Interestingly, an almost identical proverb exists in Polish ("him" is replaced with "swine" canonically, but it's often replaced by a person's name). It's used to suggest that someone is either too dumb or too self-assured to accept criticism. Is the intended meaning similar in Greek?
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
> In western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution.
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].
It's not even a person, it's a system. There's a million people behind you who will take your job if you don't grind, and that goes for your boss as well.
I wonder what happens to China when this factor disappears. China workforce peaked in 2016, and city workforce will peak in the next few years. With the economy still growing, acute labor shortage is less than 10 years away.
Definitely a concept that should be diffused and discussed in France, especially in preparation of next elections for which anti-capitalist sentiment is quite high.
This came up a lot recently in regards to competition in the solar and EV spaces.
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
>When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible.
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
The next sentence is "On a personal level, neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing."
Overworked Chinese workers have been making western consumers better off for more than two decades now. Chinese domestic consumption is very low even among developing countries, negligible compared to its gigantic export.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
I'm not saying workers aren't necessarily overworked etc. I'm just saying that's not what this word and concept is about. This concept is about capital owners.
It would hardly have become a popular slang term on the Chinese internet if it were only about the worries of a small minority of capital owners. Any kind of excessive competition dynamics may be described as neijuan. I would like to give you some social media usage examples, but Weibo is censoring the #内卷# hashtag. In any case, the Wikipedia article has examples involving students competing in exams and graduates competing on the job market, among others.
Like other comments on OP have pointed out, the term at this point is vague and used for various reasons.
But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.
Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.
No, sociologists use the term involution to describe Asian rice farmers. These farmers poured an increasing amount of labor into their tiny patches of land to extract the last bit of productivity, yet despite their hard work, they remained poor.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
The 996 working culture in this page is actually *996.ICU*. "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). [1]
Take a step further, do you want to overwork to death if you have other choices? One of the reasons behind 277k stars in 996.icu repo is that 996 working culture spreads so broad in China. With the downturn of China economy and the selective execution of Chinese labor law, in recent years, 996 becomes even harsher to labor force in China because there are more than overwork now, e.g. low salary and low human rights. When you say 'make the average consumer better off', you conveniently ignore the tears, sweets, and blood behind the facade of neijuan.
> Goldenweiser uses Māori decorative art as an example. The development of art was done within the framework of already existing patterns. The final pieces were elaborate and complicated in appearance but fundamentally the same as existing art.
Is there a way to only apply this to corporate profits but not the labor market? A world where production and labor demand is constantly growing but returns stay flat would be a great one.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 48.7 ms ] threadBut if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.
It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.
The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici...
There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that literature.
> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:
I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".
But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.
It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".
内 "inside", 卷 "roll".
[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verschlimmbesserung
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.
Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
The 996 working culture in this page is actually *996.ICU*. "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). [1]
Take a step further, do you want to overwork to death if you have other choices? One of the reasons behind 277k stars in 996.icu repo is that 996 working culture spreads so broad in China. With the downturn of China economy and the selective execution of Chinese labor law, in recent years, 996 becomes even harsher to labor force in China because there are more than overwork now, e.g. low salary and low human rights. When you say 'make the average consumer better off', you conveniently ignore the tears, sweets, and blood behind the facade of neijuan.
[1] https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU
Jeez, what an asshole.