The Wall Street comments are a bit vague/nebulous, but the amount we've spent on unnecessary war-mongering even after Vietnam is a relatively obvious problem that apparently is no longer obvious, now that we lost our "anti-war" party (the formerly anti-war Democrats).

Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the US), we are truly buried financially.

He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.

He forgot celebrity worshipfulness and the consumer culture.

The machine that produces celebrity/consumerism today is a hyper efficient over optimized machine.

He is basically saying people didn't get what they need.

And that's because the celeb/consumerism machine's only job is to keep giving people what they want.

What they need has nothing to do with it. Whether its Obama or Trump, Zuckerberg or Musk, subprime mortgages or iphones it's all about what people want and not need.

This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0. People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix it.

This "brutal theory" is the banal obvious stuff you can find on Twitter for free in 5 minutes.

Jack Ma is very protective like China, if Americans / rest of the world was like that, chances were unlikely that China could grew so much.

Also, by any measures, China is cheating right now and trying to minimize the capital bubble risk created by the government ( loans that are not payed back with worthless warranties eg. Failed buildings, subsidized shipping, manipulated / protected stocks,... ). Let's see what the future brings.

PS. If downvoted, please explain why and if you have ever travelled to China :)

It's always about the choice between short-term vs long-term benefits, or between us and them, or rich and poor. When people don't act as if other people (or even themselves, in the future) are connected to them, they make bad choices in the long term. On personal terms it's a battle between temptation and moral action.

It's basically a problem of strategy in games (here, the game being well-being). There are two main strategies: optimize for low level features (immediate benefit) or high-level features (what you should do in order to succeed). Companies battle the same choices, often very rich and successful ones optimizing for short term instead of long term, as if they expect to close shop in a few years.

The main purpose of politics should be to balance the focus between short and long term strategies, but short term relies on corruption and long term on consciousness, so it's an uphill battle. It's also called principle of "delayed gratification" - few can handle the rigors of it.

With the new Trump administration we should prepare for a lot of short-term based choices that ignore the long-term consequences.

Jack Ma: a guy whose success can only be attributed to the existence of China's Internet firewall. I try to avoid reading about his "insights".

The idea that the US's economic problems are due to war expenditures is just plain silly.

The economic golden age for the US was during the cold war, when the country spent 6-10% of its gdp on the military. Then the cold war ended, and military expenditures have been below 4% most of the time, but the US economy has done worse. Oh, and China has boomed at the same time it has been engaging in a huge, expensive military modernization program.

I am not saying high military expenditures produce economic prosperity, just that they don't prevent it (unless they are much higher, as the Soviet Union's were).

So... hindsight is 50/50. Anyone can look back and say what someone shouldnt have done and be "correct" but other action would have resulted in a different unknown outcome.

It is cool that theres a dialogue about this at such a forum and spearheaded by a respected individual, but its nowhere near new information. Without an alternative its also just non-constructive criticism.

Ma makes a good point, but he's implicitly saying the China's authoritarian regime wouldn't have lost the money as "free" market actors did in the US.

Sure, fine, but most Chinese would trade that money for American political freedoms and economic opportunities in a heartbeat.

I think it might be much more than $2 trillion the US spent on wars. Remember Sept 10th 2001? Donald Rumsfeld said on this day, they can't find out how they spent $2.3 trillion.

What rubbish!

This is the thinking of someone that lives in a country with a philosophy that puts country before individuals.

By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no doubt.

But even for those people, what is the economic value of the wonders of the modern, internet and mobile phone age? When for the cost of an internet connection, people have access to millions of free flash games? Is that a better life than 1970s Harlem? I'm not sure either way, but it is a lot closer run thing that life is worse for the "losers" of globalization than people realize, and that is the comparison for the small minority that have missed out in the modern world, not the mean or median experience.

The only way people are worse off is if they compare the best of 1960s living - e.g. have only the husband work, own a 4 bedroom house in the burbs, make a decent salary without a degree - and ignore the things missing that are present in the modern lifestyle. Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer, never got to use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980.

If that sounds like a life people prefer - a big house, no lifestyle, no electronics, basic cable if lucky and only white people food - then I reckon most people could live like that even today if they so chose. But man, that isn't a life I'd be happy with. Not even slightly.

If that is "losing" - better lifestyle, better food, better (and cheaper) entertainment and slightly smaller living conditions and more people working, man, "winning" would have been insanely good.