Interesting question. I think there is a plausible case to be made that convergent factors in AGI/ASI development might render it less important where it came from, and that fixating on this might simply cause dangerous race dynamics. However, it seems pretty clear to me that directionally the US is better:
Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government has done more for the flourishing of Chinese citizens than the American government has done for the flourishing of American citizens.
Prior to 1979 the CCP was one of the most tyrannical and abusive totalitarian governments the world has ever known. In addition to causing a huge death tool and systematically violating the rights of its citizens, it also impoverished them. Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It’s a big improvement, but that doesn’t mean policy has been amazing—they’ve just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
However, at the same time they stopped being so communist, the CCP started implementing the One Child Policy. The US has done some pretty bad social engineering in time, but none with quite the cruelty of the OCP, or whose effects are quite so predictably disastrous. Maybe they will get lucky because robots will arrest their demographic collapse, but on an ex ante basis the policy is simply atrocious.
Commerce in China ditches some of the older ideas of Marxism because it’s the means to an end: the China Dream of wealthy communism.
Responding to this one would take more time than I have so I will skip.
The American Supreme Court has established “corporate personhood” to an extent that is nonexistent in China. As corporations become increasingly managed by AI, this legal precedent will give AI enormous leverage for influencing policy, without regard to human interests.
I’m not an expert on Chinese law, but my understanding is the key parts of corporate personhood—the right to own property, to sign contracts, to be sued, etc. - exist in both China and the US. Perhaps you are thinking of Citizens United v. FEC, but that is primarily about free speech, not corporate personhood, and free speech seems like an area that the US is clearly superior to the PRC.
Compared to America, China has a head start in using AI to build a harmonious society. The American federal, state, and municipal governments already lag so far behind that they’re less likely to manage the huge changes that come after AGI.
I’m not sure what you’re gesturing at here.
America’s founding and expansion were based on a technologically-superior civilization exterminating the simpler natives. Isn’t this exactly what we’re trying to prevent AI from doing to humanity?
I don’t think that is a fair summary of the foundation of America, and nor do I really see the relevance here. Even if it was relevant, contemporary US treatment of native tribes seems significantly better than PRC treatment of groups like the Uyghurs.
the CCP started implementing the One Child Policy. The US has done some pretty bad social engineering in time, but none with quite the cruelty of the OCP, or whose effects are quite so predictably disastrous. Maybe they will get lucky because robots will arrest their demographic collapse, but on an ex ante basis the policy is simply atrocious.
Personally, I haven’t spent that much time investing this question, but I currently believe it’s very unlikely that the One Child Policy was primarily responsible for demographic collapse.
Personally, I haven’t spent that much time investing this question, but I currently believe it’s very unlikely that the One Child Policy was primarily responsible for demographic collapse.
This may not have been the original intention behind the claim, but in my view, the primary signal I get from the One Child Policy is that the Chinese government has the appetite to regulate what is generally seen as a deeply personal matter—one’s choice to have children. Even if the policy only had minor adverse effects on China’s population trajectory, I find it alarming that the government felt it had the moral and legal authority to restrict people’s freedom in this particular respect. This mirrors my attitudes toward those who advocate for strict anti-abortion policies, and those who advocate for coercive eugenics.
In general, there seems to be a fairly consistent pattern where the Chinese government has less respect for personal freedoms than the United States government. While there are certainly exceptions to this rule, the pattern was recently observed quite clearly during the pandemic, where China imposed what was among the most severe peacetime restrictions on the movement of ordinary citizens that we have observed in recent world history. It is broadly accurate to say that China effectively imprisoned tens of million of its own people without due process. And of course, China is known for restricting free speech and digital privacy to an extent that would be almost inconceivable in the United States.
Personal freedom is just one measure of the quality of governance, but I think it’s quite an important one. While I think the United States is worse than China along some other important axes—for example, I think China has proven to be more cooperative internationally and less of a warmonger in recent decades—I consider the relative lack of respect for personal freedoms in China to be one of the best arguments for preferring United States to “win” any relevant technological arms race. This is partly because I find the possibility of a future world-wide permanent totalitarian regime to be an important source of x-risk, and in my view, China currently seems more likely than the United States to enact such a state.
