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HOLIDAY EVENTS Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 28) Knights of Columbus offers dinner for those in need For the 38th year, the Georgetown Knights of Columbus Council 3067 will offer a Thanksgiving dinner for those in need. The group will provide free meals that can be picked up or eaten at St. Mary's Parish Hall at 317 Broad St. in Georgetown. Food will be served from 10 a.m. until noon or the food runs out. For those without transportation, the group will deliver meals within Georgetown's city limits between 10 a.m. and noon. For delivery, call Colin Peterson at 843-344-9771 and provide your address, phone number and the number of meals you would like delivered. Deliveries should be requested by the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov. 27. The group plans to provide 425 meals this year. Nov. 29 Pawleys Island's annual Lighting of the Park will be at 5 p.m. at Pawleys Island Nature Park, 323 Myrtle Ave. Cookies and hot chocolate will be provided as guests watch holiday lights brighten the park. Nov. 29 to Dec. 31 MarshWalk Wonderland of Lights in Murrells Inlet Visitors of Murrells Inlet this holiday season will be in for a special treat as they stroll along the Murrells Inlet waterfront. The MarshWalk Wonderland of Lights walk-through experience runs from Nov. 29 through December. The nightly light show begins at the top of the hour from 5-11 p.m. There will also be a Santa’s Village open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 5-9 p.m. Nov. 29-Dec. 22. The Wonderland of Lights will feature stunning arches with thousands of lights themed to Christmas songs, an LED-lit Christmas tree at the end of Veteran’s Pier, festive photo opportunities spread throughout the area where visitors can stop and pose along the way. For more information, visit www.marshwalk.com , check them out on social media or call the MarshWalk answering service at 843-497-3450. Nov. 29 to Jan. 5 Treasured Holiday Memories exhibit at Brookgreen Gardens Trains and treasured memories are the theme of this holiday exhibit. Trains by Lionel and American Flyer will weave through landscapes built by Brookgreen staff. This year, a new addition is a vintage American Flyer layout from the early 1960s. “Amusement Park and Pavilion” also returns, bringing back scenes and sounds of the historic Myrtle Beach Pavilion. There's even a train display in front of the pool in the Jewell Plaza. During Nights of a Thousand Candles, the trains will run. For more information, visit www.brookgreen.org . Nov. 29 Brookgreen Gardens will hold its annual Nights of a Thousand Candles Preview Benefit from 6-9 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 29. The benefit ticket enables Brookgreen to grow its educational initiatives and encourage lifelong learning. There will be a limited number of tickets, costing $150 each. The ticket price includes wine, beer and other beverages, and heavy hors d'oeuvres. Ticket sales will close on Nov. 22 and will not be available for purchase after that date. For more information, visit www.brookgreen.org . Nov. 30 to Jan. 5 The Nights of a Thousand Candles goes into full swing beginning Saturday, Nov. 30, as Brookgreen Gardens comes to life amid the soft glow of more than 2,700 hand-lit candles and countless sparkling lights. The event runs from 4-9 p.m. on select dates from Nov. 30 to Jan. 5. Walk the garden pathways with a warm cup of cider. Experience the sounds of holiday music and celebrate the season with family and friends! Dates for the event in 2024 are: Nov. 30-Dec. 1, Dec. 4-8, 11-15, 18-22 and Dec. 31-Jan. 5. Nights of a Thousand Candles has been named "Best Christmas Lights in South Carolina" by Travel+Leisure Magazine and was the winner of the 2018 Charles A. Bundy award for excellence in tourism from South Carolina Parks Recreation and Tourism. Admission for Nights of a Thousand Candles is $30 for adults and $14 for children (members) and $35 for adults and $17 for children (non-members). For ticket information, visit www.brookgreen.org . Dec. 6 Georgetown will kick off the holiday season with a tree lighting event from 6:30-7:30 p.m. at Francis Marion Park, 750 Front St. Mayor Carol Jayroe will be joined by the children and grandchildren of city employees. The official tree lighting is scheduled for 7:15 p.m. Dec. 7 Georgetown's annual Christmas parade begins at 11 a.m. on Front Street. Businesses, organizations, sports teams, bands, dance teams and other groups are welcome. The deadline to enter the parade is Dec. 3. Dec. 7 The Murrells Inlet Christmas tree lighting event lasts from 4-6 p.m. at Morse Park Landing, which is next to the Hot Fish Club. Festivities include crafts, hot chocolate, cookies and a visit from Santa and Mrs. Claus. Dec. 8 Andrews will hold its annual Christmas parade at 5:30 p.m. It begins at 430 E. Main St. The tree lighting is at 7 p.m. at 101 N. Morgan Ave. There will also be a bonfire from 7:45-9 p.m. at the Main Street Gazebo. There will be hot chocolate, s'mores and coffee. Dec. 8 The Murrells Inlet Christmas Parade starts rolling at 3 p.m. The event begins at Wilcox Avenue and travels down U.S. Highway 17 Business, ending