The Chinese are at peak family connection density. I found this analysis very interesting, here are some highlights:
+ The simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically extraordinary evolution, as extended kinship networks weaken across the nation and close blood relatives disappear entirely for many.
+ In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic increases in survival, men and women in their 30s as of 2020 have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s kin increase may be a significant, previously overlooked factor explaining the Chinese economy’s astonishing performance since Mao Zedong’s death.
+ The kin explosion has reached its peak, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and relentless kin crash, driven by its sustained and progressively steep sub-replacement fertility relationships. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in the models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese annals.
+ Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost inevitably foretell lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
+ Researchers and decision makers in China and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their consequence. Among these are pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surpluses of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions.
+ Despite this, the looming macroeconomic consequences of old- age dependency burdens, the most significant economic impact of China’s coming revolution in the family, may actually concern the micro-fundamentals of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi/social & business networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as propagation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s extraordinary upswing, the severe coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.
+ The ability of China’s increasingly sparse younger working age cohorts to support many times their number of elders is very much in question.
I think your statement is correct in the absence of a clear statement of direction and/or product launch by Kagi. I tried Kagi for a year and came away disillusioned as you were.
Key graf on page 5: "Prior to the pandemic, downtown San Francisco saw strong net new business formation, with 711 net new establishments in the information, financial, and professional services sectors in 2017 (Figure 3). The trajectory reversed sharply during the pandemic and by 2025, this figure fell to just 25 – a decline of 96%."
As for the strategic thinking elsewhere in the world, I think a secondary problem with all the cover stories and columns marveling at China’s overwhelming strength and infinite wisdom is that they not only mischaracterize Chinese motivations today, but they confuse the qualities that were the primary drivers of this story all along. China became a superpower not because of uniquely clever or patient industrial planning (which was tremendously successful, but not particularly novel), but first and foremost because of a political and corporate culture that was both entirely rational and absolutely relentless about understanding and capitalizing on Chinese advantages (winning on scale and service with a massive and unusually skilled workforce, leveraging a billion consumers to lure foreign investment, and offering the world lax environmental and labor laws that helped them grow their economies), while simultaneously exploiting a raft of weaknesses in the Western system. The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded, the PLA was modernized, and now here we are.
The tightrope walk of "Beijing bad" and "Tim Cook good" has been the most entertaining Stratechery arc to date. I can't wait to see the look on their face when they discover which American business advocated most for weakened Western market regulation and the expansion of China's industrial base.
That "American business advocated most for weakened Western market regulation and the expansion of China's industrial base" is clearly stated in the excerpt I posted from the article: "The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded."
>expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred
Makes it sound like China owes them something. They conveniently forgot that untold trillions of dollars were MADE from outsourcing to China and improving their margins.
Or that China was just the next untapped step, Western companies got parts from Japan and Taiwan before.
tldr; "One common approach we see is for bootstrapping teams that have a basic understanding of customer needs to start by offering a service. Once they get uptake on their service offers, they start to take advantage of existing solutions prospects are using to create a "system integration" or extension offering. For example, if your goal is to replace Excel where it's being used for a particular purpose, first offer an Excel template. This is more compatible with current practice, easier for prospects to trial, and easier to iterate on than a fully coded solution. Once they get uptake on the system integration offer, they can start to offer a product. "
A critique of the NRDC in light of research on the impact of fossil fuel plants on human health. Key paragraphs:
"Akrasia is weakness of will. You know you shouldn’t eat the cake; you eat the cake anyway. Temptation overwhelms correct reasoning in the moment. This is not what’s happening at the NRDC (assets ~$300M, Yale Law pipeline, board stocked with people who have read every document I’m about to cite). Akrasia would require that the people setting obstruction strategy haven’t connected the climate math to their own filings. At staff quality and funding levels that high, that’s not credible.
What’s actually happening is correct calculation with externalized cost. The NRDC’s litigation revenue model and donor base cannot survive a pivot to pro-nuclear. The fundraising enemy has to remain the enemy. The obstruction is the product. So obstruction continues, the costs land on people who will never attend a Rockefeller Brothers Fund board meeting, and everyone who filed the intervener petition goes home with their career intact."
"An American consumer wants a German duvet cover, 130x200 cm. They go to Amazon. They get four pages of Chinese-manufactured polyester comforters keyword-stuffed with every bed size ever conceived by humanity. The sponsored listings at the top are for products that share no meaningful attributes with what was searched. The organic results, if you scroll far enough to find them, are identical in kind if not in degree.
This is not a search failure. Amazon’s search works exactly as intended. The intent is not to return what you asked for. The intent is to return what someone paid to show you.
Every subsequent problem in Amazon’s retail business is downstream of that choice, and the choice was rational at every level of the org chart."
The threat: "The threat to Amazon’s retail search isn’t a startup. It’s Grainger. W.W. Grainger sells industrial and MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) supplies to corporate and institutional buyers. Roughly 1.7 million products. Catalog search that returns what you searched for, because the customer is a procurement manager with a part number who will immediately go elsewhere if the results are wrong. Grainger doesn’t sell sponsored placements above the right answer. Grainger’s business model depends on the right answer appearing first. They have existing distribution relationships, existing shipping infrastructure, existing corporate account relationships, and a search product that works because their incentive structure requires it to work."
After a long and detailed analysis, the bottom line on what Amazon businesses survive:
"Prime Video survives. Content lock-in is real. The subscriber base that stays for The Boys and doesn’t care about retail benefits is real, and it’s underrepresented in how people analyze Amazon’s decline narrative.
What doesn’t survive at current scale: the everything-store growth story, the AWS infrastructure dominance thesis, the 33% cloud market share trajectory, the Bedrock-as-AI-moat narrative, the $2 trillion valuation multiple."
+ The simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically extraordinary evolution, as extended kinship networks weaken across the nation and close blood relatives disappear entirely for many.
+ In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic increases in survival, men and women in their 30s as of 2020 have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s kin increase may be a significant, previously overlooked factor explaining the Chinese economy’s astonishing performance since Mao Zedong’s death.
+ The kin explosion has reached its peak, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and relentless kin crash, driven by its sustained and progressively steep sub-replacement fertility relationships. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in the models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese annals.
+ Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost inevitably foretell lineage extinction for many Chinese families.
+ Researchers and decision makers in China and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their consequence. Among these are pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surpluses of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions.
+ Despite this, the looming macroeconomic consequences of old- age dependency burdens, the most significant economic impact of China’s coming revolution in the family, may actually concern the micro-fundamentals of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi/social & business networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as propagation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s extraordinary upswing, the severe coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.
+ The ability of China’s increasingly sparse younger working age cohorts to support many times their number of elders is very much in question.
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