"We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." - that actually sounds more enjoyable than the "cancel culture" style of debate
But would they actually not be punished, or would it be more like the Hundred Flowers campaign, or Google asking employees to make suggestions about improving diversity?
Keep in mind Chinese civil society has weak collective memory due to the censorship of history. They definitely used it as a weapon in the past but my impression is that they haven't recently and people just don't know that happened under Mao.
My wife's uncle spent 20 years in prison, for being a sucker in the Hundred Flowers campaign, and he only died within the past couple years. I'm not sure how much their censorship accomplishes, when there's still living examples.
The difference being, of course, that your opinion doesn't ultimately matter in China. The policy makers will take your input and then decide what they want to do. They can, and do, go against public opinion.
Ditto to that- I think the actual function of these sorts of events is as a kind of pressure-release valve on public opinion. People get to say that the Party is doing a good or bad job, and then the Party can say "we've listened, and we are going to do this", and people feel like they've contributed. A cynical part of me thinks that the "feeling like you've contributed" part is actually more important than any solid democratic norms.
In terms of pressure-release valves, I think "feeling like you've contributed" and "feeling like you were heard" are the same thing but can backfire if not designed right.
I work in HR, and it's a known thing that engagement surveys that just ask people what they want are bad and disengaging, because when the company inevitably doesn't do what people said they wanted, they feel like they've been ignored. Instead you're supposed ask more indirect questions in order to identify exactly what their pain points are. Then the company has an actual issue they can address and can explain why they decided on whatever approach they ended up with. Employees still might not get what they want in the end, but the hope is because they feel like the company made an effort to care about their problems, they've been disarmed.
Same dynamic in US politics on the metro level with the open periods for comment on special initiatives or proposed legislation... I recall a CityLab story some time back about Detroit residents refusing free trees because nobody asked them if they wanted trees and to them it was just the city continuing a long tradition of being heavy handed with the community.
The cynical part of me thinks that the "feeling like you've contributed" is the most important part of actual Democracies. Almost all of the politicians that actually get elected are the same bureaucratic elites making corrupt deals with each other that arise in actual oligarchies, but the people feel like they contributed and can place all of their hatred for the government on only one half of it. As a result, the people are more content and more willing to try for change within the system rather than violently revolting against it.
This is... good? Also reminds me on how (exact numbers made up) Congress has a 20% approval rate but congressmen have 80% reelection rate. Public opinion somehow seems useless in US as well.
The "Congress has 20% approval rate" thing is an agglomeration of multiple representatives, most of whom you cannot legally vote for
The disconnect actually proves democracy works, kind of. Any congressmen I don't vote for is a control group, since the only difference is whether I personally can vote for them. Indeed, I like my rep, as do most Americans, more than the control group (the average of all represenatives, i.e. Congress itself).
I think low approval for Congress has less to do with the average of all reps and more to do with the fact that Congress as an institution mostly can't pass meaningful legislation due to the combination of high polarization and how easy it is to kill or mangle legislation in our system.
You might admire your guy for being uncompromising and relentless in blocking and fighting the other side and never acting as a moderate, but those moderates are usually the grease that gets things done.
Though this isn't a call for moderation. I say all this while recognizing that I very much want my guy to never support the other side. I'd much rather the Federal Government be crippled and paralyzed than potentially used as a tool to crush me. But I think most voters don't make this bargain explicitly, it's just the product of their choices.
Stephen Kotkin makes the interesting point that competing parties always weaken communist party control. If you allow any liberalization, in other words, the diversity undermines the ideology of remaking individuals according to a communal idea; whereas diversity strengthens the ideology of individual difference. In that regard, the ideal communist leader embodies the ideal communal type - hence, Xi Jinping does not appear to western eyes as someone striving to make an individual footprint on the sands of time.
Regarding the Scalia point about the Bill of Rights, I think what sets the US apart is having it alongside really strong norms about the rule of law. Autocrat constitutions (Gaddaffi’s is a great example) tend to be straight up lies, but other rule of law countries rarely have anything remotely as strong as the US. Europe’s answer to the first amendment, Article 10, is a good example:
“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
If you’re wondering about all the stuff it’s illegal to say, it’s normally caught under “necessary in a democratic society” if it’s racism/sexism/criticism of religions (but occasionally prevention of disorder or public safety - this is more so for homophobia). Crazy libel laws come under protecting the reputation of others, and protection of morals is left for obscenity and what’s left of blasphemy laws. In practice, you have freedom of speech unless there’s a sufficient elite consensus for both judges AND politicians not to want you to say something.
Most countries’ bill of rights equivalents look a lot like this (albeit this is a particularly funny example of paragraph 2 looking like the small print).
The broader cultural point is bang on about the separation of powers and “checks and balances” though - the UK had none of this until 2005, and still barely has it, but in practice is basically the US.
As motteposting says, the few exceptions are what matters.
This is one such exception:
A woman in Austria was sentenced to a fine of €480, or 60 days in prison, because during a seminar she reportedly said:" A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?” The case eventually ended up in the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) who upheld the decision.
On Dec. 11, 2009, Catholic clerics in Vienna sued the cartoonist Manfred Deix for two drawings on the website NEWS.at which depict God and the EU prohibition against crucifixes in schools, respectively.
And, bordering on the absurd:
On Dec. 11, 2010, 63-year-old Helmut G. was convicted for offending his Muslim neighbor by yodeling while lawn mowing. The neighbor claimed Helmet was trying to mock and imitate the Muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer.
So... stating facts about about long since dead historical figures is forbidden when those figures also happen to be the founders of a religion? Does this apply to all religions, or only to major ones? Or even only to Islam? What if the historical figure didn't found a religion, but a country or a city, are you allowed to freely speak about him then?
The justification given by the court is utter bullshit:
> "The domestic courts made a distinction between child marriages and paedophilia. In their opinion, by accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, the applicant had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, the applicant had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty."
Any man today that has sex with a nine year old girl would be widely labeled a "pedophile", and it wouldn't make one iota of a difference whether he stayed married to her until after her puberty.
You shouldn't be fined for insulting Mohamed, that's very bad that she faced legal penalties. If you agree, and are willing to argue the point on its own merits, then there's no need to quote things out of context to make it seem like Europeans are getting fined for insulting pedophiles. The "pedophilia vs child marriage" distinction is pretty wild, lead with that next time instead of the misleading version
I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching, it's really not something I want to search for - but one of the exceptions is obscenity, and I found this report from 2008:
"But a debate that's been largely abstract for years has recently changed as the U.S. Department of Justice successfully prosecuted two Web site operators for obscenity. Last Friday, Paul F. Little -- also known as Max Hardcore -- was sentenced to 46 months in prison, as well as fined $7,500 for distributing adult videos online and through the mail."
And it looks like even discussing or joking about harming the president may be a risk.
Arrests for this seem to be pretty common. E.g.:
"Columbus Man Pleads Guilty To Tweeting Threats Against President Of The United States"
I think the question would be: are these examples of things that were prosecuted in the U.S. but would not be in Europe? If not, it doesn't matter to the larger point regarding relative freedom.
I used an excel spreadsheet with some manual typing, so E&OE.
So the USA has a personal freedom index of 9.09 (max 10, higher is better).
Europe has a score of 9.06 (interestingly this is true whether you weight by countries or not.)
