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This answer sharesHow US healthcare costs are undoubtedly not only much higher but also have worse outcomes and are dissociated from health-related changes. Plus some egregious examples thereof.How defensive medicine and medical malpractice costs alone cannot explain soaring US healthcare costs.How Regulatory capture - Wikipedia helps explain runaway US health costs, some egregious examples, its well-worn path, what it might take to reduce and reverse it.First two pieces of comparison data sets illustrate the extent to which US healthcare costs are obscenely and shockingly higher even as they produce worse overall outcomes compared to healthcare systems in other advanced economies.One, from a just published JAMA paper (1) that quantifies how US population size, age, disease prevalence/incidence, healthcare service utilization, price and intensity changed from 1996 to 2013, showing (see below from 1),Disease prevalence/incidence decreased modestly.Healthcare service utilization decreased modestly.Population age and size increased modestly.Healthcare price and intensity (mean spending per visit/prescription/use of technology) increased tremendously.Two, a 2009 comparison of average life expectancy, average healthcare spending and average number of doctor visits per year across the ~35 OECD - Wikipedia countries. This figure shows (see below from 2) that compared to other OECD countries, already by 2009 the US hadWorse health outcomes in terms of lower life expectancy at birth.Among the lowest doctor visits per year.Highest healthcare costs.Some Examples of Egregious US Healthcare CostsUS healthcare cost opacity is by design, not happenstance. For example, consider the so-called Chargemaster - Wikipedia, a colossal menu of list prices for any and everything used by and in an US hospital. As US hospital systems grew and consolidated over the past two decades, a sign of their immense, sorely under-appreciated clout is in atrociously and uncontrollably ballooning chargemasters. Yet (3),'While Medicare payments to hospitals are public, the prices that hospitals negotiate with private insurers have historically been treated as commercially sensitive and are generally unavailable to researchers and the public.'Problem is healthcare economics researchers have historically extrapolated Medicare spending per beneficiary to private spending per beneficiary even though they turned out to be more or less mutually exclusive. This is why ~anywhere one looks in US healthcare, costs remain opaque and when revealed, prove to be indefensibly, atrociously inflated, which in turn makes them newsworthy. Some eye-popping examples to make the point.In 2016, a $7 band-aid cost a hospital Emergency Room (ER) user $629 (4).A box of gauze pads that costs ~$2.50 to 5.00 in the open market was charged $77 in a US hospital for a routine blood test, a far cry from ER use (5). Many more breathtaking ER and non-ER examples (6, 7, 8, 9, see below from 10) abound in media reports.Given these examples, any surprise Medical tourism - Wikipedia not only came into existence but is booming as the years pass (11)? After all, it's servicing a real, ever-expanding need.All obvious outcomes not of free-market but rather of a captive market.Defensive Medicine & Medical Malpractice Costs Alone Cannot Explain Soaring US Healthcare CostsOne argument, by now a well-worn trope, when contrasting US healthcare cost to that in other countries relies on evoking the apparently rapacious and overweening capacity for litigiousness among the US public. It implies fear of litigation is a veritable cudgel making US doctors practice defensive medicine leading to overuse in the form of unnecessary tests and procedures. Unfortunately for its proponents, this particular red herring doesn't withstand analytical scrutiny.Estimates suggest only ~2% of care in the US is attributable to defensive medicine (12, 13, 14).A 2007 study (15) on imaging, widely perceived to be a key indicator of defensive medicine, found a 10% increase in average medical malpractice payments per physician in a state was associated with only 1% increase in Medicare payments for total physician service that included a 2.2% increase for the imaging component.A 2010 analysis (16) found decrease in medical malpractice premiums would yield <1% reduction in total medical costs in every specialty.Regulatory Capture Explains Much If Not Most Of Out-of-control US Healthcare CostsIn the US, healthcare costs keep going up, outcomes keep deteriorating and yet profits for for-profit healthcare service providers (hospital systems, specialists, pharma and device manufacturers) continue to soar (6, 7, 8, 9, 10). Soaring profits despite worse outcomes doesn't quite sound like the free-market at work, does it? That's because it patently isn't. Rather, it's blatant feeding at the government trough which essentially means feeding off of each and every taxpayer, who by now as individuals have little leverage to force change on this ghastly status quo. After all, life doesn't come with a guarantee of lifelong health meaning the entire population is directly or indirectly a captive market for runaway healthcare cost.One quite plausible reason for soaring US healthcare costs is unfortunately rarely openly discussed in public, namely, regulatory capture. A nimble and dynamic process, it morphs as governments and