Of course, but it is literally the best proxy available in 1 metric.

Definitionally, it's the percentage of economic activity that is dictated by decentralized private market actors vs. centralized government ones.

All stats are imperfect reflections of reality. But name a better one for this particular issue.

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DetroitThrow 5 days ago | parent [-]

State owned enterprises as a percentage of GDP, seems definitionally a better metric than government spending per GDP for comparing "decentralized private vs centralized government actors". This shows China at 29% and USA at 19% for 2024. So even discounting legal frameworks for state intervention, regulations, or supply-side policy it seems very contrived to reach your conclusion in terms of, again, "decentralized private market actors vs. centralized government ones" - and I'm aware of the difference it would mean wrt government spending as a % of GDP.

But I'd just like to point out how silly it is to dismiss the person's concerns by claiming we should all just agree to be reductive because it's easiest to discuss a single metric. It's certainly easiest to use this single metric to make the discussion about your conclusion, though, if that's what you were aiming for. I hope not, though.

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pembrook 5 days ago | parent [-]

SOE % is definitely a great challenger for this. But I'd argue it misrepresents the picture by not including things like regulated monopolies in the US and poorly capturing taxation-driven redistribution.

Chinese utilities are all counted as SOEs, regulated utility monopolies in the US aren't, even though defacto they are government entities. The US likes to brand everything as more capitalist (just as China likes to brand everything as more communist), so this distorts the picture.

If we're just trying to capture the full picture of money flows in an economy, and whether each incremental currency unit is responding to market signals or not, % of GDP that is government spending is more reliable imo.

It's far easier to compare internationally and less fuzzy to calculate, given there's much more data on it globally.

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littlestymaar 3 days ago | parent [-]

“It's not a good metric but it's easy to calculate so let's use that to make a completely nonsensical point”.

Did you know what happened like this week, with the military parade stuff and financial institutions being told to behave around that because the government didn't want any market turbulence around their glorious parade?

The reality is that Chinese government has total control over the entirety of the Chinese economy. They don't exert their entire control all the time and let things go around as long as it doesn't interfere with their agenda, but it will interfere in absolutely anything whenever they decide for whatever preposterous reason like a military parade or anything.

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pembrook 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm no fan of Chinese authoritarianism, but you could say exactly the same about the US government. This is not a good rebuttal.

We're just 3 years from the US government shutting down all businesses during Covid? In WWII the US forced its entire manufacturing sector to retool from consumer products to war equipment. Detroit went from producing cars to producing tanks. Until recent decades the US had a mandatory draft where they took young men from their families involuntarily to go die in the jungles of Vietnam. I could cite a million other examples.

Not liking the data because it conflicts with the narrative you have in your head does not mean the data is wrong.

	▲	littlestymaar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> We're just 3 years from the US government shutting down all businesses during Covid? Did you see the Chinese version of Covid lockdown? Claiming that the US did the same is complete nonsense. What the US did during Covid is closer to what Xi did for military parade stuff than what they did for Covid. > Not liking the data because it conflicts with the narrative you have in your head does not mean the data is wrong The data isn't wrong. Your interpretation of the data makes no sense, that's the issue here.