So on average, Europe as a whole has a slightly lower personal freedom than the US. But this hides significant variation between them. The Nordic countries are the best; Sweden is 9.63, and Eastern Europe is the worst; Hungary is 7.88.
I imagine there is some variation between the American states although probably less than within Europe. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be broken out in the data.
For what it's worth, though, Austria has a personal freedom score of 9.25.
David Friedman's book on law system has a pretty genius idea: it bundles US law system together with Islamic law - they're both based on a holy book. The comparison is not just a metaphor, they actually have the same kind of problems and solutions - i.e. the book quickly becomes obsolete, but can't be easily changed because it's holy. The solution is to have a committee to reinterpret it for the times (supreme court in US), up to having it say the exact opposite of the holy book with only the barest of pretense.
Anyways, US is just as norms based as UK is. The constitution and bill of rights are just a focus or shorthand for that - just look at how often people mention them by name, vs how often they mention non-trivial content from them.
What about the money? A memorable recent "free world" debacle was Canada's designation of the trucker convoy and its supporters as "terrorists" and ejecting them from the financial system without legal recourse. Is this impossible in the US?
Fifth amendment makes it unconstitutional for the US to order accounts frozen indefinitely without some sort of legal process (though in practice it's frequently a "your accounts are frozen, you get to argue in court that they should be unfrozen, hope your lawyer's fine with not getting paid unless they win" sort of deal). I don't think there's any protection against being blacklisted by the banks themselves (i.e. shadow regulation), though I could be wrong.
He declared a national emergency, I think every country is vulnerable to that. Even if I support their right to protest, I'm not convinced that Trudeau was wrong here. If you block roads for long enough the government can make you leave, even if you're blocking the roads as part of a political statement
I too think that if they were breaking laws then the government could use force to arrest them and bring them to trial. Why it wasn't doing that for a long time and then decided to call it an "emergency" is still mysterious to me, and that proudly hyperpartisan propaganda passes for reporting these days doesn't help.
I live in Ottawa. The convoy was clearly breaking all kinds of minor laws, and the police were simply not doing their jobs. Shortly after the (very dubious) emergency declaration, the police chief was replaced and the convoy was dealt with pretty efficiently.
My understanding is that the scary authoritarian political measures were mostly driven by the inadequacy of the police response. Which was in turn pretty clearly related to the right-wing ideology of our police force.
Incidentally, it's worth noting that the right-wing provincial government declared a state of emergency several days before the center-left federal government did.
Yes, that's kinda what I gathered, but it's still strange. Police is right-wing-leaning pretty much everywhere, and apparently was easily brought under control here after the bogus "emergency". Why couldn't they replace the chief or whatever earlier and without the brouhaha?
This stuff is pretty difficult to understand, because its all thing you don't have any feel for unless you're immersed in the arcana that is Canadian Federal-Provincial division of powers politics, both the theory and actual practice.
First issue, local policing response. The Ottawa police is lead by an import from Toronto with a mandate to clean up their image after some incidents. As a result he had very little pull with the rank and file and didn't have the suction to get his manpower on board with either hard or soft measures to deal with the occupation. So Ottawa police mainly floundered and sent up the bat signal to the Federal and Provincial governments to get them some help. However, Ottawa police was too dysfunctional to even present operational plans for how to use the reinforcements they requested and were functionally useless until the chief was replaced.
The way Ottawa policing worked, either a police board (not the city government itself, but a body with representatives of the city and the province) can replace the chief, or the Provincial government can step in and do whatever it wants directly because this is all ultimately under their control. So the police and the police chief don't really work for the mayor or city council.
Next up, the Provincial government. By rights, this was their problem. It was first a city problem, but Canadian cities are the slaves of the Provincial governments, they can give orders and directions or take control. And because cities are Provincial, under Canadian conlaw rules that means the Federal government cannot touch them. That there are two co-sovereign levels of government and they have to either play nice or not touch each other's stuff is the fundamental principle of Canadian constitutional law.
So this is Ford's rodeo and under the principles of responsible government, he's the guy who is the one responsible. Ford congenitally hates being responsible for hard decisions, being the bad guy or saying no to people. Also the occupations are an issue that splits his political coalition so he had a political interest in not being involved in the crisis that its his job to be involved in. So the Provincial government dragged its feet on doing anything and did its level best to both duck the issue and put it on the Federal government's plate.
Its also important to point out, in many ways the Premier of Ontario's biggest political job is to be the super-mayor of the Greater Toronto Area and he can let the rest of the province hang if he manages that. And he made damn sure there was a firm police response in Toronto that kept the protests away from his capital area and seat of government. Meanwhile, in Canadian political psychic geography, Ottawa is the Federal government even if the bulk of the actual governing in one of the countries largest cities is handled by the Province.
Enter the Federal government. They were pretty keen for this not to be their problem too, and they have a pretty strong case that it shouldn't have been. But the protests are on their home turf, directed primarily about them. This is not because of policy substance, the substance of the policies supposedly being complained about were always the Provincial governments. This isn't unusual most active governing in Canada is Provincial. The Federal government is essentially an inter-governmental affairs board that collects taxes and sends the money to where it needs to go.
Legally, this is basically a crisis of local policing. Local policing is firmly a Provincial responsibility. However, two levels of government are yelling to them upstairs that we can't handle this problem. That this inability to handle it is more a matter of dysfunction rather than lack of powers is the big reason the clusterfuck is so large and the response is so unusual and confusing. Basically, to deal with a local policing matter that's gotten out of hand, the Federal government can only use one tool in its box and is a big hammer, the Emergencies Act. In theory, they could just send reinforcements of federal police to aid local and provincial police, but as discussed above, its not just a matter of bodies but also policy and direction. The Federal government is also legally prohibited from ever taking control of Provincial or local police except for basically a state of war.
So the Trudeau government basically has to use a big hammer to sweep up a mess. Its the wrong tool for the job in many ways, but they don't have a broom, they have a hammer. They're also the only people in this chain of command trying to act remotely responsibly to the people of Ottawa who've been subjected to an ongoing break down in law and order and who will most likely start imposing street justice on the protesters for abusing their welcome if the police don't do something now. Emergencies Act is used, direction from on high for the police to collectively do their jobs happens and they end up doing a bang up job dispersing the occupiers with minimal actual violence.
So if you're looking for who is responsible for things getting out of hand, its mainly the police chief who got replaced, and the Premier who did everything possible to avoid taking any responsibility for something it was inconvenient for him to be responsible for. One lost his job, the other basically skated off scot free because he successfully deflected focus onto the Prime Minister, who had to step in to awkwardly repair his total fuck up.
The critique I've seen has been over process issues (i.e. Trudeau enacted punitive - as opposed to preventative - measures with emergency non-appealable powers, which is essentially attainder), over the proportionality of the punishment (i.e. debanking, in a society where people are heavily encouraged to not interact with debanked people), and over the broad swathe of people either hit or threatened with that punishment (this comes uncomfortably close to the sort of measures you'd use to dismantle effective opposition parties and entrench power).
Yes, obviously removing the trucks was the right thing to do. But that's not the same as Trudeau being in the right.
There is a great deal of inflation on what the financial measures were, particularly by the time this story got to foreign markets who were chasing a man bite dog story of boring Canada in crisis.
