China's unfair advantage -- collective action?

Today's Wall Street Journal had an article titled "China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash".

The article basically whines that China is somehow breaking unwritten rules to let "market forces" prove how successful they are, by, gasp,  actually thinking about problems and taking coherent action to address them. This is viewed as an "unfair" advantage, apparently, particularly since it embarrassingly works much better than the solution we had all agreed to worship before called "market forces."   This conflict with our deeply held religious beliefs has to be resolved, of course, by erasing the data point that is in "the wrong place" so we can continue in our comfortable myth.

The article begins:

Since the end of the Cold War, the world's powers have generally agreed on the wisdom of letting market competition -- more than government planning -- shape economic outcomes.  China's national economic strategy is disrupting that consensus ..."

I had to comment on that, and I repeat it here:

OK, let's see if I have this correct. People are upset because China has "an unfair advantage" in that the central planners in government take a strong hand in the economy. In the same breath, if told the US government was going to similarly take a strong hand in the US economy, they would scream bloody murder.

Larry Summers calls China our largest challenge, but this is an opponent that writes out their game plan 15 years in advance and publishes it for everyone to read? And we still can't beat them?

It's time to stop blaming "unfair practices", health-care costs, foreign terrorists, weather, sun spot cycles, global warming, labor, management, oil prices, education, Democrats, Republican, Liberals, Conservatives and Scout Troop #217 in New Jersey for our own monumental collective incompetence.

This reminds me of a hospital I was in that had given 2 Gigahertz laptops to 10,000 staff members, but justified the molasses speed of the central computer systems as due to "insufficient computer power".

I'd suggest that we stop considering the word "collective " to be a dirty word, abandon the idea that competing with everyone over everything is a self-evident great idea, and start looking at better ways to work together to tap the resources we, collectively, have to bring to the table.

Even the lowly slime mold, when threatened or faced with a resource challenge, can literally pull itself together into a single cohesive entity, take coherent action to address the problem, before dissolving again into ten million "separate" cells. There's something we should be learning from all this.

Blaming others for "unfair advantage" is not the way to get there.

 A more insightful view of the world is in the book "Peace - More Than an End to War", by the Baha'i Publishing Trust, which

asks them to put aside their belief that conflict and aggression are intrinsic to human nature, to overcome the paralysis of will that prevents them from finding solutions to the problems facing them.

The book continues

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior -- individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international -- based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation, which unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating that the US adopt Chinese Party rule. I am pointing out that coherent social action,  even when achieved by arguably dictatorial means,   is demonstrably MORE SUCCESSFUL in the short run (5-10 years) at dealing with the problems facing us on population scales than waiting  for "market forces" to address those problems.

Please note that I fully believe that central party rule,  with the suppression of dissent,  has within it the seeds of failure to be flexible to news from the front,  and will crash and sink on those shoals, as have all other efforts to rule by decree without corresponding efforts to listen to the people and accept surprising news, even if it overturns cherished long-standing beliefs and myths.

My point is that there are more choices than the anarchy of "market forces" and the powerful-but-internally-flawed central planning model of communism.    Central planning can work only if there are extremely strong built-in structures to weed out corruption and encourage dissenting views,  so that the strong down-flow of authoritative command is equally matched by a strong up-flow of wisdom from the front about the true state of affairs, which always seems to be invisible from "the top".

Otherwise, we get the all-to-common problem, say, in the US  of central economic planners unable to see a financial bubble the size of the planet,  despite a chorus of screams from below that it was coming; or of  startling and embarrassing comment from a vice president of General Motors that "no one could have predicted"  the drop in sale of expenisive gas-guzzlers when the price of gasoline rose.

Interestingly,  the US Army addresses just such a problem in Doctrine in FM22-100, the prior version of the US Army Leadership Field Manual.    The Army epitomizes a central command structure,  and yet the manual stresses the need for two things in order for such a structure to not blindly lead us all over a cliff -- (1)  the people at the top need to be exemplary in terms of moral behavior and concern for the troops,   and (2) the people at the top need to be acutely aware of their own blindness and take active steps to learn from those "below them".

Central Planning in communist countries, and as practiced in the US,  seems to have mastered the part about "authority going down" but seems to have discarded the part about "listening with humility to those below" going up.    Sadly,  that part discarded is the part that makes it work.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with central planning , with authority, or with coherent social action.  In fact,   as China is demonstrating, these are, in the short run, far more powerful than the chaos of the marketplace "solutions".     What's wrong is only visible on a larger time scale, which is if the central authority confuses the authority-to-steer with some kind of genetic-authority-due-to-mental-brilliance.   It's an easy mistake to make.  It's the normal method of failure of power, as "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely".   There is no intrinsic reason for this corruption of power to be a given -- but it will be a given if explicit steps are not built in to prevent that failure mode.

The only solution to such power grabs is to have absolute demands for the highest in character values and moral integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness of those we select as our leaders.  Not only "the appearance of impropriety" but impropriety itself must be considered disqualifying for office.

Otherwise,  we know what always happens.

In any case,  it does appear that

There are spiritual solutions to "economic" problems.

So far, there don't see to be any other kind of solution for "economic problems".