at Wachesaw Road. Dec. 14 The Friends of the Georgetown Library will hold their Yuletide Home Tour from 1-5 p.m. The 22nd annual event will feature 11 residences in Georgetown’s historic district, two houses of worship and three museums. The event supports the Georgetown Library. Tickets may be pre-purchased online at the Friends of the Georgetown Library website, www.myfogl.org/our-events , or at any of the Georgetown County library branch. To submit items for the Holiday Events Calendar, email cperry@postandcourier.com .CHICAGO (AP) — Matt Duchene and Jamie Benn each had a goal and two assists, and the Dallas Stars beat the Chicago Blackhawks 5-1 on Sunday night. Jason Robertson, Evgenii Dadonov and Wyatt Johnston each had a goal and an assist for Dallas, which had lost three of four. Jake Oettinger made 24 saves. Chicago dropped its fourth consecutive game. It lost three of four in its season series against Dallas. Connor Bedard scored his 10th goal for the Blackhawks, and Arvid Soderblom made 30 stops. Next up for Bedard and company is the Winter Classic on Tuesday against St. Louis. Dallas grabbed control after Chicago forward Tyler Bertuzzi was ejected 8:11 into the second period. Bertuzzi was sent off for elbowing Stars forward Colin Blackwell in the face. Robertson made it 2-1 when he converted a wrist shot from the right circle at 8:23. It was Robertson's first goal since Dec. 14 and No. 8 on the season. Dadonov got a slick pass from Duchene and scored his 10th goal with 5:14 left in the second. Takeaways Stars: Miro Heiskanen added two assists as the Stars used their superior depth to control much of the game. Blackhawks: Once again, not enough offensive opportunities. It has been a recurring problem for the Blackhawks for much of the season so far. Key moment Johnston's stick broke right before he scored his eighth goal 10 seconds into the third period. Duchene's pass went off Johnston and past Soderblom, giving the Stars a 4-1 lead. Key stat The Stars are 12-3-0 against the Blackhawks since the 2021-22 season. Up next Dallas opens a three-game homestand on Tuesday night against Buffalo. Chicago plays St. Louis on Tuesday at Wrigley Field. ___ AP NHL: https://apnews.com/hub/nhl Jay Cohen, The Associated Press
The standard Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum." Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC "Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?" Thanks for your interest in Kalkine Media's content! To continue reading, please log in to your account or create your free account with us.The Government will block new incinerators if they do not help meet environmental objectives under rules unveiled on Monday. Developers will have to show that their project either helps reduce the amount of non-recyclable waste going to landfill, or replaces an older, less efficient incinerator. The move forms part of the Government’s drive to increase recycling rates, which have held at about 45% of household waste since 2015. Environment minister Mary Creagh said: “For far too long, the nation has seen its recycling rates stagnate and relied on burning household waste, rather than supporting communities to keep resources in use for longer. Developers will also have to ensure their incinerators are ready for carbon capture technology, and demonstrate how the heat they produce can be used to help cut heating bills for households. The Government expects that its “crackdown” on new incinerators will mean only a limited number are built, while still reducing the amount of waste sent to landfill and enabling the country to process the waste it produces. The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said the country was almost at the point where it had enough waste facilities to handle non-recyclable rubbish, and so had limited need for new incinerators. But the proposals stop short of the plans included in the Conservatives’ 2024 manifesto, which committed to a complete ban on new incinerators due to their “impact on local communities” and declining demand as recycling increased.NonePower Management IC Market to Observe Prominent CAGR of 6.8% by 2031, Size, Share, Trends, Demand, Growth, Challenges and Competitive Outlook
AP Sports SummaryBrief at 3:32 p.m. EST
LOS ANGELES –– The Kings defeated one of the NHL’s hottest teams and turned in a perfect afternoon on special teams as they beat the Seattle Kraken 2-1 on Saturday at Crypto.com Arena. The Kings scored the game’s only power-play goal, reversing a troubling recent trend in the process, and were 3 for 3 on the penalty kill. They entered the match as losers of three of their last four games while Seattle had prevailed in five of its past six clashes. Adrian Kempe and Quinton Byfield, who was playing in his 200th career game, each found the net for the Kings. Anže Kopitar assisted on both goals. David Rittich stopped all 19 shots. Brandon Montour scored late for Seattle on an active night for the former Ducks defenseman. Joey Daccord made 19 saves. Two of the NHL’s 10 best teams defensively produced a predictably low-event first period – while the Kraken and Kings once combined for 17 goals in a game, they had only nine combined shots in the opening 20 minutes – but the