regulators enact laws and procedures to stem one or other form of capture. In the US healthcare system this entailed shifting from entry-barrier capture that dominated until the 1970s to the more corrosive deregulatory and cultural forms that prevail today (17).US healthcare costs are in fact one of the most compelling examples of how the so-called free-market, capitalism or whatever pro-market ideology one espouses pretty much amount to worthless gibberish once regulatory capture has sneaked into the room, taken a seat at the decision-making table and slowly over the course of several decades, not just spread its pervasive reach, octopus-like, into every corner of US politics but also assumed the mantle of key decision maker. And there it sits, unassailable in its reach and heft, every decision on costs, be it about hospitals, specialists, prescription drugs or medical devices, a mute and helpless hostage to its dictates.Some Examples of Egregious Regulatory Capture In US HealthcareDecades in the making, such regulatory capture of US healthcare is part of a well-worn path.Why are for-profit hospital costs so high in the US? Apparently (see below from 18)'The main reason for high hospital costs in the United States, economists say, is fiscal, not medical: Hospitals are the most powerful players in a health care system that has little or no price regulation in the private market.'When it comes to drug prices, consider the fact that already all the way back in 1995, the US regulatory agency, NIH (see below from 19),'The National Institutes of Health today relinquished its right to require "reasonable pricing" on drugs and other products developed in cooperation between the Government and industry. The pricing policy had been opposed by business interests since it was imposed six years ago.'Let the implications sink in. Government- aka taxpayer-funded research is the source for most drugs currently in the market yet such a drug policy implies the private sector can sell them in the US for whatever price they deem fit.Much worse lay in the future. Consider the 2003 Medicare drug bill. That one had a doozy of a provision, yes, one that (see below from 20)'made it impossible for Medicare to negotiate with drug companies in order to lower costs'Guess which age group is most likely to require prescription drugs? Obviously those on Medicare.The Well-worn Path To Regulatory CaptureAccording to a 2011 article (21) by administrative lawyer Sidney A. Shapiro, the play book for regulatory capture entails certain stereotypical processes as part of a relentless decades-long ideology-driven sophisticated campaign whose ultimate goal is to delegitimize government. As Grover Norquist - Wikipedia famously put it,'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.'The stereotypical maneuvers to bring about such an outcome include,Industry oriented mandates (see below from 21)'It should be no surprise that corporations are able to use their political muscle to obtain legislation friendly to their economic interests. The United States Code is chock full of tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory loopholes that are questionable from a public policy perspective.25 When these benefits are delivered by administrative agencies, the agency might be described as captured, but the agency is simply carrying out its defective mandate.'[Appointing] Hostile administrators (see below from 21)'...Agency officials have an additional incentive to favor industry interests. Because regulators will be seeking employment with regulated entities after government service, or have come from industry and intend to return, they will pull their punches to remain on good terms with future employers. This problem is usually described as the “revolving door” problem to indicate that the movement of government employees in and out of industry creates a type of conflict-of-interest...Tom McGarity has demonstrated how Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush were able to slow, or even stop, regulatory efforts in a number of regulatory agencies by the appointment of administrators hostile to regulation.'Insufficient funding (see below from 21)'While the appointment of administrators hostile to regulation is a well-recognized tactic, another method of capture has received less attention. Budget cuts have prevented agencies from carrying out their regulatory missions.41When Rena Steinzor and I examined the budgets of the five largest health and safety agencies,42 we found three things to be true. First, with the exception of FDA, none of the agencies had received significant increases in their budgets since 1980.43 FDA has received moderate funding increases, but only to accelerate its process for approving new drugs,44 leaving its other functions, such as protecting the food supply, short of money. Second, the regulatory responsibilities of the agencies has substantially increased, putting greater strain on existing resources.45 Finally, all of the agencies have floundered in addressing pressing regulatory problems, a symptom that is attributable in large part to a lack of funding.The idea of using budget cuts to slow down agency enforcement and rulemaking efforts in administrations hostile to regulation dates back to the Reagan administration, and this tactic was also popular in the George W. Bush administration.47 While budget cuts are not normally mentioned as a tool of