many people point to tax rates as the cause of (and solution to) inequality. I think they’re correct but that’s also really stretching the definition of “regulation”.

    The fact that it’s steadily decreasing is directly related to the point I made about the CPC truly working for the people to solve the real problems they’re facing: they identified a problem, identified some causal factors, discussed the importance of fixing it, made plans of how to fix it, are implementing those plans, and make reports on the progress of those plans.

    Every government bigger than a village generally does this. Every politician talks up what they’ve done because they want to keep power. China should be proud of its accomplishments but I’m sorry, there’s nothing unique or special to what you’re saying here.

    If there’s a failure to follow through on campaign promises, it’s because the legislation failed to pass but that’s more about democracy than economics. I politely suggest we not go down that road in this thread :).