There were two elements to the Emergencies Act financial aspects. Firstly, making charitable donations subject to FINTRAC monitoring. That was a known loophole that hadn't been addressed previously that became relevant as GofFundMe and equivalents were effectively being used to fund illegal activities, and were being done so out of foreign jurisdictions which literally every sovereign state would take issue with.
The other element that was a lot more controversial was temporarily freezing the bank assets of about 200 bank accounts identified by the police as involved in "blocking infrastructure and borders." This appears is claimed by the police to be limited to either blockade organizers or owners of the trucks in question. So the degree that this was targeted and proportionate tends to be overlooked. There was a concerted effort to claim that people who were merely donors got their accounts frozen but that doesn't seem to have turned up anyone real that happened to. These measures were also revoked right after the main occupation was cleared.
This isn't the kind of measures that would be at all effective in dismantling opposition political parties and the like. First, extremely time limited, second identified by arms length institutions, and third rationally connected to ongoing illegal activity. Lastly, if they were connected to legal political speech, everything would be subject to a court challenge because these measures are required to be Charter compliant (despite breathless foreign reporting, no civil liberties were suspended by invoking the Emergencies Act).
What I heard (from Zvi) was that they *threatened* to debank donors. This is not as bad as doing it (obviously), but still bad. Was this wrong?
The reason I said that this (the threat) is close to the sort of things that would dismantle *effective* opposition is that the threat is enough to chill donations and political parties do actually need some amount of money to have a chance of winning.
(I'm envisioning more of a Putin's Russia scenario, in which opposition parties are allowed to exist but state power is applied covertly to prevent them actually winning.)
I have no idea on what Zvi based his notions on, but it isn't anywhere in the Emergencies Act measures. It doesn't appear to be in any of the government communications about the measures either.
Also keep well in mind that this is politics, and there is a veritable cottage industry in taking shit the government does out of context to pretend it's something it's not, on top of the stuff that's essentially lying.
> Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations.
Don't know about China, but that's not how Chrushchev got selected. I think every member of politbyro was very acutely aware of what would happen to them personally if Beria won. It was more like a fight for survival.
Despite what The Death of Stalin says Khrushchev didn't succeed Stalin. Malenkov did. Malenkov and Beria got into what amounted to a policy struggle where Khrushchev supported Malenkov in the struggle then used some of Beria's dirt on Malenkov (and some of his subordinated) to stab Malenkov in the back. In part because he promised a more moderate, traditionally Marxist-Leninist course than Malenkov and Beria. In part because he was cleaner of various sins than either due to being less important. And in part due to internal Kremlin politics.
The events of the Death of Stalin really took place over two years. And if Beria hadn't messed things up in Germany and been so heterodox on policy he might have survived.
"I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight."
The more I learn about China, the more I update toward "China has a very high functioning, innovative and strategic government focused on long-term economic and military primacy. The US has a sclerotic government mostly occupied with internal hostilities, buying votes with handouts (to citizens and corporations) and culture war red meat."
There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking otherwise -- I also wish it wasn't true since one of their primary goals is to bury the US -- but it seems like the simplest synthesis of everything I read. I'd love for someone to talk me out of it.
Though I would also say that being threatened with 20 years in prison for incorporating wrongthink into a meme is rather violent crushing HK is now subject to.
Yeh but the first few months of the virus China was having a “Chernobyl moment”. Then that rhetoric all but died off as the west clearly did much much worse. The US is way up there on deaths per million, which is after all the main metric we should be concerned about.
On the Ukraine the Russians pretty much handed that victory to the west.
This is a good example of US cope. Firstly you argue against the lockdowns but China managed an initial lockdown so effectively that it could open up, so much so that it’s economy came back into growth in 2020 which was pretty much unique in the covid affected world. So if lockdowns were bad policy then the west did it worse, and the US amongst the worst.
And of course deaths per millions is the way of evaluating policy of combatting an epidemic.
I’m going to go with the official count of deaths per million from the WHO and the US is 18th worst in the world, worse than most African and low to medium income countries, about 3.5 times the world average. It’s also about 1000 times worse than China. I’m dubious that there’s that level of undercounting there.
I also find the “come back when you have…” comments to be far from instructive. Particularly when you didn’t even do your own workings out correctly. To be polite.
The US is a younger nation than most of the west - at 38 years compared to Germany’s 45 for instance. Yet it did much worse.
China has a slightly higher median age than the US. Come back when you’re able to do a simple google search. As for obesity, the US is indeed a grossly obese nation, is that enough to explain a discrepancy of 100,000%.
Locking down until elimination, then waiting for vaccines, was a good plan in early 2020 (it would have been an even better plan in late 2019, then the virus might never have escaped Wuhan in the first place).
But in 2022 it's a terrible plan. For starters, everyone is vaccinated so the threat is fairly low. Secondly, we have omicron, so eradication is either completely impossible or at least many times more expensive than it was with original-recipe Wuhan strain. And thirdly, the virus is endemic in the rest of the world so covid zero requires permanently closed borders plus regular lockdowns every time there's a quarantine leak. I guess the second point is the most important though, because if something is impossible then the cost-benefit questions don't matter.
If there's a lesson here it's that democracies and dictatorships screw up in different ways. When a democracy screws up, it's because they failed to commit to a single plan of action and hence failed to execute. When a dictatorship screws up, though, it's because they committed to the wrong plan of action and dictatorships have no safety release valve, no way of correcting themselves when they commit to the wrong course of action. So it's no coincidence that while democracies fuck up in many little ways all the time, to fuck up in a really _big_ way (like Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot or more recently Putin and Xi) you have to be a dictatorship.
>Russians pretty much handed that victory to the west.
Russia was already defeated, in the Cold War most recently. The separation of Ukraine was probably the most humiliating part of that, and the West of course continued to fuel anti-Russian sentiments there non-stop. So, the choice was to continue being humiliated quietly, or to punish Ukraine for its impertinence, whatever the cost.
Is it better to stay silent and have people suspect that you're a fool, or speak up and confirm it without a doubt? Russia is far more humiliated now than they were before
Nah, those who buy into that narrative don't think so. They see it as Russia finally claiming its rightful place on the world stage and facing the open full-strength opposition of the American hegemony as the result, and having some minor inconveniences and setbacks due to that is to be expected.
The zero Covid policy is looking like a disaster recently, much more so than when the above was written. And they seem to be stuck with it for reasons inherent to their system of government (inability to reverse course once leadership has chosen a direction).
Also of note is that post's description of Chinese foreign policy blunders, which you can contrast with what seems so far to be a clear US foreign policy success in marshalling the Western response to the Ukraine invasion. To the extent China's (assertive, nationalistic) approach to "focusing on long term primacy" has alienated other countries, it may have been counterproductive.
China, like most authoritarian regimes, has greater capacity to "get things done" because it has greater capacity to ignore consent and costs. The advantage of democracy is that all that consultation means what does get done is more likely to be useful. For example, China's Zero Covid or One Belt, One Road or national railways certainly looks impressive to people who wish for a heavy handed government intervention. But they built a lot of trains that are losing money and made a lot of dubious investments and they have definitely killed people and damaged the economy with the lockdowns.
Also, the Chinese government operates on the initiative of individual or local cadres with widely varying results. There's also a lot of internal tension the system generates. And if all that doesn't convince you they're about to undergo pretty severe population decline. By 2100 they're supposed to have less than a billion people. The US population is supposed to double in that time.