That said, I still favor a broadly more cooperative approach toward China, seeking win-win compromises rather than aggressively “racing” them through unethical or dangerous means. The United States has its own share of major flaws, and the world is not a zero-sum game: China’s loss is not our gain.
Yes I was making a pretty limited critique of a specific line in Lark’s comment on causal attribution. I mostly agree with you (and him) on other points.
I agree that the US government, and Western governments in general, have substantially greater respect for individual freedoms, partially for Hayekian reasons and partially due to different intrinsic moral commitments to freedom. I also agree that this is one of the most important factors to consider if you’re asking whether you prefer a US- or China- led world order.
I spent some time researching this topic recently (blog post link). It seemed an odd paradox—why does the one-child policy not seem to have that much of an impact on the birth rates?
The answer is quite simple but weird that no-one knows about it. It’s mainly that the pre-One Child Policy population control policies in China in the 1970s were more restrictive than you think, and the 1980s policies were de facto more liberal. You can see this 1970s crash on any visualisation- from 6 to 2.7 births per women in 7 years! (1970-1977). A big chunk of this was because the legal marriage age shot up in most areas, to 25⁄23 for rural women/men, and 28⁄25 for urban. You get a big gap where people, especially in villages, would previously be having kids at 18 and suddenly weren’t.
Thanks to Deng’s reforms, the 1980s were more open in many ways, marriage was restored to the normal age, divorce was liberalised, so the one child policy was implemented partly to stop a resurgence of the birth rate! So alongside a big wave of sterilisations, you also get the “catch-up” of people now allowed to marry and have kids. Also, after some pushback, the OCP wasn’t that strictly enforced in the late 1980s, especially in rural areas, so you get some provinces where 3 or 4 kids stayed normal. Some people also took advantage of Deng’s reforms to leave their village, get divorced and have a kid with someone else. So you don’t see a big crash in the birth rate in the 1980s, and China averaged 2.5 kids per woman in the mid 1980s.
The OCP was more strictly enforced in the 1990s, so you see the crash from 2.5 to 1.5 births per women then. You also start seeing the extreme sex ratio imbalances. Now that the 1990s (56% male) cohort has reached parent-age, that’s one reason the current crash in the birth rate is so extreme. China would probably be seeing drops in the birth rate in the absence of any population control policies, but there’s no chance it would be this extreme.
However, it seems pretty clear to me that directionally the US is better
If you’re happy to elaborate further, I’m curious whether you believe that is also true conditional on a single person ending up controlling the first ASI system.
Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It’s a big improvement, but that doesn’t mean policy has been amazing—they’ve just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
This might be nitpicky, but still probably worth pointing out, because I think it is symptomatic of Western observers’ tendency to talk past Chinese interlocutors on subjects like this.
It is objectively quite extraordinarywhat China under the CCP has seen in terms of economic growth and development. That is a really hard intellectual problem for us liberal democrats (and especially consequentialists). You can believe the CCP is net bad, totalitarian regime in the status quo—I think this—but dismissing what it managed to do post-Mao for the Chinese economy requires ignoring the wealth (no pun intended) of evidence about how uniquely strong Chinese growth has been, which suggests the CCP was doing more than just not being abjectly terrible.
China’s GDP per capita in the late 1970s, shortly after Mao’s death and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, was a fraction of the average in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank: China, SSA)! Playing around with Our World in Data charts, which only go back to 1990, also really underscores this. China was dirt poor for basically the entire 20th century, in no small part due to historically bad abuses and mismanagement by the CCP up until about 1980—and in the historical blink of an eye it turned things around.
Things like the mass incarceration and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, forced sterilizations and abortions under the one-child policy, and plenty of other post-Mao abuses and human rights catastrophes are real. But an educated, reasonable Chinese person could certainly shoot back: so is the near elimination of e.g. child malnutrition, or the complete elimination of malaria, both of which are still rampant in neighboring, (mostly) democratic India, which was richer than China back in the 1970s.
Have you checked it was uniquely strong? Just off the top of my head Taiwan and (especially) South Korea both grew very rapidly too, under “right-wing” dictatorships and then (at least with SK, less sure about when Taiwan stopped growing rapidly) under democracy as well. I don’t dispute the general point that the CCPs developmental record is very impressive, but that’s still importantly different from “their system achieved things no one has ever achieved under another system”.