regulatory capture, they have this impact. Legislators friendly to business interests support the budget cuts, and regulated entities get the benefit of reduced enforcement, or even non-enforcement of the health, safety, and environmental laws.'Rulemaking ossification (see below from 21)'Budget cuts reduce regulatory effectiveness, in part, because agencies have been hobbled by a series of procedural hurdles, found both in legislation and a series of presidential orders.49 With smaller staffs and less money, agencies find it more difficult to finish regulations because there are more procedural hurdles to overcome,50 a phenomenon known as “rulemaking ossification.”'Regulatory capture playbook in hand, it's fairly obvious that participants at the individual level from patients to doctors to insurers to regulators could be easily led to engage in counter-productive circular firing squad type of exercise against each other. After all, like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, at this point in time, none of them is in a position to see the 'whole' of the healthcare pie, just their own increasingly, mystifyingly, nonsensically rule-bound piece of it. Meantime, the handful of extremely high-placed individuals/entities who orchestrate the entire show for their own benefit continue to profit ever more handsomely.Can US Healthcare Regulatory Capture Be Reduced & Reversed?Given the extent of US healthcare regulatory capture, how to set about reversing it and reducing cost? After all, scale of the problem does suggest it's insoluble. Shapiro (21) offers two theoretical over-arching suggestions to reverse this lamentable and corrosively corrupt practice, make government agencies more resistant to change and more transparent.Economist Gerald Caprio, Jr.'s use of the analogy of sports instant replay, how home-field advantage apparently (one commenter wrote that it actually didn’t change as much as Caprio implies it does) evaporated once baseball umpires were told cameras were observing their every call (22), does suggest increased transparency in the way regulatory agencies operate could be the proverbial 'disinfecting sunlight'.However, sounding easier said than done, question remains whether, even when undertaken, such changes could bear the hoped-for fruit. Somehow the fight to lower US healthcare costs is all too sickeningly reminiscent of the fight against Big Tobacco. Richard Doll - Wikipedia first established a link between smoking and cancer all the way back in 1950 and yet it wasn't until the 1990s that the tide turned against Big Tobacco, after lawyers such as Mike Moore (U.S. politician) - Wikipedia started winning big settlements against them.Problem is healthcare in the US has been allowed to become a hydra-headed monster, with all too many powerful stakeholders who've become used to feeding off of a captive market at the government trough. Reining them in now will take a lot more than a handful of big settlements. It will take massive culture change on the part of a population that's deep in the throes of Learned helplessness - Wikipedia.After all, the self-serving logic of systems such as capitalism is well-nigh unassailable. Asking whether such a system should even play a role in healthcare would be a good starting point but unfortunately in the case of the US, that's pretty much shutting the proverbial barn door after the horse has bolted. Lawmakers predictably show appetite for nothing more than tinkering around at the margins. Similar to other large-scale social movements such as the one that got women the right to vote or the later Civil Rights movement, only groundswell of people campaigning persistently for a cheaper, more effective, hopefully not-for-profit healthcare alternative can shift this paradigm.Bibliography1. Dieleman, Joseph L., et al. "Factors Associated With Increases in US Health Care Spending, 1996-2013." Jama 318.17 (2017): 1668-1678.2. Edward Tufte’s “Slopegraphs”3. Cooper, Zack, et al. The price ain’t right? Hospital prices and health spending on the privately insured. No. w21815. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2015. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/66059/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Centre_for_Economic_Performance_Discussion_papers_Discussion%20papers%20December%202015_dp1395.pdf4. The case of the $629 Band-Aid5. Brill, Steven. "What I learned from my $190,000 surgery." Time 185.1 (2015): 34-43. https://www.ccscenter.org/cechcr/Training%20Handouts/What%20I%20Learned%20From%20My%20$190,000%20Surgery.pdf6. After Surgery, Surprise $117,000 Medical Bill From Doctor He Didn’t Know7. Health Care’s Road to Ruin8. Patients’ Costs Skyrocket; Specialists’ Incomes Soar9. The Odd Math of Medical Tests: One Scan, Two Prices, Both High10. Colonoscopies Explain Why U.S. Leads the World in Health Expenditures11. The Growing Popularity of Having Surgery Overseas12. Beider, Perry, and Stuart A. Hagen. Limiting tort liability for medical malpractice. United States Congressional Budget Office, 2004. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/images/medical_liability/01-08-MedicalMalpractice.pdf13. Avraham, Ronen, Leemore S. Dafny, and Max M. Schanzenbach. "The impact of tort reform on employer-sponsored health insurance premiums." The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization 28.4 (2010): 657-686. http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/8_Dafny_Impact%20of%20Tort%20Reform_2012_93c817fc-8837-4430-bf73-e17d651f505e.pdf14. Mello, Michelle M., et al. "National costs of the medical liability system." Health affairs 29.9 (2010): 1569-1577. http://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2009.080715. Baicker, Katherine, Elliott S. Fisher, and Amitabh Chandra. "Malpractice liability costs and the practice of medicine in the Medicare program." Health Affairs 26.3 (2007): 841-852. http://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.26.3.84116. Thomas, J. William, Erika C. Ziller, and Deborah A. Thayer. "Low costs of defensive medicine, small savings from tort reform." Health Affairs 29.9 (2010): 1578-1584. http://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/pdf/10.1377/hlthaff.2010.014617. Carpenter, Daniel, and David A. Moss, eds. Preventing regulatory capture: special interest influence and how to limit it. Cambridge University Press, 2013.18. As Hospital Prices Soar, a Stitch Tops $50019. U.S. Gives Up Right to Control Drug Prices20. The Lobbyist Who Made You Pay More at the Drugstore – BillMoyers.com21. Shapiro, Sidney A. "The Complexity of Regulatory Capture: Diagnosis, Causality, and Remediation." Roger Williams UL Rev. 17 (2012): 221. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sidney_Shapiro/publication/228125860_The_Complexity_of_Regulatory_Capture_Diagnosis_Causality_and_Remediation/links/0046351ea3b87c9daa000000.pdf22. Caprio Jr, Gerard. "Regulatory capture: Why it occurs, how to minimize it." NC Banking Inst. 18 (2013): 39. http://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1354&context=ncbiThanks for the R2A, Paul Carter.

This time?Well, your bull run in 2017 was built entirely on a bunch of pretend USD. Which is great, but somewhere along the line, miners have to pay the bills.A lot of these miners started setting up in late 2017. It takes months to get these operations going, but as Everyone Knows, Bitcoin Always Goes Up, so hashing power increased awaiting the inevitable 30k. Or 40k. Doesn’t matter.Then it just kind of sat there at 6k, and miners started feeling a little awkward. They are not using an amount of electricity equivalent to roughly the entirety of Ireland to break even. They want to make sick cash.Craig Wright and Roger Ver start bitchslapping each other over their favored flavor of Unix—er, Bitcoin. Miners do some math and realize that while BTC’s flailing about like mad… Lemme just check the ol’ Coin Dance here a moment—here, you can too—Coin DanceAh, it’s currently 66% more profitable to mine for BCHSV than Bitcoin. Well, since you’re in Bitcoin mining to make money, that about covers it, then. Bitcoin gets liquidated to fund the BCH wars…But that’s just one part of our perfect storm.Bakkt is the precious holy saviour child of Bitcoin. Finally, the coin that will free us from governments and banks is going to be accessible via a government regulated financial institution, the thing Bitcoin has always needed.Yeah, we’re all lost too, but I guess when you bought in late in 2017, you’ll take whatever salvation you can get.Except—it delayed to January 24th. Remember how crypto regulation is still kinda problematic and sketchy? Yeah. This announcement was, I guarantee you, a front running spree beyond the limits of space and time. Anyone who knew that was coming either started selling, or started shorting.It’s easy to short when you have built a cultural cargo cult over the idea that ‘Bitcoin goes up in November and December because it just does.’Seriously, you’d think it was just like some mysterious moon tide, and that the price did not have any reflection of who was buying or selling it, the way these guys talk.So, Bakkt might happen in January. If they get regulatory approval. It’s like those ETFs, which—well, here’s the problem.The SEC likes two things when it comes to ETFs. Investor protection, and a reason to believe the price isn’t manipulated. Given that you can point to literal sections of Bitcoin’s hourly charts, observe when someone has placed a sizable short and sizable longs exist, and watch the price windshield wiper up just high enough to liquidate a bunch of shorts, drop again to liquidate longs, and rise back up to liquidate shorts like a windshield wiper…It’s roulette, except the house decides where the ball lands.So, the US department of justice is investigating Bitcoin manipulation. This is a problem, because a lot of the major whales who hold Bitcoin are, er, the criminals who were money laundering and selling drugs and child porn that gave you that one bull run leading up to Silk Road going down.The field is littered with countless reasons to bail on Bitcoin. No specific party this time, though.By the by, in case you’re wondering—no, this isn’t the end of the ride. Mt. Gox coins start releasing back to their original owners. They only get 10–20%, but that’s still 13–26k coins. Coins that they COULD have sold for 7k, but held out to get the original coins thinking Bitcoin’d be higher by now.Tell me, would you turn down 20x gains when you’d just missed out on 30x?