The US will only double in population with significant immigration. In fact all of that population increase has to be from immigration as the US also has a demographic crisis.
(Demographic crises are apparently something that only the other guy can have).
The US population is growing year over year and looks set to continue growing into the future. The Chinese population does not. In part because of differential immigration policies and in part because of the One Child policy and its after effects. So no, the US doesn't have a demographic crisis and China does.
The US could have a demographic crisis like China's. We could, for example, limit the number of children women have and cut off immigration. But we haven't done that so we aren't.
If you want to argue immigration has other negative effects that's still an entirely different problem than a population that is set to decline overall.
that’s just a restatement of the original position and doesn’t really refute my point about US demographics in the absence of immigration. European demographics are even worse. Right now the US has an annual fertility rate which if it continues isn’t enough to replace the population. Populations can increase in these circumstances for a while if life expectancy increases, or because of previous population momentum. In general though the population will eventually decline as these factors decrease, in the absence of immigration.
Yes, it is just a restatement. I was hoping you'd notice that we are agreeing that the US is not experiencing a demographic decline (as you yourself have just restated). Yet for some reason you say it is.
To be clear, the US population is set to expand and China's is set to contract so China has challenges the US will not face. If you want to separately discuss immigration or its effects then you can. But it's irrelevant to the point that the US population will grow and the Chinese population will shrink.
And the US has challenges that China won’t face, including integrating immigrants - something that becomes harder over time. I’m not agreeing that chinas population will fall dramatically by the way, or that the population of the US will continue to increase. The present TFR of China looks like it was covid related.
In any case immigration doesn’t necessarily increase GDP per capita, nor does a declining population halt GDP per capita increases.
Many countries in Europe seem to acknowledge their difficult demographic future. Not sure that it's always the other guy?
Also, the US is really, really good at interesting immigrants and there are many people around the world who would like to migrate to the US. Why shouldn't the US play to tar strength?
I think that China used to be a lot more high-functioning before Xi Jinping's pivot to authoritarianism. At the same time, everything you say about the US government is accurate; it's completely dysfunctional, and likely broken far beyound repair. As the result, the current decline of the global power of the US (cultural/political/technological/economic) is irreversible, and will likely accelerate; but it's not 100% clear who will step in to fill that gap. China is still the best candidate, but if they stay their current course, they may end up destroying their own power base before they can solidify their grip on the world.
The operative term here is "still". China's manufacturing sector is the industry standard; if you want to build something, "made in China" is pretty much your only option (plus or minus government contracts). Meanwhile, China is making major investments (and already reaping tangible gains) into AI and genetic research. China is also pretty much the only remaining nation with a viable space exploration program; the US has a thriving commercial space industry, but it's mostly focused on launching commercial satellites (and/or tourists) into low Earth orbit. The US does still have an edge in R&D, but the pipelines are running dry, due to dysfunctional schools and a restrictive IP regime. Meanwhile, the US entertainment industry is increasingly focused on sales in China these days. Overall, perhaps we can coast on inertia for some time, but the engine is dead.
It is really difficult to overestimate just how weird China's post-Omicron COVID response is right now, and I have absolutely revised down my opinion of China's competence as a result of it.
Like, in the main sense (and across the whole pandemic) it is of course a big success relative to America's—fewer people died! But in the moment, here in 2022, they have learned seemingly nothing at all from the rest of the world's successes and failures. Not just in the obvious ways, like "their vaccines are worse than ours and they don't have anything like Paxlovid," but "they're using their formidable state capacity to spray down streets with disinfectants instead of forcing old people to get vaccinated."
Theoretically a country with essentially unlimited authority over its populace plus two years of global experience fighting this disease should be in a position to succeed gracefully and easily. But they aren't doing that, and in attempting to keep Zero COVID going indefinitely in the face of much more transmissible variants they're basically committing to closing their borders indefinitely.
You can come up with reasons for that related to authoritarianism ("this is an excuse to do what they'd like to do anyway") or incompetence ("they literally haven't read the literature about who's most vulnerable and where transmission happens, or they have and think they must be right because they're China") but neither one paints the picture of an unstoppable geopolitical foe.
Just to put my cards on the table, my imagined Tool-Assisted Omicron Speedrun version of China—with the ability to lock everyone up in their apartments and send people in Hazmat suits out for groceries + up-to-date knowledge of COVID prevention and safety—would have required every senior citizen to get vaccinated and boosted, stockpiled antivirals and antibodies to mandate for anybody who tests positive, and pushed its economic advantages over the rest of the world by going back to normal faster than its competitors.
That would be much easier work, and much better for nearly everyone, but they're basically doing the opposite—focusing on the suppression of the virus in a way that is going to cause a bunch of problems for their industries and obviously is not very pleasant to live through either. (And it's wrong, too! The strange focus on outdoor transmission and implacable urge to herd people who are testing and quarantining into big indoor spaces suggest they know less about COVID now than Japan was able to communicate to its citizens in February 2020.)
I think it's hard to see 2022 to date as anything but a massive W for "The Free World" writ large. Don't get me wrong, I hate living in today's American political environment. But the alternatives are looking even worse! Russia swan-dived onto a landmine for no reason—simultaneously revitalizing "Western" identity/militaries/political organizations and demonstrating that basically no Western European country should be afraid of its conventional war machine—and China has decided for reasons that are totally opaque to me to shut down its economy and ensure that the roads are free of COVID.
Meanwhile, I get to drive to McDonalds whenever I want without supervision, and I can bitch about our stupid government, and if—despite the effective American vaccines I participated in a massive and transparent clinical trial for—I were to get COVID, I would just take the free cure that we invented for it in 18 months. U S A!
There's plenty of alternatives to the US that don't look worse.
I quite enjoy my time in Singapore for example. But there's also South Korea, Switzerland, Denmark, Estonia, the Czech Republic etc. Surely there's one that would suit you, if you dislike the US?
What does that have to do with someone's decisions on where to live?
(Slightly off-topic: I think Europe could get their own security umbrella, if they needed to. It's just cheaper to pay homage to the Americans. They aren't bad overlords all things considered.)
It might be that America’s burden of defending the free world is one cause of its toxic political environment. I’m not sure I believe that, and it may not be what Dan Moore thinks, but I can imagine the outline of an argument to that effect.
I actually think that's great advice for anybody able to put it into practice, since (from my limited experience) I think it's way easier to bear stupid or depressing cultural events from a place you're not "from," but ultimately I'm stuck here—I hate what America is frequently like, but I like being where I'm from, if that makes sense. Even within the US I feel a connection to my home state that's different from the one where I've lived for ~10 years now.
Friends have suggested to me that even China's theoretically unlimited authority over its populace runs into a few speed bumps when going up against culture. In this case, mandating senior citizens to get vaccinated necessarily implies the possibility of having to use violent force on the recalcitrant- which in filial, elder-loving Chinese society is as close to verboten as you can get.
Totalitarian as the CCP/CPC is, they derive a nonzero amount of legitimacy from public trust, which would nosedive if they were to be seen dragging poor Grandma through the streets to be jabbed with a needle. Which could partially explain why the current vaccination push features incentives (free food! coupons! outright cash!) so heavily.
Vaccinating the elderly is difficult everywhere (think Western antivaxxers too!). Taiwan (similar culture but a democracy) also struggled not just with vaxxing but with getting the elderly to follow basic covid precautions.
