The Calcification Consensus: Why Everyone Discussing China’s Future Is Lying About the Odds

The polite version of China’s economic debate goes like this: optimists emphasize institutional capacity and monetary sovereignty; pessimists emphasize real constraints and debt; reasonable people occupy the middle ground and wait for more data. This framing is not wrong so much as it is cowardly—a description of positions that serves everyone’s professional interests and nobody’s analytical ones. The evidence, read without career anxiety, points somewhere more specific: China is not approaching a cyclical correction or a dramatic collapse. It is approaching calcification—a condition the historical record knows well and that the comfortable center of the China debate has conspired, for intelligible reasons, to avoid naming. I. What the Evidence Actually Requires You to Believe Start with the numbers no serious analyst disputes. China’s total factor productivity growth fell from roughly 2.8 percent annually before 2008 to approximately 0.7 percent in the decade that followed, per World…