That’s a really good question, and one to which I’m not sure anyone really knows the answer right now. I think it is safe to say that the world’s two largest national economies are set to become even more powerful and influential in the greater sphere of global economics as a result of this crisis, but both also carry serious risks in their futures as well.One of the interesting aspects of this comparison is that the two nations show the relative strengths and weaknesses of economic models that are nearly diametrically opposed from a certain standpoint, and are likely to become even more divergent in the wake of this pandemic. And both models, despite their dissonance, have managed to outperform the predictions of their naysayers.At the end of the Cold War, there was a widely-held assumption amongst many Western political analysts that as the Chinese economy grew and its population became wealthier, we would see a natural shift away from its Communist model toward mirroring the economies of the Western powers. Not only did this prediction fail to come about, but if anything, the Chinese State has expanded its control over the national economy, and the rise of Xi Jinping—the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao[1][1][1][1] —makes it seem unlikely that this would change any time soon.[2][2][2][2][3][3][3][3][4][4][4][4]One of the effects of the Cold War was the proliferation of a narrative in the West which held that Communism and Socialism in all their forms were always guaranteed to fail and eventually bow out to the power of the free market, but it is evident that China has managed to use its economic system to its advantage. It’s model of State-Capitalism endows it with powers that are unique among the leading economies: most notably the power to focus on long-term investments in alignment with national interests. This approach has led to its immense infrastructure development, and their global development strategy—characterized by the Belt and Road Initiative—has helped China to weave its national economy into a broader array of international interests than is possible for its less-controlled competitors, and its investments have been paying off.[5][5][5][5]On the other side of the coin, you have the United States. As China sees its government take more and more control of its business, the US has its businesses taking more and more control of its government. The American economy is built on the biggest and most powerful private companies in the world, and its national approach to economics, especially under the Trump administration, has been to allow these driving companies to earn and grow without any inhibitions, and the efficacy of this approach is evident as well. If you consider the world’s most powerful business leaders, not all of them are American by birth (Elon Musk for example), but they all seem to make their way here in the end.I think it is reasonable to assume that in the aftermath of this pandemic, both nations will become even more entrenched in their separate models and the divide between their approaches will grow even wider. As has happened in the past, these differences will provide each nation with a different set of strengths and a different set of weaknesses, and I tend to favor analyzing such complex systems through the weighing of such assets and risks rather than an opinionated declaration of a winner and loser.Image credit [6][6][6][6]With that in mind, here is a very broad sketch of the strengths and risks offered by each model in the aftermath of the COVID Pandemic.ChinaStrengthsThe greatest benefit of China’s state-controlled economy is that it allows them to make long-term investments in support of its national interests. To use an imperfect metaphor, China is not the day-trader who buys whatever stock looks like it is going up, but rather the careful investor, who always buys low and focuses on stocks with the promise of eventual benefits. As the world economy is devastated by this pandemic, China is set to be able to buy low like never before, and acquire a wide new range of assets, both establishing an identity as “the hand the helps lift a broken world,” and leaving a huge swathe of the planet in its debt. Energy resources, mineral access, and farmland—all of which are key to Beijing’s investment strategy—are likely to see a glut of availability, and China’s careful state-investment plan has left it with the resources to capitalize.With fossil fuels in particular, we are witnessing price fluctuations that nobody had the power to see coming as rapidly and extensively as they have. Just back in January of this year, I predicted that the price of oil (on the WTI Crude Index) would likely stabilize around $70 in the wake of the escalation with Iran.[7] As I write this, the WTI Index is less than half of my prediction,[8] up from a low point of $11.57 on April 21.[9] This crash was partially created by the profit-driven American approach to investment, as many of the parties and investors who had bought oil before the pandemic had no interest in actually using the oil, but were merely looking to sell it for profit, which accelerated the drop as they tried to cut their losses and sold low. This is exactly the kind of situation in which the Chinese model works best, and Beijing is ready to play the long game and capitalize.Another effect of the pandemic has been a broader acceptance of a greater degree of state control over the activity of the populace at large, even among the most laissez-faire Western economies. Sure, there are protesters, but if you had told me even three months ago that I would see this kind of social and economic disruption in my own United States, I would have told you that such eventualities were impossible. Nonetheless, here we are, deserted in our own insular apartments with more than 1-in-10 of our citizens unemployed.