China’s growth problem
The western media has always been keen to print bad news about China but the Guardian article Millions caught in China’s downturn (4 September) overdoes it a bit. I hardly see China’s chief statistician reporting in public that growth is lower than President Xi Jinping pretends. However, data on imports, which is generated abroad, is a good indication of the situation, and this recent data suggests that China’s economy, while still growing faster than all western countries, is not growing as well as expected. However, this is neither an “incoming economic storm” nor an indication that “things could crack or break relatively easily”; it should not come as a surprise either.
Up until now China’s spectacular growth has been based on exports, a rather simple but effective strategy. However, the world market is nearly saturated and China’s improved standard of living has reduced its competitiveness. So the government is now trying to generate growth through increased domestic consumption. Such a shift in policy required a change in production and cannot be done without disruptions; reduced growth is likely for a while.
Moreover, such a strategy is more complex than export promotion and will required at least two major policy changes. The first is a better redistribution of income so that poorer people, especially in rural areas, will have more cash to increase their purchase. The second consists of encouraging Chinese to spend more rather than save.
No one knows yet how this change will turn out. But, instead of speculative criticism, one could simply hope for the Chinese and for the world that this shift in economic policy will succeed.
François P Jeanjean
Ottawa, Canada
Populations and prosperity
How sad to see the front page of the Guardian Weekly (28 August) assert the dangerous view that birthrate fall is a threat to economic prosperity. What matters is not economic “prosperity” but economic sustainability. Economic sustainability is incompatible with overpopulation. “Growth” always has its limits, and climate change seems likely to restrict those limits even further in the near future. Inequalities of wealth and power, “prosperity” by a different name, are also threats to economic sustainability.
Let us continue to encourage population decline wherever we can find it, until the day when the supply of sustainable food, water and energy is sufficient to meet the lower world population that is so likely to be imposed by natural means if we continue in our pursuit of “prosperity”.
Barney Gilmore
Kaslo, British Columbia, Canada
• A wise man has said there are only two kinds of people who believe that the growth of anything can continue for ever on a finite planet: idiots and economists. It was presumably one of the latter who wrote the subheading Birthrate fall is a threat to economic prosperity. Even if gross domestic product (GDP) is accepted as a measure of wellbeing (a dubious proposition), the relevant number is GDP per capita. It doesn’t matter if GDP shrinks as long as population does too.
The only people for whom GDP growth is a must are those irresponsible politicians who run up huge deficits assuming that the debts can be repaid out of next year’s larger GDP.
Graham Andrews
Spokane, Washington, US
• Shh! Just don’t mention the invasions, the bombings, the bogus wars for freedom and democracy. Just distract us with tittle-tattle about people traffickers, economic migrants and how to process the refugees appearing for no particular reason (Migrants turn to Balkan trails, 4 September).
Propaganda is easily done by both commission and omission. The “war crimes” words should never be spoken. Pull a heavy curtain across the obliteration of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other “worthless” places. Just good, innocent shoot-’em-up, eh? Unintended consequences, collateral damage, friendly fire and plausible deniability ... that’s the way to do it! Never prosecute the war criminals; instead give them honours and lots of money. Thus the police, judiciary and mass media become complicit in the crimes, taking the rest of us with them.
What use is a newspaper if it doesn’t analyse the actions of the elite, call out their hypocrisy, defend the voiceless and fearlessly state the cause and effect of history?
Sam Nejad
Geraldton, Western Australia
Reflections on software of life
I was interested to read Paul Davies’s piece on the “software of life” (4 September). However, when I had finished, I realised that the article had never really referred to software at all. There was mention of feedback loops, logic circuits etc, but these are all electronic hardware. Even DNA is better described as a “blueprint” than a “digital code”.
I went back to the sources and read Paul Nurse’s letter to the journal Nature, which is quoted in Paul Davies’s piece. This is clearly couched in the language of electronic hardware, specifically logic circuits.
The program advocated by Nurse is to use this language to describe how biological processes work and interact. The best analogy from computer science field for Nurse’s vision is system specification, not software itself.
It is true that Gregory Chatin, the founder of modern information theory, has likened DNA to a “program”. But his analogy is at a higher conceptual level: genetic DNA guides biological processes to achieve the development of an organism just as a software program guides a computer to perform its computation.
This does not imply that computer-specific information concepts are relevant to biology.
Geoffrey Watson
Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
Hospital danger at weekends
It may be true that “thousands of patients die every year after being admitted to hospital at the weekend, partly because too few senior doctors are on duty and back up services are not available” (11 September). But just how big a part do these two factors play in patient outcomes? What other countervailing factors might be at work?
One possibility could be that a significant proportion of patients admitted during the week are non-critically ill people, scheduled by their doctors to undertake planned hospital treatment in good time. On the other hand, those presenting for treatment at weekends might overwhelmingly be emergency admissions of people who are critically ill. If that were the case, any quantitative research results attributing cause would seem very shaky indeed. Can the researchers assure us that their results are not?
Lawrie Bradly
Surrey Hills, Victoria, Australia
Briefly
• Amid the anguish about the destruction of Palmyra and other ancient sites by Islamic State (4 September), I have not seen any acknowledgement of the sites’ economic importance. In times of peace, they attract tourists and are therefore a vital part of the local economy. Their destruction demonstrates Isis’s contempt not only for Syria’s non-Islamic heritage, but also for its people’s future prosperity. It is like burning crops, except that crops can at least be planted again next year.
Martin Platt
Berlin, Germany
• Your article on American gun violence (4 September) uses the word “executed” to refer to the deaths of the two young journalists killed by their disgruntled former colleague. Not so. Execution is the act of a government that practises capital punishment. I encourage you to speak of such deaths as murders, which is what they are.
Donald Grayston
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• I read Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker’s suggestion that a wall be built on the US/Canada border. I fully endorse Walker’s initiative, and hope the wall, when built, will be bulletproof.
Colin Royle
Outremont, Quebec, Canada
• Thank you, Polly Toynbee, for your inspired piece of lèse-majesté (11 September). By the way, is that still a capital crime in the UK, or is it now simply punished by forced extradition to Australia, which will almost certainly be the last bastion of royalty, once what is left of the UK comes to its senses?
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
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