I think that's what I meant -- Xi Jinping is the face of incumbency (and thus heredity, and the absence of meaningful change) in the Party. Attempts to secure the general prosperity fail because the general prosperity disadvantages someone whose position rests on (some mix of) corruption, heredity, incumbency, and existing wealth. It takes a lot of sustained exercise of power to overcome incumbency.

(It is also, I think, dangerous to decide someone like Xi is stupid. Narrow, perhaps, but gett…

Re: Globalization

We should remember that in the 20th century, international trade as a %age of global GDP peaked in 1913, just before WWI, and declined until 1945. It then rose and recovered its peak ratio in the 1970s. Was popularism the cause then, or was it more about instability and risk of supply lines? Why did international trade not recover in 1918, but continue to fall even though the beggar-thy-neighbor policies did not get enacted until the Depression starting in the late 1920s …

Creating artificial scarcity is what businesses try to do. The offset should be some net benefit ("cute shops in a more crowded neighborhood" as Brad puts it. ). But the current idea is that we have reached a far more predatory form of capitalism which is clearly zero-sum. All those robocalls with various scams are not benefitting the buyer and we know there is a net cost. Predatory landlords are on the rise, which hurts anyone paying rents. So I don't think it is so much some sort of zei…