[10] In short, there has never been a more fertile environment for the Chinese government to expand and consolidate its control.Furthermore, the vacuum of geopolitical leadership that came in the wake of the Trump Administration looks like it will continue to grow regardless of the results of the upcoming US presidential election. No matter who wins in November, it seems fairly certain that the American government will remain focused on domestic reconstruction. This unexpected overlap of American isolationism and global catastrophe, coupled with a timeframe shift in the recovery effort specific to China, which faced the virus before anyone else and is therefore ahead of its competitors in the recovery effort as well, has left a vacuum of global influence that hasn’t been seen since the World Wars, and China is almost perfectly situated to fill it, propelled by the momentum of its now-decades-long rise to global economic prominence.WeaknessesChina’s extensive portfolio of long-term investments is also incredibly risky in a global economy as unstable as the current one. Much of their international investment capital has been poured into the world’s poorest and riskiest economies, and if the international economic depression continues to spread and deepen then some of those investments may never see fruition. Chairman Xi’s 2017 address to the Chinese National Congress—which I recommend everyone take the time to read at some point as it is, in my view, the single most consequential political address since Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union—laid out China’s determination to lead the world into a new era of cooperation and growth throughout the international community, and made clear his determination to fill the void of leadership left in the wake of Trump’s election.[11] While this approach has been working well for them, the inevitable result is that the fate of the Chinese economy is now tied more than ever to that of the developing world, and a crisis like the COVID Pandemic puts those developing economies in which China has been investing riskier and more uncertain going forward.In particular, China has lent tens of billions of dollars to developing nations, swinging into play the role of creditor to the world.[12] As economies around the globe experience deepening depressions, it is certainly possible to see many foreign nations simultaneously defaulting on those loans, leaving Beijing overstretched for capital.Beijing has also loaned a great deal of capital to Chinese local governments over the past few years in order to spur the explosive growth of Chinese infrastructure. While this policy has generally been successful, many of those same local governments now face the need to pursue new infrastructure developments in response to the pandemic when Beijing is already stretched fairly thin, leading to some worries about the consequences of widespread simultaneous economic collapses.[13]In summary, China’s investment portfolio has become the riskiest of any leading world economy as we head into this crisis, and there are serious concerns about whether they will have the economic resilience to continue with their patient long-game approach through the coming months. On top of this, China has recently seen much of its domestic investors looking to get their money out of the country.[14] In that respect, the lockdown has been a boon of sorts, keeping capital from flowing out, but when restrictions are lifted, there is reasonable cause for concern as to whether the Chinese economy will be able to handle the shocks of a worse-case scenario with capital outflow and simultaneous investment failure.So that is China. Real strengths and real weaknesses. At this point, I don’t think anyone knows exactly what will happen, but it is possible to envision anything from a continuing trend of growth as its rivals recede and fall to the crumbling of what was until recently a pretty well-planned investment portfolio.And with that in mind, let’s turn our gaze to the world’s number-one economy, and China’s chief rival.The United StatesStrengthsWhile the USA may not have the same kind of state-control that China uses to guide its economic investments toward alignment with its national interests, it is also undeniable that American free-market capitalism has made it home to the most powerful businesses in the world. American businesses sit at the very forefront of innovation, and the American government has, for the past few decades, focused on helping those great businesses at the heart of its economy to partner with it in creating a fertile substrate for growth. With regard to the new tech challenges that preceded the pandemic (5g, for instance) and those that came in the wake of it (vaccines, contact tracing, etc.), the American government lacks both the means and the inclination to put itself in the vanguard. But it doesn’t have to, because American businesses will be more than happy to take up these challenges for themselves, and the competitive environment in which they have been nurtured ensures that they are ready to outperform and disrupt even the giant Chinese economic machine.Despite the current depression, America sits at the tail end of a full decade of economic growth that has thrown some momentum behind its advance. We have already seen the private sector take on public challenges, and the fact that these same corporations are the ones that are best-situated to benefit most from the vacuum-filling growth spree that will most likely follow in the wake of the pandemic, as the world struggle to get back up and running.The tech sector in particular, which has long seemed to hold the greatest promise of long-term sustainable growth in the age of automation, has actually benefitted from the pandemic, to an extent, as more and more of the world’s business has been forced to accept a technological medium as a natural aspect of its daily business.