Here's Why China Is Beating the Pants Off The US, by Mike Whitney - The Unz Review

 There are many reasons why China is doing better in this regard that the United States (Special interests, corruption etc), but certainly incentives play a significant role. In the US, millionaires can become billionaires overnight without contributing anything of value to society. It’s just a matter of how adept they are at trading paper assets on Wall Street. In America, the market system is so degraded that companies are allowed to buy back hundreds of billions of dollars of their own stock in order to push share prices higher allowing them to skim hefty profits off the shuffling of paper. These stock buyback transactions are entirely legal even though the capital is deployed in a way that fails to boost productivity, R&D, worker training, innovation or anything else. It is simply a way to fiddle the system in order to enrich professional speculators. In the US, wealth is generated through financial engineering not through productivity, efficiency or innovation. As we said earlier, the incentives are all wrong......

...If the western-style system actually deployed capital to productive outlets of investment, then one would NOT expect the country with the largest and most liquid markets in the world to also have rising poverty, a shrinking middle class, surging homelessness, falling standards of living, and some of the most dilapidated, out-of-date infrastructure in the developed world. But in the US, capital is not deployed to productive outlets of investment, it is recycled into a financial system that functions as a wealth-generation mechanism for voracious billionaires who use their money to buy yachts, luxury mansions and glitzy baubles at Tiffaney’s. Take a look:

Full text: https://www.unz.com/mwhitney/heres-why-china-is-beating-the-pants-off-the-us/#comment-7140070 

....This isn’t a matter of capitalism vs Communism. It’s a matter of good government vs lousy government. Virtually all the profits extracted from our “free market” system go into the pockets of the people who need the money the least and who fail to contribute anything of value to the ‘greater good’. In contrast, the Chinese government is pumping nearly every penny into improvements that benefit everyone and that have transformed the country into a shining example of 21st Century modernity.

Shockingly, our leaders in Washington still think the United States can “out compete” and even surpass China if we just put our minds to it and make it a national priority. But anyone who can ‘do the math’ can see that’s not going to happen. It’s simply a matter of which country has the superior development model, and, in that regard, China has us beat hands-down.