CSIS’s Red Ink is deservedly one of the most widely cited reports on China’s industrial policy. But the headline figure—China spends 1.7% of GDP on industrial policy—is a vast, vast underestimate (the report says it’s a conservative estimate). Look at SOEs which are 1/4 of GDP and 60% of total market cap or state banks which dominate lending. Look at the control of SASAC over every strategic sector of the economy. Even famous private sector firms have to align with national goals or face consequences. Look at how carefully the state controls and cultivates the entrance of foreign firms into China’s domestic market. Look at the trillions of dollars China spends on infrastructure. Look at state ownership of land and the ability to turn rural areas into industrial zones. My point is that what most people think of as industrial policy—subsidies, tax breaks—barely scratches the surface of what the Chinese party-state does to intervene in and “guide” the economy. (The report actually goes into great detail and is required reading for anyone interested in China’s industrial policy: csis.org/analysis/red-ink-es…)

It's extremely bizarre for the U.S. to pursue a counter-Chinese industrial policy—in a century of structural population decline!—without a strategy to increase legal immigration and specifically recruit/hoard the world's smartest people. theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv…

Around the mid-2010s, Canada diverged from the U.S. and is now getting poorer.

The world is a seeing new kind of rail option: rapid regional rail These providing travel options into cities for much wider commuting areas Paris, London, Istanbul, Seoul, Delhi, Guangzhou are all building them out. The US could too, if it brought construction costs down

“It smells like Russia. It looks like Russia:” European investigators increasingly see Russian fingerprints around recent acts of suspected sabotage on strategic infrastructure but are struggling to respond. Detecting potential attacks is increasingly difficult because Russia, since launching its full-scale invasion on Ukraine two years ago, has turned more to civilians and commercial vessels to survey and possibly attack critical infrastructure such as undersea connections, offshore energy facilities, transport networks and military installations, people familiar with the cases say - the Wall Street Journal writes. ◾️German prosecutors last month detained two dual Russian-German nationals suspected of spying for Moscow with the goal of disrupting Western military assistance to Ukraine through sabotage. ◾️Britain’s cyberintelligence agency GCHQ is “increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks—as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations,” its director Anne Keast-Butler said last week. Authorities believe Moscow is using civilian equipment for spying and sabotage. Russia has in recent years employed its vast commercial fishing fleet, as well as marine-research ships for intelligence gathering in the Arctic, an area crucial for its strategic nuclear-submarine deterrence that is based there, an official for Norway’s security service PST said. Some of the vessels are modern ships, more than 300 feet long, equipped with sonar and other technology that allows them to scan the seabed, the official said. ◾️On Oct. 7 the Chinese-registered containership Newnew Polar Bear left Russia’s Baltic Sea port of Kaliningrad and sailed north. Staffed by a Russian crew, it crossed the pipeline’s area at the same time the link broke. Finnish investigators believe that the pipeline was cut by the Newnew Polar Bear’s anchor. Immediately after the pipeline was cut, Finnish officials identified the ship as a potential culprit, but they were unable to search it because it was in international waters. ◾️In Germany, officials and investigators say they suspect Russia could have been behind an attack on the railroad that temporarily halted all rail traffic in the north of the country in October 2022. The rail attackers crippled both the railway’s main communication network and its backup by almost simultaneously severing two data cables located roughly 200 miles apart, investigators said. Whoever carried out the sabotage had detailed knowledge of the network, investigators said. In January 2022, as Russia was positioning its forces to attack Ukraine, a Russian fishing trawler was detected traversing the icy waters above a major fiber-optic cable around the time it was cut. The cable carried data from SvalSat, one of the largest commercial satellite ground stations in the world, located on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in the far north. The Russian trawler crisscrossed more than 100 times over the exact spot where the cable was cut, according to satellite traffic-monitoring data, said Ronny André Jørgensen, a prosecutor from the northern city of Tromsø who investigated the incident. Footage from an underwater drone revealed that the seabed where the cable was cut had been plowed by a hard object, the tracks of which resemble the impact of the equipment carried by the Russian trawler Melkart 5. wsj.com/world/europe/europe-…

New paper from Norway: Banning smartphones in school - significantly decreased doctors visits for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls - reduced bullying among both genders - improved girls’ GPA and attendance rates - largest effect sizes were among the poorest kids

Tesla reap what it sow Tesla has lost a few hundred billion in market cap YTD. Plenty of that can be attributed to Chinese competition. BYD replaced Tesla as the world’s biggest EV company at the end of last year. I say Tesla essentially groom its competitors to outcompete itself. - Tesla open source its technology. Elon said he wants to promote green innovations. I was shocked when I heard this from him in that NYT conference last year. I can’t think of a single major tech company that open source its technology w its own shareholder capital - Tesla groomed an EV supply chain in China. Almost entirely of Tesla components are sourced in China. gizchina.com/2022/02/25/tesl… This supply chain also supplies its Chinese competitors. China EV took off from about 1.2 million in 2017, the year Tesla entered China, to about 9 million units last year. Now with its own EV industry fully grown, China is done courting Tesla “Tesla Cars Are Banned in Certain Areas in China Amid Security Concerns” autoevolution.com/news/tesla… So I say Tesla perfectly demonstrates the meaning of “you reap what you sow”.

Dystopia

There’s been an extraordinary decline in poverty in India 🇮🇳

Eleven US states now get over half their electricity from renewables (and 10 of them have below-average electricity prices) theprogressplaybook.com/2024…