Althouse: The bike mountains of China.

May 12, 2018

The bike mountains of China.

27 comments:

Rusty said...: The glories of central planning.
On the plus side?
Think of all the armaments that never got made.; 5/12/18, 5:37 PM
tcrosse said...: Many fish in China.; 5/12/18, 5:37 PM
Danno said...: A virtual cornucopia of bicycle parts!; 5/12/18, 5:42 PM
Caldwell P. Titcomb IV said...: The "authorities" confiscate them because they're left in the wrong place....why not sell them back, IOW, charge a fine?; 5/12/18, 5:53 PM
Achilles said...: Rusty said...
The glories of central planning.
On the plus side?
Think of all the armaments that never got made.

This is reason one why China will not take over the world.

The other is they are going to get old.

There will be different kinds of mountains in China soon.; 5/12/18, 5:58 PM
Bad Lieutenant said...: Isn't this odd? How can it pay to have a million bikes seized and thrown on junkpiles? Perhaps they could have motors and guidance and drove themselves away to someplace appropriate. Further, when you order, let the bike come to you.; 5/12/18, 7:06 PM
Rusty said...: Caldwell Titcomb IV said...
"The "authorities" confiscate them because they're left in the wrong place....why not sell them back, IOW, charge a fine?"

Hellooo! Socialism?; 5/12/18, 7:46 PM
Dr Weevil said...: "How can it pay to have a million bikes seized and thrown on junkpiles?" Maybe they got the idea from 'Cash for Clunkers'.; 5/12/18, 8:15 PM
Gahrie said...: Perfect example of unintended consequences and the tragedy of the commons.; 5/12/18, 8:37 PM
Gahrie said...: Call me when they have wasted as much money as Jerry Brown has on his slightly faster train to nowhere.; 5/12/18, 8:40 PM
n.n said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5/12/18, 8:59 PM
n.n said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5/12/18, 9:00 PM
n.n said...: Planned Economies are infamous as first-order forcings of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Market Misalignments (CAMM). This time, it's just bikes.; 5/12/18, 9:01 PM
bagoh20 said...: What about the huge carbon footprint and tons of other waste from building all those bikes which are now huge mountains of garbage to be disposed of probably in a very dirty way. Then these businesses pretend they are about the environment. They're green alright. Green is what they are all about.; 5/12/18, 10:23 PM
Darkisland said...: Blogger bagoh20 said...

What about the huge carbon footprint

What "carbon footprint"?

Do you mean carbon? Like diamonds, coal, graphite?

Or do you mean carbon dioxide (CO2) like you drink in your beer or diet coke?

Only one of these is emitted by burning fossil fuel.

From previous comments, I am sure you know the difference and perhaps I am being overly pedantic.

People going around talking abut "carbon" footprint when they mean CO2, drives me up a wall. Especially when they know, or should know, the difference.

It is sloppy speech and sloppy thinking. Or, perhaps, it is simply propaganda to fool the rubes. (Not accusing you of this, Bagoh)

You all know what I think of the global whatsit scam and especially blaming it on CO2 so I'll shut up now.

John Henry; 5/12/18, 10:39 PM
Darkisland said...: Blogger n.n said...

Catastrophic Anthropogenic Market Misalignments (CAMM).

Shouldn't that be Societal Catastrophic Anthropogenic Market Misalignments or SCAMM?

John Henry; 5/12/18, 10:41 PM
bagoh20 said...: The bike businesses are promoting themselves primarily as being good for the environment by reducing carbon emissions, but clearly they don't care about it except as a marketing tool. I don't care which side of the issue they are on, but pick one and run your business appropriately.; 5/12/18, 10:51 PM
mandrewa said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 5/12/18, 11:07 PM
mandrewa said...: This is not central planning, people. The name for this kind of problem is the tragedy of the commons.

The original example was the commons in an English village. This would be a pasture that nobody owned but was shared by the whole village. The frequent consequence would be that the commons would become severely degraded since people, or rather their livestock, would overgraze the land.

Normally people don't overgraze land that they own because they can see what's happening, and unless they are desperately poor they will cut back whatever animals they have that are eliminating the vegetation.

My first experience of the tragedy of the commons was looking at Landsat photographs of Mexico. Much of it was dull brown or tan but there was this huge big green square I found myself looking at. I wondered about it and it turned out this large area had been owned by a prominent supporter of the Mexican Revolution, and thus had been continuously privately owned.

The land all around it had been green a hundred years ago, but during and after the Mexican Revolution it had been seriously degraded as a consequence of communal ownership. Once the original plant cover had been stripped off, it couldn't recover. Or at least hadn't so far.

