A fairly bold claim and of course not one that Tesla itself is actually making. But one that can be divined from Tesla’s activities. That China is actually the most free market economy on the planet at present. This being one of the reasons for its growth and the speed of it:
Something we’ve noted more than once before – China is probably the most free market economy in the world at present.
Clearly, this is using free market in a fairly specialist sense – a communist shading into merely authoritarian government isn’t usually thought of as that. However, it is true, in the sense that is being used. People, organisations, are able to start new economic activity there faster than they are anywhere else. Take the example of Tesla.
Their China factory went from empty field to pumping out cars in a year. Compare this to Germany:
The German process started in November, thus has 8 months left to match the Chinese experience. And one third of the time into the process they’ve not cleared the land, not cleared the courts and not cleared the planning process.
Something which rather neatly explains the different speeds of growth. Economic growth is, obviously enough, the outcome of doing new things or old things in new ways. The speed of economic growth is determined by how fast you can do new things, old things in new ways. We in the already rich countries place significant barriers in the way of people doing those new things. Therefore our economic growth is slower than it could be, slower than it might be in other places.
If you want to have more economic growth, faster economic growth, then you need to be putting rather less effort into stopping people creating that economic growth.