You’re right, I should be more careful in wording; I’ve struck “uniquely”. China is unique in the sheer scale of such growth given the size of its population, but the Asian Tigers + Japan also had very high growth rates. I think the gist of my original point still stands: growth did not happen in these countries because the ruling parties just stopped doing really bad things, but, generally, the regimes (excluding Japan) engaged in extensive economic reform that is by no means a guaranteed success (cf. Russia).
Interesting question. I think there is a plausible case to be made that convergent factors in AGI/ASI development might render it less important where it came from, and that fixating on this might simply cause dangerous race dynamics. However, it seems pretty clear to me that directionally the US is better:
Prior to 1979 the CCP was one of the most tyrannical and abusive totalitarian governments the world has ever known. In addition to causing a huge death tool and systematically violating the rights of its citizens, it also impoverished them. Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It’s a big improvement, but that doesn’t mean policy has been amazing—they’ve just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
However, at the same time they stopped being so communist, the CCP started implementing the One Child Policy. The US has done some pretty bad social engineering in time, but none with quite the cruelty of the OCP, or whose effects are quite so predictably disastrous. Maybe they will get lucky because robots will arrest their demographic collapse, but on an ex ante basis the policy is simply atrocious.
Responding to this one would take more time than I have so I will skip.
I’m not an expert on Chinese law, but my understanding is the key parts of corporate personhood—the right to own property, to sign contracts, to be sued, etc. - exist in both China and the US. Perhaps you are thinking of Citizens United v. FEC, but that is primarily about free speech, not corporate personhood, and free speech seems like an area that the US is clearly superior to the PRC.
I’m not sure what you’re gesturing at here.
I don’t think that is a fair summary of the foundation of America, and nor do I really see the relevance here. Even if it was relevant, contemporary US treatment of native tribes seems significantly better than PRC treatment of groups like the Uyghurs.
This is a claim that has intuitive plausibility, and I sort of used to believe in the past, but I’m personally fairly skeptical these days. In this graph of fertility rate of China over time below, can you point to where the One Child Policy was implemented? (Here’s that same graph + other parts of East Asia + US + India for reference).
Personally, I haven’t spent that much time investing this question, but I currently believe it’s very unlikely that the One Child Policy was primarily responsible for demographic collapse.
This may not have been the original intention behind the claim, but in my view, the primary signal I get from the One Child Policy is that the Chinese government has the appetite to regulate what is generally seen as a deeply personal matter—one’s choice to have children. Even if the policy only had minor adverse effects on China’s population trajectory, I find it alarming that the government felt it had the moral and legal authority to restrict people’s freedom in this particular respect. This mirrors my attitudes toward those who advocate for strict anti-abortion policies, and those who advocate for coercive eugenics.
In general, there seems to be a fairly consistent pattern where the Chinese government has less respect for personal freedoms than the United States government. While there are certainly exceptions to this rule, the pattern was recently observed quite clearly during the pandemic, where China imposed what was among the most severe peacetime restrictions on the movement of ordinary citizens that we have observed in recent world history. It is broadly accurate to say that China effectively imprisoned tens of million of its own people without due process. And of course, China is known for restricting free speech and digital privacy to an extent that would be almost inconceivable in the United States.
Personal freedom is just one measure of the quality of governance, but I think it’s quite an important one. While I think the United States is worse than China along some other important axes—for example, I think China has proven to be more cooperative internationally and less of a warmonger in recent decades—I consider the relative lack of respect for personal freedoms in China to be one of the best arguments for preferring United States to “win” any relevant technological arms race. This is partly because I find the possibility of a future world-wide permanent totalitarian regime to be an important source of x-risk, and in my view, China currently seems more likely than the United States to enact such a state.
That said, I still favor a broadly more cooperative approach toward China, seeking win-win compromises rather than aggressively “racing” them through unethical or dangerous means. The United States has its own share of major flaws, and the world is not a zero-sum game: China’s loss is not our gain.
Yes I was making a pretty limited critique of a specific line in Lark’s comment on causal attribution. I mostly agree with you (and him) on other points.
I agree that the US government, and Western governments in general, have substantially greater respect for individual freedoms, partially for Hayekian reasons and partially due to different intrinsic moral commitments to freedom. I also agree that this is one of the most important factors to consider if you’re asking whether you prefer a US- or China- led world order.