Kings flipped the script with goals at the 4:19 and 6:03 marks of the middle frame. First, it was the vision of Alex Turcotte synergizing the finishing ability of Kempe, who scored his 10th goal of the season and his 11th point in his past 11 games. Turcotte received the puck behind the net, curled toward the right-wing boards and sold a play along the wall as he sucked in four Kraken defenders. His no-look pass hit Kempe in the slot, with Adam Larsson unable to close his gap and Daccord having little chance at Kempe’s searing short-side wrister. Then, two weights were lifted at once when the power play scored its first goal since Brandt Clarke’s Nov. 9 empty-netter and Byfield tallied for the first time since he scored in consecutive games Nov. 5 and Nov. 7. He scored his third goal of the year and the first for the newly configured top power-play unit with a kneeling one-timer from the right faceoff circle. The primary assist was Kevin Fiala’s first point in seven games and the secondary one, as it did on Kempe’s goal, went to Kopitar. The captain’s pair of helpers brought him to 14 points in his past 11 games, remaining a beacon of consistency even in lean offensive stretches for the team. Related Articles The Kings had the opportunity to slam the door at the end of the period when a bizarre sequence during a Seattle power play left Byfield and Warren Foegele with a two-on-none shorthanded rush. After four passes across Daccord’s crease, Foegele’s eventual shot was negated by the handle of Daccord’s stick. Foegele would have another brush with glory in the third period, right after Montour had two of his own. His slap shot was saved by Rittich but his follow-up bid beat the big Czech, only to dent the right post just below the crossbar. Montour broke through 23 seconds after the Kings survived a six-on-four sequence, when his slap shot roared past Rittich with 1:34 to play, but Seattle drew no nearer.
After Trump's Project 2025 denials, he is tapping its authors and influencers for key roles
From Andrew Michael Hurley to Johanna Ekström: new books reviewed in short( MENAFN - Asia Times) China's Economy is having major problems. Despite the country's dominance of global manufacturing, its living standards are starting to stagnate at a level far below that of developed countries. China's growth has slowed down dramatically, from around 6.5% before the pandemic to 4.6% now, and there are credible signs that even that number is seriously overstated . See this , this , this and this on the theme. I think everyone cited here is broadly in agreement. But in the background, China has another problem that's weighing on its people's prosperity and also making it harder to respond to the macroeconomic crisis. This is the problem of chronically low productivity growth. I don't quite believe the official numbers that say China's total factor productivity (TFP) has fallen over the past decade and a half, but it's undeniable that it has grown much more slowly than in previous periods. Why? Paul Krugman points to a sectoral shift toward real estate - an industry with slow productivity growth - after the global financial crisis of 2008. I think that's definitely a part of the story, but probably not all of it. Back in 2022, I wrote a post thinking through various possible reasons why China's productivity growth declined long before it reached rich-world living standards . So in light of China's current struggles, which have only gotten worse in the intervening 2.5 years, I thought it might be helpful to repost it now. I think what I wrote holds up pretty well. It's always an interesting experience to read books about China's economy from before 2018 or so. So many world-shaking events have changed the story since then - Trump's trade war, Covid, Xi's industrial crackdowns, the real estate bust, lockdowns, Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Reading predictions of China's evolution from before these events occurred is a little like reading sci-fi from 1962. When I started China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® , by the veteran economic consultant Arthur Kroeber, I was prepared for this surreal effect. After all, it was published in April 2016 - not the most opportune timing. So I was pleasantly surprised by how relevant the book still felt. Most of the book's explanations of aspects of the Chinese economy - fiscal federalism, urbanization and real estate construction, corruption, Chinese firms' position within the supply chain, etc. - are either still highly relevant, or provide important explanations of what Xi's policies were reacting against. Dan Wang was not wrong to recommend that I read it. But China's Economy is still a book from 2016, and through it all runs a strain of stubborn optimism that seems a lot less justifiable six years later. Most crucially, while Kroeber acknowledged many of China's economic challenges - an unsustainable pace of real estate construction, low efficiency of capital, an imbalance between investment and consumption, and so on - he argued that China would eventually overcome these challenges by shifting from an extensive growth model based on resource mobilization to one based on greater efficiency and