Anyway the companies renting these bikes in China are private enterprises and are doing this with the goal of making money. It's their idea and the government had nothing to do it. It's in part a tragedy of the commons problem, because the companies doing this could not afford to do it if they had to own the space these bikes are occupying. They are to some degree taking from the shared public space.

China has a communist government but a huge portion of its economy is capitalist. One could for that reason argue that China is not really communist. Instead it has an authoritarian government, controlled by a small section of the population, that controls large parts of the economy but certainly not all of it, while tightly controlling the media and severely limiting what ideas people are exposed to and are allowed to express.; 5/12/18, 11:10 PM
mandrewa said...: Serpentza:

When something starts to make money in China, all of a sudden things go into OVERDRIVE! and everyone jumps onto the bandwagon! Nothing can demonstrate this China phenomenon more than the shared bike market that's exploded recently.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IYu4wzy9Lw&t=503s

Technically, almost everything is illegal in China, but currently, except for severe restrictions on political opinion, most laws are not being enforced. And this has been going on for decades. As a consequence, in reality, China is one of most capitalist countries in the world.

serpentza: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0RXyzBmsvc; 5/12/18, 11:24 PM
Yancey Ward said...: "Isn't this odd? How can it pay to have a million bikes seized and thrown on junkpiles?"

It isn't profitable on an accounting basis. That the bikes are being scrapped soon after they are put into service is telling me that there is a deep Ponzi quality to this business that will, at some point, end when the investors stop eating the losses.; 5/12/18, 11:55 PM
Humperdink said...: "Technically, almost everything is illegal in China, but currently, except for severe restrictions on political opinion, most laws are not being enforced. And this has been going on for decades. As a consequence, in reality, China is one of most capitalist countries in the world."

The term for this used to be the "blackmarket".; 5/13/18, 6:44 AM
Humperdink said...: Ever wonder what happens when you take you car to the junk yard to be crushed? Voila, a shiny new bike manufactured and discarded in China. Which later becomes a coat hanger imported into America. And much later, to the landfill. Ah, the circle of life for scrap.; 5/13/18, 6:48 AM
mandrewa said...: Since I put a link to Serpentza, I should point out what is wrong with what he is saying. Like most people he doesn't understand economics, and doesn't fully understand what he is seeing.

The reason most food in China is amazingly cheap is not that some of it is unsafe. The reason it is so amazingly inexpensive is that food production along with most other economic activities in China is completely unregulated. That means you have hundreds of millions of primary producers competing with each other. That is what pushes prices down to what seem like impossibly low levels.

We used to have the same situation in the United States. For example when my father was a child one of his chores was to milk the family cow. They would consume some of it, but most of it would be put in a jug that would be bought by a company that went around to every household in the community that was selling milk. This would then be sold at stores in a nearby town.

This only works if you can trust everyone to be careful about the milk they produce as the consequences of contaminated milk for the community can be pretty serious. But this was the way milk was produced in America for a long time, and America was once such a high-trust, high-competence society that this arrangement routinely worked. In contrast today's milk supply is highly regulated. A new milk producer will have to spend many millions of dollars to even reach the point where they can legally sell milk.

As a consequence new entrants in the milk production market are going to be rare, and milk costs much more than it would otherwise cost. But even so the number of competing milk producers is still high, and the cost of milk is thus acceptably low.

Getting back to China, the China of today is almost completely unregulated and that means that food, along with all sorts of things, like bottom-tier apartment rentals, is amazingly cheap. It also means that some huge percentage of food producers are reliable, because unlike what Serpentza thinks, it simply wouldn't work unless considerably more than 99% of food producers weren't producing safe food in context.

Now on paper China is extremely regulated, and in fact most acts by individuals are illegal, because up until 1982 or so China was essentially communist. The capitalist transition was accomplished in part by the government making the decision to not enforce most laws. But as serpentza points out, the structural framework to go back to communism is all still in place.; 5/13/18, 9:08 AM
Rusty said...: It's still communist.; 5/13/18, 9:28 AM
Robert Cook said...: "The glories of central planning.
"On the plus side?
"Think of all the armaments that never got made."

We should take a lesson from it...then create inducements to get more people biking and fewer people driving.; 5/13/18, 10:44 AM
Rusty said...: "We should take a lesson from it...then create inducements to get more people biking and fewer people driving."

By inducements you mean taxpyer money? Lets let the market decide instaed. Much more efficient and it doesn't cost you anything. Unless Elon Musk does it.; 5/13/18, 3:33 PM