However, Taiwan has opened up (veeery recently). Granted I think they've also looked at their recent mortality rates (10k ish daily cases, currently single digit deaths but that's lagging and will go up). They also didn't have a political agenda that prevented them from using foreign vaccines, which does help here.
I would say the heavy handed state control of media helped stem the spread of vaccine misinfo somewhat. Not completely, but vaccine misinfo was just so horribly managed in English language media. Why was a major news outlet allowed to publish content directly counterproductive to health efforts?
Because freedom of speech is important? In 2020, the worst covid misinformation was coming form official government sources, and our ability to get accurate information depended on the free speech of internet bloggers.
Aside from the US there is still Europe, there is still India (albeit one wonders about its democracy), and there is still Japan-Korea-Taiwan (and Australasia).
The US is not the sole bastion of democracy and not the only capable opponent of China in the world. If the US fails the rest of the world will carry on.
The big questions are "who's going to take up the US's military spending?" and "what's going to happen to the NPT?". The EU needs a unified military with compulsory spending before it can even begin to take up the US's mantle (this applies to Free Asia to a lesser extent because there are fewer countries), and Japan/(S)Korea/Taiwan/Australia have all ratified the NPT which means no deterrence.
Dissuading the PRC from going a-conquering in Asia requires either a huge conventional military, a huge pile of nukes under the control of someone who'd be toast anyway if Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo fell, or both.
The obvious candidates there are various combinations of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. The problem being that all four of those put together have less than half the GDP of China and maybe 15% of the population. Adding in Vietnam and the Philippines as potential/likely allies helps some, especially in terms of population, but not enough to come anywhere near parity in conventional military potential without being able to call on the US (or at the very least Britain and France) to take center stage in any war with China.
A huge pile of nukes is more doable. Japan and Australia especially are in good technological shape to go nuclear in short order if so inclined (Japan has an extensive civilian power industry, and Australia has enormous uranium ore reserves and manufactures uranium enrichment equipment for export). Both have strong domestic political reasons not to build a nuclear arsenal, but that could change quickly if the US nuclear umbrella no longer seemed sufficient. Japan in particular seems to have started seriously considering developing an independent nuclear deterrent in response to House Kim's Family Atomics (i.e. the North Korean nuclear arsenal).
The big issue with the nuclear option is that it's difficult for nation X to provide a credible deterrent against nuclear nation Y invading non-nuclear nation Z with nukes (due to this resulting in X getting nuked back, hence my note about "someone who'd be toast anyway"), although given the strategic realities of the First Island Chain* one could see Japanese or Korean nukes credibly deterring an invasion of Taiwan. Not Australian, though.
*The big issue here, for anyone who doesn't know, is that Japan and Korea are fully dependent on international seagoing trade (they are not self-sufficient in food or minerals, and have no land borders except with China itself and NK's little sliver with Russia), and without the First Island Chain (Philippines/Taiwan/Ryukyus/Japan) the PLAN would immediately be in a position to threaten blockade of Korea and Japan. Australia doesn't have this dire prospect, as it's much further from China and is self-sufficient in the essentials, so it would have a much harder time threatening nuclear war over Taiwan.
My evidence for Beijing intending to conquer Taiwan is the Anti-Secession Law that literally legally requires them to do it if peaceful reunification can't be achieved (spoiler alert: it can't, at least while the PRC is in substantially its current form). Calling *that* hysterical is nonsense.
Korea's further off, I'll agree, but Korea was a Chinese tributary until the Century of Humiliation (which the PRC is founded on ending) and Chinese official history now teaches that Goryeo was a Chinese state. I wouldn't say they'd invade out of the blue, but if Taiwan falls I could very easily see an attempt to bring South Korea back into puppet status with the threat of blockade.
That's enough to qualify as "a-conquering" for me.
(None of this except maybe Taiwan is happening while Uncle Sam's significantly in the picture, but this comment chain is about what happens if he falls ill.)
What do you wonder about India's democracy which is not a 'No true Scotsman' fallacy? There is no doubt that India IS a democracy. It functions about as well as any other democracy (which is to say, not very well, but many people seem to regard this as better than the other options available).
I fully agree that India is a democracy right now, but so is South Africa. They are likely to be on the same path for a while, one where only one party is capable of winning for decades in a row. When something like that happens is no longer really a successful democracy.
But that's not really what I was getting at, it's more that I wonder if India will remain whole in a few decades; I think a breakup of India is a real possibility. The other possibility is that India becomes more authoritarian in order to try to hold the country together and, sadly, this is probably the more likely outcome.
A dysfunctional democracy is one where the ruling party doesn't change for 20 years.
The change from empires to nations began during World War I, ever since then empires have been breaking up. India is of empire size and is very likely to break up or at least break down. There are a lot of potential cleavage points: the Muslim minority, the Dravidians, state borders even. We are near the end of a long process with India as one of the final empires; this isn't the start of a slippery slope it's nearing the end.
In India, the ruling party didn't change for the first 40 or so years of independence, and has rarely not changed since then. I assume you think it is now a more functional democracy than it was before?
There is a reason that many of the wealthiest and most powerful governments in the world are democracies now, and it's not entirely coincidence. The reason is that democracies (even sclerotic ones) have the ability to change course when things get bad enough. In an authoritarian regime you can have periods of high competence, but you can also have Mao. And when you get Mao, you just have to wait for him to die.
First, I don't see the specific trendline that they're claiming has slope greater than 1. It's true that the bottom envelope of the data points has slope greater than 1, but the top envelope of the data points has slope *far* less than 1. The biggest thing that chart clearly shows is that low-income countries have much greater *variance* in their growth, while high-income countries have much lower variance in growth. It's true that the only countries that had negative growth are countries whose GDP per capita in 1950 was below $5,000. But it's also true that the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 10x were below this line, and the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 15x were even lower, and the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 30x were even lower.
What you'd want to properly let your eyes see the relevant trends is a graph where the x-axis is GDP per capita in 1950, but the y-axis is growth rate from 1950-2016, rather than the y-axis being GDP per capita in 2016.
In any case, looking at the chart, it seems that the catch-up growth idea is very strongly supported for countries that were above $5,000 GDP per capita in 1950. The top 5 countries are all below the world average (other than Luxembourg, which barely beats it), and the next 20 or so countries are almost all above the world average, with the ones that nearly double world growth being towards the bottom of that range. The only members of that top 20 that grew slower than the top 5 are South Africa, Lebanon, USSR, Uruguay, and Argentina. Three of those countries had famously dysfunctional regime changes in that period, and Argentina had some famously bad financial crises, though Uruguay is hard to explain.
It's very hard for me to tell if there is much support or counter-evidence for the catch-up growth thesis for the countries that started poorer. I would dismiss most of the actually shrinking low-income countries as exceptions due to war, though the opponent of the catch-up growth thesis would presumably claim that these conflicts are in fact endogenous to the poverty.
It seems very plausible to me, given just this chart, that by "default", lower-income countries have higher growth rates than higher-income countries, but that low income countries have a possibility of awful conflict and war that leaves them even worse off which high income countries don't have.
Agreed that Jonathan's point isn't actually a refutation of Scott's. Jonathan seems to be saying that because rich countries generally grow faster than poor countries in any given year, it's implied that as a country gets richer, its growth will accelerate, but that's not what his data is saying. His data is just saying it's rare to have cases in which there even is rapid growth of a poor country.