I also agree with your final paragraph.
I spent some time researching this topic recently (blog post link). It seemed an odd paradox—why does the one-child policy not seem to have that much of an impact on the birth rates?
The answer is quite simple but weird that no-one knows about it. It’s mainly that the pre-One Child Policy population control policies in China in the 1970s were more restrictive than you think, and the 1980s policies were de facto more liberal. You can see this 1970s crash on any visualisation- from 6 to 2.7 births per women in 7 years! (1970-1977). A big chunk of this was because the legal marriage age shot up in most areas, to 25⁄23 for rural women/men, and 28⁄25 for urban. You get a big gap where people, especially in villages, would previously be having kids at 18 and suddenly weren’t.
Thanks to Deng’s reforms, the 1980s were more open in many ways, marriage was restored to the normal age, divorce was liberalised, so the one child policy was implemented partly to stop a resurgence of the birth rate! So alongside a big wave of sterilisations, you also get the “catch-up” of people now allowed to marry and have kids. Also, after some pushback, the OCP wasn’t that strictly enforced in the late 1980s, especially in rural areas, so you get some provinces where 3 or 4 kids stayed normal. Some people also took advantage of Deng’s reforms to leave their village, get divorced and have a kid with someone else. So you don’t see a big crash in the birth rate in the 1980s, and China averaged 2.5 kids per woman in the mid 1980s.
The OCP was more strictly enforced in the 1990s, so you see the crash from 2.5 to 1.5 births per women then. You also start seeing the extreme sex ratio imbalances. Now that the 1990s (56% male) cohort has reached parent-age, that’s one reason the current crash in the birth rate is so extreme. China would probably be seeing drops in the birth rate in the absence of any population control policies, but there’s no chance it would be this extreme.
Thanks for explaining, that makes sense and is very interesting!
If you’re happy to elaborate further, I’m curious whether you believe that is also true conditional on a single person ending up controlling the first ASI system.
This might be nitpicky, but still probably worth pointing out, because I think it is symptomatic of Western observers’ tendency to talk past Chinese interlocutors on subjects like this.
It is objectively quite extraordinary what China under the CCP has seen in terms of economic growth and development. That is a really hard intellectual problem for us liberal democrats (and especially consequentialists). You can believe the CCP is net bad, totalitarian regime in the status quo—I think this—but dismissing what it managed to do post-Mao for the Chinese economy requires ignoring the wealth (no pun intended) of evidence about how
uniquelystrong Chinese growth has been, which suggests the CCP was doing more than just not being abjectly terrible.China’s GDP per capita in the late 1970s, shortly after Mao’s death and the initiation of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up, was a fraction of the average in Sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank: China, SSA)! Playing around with Our World in Data charts, which only go back to 1990, also really underscores this. China was dirt poor for basically the entire 20th century, in no small part due to historically bad abuses and mismanagement by the CCP up until about 1980—and in the historical blink of an eye it turned things around.
Things like the mass incarceration and cultural genocide of Uyghurs, forced sterilizations and abortions under the one-child policy, and plenty of other post-Mao abuses and human rights catastrophes are real. But an educated, reasonable Chinese person could certainly shoot back: so is the near elimination of e.g. child malnutrition, or the complete elimination of malaria, both of which are still rampant in neighboring, (mostly) democratic India, which was richer than China back in the 1970s.
Have you checked it was uniquely strong? Just off the top of my head Taiwan and (especially) South Korea both grew very rapidly too, under “right-wing” dictatorships and then (at least with SK, less sure about when Taiwan stopped growing rapidly) under democracy as well. I don’t dispute the general point that the CCPs developmental record is very impressive, but that’s still importantly different from “their system achieved things no one has ever achieved under another system”.
You’re right, I should be more careful in wording; I’ve struck “uniquely”. China is unique in the sheer scale of such growth given the size of its population, but the Asian Tigers + Japan also had very high growth rates. I think the gist of my original point still stands: growth did not happen in these countries because the ruling parties just stopped doing really bad things, but, generally, the regimes (excluding Japan) engaged in extensive economic reform that is by no means a guaranteed success (cf. Russia).