> I simply brought up China's remarkable economic success, and you responded with a laundry list of "China Bad!" that mostly had nothing to do with economics.

You're right that I insufficiently explained what I meant with the links. I'll break down how I felt the list had economic relevance:

[0][1] ~55mm people died or were killed during the Great Leap Forward and the Chinese famine likely stemmed from it as well. Looking at a series of historical Chinese GDP data, you can see that these policies caused economic contraction of -26.6% at their peak. If evaluating the merits of economic systems, this is a clear failure.

[2] China uses its human rights abuses to further its economy. Consider the harvest and sale of human organs [`]. That's clearly economic activity. It's also mortifying. Ultimately though, I'd say it's relevant to the discussion.

[3] Industrial espionage has everything to do with economics. There's no doubt that China is the largest perpetrator of industrial espionage in the world. If you want to demonstrate that Western values aren't necessary to develop prosperity, it doesn't help to steal so much IP from the West.

[4] Chinese consumers do not trust many consumable Chinese goods. That's certainly related to economics. In fact, it indicates weakness in the Chinese regulatory regime. I'm not informed enough to posit why this is, but my understanding is that foreign consumable goods command a premium because of it.

[5] Science and technology are major drivers of economic growth. Fraudulent research undermines trust in the published body of research, making it more difficult to perform science in the future.

Hopefully you can see the economic relevance now. I'm happy to make lists of problems with Western economies, of which there are many, but I won't pretend China is a paragon of economic development.

> Sauce for the goose. Rather than the abstract theoretical exercise you presented, you should offer a measurable scale, so we can compare China to western nations. Otherwise, it's meaningless. Otherwise, I'll see your human costs and raise you a slavery.

The exercise was simply to demonstrate that an economy is more than just GDP. As for hard numbers, consider the 55mm killed in the Great Leap Forward. Although I had already mentioned slavery as an atrocity perpetrated by the US, I'll provide numbers. In 1860 there were 3.9mm slaves in the United States. Approximately 12.5mm slaves landed in the US during the slave trade [^]. Since we live in the present and not history, let me provide some current statistics. 1mm - 3mm people are currently in concentration camps in Xinjiang [!]. 70mm Falun Gong practitioners are prohibited from their beliefs [~].

Your argument still engages in whataboutism. In July you tweeted [#]:

> Whataboutism is a lazy and uninteresting argument. It’s what you use when you don’t like someone’s point, but don’t have a solid argument against it. If you’re using “But what about...?” as the basis of a rebuttal, check and make sure you’re not just being dumb.

And you are attempting to put words in my mouth here:

> If you'd stop thinking about why China is more evil than the west

I never stated that I believe China to be evil or western countries to be good. In fact, I consider China's economic development to be a phenomenal advancement for human welfare. However, that is not what's being discussed. We are considering whether China's prosperity could have occurred without the existence of Western values.

> A bad social structure eventually falls away and is replaced by a better one, and over the course of a couple of generations, the nation accelerates radically.

Ideally this is what happens. Economic growth models (like Solow) indicate that this is an expected outcome over time. However, there are no guarantees. Structural phenomena impact this quite a bit. Countries with better infrastructure, physical, legal, and otherwise, should enjoy higher rates of growth. Yet many developing countries have less developed infrastructure. This serves as an impediment to such economic convergence.

> seems to happen to nations regardless of their history, language, culture, government

This is obviously not true. Corruption appears to harm economic growth (most strongly in the medium term) [<]. Argentina, had the largest economy in the world in 1895. Poor decisions on the part of the government caused a century of economic turmoil. My understanding that corruption is simultaneously a government and a cultural phenomenon, so you can see that history, culture, and government can have measurable impacts on economic growth.

[`] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

[^] https://www.theroot.com/slavery-by-the-numbers-1790874492

[!] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps

[~] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong

[#] https://twitter.com/davestagner/status/1021810579890159616

[<] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1331677X.2016.11...

[>] https://panampost.com/marcelo-duclos/2018/04/14/in-1895-arge...