So Jonathan is right that China is something of an exception in that it escaped the poverty trap, but of those that do jump from low to middle income status, China is actually following the same trajectory (and broad economic policies) as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc, which is the rapid industrialization followed by leveling out at "modern" technological levels that Scott described.
Except it doesn't even seem all that rare for there to be rapid growth of a poor country. When I look at the countries below $1,000 on the 1950 axis, four of them (Romania, China, Mongolia, Equatorial Guinea) outperformed the world by a factor of 3 or 4. Only three or four of them (Liberia, Burundi, Malawi, and maybe Madagascar) underperformed the world by a factor of 3 or 4.
Catch-up growth is a thing that is unlocked when (and to the proportion that) the cause of the lag is eliminated. In 3/4 countries listed that cause of lag was clearly and obviously its economic system. The other one is Equatorial Guinea which found oil and probably shouldn't be included in any discussion of catch-up.
Catch-up is much more achievable when you have similar nearby countries that are far more developed (after discounting natural resource windfalls). It hints that there's big and obvious source of lag as well as a ready model for development. It seems highly plausible that Ukraine should be able to catch up to Poland or at least Belarus, or that North Korea should be able to catch up to South Korea, with some very obvious reforms. It's far more of a stretch to say that Burundi should be able to catch up to Canada.
And over time as reforms are achieved and more countries catch up, there's less low-hanging fruit, more Burundis in the mix and fewer South Koreas, and thus fewer examples of catch-up underway.
The visual correlation seems to be driven entirely by the cluster of poor, low-to-negative growth African countries at the bottom of the chart. I can't get a good sense of what it would look like if restricted to e.g. only Asian countries or only European countries. Possibly the correlation would reverse?
So I think unique dysfunction in central Africa is a hypothesis that would explain the observations more simply.
>What you'd want to properly let your eyes see the relevant trends is a graph where the x-axis is GDP per capita in 1950, but the y-axis is growth rate from 1950-2016, rather than the y-axis being GDP per capita in 2016.
>It seems very plausible to me, given just this chart, that by "default", lower-income countries have higher growth rates than higher-income countries, but that low income countries have a possibility of awful conflict and war that leaves them even worse off which high income countries don't have.
I decided to do a quick check, using Gapminder ( https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd001/ ) and a spreadsheet to compare growth rates over various subperiods, stopping in 2019 since that's when their source data stops.
Overall, the trendline was for separation for long time horizons, but flipped towards catchup at some point between 1928 and 1950 (not sure exactly when, cbf to do that). The strength of the trend lines was somewhat exaggerated by microstates, particularly Brunei, which hit a GDP per capita (PPP) that wouldn't be out of place in 2019 back in 1950 (it's the weird outlier in those graphs), but when I cut the microstates out (any country with a pop lower than Bahrain's, which excludes Brunei but keeps in Singapore), the trend (pre-1950 rich-get-richer, post-1950, poor-get-richer) was the same, even if the specific angle was somewhat less exaggerated.
Confidence: not great? Possibly this data is corrupted somehow, but a flip happening sometime between 1928 and 1950 would technically fit with my preexisting knowledge (I know over the 1928-1970 period, catchup was very hard, but there was obviously colonization going on then to fuck it up). On the other hand, I am confident in the "middle income trap" escape list being quite restrained geographically (East Asia, Europe, oil-rich). Possibly there's just enough countries that fit into this category that it overpowers African, South Asian, etc, countries having failed, or possibly it's that a lot of these countries haven't hit the high income threshold just yet - Vietnam's had average >5% GDP per capita (PPP) growth since 1992, but still has a GDP per capita (PPP) of $10.8k, which would still be sub-high income even if it was nominal (its nominal GDP is $3.5k).
Interesting! Just eyeballing the first couple charts, where you have that trendline suggesting separation, it seems plausible that there might be a better fit curve, that is upward sloping at the low end and downward sloping from the middle to the high end. Which I guess suggests the opposite of a "middle income trap". But obviously, I am not a development economist.
The middle income trap kicks in at ~12.5k nominal in modern dollars (these are in 2017 USD, so it'd be about the same), which is ~20% of the modern US GDP per capita (and is inflation adjusted), so keep that in mind. Countries in the "bump" are, mostly, going to be "high income" already, like France or Austria; the "upper middle income" countries with GDP per caps of just under 25% the US's in 1928 would be Lebanon, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Libya, Costa Rica, Syria, Namibia, Palau, and Mexico, for example.
> Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics.
So that's how you weed out power seekers! You simply have to select people for ideological reasons!
Well, look through Soviet history, for example, and you will see that ideology differences of Party groups strangely happens to coincide with their political interests.
Yes, and looking through Catholic church history the theological doctrines of various popes seem to weirdly correspond to their political interests. This does not mean there weren't a lot of believing Catholics or that "Catholicism" didn't exist. And it's a pretty strong explainer of a lot of pope's actions and also why there's never been a Protestant pope. Politics in general tends to be a combination of the ideological and pragmatic.
Also, I say in the original comment it's a combination of ideology "combined with pragmatic political considerations."
I've noticed a similar effect where dictatorships predict that western leaders will act in a cynical power-maximising way and are repeatedly surprised when they end up working to advance western ideals even when it's costly and not power-maximising. Is it really that hard to believe that the CCP leadership believes in communism for communist reasons, in the same way that western leaders believe in liberalism for liberalist reasons?
The CCP doesn't seem to believe in Communism at all, but something else which is sometimes called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and which amounts to "take all the stuff from Communism that lets us keep power and get rid of the rest".
"The CCP doesn't seem to believe in Communism at all, but something else which is sometimes called 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'"
Granted
"which amounts to 'take all the stuff from Communism that lets us keep power and get rid of the rest'."
What makes you believe this? Why can't "socialism with Chinese characteristics" be its own genuine ideology with real believers, instead of an excuse to maximize power?
It'd sure be nice if politicians who believe in liberalism for liberalist reasons were on my ballot for the upcoming elections.... (I mean, they are, but only minor parties with negligible chance of winning)
Just fyi "oikonomia" is also the Orthodox term for latitude given to priests to bend the rules in response to local conditions. One example might be allowing Americans to break the Nativity Fast on Thanksgiving because it's a God-centered holiday and therefore to be approved of.
I honestly don't know what we would do with such a controversy. A quick browse of Orthodox Wiki suggests that we're fine with the title "Shangdi" for God, and I imagine we'd accept "Heaven" as an acceptable term, since in general we don't split hairs the same way. Ancestor veneration is certainly out as a part of worship, and whether it is allowable at all would depend on some very fine linguistic combing of what is meant by "veneration." It appears (still going by Orthodox Wiki) that we were tolerated even after Catholics were booted, so either we had better political connections or we were better at being conciliatory.
As for today, we had no Vatican II so our practices are more regular and old fashioned, though we never AFAIK had any objection to worship in the local tongue. Catholics seem to allow a prodigious amount of latitude in some particulars (like that weird mass with statues of the Peruvian deity Pachamama) while being very strict in others (Francis seems to have all but banned the traditional Latin mass because it's associated with people who hate his guts). As we're decentralized, it's something of an apples-and-oranges question. One national church might allow a local custom, but other churches might or might not respect that indulgence as legit.
(1) Should we weight by population? I haven't done the calculation, but if I look at only China, India, USA, & Indonesia (the 4 biggest countries), the slope does look less than one.