productivity improvements. This was despite his acknowledgement of the fact that productivity growth had already slowed well before 2016, and that Xi's policies so far didn't seem up to the challenge of reviving it. In many ways, productivity growth is the thread that ties together the entire story of the Chinese economy since 2008. Basic economic theory says that eventually the growth benefits of capital accumulation hit a wall, and you have to improve technology and/or efficiency to keep growth going. Some countries, like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, have done this successfully and are now rich; others, like Thailand, failed to do it and are now languishing at the middle-income level. For several decades, Chinese productivity growth looked like Japan's or Korea's did. But slightly before Xi came to power, it downshifted to look a bit more like Thailand. Here's a graph from a Lowy Institute report : In fact, the Lowy Institute's numbers are more optimistic than some other sources. The Penn World Tables has China's total factor productivity growth at around 0 or negative since 2011: And the Conference Board agrees . Personally, I suspect these sources probably underestimate TFP growth (for all countries, not just for China). But even Lowy's more reasonable numbers show a huge deceleration in the 2010s. If this productivity slump persists, it will be very difficult for China to grow itself out of its problems - such as its giant mountain of debt - in the next two decades. The question then becomes: Why has Chinese productivity growth slowed to a crawl? There are several main candidate explanations, and they have important implications for whether Xi will turn things around. The first reason, of course, is that China had several tailwinds that were helping them become more productive, and these are mostly gone now. One thing helping Chinese productivity growth was simply their distance from the technological frontier. When you don't even know how to do fairly simply industrial processes, it's pretty easy to learn these quickly. China imported basic foreign technology by insisting that foreign companies set up local joint ventures when they invest in China, by sending students overseas to learn in rich countries, by reverse-engineering developed-country products, by acquiring foreign companies, etc. Also by industrial espionage, of course, but there are lots of above-board ways to absorb foreign technology too. The problem is, this has limits. As you reach the frontier, the remaining technologies you need to absorb to keep growing productivity quickly become more and more complicated - not the kind of thing you can easily learn from looking at blueprints or taking a class. Companies guard these higher-level secret-sauce technologies much more carefully. A case in point is that China has had trouble building its own fighter jets , because the metallurgy to build the specialized jet engines that make modern top-of-the-line fighters possible is only known to a few companies in a few countries. So over time, the ability to absorb foreign technology peters out and it becomes necessary to start inventing your own stuff. A second tailwind was demographics. Everyone (including Kroeber) talks about China's unusually large demographic dividend in terms of labor input - when you have a ton of young people with few elders or kids to take care of, they can go work a lot - but it's also probably a factor in productivity. Maestas, Mullen & Powell (2016) shows a negative relationship between population age and productivity at the US state level, while Ozimek, DeAntonio & Zandi (2018) find that the same is true at the firm level. The mechanism is unknown, but the pattern is pretty robust. In any case, China began to age rapidly right around 2010, when its working-age population peaked as a percentage of the total (and peaked in absolute terms shortly afterward): A third tailwind for productivity was rapid urbanization. As Arthur Lewis famously noted , simply moving people from low-productivity agricultural work to high-productivity urban manufacturing work raises productivity a lot. Agglomeration economies are another force by which urbanization raises productivity. And economists find that China hit its“Lewis turning point” - i.e. ran out of surplus agricultural laborers to move to the cities - right around 2010 . Of course, China also limited urbanization unnecessarily by using its hukou (household registration) system to keep migrant laborers from settling permanently in cities. But in any case, this tailwind also appears to be over. So in the last decade, three big tailwinds that were driving Chinese productivity growth probably dried up. And there's not really anything that Xi Jinping or any leader can do about that. But there are probably other factors dragging down China's productivity growth as well, that might be more amenable to policy fixes. If you can no longer import foreign technology, one thing you can do is to invent your own. In fact, this is a good thing to do even if you do import foreign technology, since companies should create new products and new markets instead of just aping foreign stuff. And indeed, China has been spending a