I’ve been talking about vibes a lot over the past week, so let’s talk about something a little more substantive. Trump and his movement basically have two main policy ideas: 1.) immigration restriction, and 2.) more tariffs. Let’s think about the second of these. Tariffs aren’t just a Trump idea anymore – they’re now an important part […]

The post Looking for the upside of tariffs on China appeared first on Asia Times.

For some Americans, the relevant question isn’t “Which candidate will stand up to China?”, it’s “Should the US stand up to China at all?” There are still some progressives who believe that the negative turn in relations between the two countries is America’s doing, and that if we chose, we could simply stop “saber-rattling” and […]

The post Why Trump or Harris might sell out to China appeared first on Asia Times.

Once in a great while, Twitter X can still be a place for interesting discussions instead of breathless political screeching. July 29 was one of those times. I wrote a thread asking why America missed the battery revolution and got a lot of very interesting responses. So I thought I’d redo that thread as a blog post and expand […]

The post Why did US miss the China-led battery revolution? appeared first on Asia Times.

“I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!” — Slacker In my roundup last week, I flagged some disappointing results for a basic income experiment. When people got US$1,000 a month, 2% of them stopped working. That’s a significant amount, considering that $1,000 a month is not enough to […]

The post Yes, we still have to work appeared first on Asia Times.

Throughout the 2010s, many people – including myself – treated it as a truism that manufacturing industries have faster productivity growth than service industries. Historically that was true, and the reason wasn’t hard to grasp – machines improve faster than human beings do, so industries that depended on better machines naturally tended to advance faster […]

The post Why is US manufacturing so unproductive? appeared first on Asia Times.

In discussions about China’s economy, the issue of demographics comes up quite a lot. In 2022, China’s population began to decrease (and coincidentally, India’s population surpassed China’s). The country’s fertility rate, which had already fallen below replacement levels decades earlier, fell again recently, to just 1.09 — one of the lowest rates in the world, and even lower than Japan. […]

The post China’s demographics aren’t a short-term problem appeared first on Asia Times.

The Economist has a good story on the rise of Chinese science. In terms of “high-impact” (i.e. highly cited) publications, China has soared past the US and Europe: Now, these numbers have to be taken with a grain of salt. Measuring the impact of papers by looking at how many other papers cite them can be a […]

The post Putting China’s science surge in proper perspective appeared first on Asia Times.

Donald Trump still leads in most polls, and betting markets give him a better than even chance of winning the election this November. So it’s important to think about what his actual policies would be, and how these would affect the outcomes that Americans care about. Right now, the outcome Americans probably care about most is inflation. So we […]

The post How inflationary would Trump be? appeared first on Asia Times.

The big economic news this week was Biden’s very large tariffs on a number of Chinese-made goods. Those tariffs appear to have acted as a catalyst for a bunch of other countries — India, Brazil, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, the EU, etc. — to consider their own tariffs on China. In other words, much of the world now sees the Second […]

The post Weighing why China is juicing exports appeared first on Asia Times.

Joe Biden is about to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. A 100% tariff is an absolutely huge tariff. It means that Chinese EV makers would have to sell their EVs in the US at half the price of EVs manufactured elsewhere in order to be competitive. That just isn’t going to happen. A 100% tariff will probably […]

The post The Big Tariff era is here appeared first on Asia Times.

The other day at a fundraiser, Joe Biden made a casual comment that I consider to be the worst gaffe of his entire term as president. He declared that two of America’s most important allies, India and Japan, are “xenophobic”, and placed them in the same category as Russia and China: “You know, one of […]

The post No, Japan’s actually not a xenophobic country appeared first on Asia Times.

Viola Zhou has written an excellent investigative report into the culture clashes and growing pains at the TSMC factory in Phoenix, Arizona. Before I dive in, however, I should note that in my opinion, the headline that the magazine gave to this article was not very representative of what’s actually going on. The headline is “TSMC’s debacle […]

The post Who’s afraid of TSMC’s management culture? appeared first on Asia Times.

The US Congress just passed — and Biden signed — a major national security bill. The bill has four main provisions: I’m actually pretty surprised this bill passed, for two reasons. First, Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, had stalled Ukraine aid for quite some time, under pressure from the MAGA movement. Second, the Senate looked like it […]

The post What US should do next on national security appeared first on Asia Times.

Recently I’ve been writing some fairly gloomy stuff, mostly related to war and international affairs. But even though I’ve been focusing on scary happenings overseas, I’m still very optimistic about the domestic situation here in the United States. So I thought I’d make a little list of trends that we should be happy about. First, the […]

The post America ain’t all bad: five good reasons to be optimistic appeared first on Asia Times.

In a recent post, I tried to warn people about the substantial and growing chance of World War 3. My post was focused on the risk that a war will occur, but it didn’t really focus on the risk that the US and its allies will be defeated in that war. Yes, nuclear weapons are a […]

The post Sizing up the China-Russia ‘New Axis’ appeared first on Asia Times.

Being the guy who’s always shouting about impending disaster is frustrating, thankless work. If nobody listens to you, and the disaster happens, you’re a useless Cassandra. If nobody listens to you and the disaster luckily doesn’t happen, you’re viewed as a fool. If people do listen to you and they take action to successfully avert the disaster, a lot of […]

The post Americans should worry more about world war appeared first on Asia Times.

The paradigm shift in US economic policy began during the 2016 presidential election campaign. It was in that campaign that the candidates of both parties agreed on scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP was a proposed free trade deal between the US and a bunch of friendly Asian countries that was intended to create […]

The post US would be insane to go it alone on trade and industry appeared first on Asia Times.

I can clearly remember a moment after Barack Obama was reelected in 2012, where a Republican politician declared that his party just had to get better at explaining their message to the voters. I recall thinking that no, the problem wasn’t a lack of understanding — it was that voters, by and large, didn’t like […]

The post Chinasplaining backfires in ‘China’s World View’ appeared first on Asia Times.

When you look at modern China, you are witnessing something stupendous – a great civilization at the peak of its relative power and effectiveness. Along a few dimensions, modern China is the most impressive civilization humanity has ever built. It has the highest total GDP of any country in history, measured at purchasing power parity. Its manufacturing […]

The post Did China squander its moment in the sun? appeared first on Asia Times.

There was some reason for cheer among Japanese commentators on February 22. The Nikkei 225, Japan’s flagship stock index, finally reattained its previous peak from 1989: (Note: Technically this isn’t adjusted for inflation, but since Japan hasn’t actually had much total inflation since 1989, that doesn’t make much of a difference.) Bloomberg’s detailed breakdown shows that the rally over the […]

The post Japan, not quite ‘back,’ has a new fighting chance appeared first on Asia Times.