[15]By comparison to other free-market economic superpowers like the European Union, the United States has the advantage of having already gathered many of the most powerful business leaders into its own domestic environment. As the rest of the Western world tries to figure out how much of the dream of a globally-connected world to momentarily set aside, America’s consolidated domestic market makes the growth of its companies less problematic, and it doesn’t need to wait for the waters of the global trade environment to settle for it to keep moving forward.WeaknessesLike China, many of America’s weaknesses are merely another facet of its strengths. As the nation looks to its major corporations to light the way toward recovery, those same corporate powers will gain an even greater degree of power and control over the American economy. While this might help our numbers on a national level, that doesn’t mean that it will necessarily maintain the free and competitive environment that gave them birth. America’s philosophy of what I call “Darwinian Economics,” in which the strong powerful companies push their smaller competitors into extinction, will always trend toward monopolies, and the end of the Nineteenth Century saw the passage of extensive anti-trust legislation to keep matters from getting out of hand.[16] The advent of the Internet Age has made matters a bit more nebulous, and new companies like Google and Amazon have reached a point of being singularly beyond the power of competition. As a withered nation looks to its most powerful corporate leaders to light the path, we may see small businesses—often touted by politicians as the “backbone of the American economy”—phased out of our economic model to a steadily greater extent unless specific action is taken to help them. This trend may help America’s economy remain the most robust on Earth, but it will also lead to a large medium-to-long term unemployed workforce in a nation where all basic needs are generally addressed through employers.Building on the point above, America has the least effective social safety net of any leading economy, and with major corporate leaders displacing other industry faster than ever before (which seems likely to my eye), an unprecedented number of Americans are set to find themselves without the means to retrain for newer opportunities, and with insufficient support from the public sector to carry on with their lives as they knew them before. I believe that one of the most pivotal factors in the upcoming presidential election will be in determining whether America will be willing to adapt to these new challenges, or hold fast to its laissez-faire mythology as the “American Dream” that has long occupied the center of its national narrative becomes steadily more unfeasible to a greater portion of its populace than ever before.On top of this, this crisis hit at a point when faith in the legitimacy of the government is lower than it has ever been before. The idea that the very system of American government is “rigged” against the people has entered the narrative on both sides of the aisle, and tribalism has continued to rise throughout the Trump presidency. As more and more of the nation—on both sides of the aisle—becomes desperate and sees its government as a failure, it is difficult to see that government, depending as it does on the voice of the people for guidance, to get anything but worse. No matter who wins the 2020 election or the ones that come after it, unless Americans can let go of their dream of seeing the other half of the country lose, we seem destined for a decade of destructive derision, in which a government depended on by more of its citizens than ever before becomes less and less prepared to face the challenges that proliferate in the maelstrom of intransigent incompetence.ConclusionThere is little doubt in my mind that some readers will feel that I have overstated matters in some part of the analysis above, but I think it is extremely important that we honestly assess the extremities of the economic whirlwind ahead. I’m not pretending to know exactly what the world economy will look like three years, or even three months from now. Nobody does. I believe the best path forward will be found by understanding our strengths and how to maximize their benefit, and by seriously examining our weaknesses so as to guard against catastrophe.I am fairly certain that over the course of the coming years, both the United States and China will become even more prominent within the greater world economy than they were before. Some people might call that winning, I suppose, but even a hard-fought victory can feel like utter defeat if it comes at to great a cost, and we need to understand just what we are trying to win and stop