(2) This is looking at the total change between 1950 and 2016, so the data is integrated in some sense. If you look at every year for every country, a different picture might emerge.
(3) I think that the biggest conclusion will be that high income countries have lower variance than low income countries. They're likely to have good institutions (or they wouldn't be high income), so they're unlikely to do too poorly. They're at the technological frontier, so they're unlikely to grow too quickly. Lower income countries with good institutions can grow much more rapidly, so catch up growth is a real phenomenon. Lower income countries are more likely to have terrible institutions than high income countries, so they also might perform worse.
> And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have.
He certainly can't *just* march back into power, but I do think he's trying to retake power. There have been some fires, plane crashes, and other incidents which are consistent with someone trying to publicly humiliate Xi in advance of his reelection this Fall. Jiang, who certainly consolidated control over the secret police during his tenure and still has a lot of connections if not outright control there, is the logical culprit. Plus, Jiang's power base is in Shanghai. The "bungled" early lockdown there followed by the much stricter one currently in place is consistent with a calculated ploy to create a crisis in Shanghai which Xi can use as an excuse to bring in military and civil authorities to crack down on Jiang's supporters. Clearly this has gotten out of hand and, if this theory is true, Xi created a much bigger problem than he was trying to solve, since now he has the failure of COVID Zero and a potential civil revolt in Shanghai to deal with, but that's consistent with the sorts of mistakes Chinese autocrats have historically made.
Jonathan Ray isn't quite wrong, but he's also not really correct. It's true that catch up growth isn't a hard law of economics (pretty much nothing is lol). Just because you're currently poor (meaning low GDP/cap) does not mean that you will grow quickly. There are lots of countries that used to be poor, and still are. However, the idea of catch-up growth is useful as a prediction of the limits of potential growth. That is, being poor doesn't mean you *will* grow fast -- but the cap on how fast you can grow will be higher than a more developed economy. Starting off poor is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high growth. If you manage your economy poorly, all bets are off -- but an ideally-managed developed economy can't grow nearly as fast as an ideally-managed developing economy. The US today, for example, could never achieve the growth of Japan in the 70s/80s.
Source: I'm currently taking a course on economic growth and development from a prominent scholar in the field at a top-10 school.
To be clear, the cap isn't on growth, but on the rate of growth. We're still growing, but slowly -- I think around 2-3%/year.
With regards to "impressively rapid growth" in the 18th/19th centuries, what are you referring to? I don't see that https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270?yScale=log -- it looks to me that the UK has been growing remarkably steadily since ~1500, with an increased rate around 1900, and a couple dips for obvious reasons.
maybe "growth" just starts to take on other forms that are harder to measure? past a certain point of development, the excess gets funneled off into more qualitative improvements that are harder for us to recognize presently? like, was "growth" (or at least gdp) refined and reified enough in the minds of enough smart people in these 18th/19th century countries for them to look around and all agree "yeah, this is great, everything's just peachy, full steam ahead", or were they too overcome with latent anxiety over some other supposed bellwether that was stagnating back then?
Yes, because the word was invented by a 19th century German. The idea was that ecology meant the affairs of the specific species and its relation to the outside environment. Evolution was seen as creating a sort of "home" for the species, both in the features of the species and its natural environment. This species then interacted with other ecologies.
As with many terms of the time it's really a German idea/term that's being rendered in a Classical language because 19th century Germans were HUGELY pretentious.
What those charts show is that the wealthiest countries grow at a moderate/average rate, while the poorest countries have a wide spectrum of growth rates. Editorializing a bit: if they keep doing the things that made them poor in the first place, they grow slowly or shrink; if they get in gear and grow, they can grow faster than any wealthy country; and they can do anything in between.
On the Our World in Data chart that Jonathan Ray linked to, this corresponds to the fact that there's nothing above the top of the chart. E.g., the only countries that grew 30x from 1950–2016 are those that started from at most ~$2500/person, the only ones that grew 10x started from at most ~$8000, etc. (And also that there's nothing in the upper right corner: countries that started wealthy but grew slowly, instead of moderately.)
I called this the Anna Karenina principle of economic growth: “Wealthy countries are all alike (in growth rate); every poor country has its own growth rate.”
See also this Twitter thread where Nathaniel Bechhofer claims that, in recent years, the triangle has tilted, so that on average, “low and lower-middle income countries are doing better than high-middle and high income countries as measured by growth rates”: https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1512211228248064002
"I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen for miles. In the US most folks would just jaywalk."
It always tickles me that jaywalking is a thing in the land of the free.
I don't think this is actually true for Germany. There is some social pressure to avoid jaywalking when there are young kids observing who might learn the wrong lesson from it, which I think is reasonable.
I was actually running a red light on a bike lane after dark a few years back, not noticing that the car waiting next to me on the intersection was a police cruiser. Had to pay a fine, 40 Euro or something. I certainly learned my lesson: now I push my bike over an intersection instead of riding it, which means I am a pedestrian and the fine would be much lower.
Of course, in a car (a.k.a. a ton-heavy death machine), considerations are quite different. While many drivers will eventually cross with a 'kirschgelbes Licht' (cherry-yellow light) because they overestimated the yellow signal duration, almost nobody will run a red light even at 3am. (Mostly, municipalities are intelligent about figuring out at which times the roads are mostly empty and turn off the traffic signals during the night.)
I too have never interpreted "The land of the free" as meaning "no rules exist, not even road rules". But you'd think the 'land of the free' might manage without one about how you cross the road.
"From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better."
I would like to hear more about how this was achieved. Low level bribery (just to get someone to do their job) was just a fact of life when I was in China a couple of decades ago. How was the cultural change enabled?
I'm not enough of an insider in anything to really know the answer to this. Things I have seen and heard about include:
Some quite serious attacks on displays of conspicuous consumption. At the end of the year, if you were part of a patronage chain (I'm getting this from my father-in-law, who is in some district-level patronage groups), you would take your patrons for fancy meals, and maybe give them some cash; and your clients would take you for fancy meals. People within the Party were told that they could not be seen doing this, and real cases of punishment occurred when people were caught engaging in overly lavish banquets. Things like being demoted or kicked out of the Party. Big national level cases of this were publicised nationally. This didn't exactly make conspicuous consumption go away, but it feels to me like there has been a change in the last ten years. A decade ago I heard a lot of very tedious discussion of the price of food and alcohol (because the whole point of those banquets was not to enjoy them, but to demonstrate the transmission of value). I hear that less now. (But this is complete anecdote, so don't give it any more credence than it's worth. My circle of acquaintance has changed, we gotten older... I have no idea how representative my experience is.)
Second was institutional punishments for accepting cash bribes. Again, real cases were brought, a few people got canned.
Third, wages for state employees rose a lot. I know some teachers, and their wages have gone up a lot - moving with the rest of the economy around them. Like, 15 years ago, teachers couldn't really buy handbags on their wages, and now they can. For some, it's quite lucrative; for most, it's a living wage. (If I have time in the next couple of days, I'll try to find some actual numbers.)
I don't know which of these factors has been important, if any, but they are the ones that seem vaguely relevant to me.
So your position is that Xi Jing Ping, a rather important guy whose time is valuable, spent tens of thousands of hours writing Marxist theory after being educated in Marxism and being born to Marxist parents and then ordered a hundred million people to spend hours and hours every week reading, thinking about, and expounding on Marxism is not in any way Marxist?