lot more on research and development in recent years. Here's a chart from the blog Bruegel : Unfortunately, research input doesn't always lead to research output. A 2018 study by Zhang, Zhang & Zhao finds that Chinese state-owned companies have much lower R&D productivity than Chinese private companies, which in turn have much lower productivity than foreign-owned companies. And a 2021 paper by König et al. finds that while R&D spending by Chinese companies does appear to raise TFP growth, the effect is quite modest: The authors suggest misallocation of resources as a major culprit in low R&D productivity - in other words, a lot of this spending is being done by state-owned companies that are just throwing money at“research” because the government tells them to, but not really discovering much. They also note that some companies simply reclassify normal investment as“R&D” in order to take advantage of tax breaks (note that companies do this everywhere). What about university research? This is an extremely important part of how the US keeps its technological edge. And China has indeed been throwing huge amounts of money at university research, such that its expenditure now nearly rivals that of the US China recently passed the US in terms of published scientific papers , including highly cited papers . But the quality of this research has been called into question. Investigations regularly find that despite all this publication activity and all this spending, Chinese universities are not the leaders in most fields of research . Basically, the story is that Chinese scientists are under tremendous pressure to publish a ton of crappy papers, which all cite each other, raising citation counts. In the words of Scientific American, this has led to“the proliferation of research malpractice, including plagiarism, nepotism, misrepresentation and falsification of records, bribery, conspiracy and collusion.” So the low productivity of Chinese R&D may help explain why the country's domestic innovation hasn't risen to take the place of foreign technology absorption. As everyone who reads this blog knows, I'm a big fan of the development theories of Joe Studwell and Ha-Joon Chang. A pillar of the Chang-Studwell model is the idea of“export discipline .” Basically, when companies venture out into global markets, they encounter tougher competition and also ideas for new products, new customers, and new technologies. This raises their incentive (and their ability) to import more foreign technology, and in general makes them more productive and innovative. After the global financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed, the US wasn't able to absorb an ever-expanding amount of imports from China. So Chinese exports to the US market slowed in the 2010s , and then Trump's trade war slowed them even more. China's exports to the EU rose a bit , but not that much. Many people (including Kroeber) talk about this as a shift from export-led growth to growth led by domestic investment. And so it is. But if productivity benefits from exporting, then this is also a challenge for long-term growth, because there's less opportunity for export discipline to work its magic. In fact, this might be one reason that it's harder for big countries to grow relative to small countries. It's a lot harder to be an export-led economy when you have 1.4 billion people than when you only have 50 million people (as South Korea does), because the world simply gets saturated with your exports. Which raises the question of why the US manages to be so productive - more productive even than most European and rich East Asian economies. Consumption might have something to do with that. The US is a very large economy that is geographically distant from most other major economies. This explains why the US has a very low amount of trade relative to GDP - just 23%, compared to 81% for Germany and 69% for South Korea. But the US is also a highly productive economy, more productive than all but a few small rich nations. Exports certainly helped the US grow, but to a large extent it simply sold stuff to itself. As the chart above shows, China increasingly does the same. But unlike the US, China's domestic economy is heavily weighted towards investment in capital goods - apartment buildings, highways, trains, and so on. China's final consumption is only 54% of GDP , compared to over 80% in the US. And private household consumption accounts for only 39% of China's GDP , compared with 67% in the US. Of course, China is still at an earlier stage of development, but as Kroeber notes in his book, even countries like Japan and South Korea had significantly higher consumption shares at equivalent stages of their own growth stories. Usually this gets discussed in the context of“imbalances.” But what if it also affects productivity? Consumers have a preference for differentiated goods that spurs companies to develop new products, increase quality, offer new features, and so on. The strategy professor Michael Porter argues that when companies compete by differentiating their products instead of simply competing on costs, it results in higher value-added - in other words, it makes them more productive. Over the past