caring about whether other people lose.It is my not-remotely-disguised view that the zero-sum model of global economics in which 21st century Americans seem to put so much weight is not merely flawed but downright fallacious, and that better results for either China or the USA will mean better results in the long run.If I may be allowed to give a few words of warning, even before the pandemic, the global economy was already in danger of bifurcating into a new Cold War divide between the United States and China at a moment in history when the implementation of new technologies like 5G could make such a chasm difficult to bridge in the future and force nations to pick a side. While there has been enough misconduct on both sides to make such a division seem justifiable, I am firmly of the view that continued engagement in such an economic conflict would leave everyone the poorer for it. As I have said so many times before, the goal of America’s approach to relations with China should not be us winning and them losing but instead the establishment of a fair and equitable trade relationship between the two powers.That is why I get really upset when I see my president insist on calling this the “China virus” or the “plague from China.” It’s not because I refute that China was indeed the nation in which the virus that causes COVID-19 was transferred from animals to humans, but because the argument over who to blame is entirely beside the point. If there has ever been a time for us all to start trying to cooperate better, that time is now upon us. It is my very sincere hope that the end of this year might see the election of a new administration that will focus less on explaining why nothing is their fault and focus more on finding solutions.The answer above doesn’t aim to say any of these extremes are definite, merely to examine the possibilities. China’s state-controlled economy makes it uniquely able to capitalize on international resources while the price of acquisition is low, but it also sports the riskiest portfolio of any leading economy. American business can be relied upon to rise to challenges, but the nation’s ability to maintain its population’s access to the benefits of global economic leadership through the trials ahead has never looked more dubious. Both sides face opportunity and peril, and the future of the world economy will pivot on our ability to capitalize and adapt.Thank you for reading. Together, we will overcome this. The casualties have already been far too high, and I hope that you will join with me in pursuing the healing and restoration of our world, both physically and diplomatically.Don’t give up hope, because a better world is just over the horizon, if only we can have the wisdom to work toward it together.Footnotes[1] Xi 'most powerful leader since Mao'[1] Xi 'most powerful leader since Mao'[1] Xi 'most powerful leader since Mao'[1] Xi 'most powerful leader since Mao'[2] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf[2] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf[2] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf[2] https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33534.pdf[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/11/27/china-authoritarian/[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/11/27/china-authoritarian/[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/11/27/china-authoritarian/[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2018/11/27/china-authoritarian/[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-approves-plan-to-abolish-presidential-term-limits-clearing-way-for-xi-to-stay-on/2018/03/11/973c7ab2-24f0-11e8-a589-763893265565_story.html?utm_term=.54c68494551a[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-approves-plan-to-abolish-presidential-term-limits-clearing-way-for-xi-to-stay-on/2018/03/11/973c7ab2-24f0-11e8-a589-763893265565_story.html?utm_term=.54c68494551a[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-approves-plan-to-abolish-presidential-term-limits-clearing-way-for-xi-to-stay-on/2018/03/11/973c7ab2-24f0-11e8-a589-763893265565_story.html?utm_term=.54c68494551a[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/china-approves-plan-to-abolish-presidential-term-limits-clearing-way-for-xi-to-stay-on/2018/03/11/973c7ab2-24f0-11e8-a589-763893265565_story.html?utm_term=.54c68494551a[5] Overview[5] Overview[5] Overview[5] Overview[6] Presidents Trump, Xi strike diplomatic tone during US-China trade talks[6] Presidents Trump, Xi strike diplomatic tone during US-China trade talks[6] Presidents Trump, Xi strike diplomatic tone during US-China trade talks[6] Presidents Trump, Xi strike diplomatic tone during US-China trade talks[7] Tom Robinson's answer to What are the strategic implications of Soleimani's assassination? What are the potential ramifications for the Middle East as a whole?[8] Crude Oil Prices Today | OilPrice.com[9] WTI Crude Oil Price Charts | Oilprice.com[10] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf[11] http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/download/Xi_Jinping's_report_at_19th_CPC_National_Congress.pdf[12] Debt-trap diplomacy - Wikipedia[13] China risks local government debt surge as it tries to spur economic growth[14] Money has been leaving China at a record rate. Beijing is battling to stem the tide[15] Big tech’s covid-19 opportunity[16] United States antitrust law - Wikipedia