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Notes -
China has over a billion people and an average IQ of 104. While this is a complex topic, when simply considering these two variables it seems almost inevitable that China will by some distance become the dominant global economy within this century.
What are the reasons it's not so simple?
I mean, to start with East Asian countries underperform their IQ numbers. Japan is poorer than Italy, after all. China also has multiple bubbles propping up their economy.
But secondly, China has a population pyramid that makes Europe’s look good and a rigidly inflexible totalitarian government that has not managed to find solutions to historical Chinese weaknesses. Sheer number of people will make China a top global economic power for the foreseeable future, but ‘dominant by a wide margin’ seems unlikely just due to those.
According to what metric? GDP per capita? I'd consider that stronger evidence for the proposition that GDP does not measure anything useful than that Japan actually underperforms according to any sensible measure of performance. It is more surprising that people still have this blind faith in economic metrics considering how official inflation figures have gone viral for being comically disconnected from easily observable real price changes in recent years.
It's a blatant exploit, which seems designed to inflate the score of systems implementing a particular economic culture, that GDP includes the "market value" of illiquid and socially constructed line items which can be created out of thin air at no material cost. If the US were reduced to an irradiated reservation occupying half of Wyoming after a future war against China, its economists would probably still find a way to award themselves the superior GDP medal by having the two surviving lawyers on the territory mutually bill each other a few hundred trillions for consultations.
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On a per capita basis, sure, but in absolute terms the Japanese economy is substantially larger (approx $4tn vs $2.3tn). China could in theory be a lot poorer than the US per capita and still dominate it as an overall economic unit.
I accept the rest of your points.
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There is more to the human mind than just IQ, despite the fact that your G is one of the best predictors. Many also postulate that Indo-European populations tend to have fatter tails. Culture comes from people. The East Asian worldview is more risk-averse, with a much larger emphasis on standardised tests over everything else. Most stats about IQ from China are not very trustworthy either.
My amrchair theory is that having a population that has always self-selected for people defined by tests is not good in the long run. China will dominate within this century, it already is and it has good biocapital which could have been better without these insane pressures.
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Because the IQ stats are fake. They're obvious nonsense if you've ever left a tier 1 city and spoken to actual Chinese people in Mandarin, which I have. The vast majority of China is either Soviet dystopia or 3rd world hellhole. There's plenty of low IQ behavior on display. Going off vibes and Lived Experience™ I would wager their average IQ is around 95 or so.
If China becomes a dominant power, it will be by virtue of having a ton of warm bodies, a large overall number of >120 IQ people simply due to population size, and a very powerful government apparatus unhindered by Western moral concerns and that rules over a populace that has long been content to submit to authority as long as at least a little of the sweet corruption money trickles down. You don't need to have an average IQ of 104 to win if you have those advantages.
I've seen some IQ numbers for China that suggest it might have an IQ around 90 or so (no sources rn, sorry), which seems to make more sense than them actually currently having a 104 IQ. But judging by Taiwan, Singapore, and other East Asian nations, isn't it probably true that the mainland Chinese have the genes for a ~104 average IQ but are held back by the poor environment? If this is the case, I would think that the OP's argument still applies.
China is large and diverse. The northern coastals likely have similar IQ to the rest of north east Asia while other regions have other (lower) averages. What all this averages out to is anyone's guess but 104 is likely the upper bound given how testing has been done. Maybe it's above 100 maybe it's below, regardless there are a shitton of high IQ individuals in China.
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Why didn't the scientific and industrial revolutions start in China?
One theory is that they got stuck in a high level equilibrium trap where the economy was efficient enough that the initial capital expenditures to get the industrial revolution started wouldn't be profitable, unlike in Britain where the there was a significant mismatch in damand/supply (partially to do with the after effects of the bubonic plague) that encouraged capital investments in worker productivity.
Other explanations are lack of competition and cultural explanations either inherent to chinese culture or a shift from Taoism towards Confucianism.
Likely it was a combination of factors such as cultural, geographical, technological and economic.
Perhaps a better question is why did the industrial revolution start in Britain and why did it take so long for it to spread to the rest of Europe?
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Rigid and inflexible governance practices, worsened by a lack of competition. Consider the Seaban where the Ming relocated whole villages away from the sea to combat piracy. That's a bizarre thing to do, rulers usually like having trade. But the Ming were so strong they didn't care, they had no peer competitors and so little need to search for revenue. The consequences for this stupid crap didn't hit them immediately. The Qing didn't raise taxes for about a century or two because they wanted to be benevolent, so the footprint of the state was very light compared to Europe. The population ballooned and they had the same number of officials, it was a mess. Proto-industrialization was accelerated by the military-industrial complex, China wasn't usually under threat... They could afford to do all this suboptimal governance that would get them annexed if they were in Europe. In Europe, states had to search for qualitative military advantages in metallurgy and shipbuilding, they had to squeeze out as much tax revenue as they could from people. Europeans weren't interested in ritualized trade missions where they gave out more than they received to 'tributary states', they wanted profits. The Chinese state didn't care so much about profit, they assumed they were the richest and the best from the start.
China built a huge fleet and explored all around the Indian Ocean, terrifying all the natives. But they felt like there was no use for it, they had plenty of money already. And the steppe nomads were acting up again, so they scrapped it and refocused. They thought they were on top of the world, so resisted catch-up industrialization for some time in the 19th century on the basis that they already had everything they needed.
Many megadeaths later, the lesson sank in. Today they push out official party doctrine books about how important scientific and industrial development is, overcorrecting if anything: https://www.strategictranslation.org/articles/general-laws-of-the-rise-of-great-powers
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