decade, China has been building a lot of buildings and a lot of infrastructure. But it hasn't been developing a lot of innovative and high-quality cutting-edge consumer products. Various government policies that funnel resources toward domestic investment rather than domestic consumption may inadvertently be holding back Chinese productivity. And the biggest such policy might be macroeconomic stabilization. It's important to stabilize the economy. Recessions throw people out of work and create tons of suffering, and probably also lead to underinvestment by companies. They can damage the cohesion of entire societies. The US rediscovered this lesson the hard way in 2008-11 when our insufficient fiscal stimulus resulted in a recession that was longer and more painful than it had to be. But there may be such a thing as too much stabilization. As I explained in a post last September , China avoided going into recession both in 2008-11 and again in 2015-16 (after a big stock market crash) by pumping money into real estate, via lending by state-controlled banks , often to SOEs and to local governments . This likely saved the Chinese economy from experiencing recessions in 2008-11 and 2015-16. But it had a big negative effect on productivity growth, for three reasons. First, SOEs simply aren't very productive compared to other Chinese companies. Second, the money was shoveled out the door very quickly, meaning that there wasn't much time or incentive to figure out which projects were worth investing in. And third, real estate and construction are sectors of the economy with notoriously low rates of productivity growth. This last is probably the scariest, as it led China's economy to be more dependent on real estate than any other in recent memory: Anyone who has followed the saga of China's Covid lockdowns will sense a familiar pattern here. The Chinese government, eager to preserve the appearance of invincibility, often goes overboard in unleashing the tools of control. But while recessions are not healthy things, the lengths to which Chinese policymakers went to make absolutely 100% sure they never had even the slightest recession may have left their economy with a huge hangover of low-productivity industry. So there are plenty of reasons why China's productivity growth crashed to a low level in the 2010s and 2020s. But speeding it back up again - which every analyst, including Kroeber, seems to recommend - will be no easy task. The tailwinds driving productivity higher are gone. And China's misallocation of resources toward low-quality research and low-quality real estate industries will not be easy to reverse; these systems have a way of getting entrenched. Xi Jinping, of course, is going to try. Part of his effort consists of industrial policy - the Made in China 2025 initiative and the big push for a domestic semiconductor industry . It remains to be seen whether those will bear fruit. But in the last three years, Xi has undertaken a second, more destructive effort to reshape China's industrial landscape. Instead of simply boosting the industries he wants, he has attacked the industries he doesn't want. He has cracked down on consumer internet companies, finance companies, video games and entertainment. And he has attempted to curtail the size of the real estate industry , resulting in a slow-motion crash that's still ongoing . Essentially, Xi is trying to crush industries he doesn't like, in the hopes that resources - talent and capital - flow to the industries he does like. This is a new kind of industrial policy - instead of“picking winners”, Xi is stomping losers. One of the saddest things about optimistic 2016-era analyses like Kroeber's is how much hope they place in internet companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu as heralds of a new, more innovative China. Xi has declared that these companies are not, in fact, the future. But it's far from clear that an economy works like a tube of toothpaste, where smashing one end will send resources squirting out the other end. If you're a budding entrepreneur, do you really think that starting a semiconductor company instead of an internet company will win you Emperor Xi's favor? What if next week he decides that he doesn't need more chip companies and that your company isn't one of his preferred champions? What if after you get rich and successful, Xi decides you're a potential rival and appropriates your fortune? An economy where the leader is always smashing companies and industries he doesn't like is inherently an economy full of risk. Yes, Chinese engineers and managers will obey Xi's will and go into the industries he wants them to go into. But the loss of entrepreneurship and initiative might make this a pyrrhic victory. In other words, escaping China's low-productivity-growth trap is going to be tough, and Xi's strategy doesn't fill me with a ton of confidence so far. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here. Thank you for registering! An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link. MENAFN30122024000159011032ID1109040388 Legal Disclaimer: MENAFN provides the information “as is” without warranty of any kind. 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