by miohtama on 9/20/25, 1:18 PM with 254 comments
by Igrom on 9/20/25, 1:45 PM
by Herring on 9/20/25, 2:01 PM
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.
by RandyOrion on 9/21/25, 11:09 AM
Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.
by decafninja on 9/21/25, 2:32 AM
Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system?
That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted.
What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?
by alephnerd on 9/20/25, 1:49 PM
1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese)
2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy.
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I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases.
It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0].
Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away.
Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well.
[0] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...
* - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."
by thr0waway001 on 9/20/25, 7:36 PM
by HPsquared on 9/20/25, 1:46 PM
by RoyBean on 9/21/25, 7:26 AM
by Ericson2314 on 9/20/25, 1:48 PM
Too bad China has neither of those things!
by yocoda on 9/20/25, 1:52 PM
> The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible
Is this author trolling or am I dumb?
by charlie0 on 9/20/25, 8:41 PM
I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there?
Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.
by jmyeet on 9/20/25, 2:14 PM
In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.
Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.
China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.
The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.