What this usually boils down to is the writer thinking their personal definition of Communism is the one, true definition and everyone who disagrees with them is secretly lying about being a Communist. I think that is strikingly arrogant.
Do you have any evidence that doesn't boil down to "they do X and I think Communism is Y so they're not Communist! No, I haven't read any of their justifications for why X is Communist and I don't know anything about Deng Xiaopeng thought. Why do you ask?"
My prior would be that there is signalling and performative value to compliance with stated ideology, but that actually, it is public choice theory that drives actions within an equilibrium, not ideological positions.
Actions where sticking to the ideology is easily identifiable as reducing your well-being, prospects, or chances of success in whatever it is that you're otherwise trying to achieve would likely satisfy me as being ideological. Generally speaking my prior would be people who succeed (and thus are typically optimising to succeed) are not also optimising for ideological purity or correctness. It would take significantly stronger evidence than ideological essays (that were likely ghost written by a staff member) to convince me.
While they may have had other writers involved a significant number are speeches, meaning Xi actually traveled to some place in the country and took several hours to prepare and say the words. Also, Xi was a writer and theoretician BEFORE he was a leader and has a very large output. Unlike, say, Putin.
But here's what I don't get about your definition: "chances of success in whatever you're trying to succeed." How do they decide what they're trying to succeed? My argument is not they're ideological idiots. My argument is that they're Communists whose goals are informed by Communist ideology. That Xi, like Deng, got into power in large part because the party believed that he would be likely to succeed at what they, as CCP members, wanted to do. (Plus or minus oligarchal patronage neworks.)
Likewise, ideology is not static. They change in response to external events. And I don't see how, "The Soviet Union fell, we need to re-exaimine some of our assumptions in order to keep the CCP alive and Communist" is different from optimizing along power lines.
Your assumption appears to be that CCP, just because it calls itself communist, is mainly communist and tries to institute and spread communism. My assumption is that it is mainly a collection of people who want power and wealth for themselves and those close to them, and are exploiting whatever means are available to them to perpetuate that. I think the fact that the Chinese economic model now looks nothing at all like socialism/communism, and a lot more like market capitalism implies that my assumption is more correct.
I taught English at a high-level university in Wuhan for years, from 2010-2015. I was allowed to teach whatever I wanted, and I did. So did my colleagues. Universities were definitely allowed more leeway up until recently.
Probably the funniest part is when I told my students casually that Vietnam won the war against China in 1979. They protested that China had in fact won, because that's the lie they'd been taught, and I told them it was okay to accept the truth of their defeat because America had lost to Vietnam as well. They thought that was hilarious.
It always seems weird to me to say that America lost to "Vietnam". There wasn't a Vietnam to lose to in those days, there was a North Vietnam (which won) and a South Vietnam (which lost).
".... We simply want to point out that while economists were busy refining the econometric tools for studying divergence, the basic facts about economic growth around the world turned completely upside down a quarter century ago—and the literature doesn’t seem to have noticed.
While the Johnson-Pageorgiou review notes in passing that “[s]ince the early 1990s the pace of growth of income per capita in many developing economies has accelerated to unprecedented levels and is substantially above that in high income countries,” it goes on to perpetuate the pessimistic no-unconditional convergence view, even and especially drawing on literature for the recent past (see emphasized text above). But this view is plain wrong. While unconditional convergence was singularly absent in the past, there has been unconditional convergence, beginning (weakly) around 1990 and emphatically for the last two decades."
“ Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal.”
I live in Japan and I see people blowing red lights literally every day, jaywalking, etc. The whole Japanese people are law abiding thing is not as true as people make it out to be.
Responding to Phil H on corruption: I lived in China from 2016-2017 and I did a *lot* of cash bribery, and was advised it was an unavoidable fact of life by all Chinese friends and colleagues.
Perhaps this stamping out happened since then. Or perhaps my large (almost 10 million) but not especially prominent city was well behind on that modernisation. But it seems like a counterpoint worth mentioning.
"We are having a debate on corporate tax policy. No businesspeople will be punished for discussing tax policy for the next fifteen days and will have the chance to present their opinions to decision makers at the end of the period." - that actually sounds more enjoyable than the "cancel culture" style of debate
That was one I found especially interesting. It's like The Purge as applied to speech.
How funny would this be as a university holiday? It's The Purge, but for speech only. Someone should organize this on their campus.
But would they actually not be punished, or would it be more like the Hundred Flowers campaign, or Google asking employees to make suggestions about improving diversity?
Keep in mind Chinese civil society has weak collective memory due to the censorship of history. They definitely used it as a weapon in the past but my impression is that they haven't recently and people just don't know that happened under Mao.
My wife's uncle spent 20 years in prison, for being a sucker in the Hundred Flowers campaign, and he only died within the past couple years. I'm not sure how much their censorship accomplishes, when there's still living examples.
The difference being, of course, that your opinion doesn't ultimately matter in China. The policy makers will take your input and then decide what they want to do. They can, and do, go against public opinion.
Ditto to that- I think the actual function of these sorts of events is as a kind of pressure-release valve on public opinion. People get to say that the Party is doing a good or bad job, and then the Party can say "we've listened, and we are going to do this", and people feel like they've contributed. A cynical part of me thinks that the "feeling like you've contributed" part is actually more important than any solid democratic norms.
In terms of pressure-release valves, I think "feeling like you've contributed" and "feeling like you were heard" are the same thing but can backfire if not designed right.
I work in HR, and it's a known thing that engagement surveys that just ask people what they want are bad and disengaging, because when the company inevitably doesn't do what people said they wanted, they feel like they've been ignored. Instead you're supposed ask more indirect questions in order to identify exactly what their pain points are. Then the company has an actual issue they can address and can explain why they decided on whatever approach they ended up with. Employees still might not get what they want in the end, but the hope is because they feel like the company made an effort to care about their problems, they've been disarmed.
Same dynamic in US politics on the metro level with the open periods for comment on special initiatives or proposed legislation... I recall a CityLab story some time back about Detroit residents refusing free trees because nobody asked them if they wanted trees and to them it was just the city continuing a long tradition of being heavy handed with the community.
The cynical part of me thinks that the "feeling like you've contributed" is the most important part of actual Democracies. Almost all of the politicians that actually get elected are the same bureaucratic elites making corrupt deals with each other that arise in actual oligarchies, but the people feel like they contributed and can place all of their hatred for the government on only one half of it. As a result, the people are more content and more willing to try for change within the system rather than violently revolting against it.
This is... good? Also reminds me on how (exact numbers made up) Congress has a 20% approval rate but congressmen have 80% reelection rate. Public opinion somehow seems useless in US as well.
Congress as a whole body has a low approval rating but most individual Congresspeople poll much better in their actual districts.
The "Congress has 20% approval rate" thing is an agglomeration of multiple representatives, most of whom you cannot legally vote for
The disconnect actually proves democracy works, kind of. Any congressmen I don't vote for is a control group, since the only difference is whether I personally can vote for them. Indeed, I like my rep, as do most Americans, more than the control group (the average of all represenatives, i.e. Congress itself).
I think low approval for Congress has less to do with the average of all reps and more to do with the fact that Congress as an institution mostly can't pass meaningful legislation due to the combination of high polarization and how easy it is to kill or mangle legislation in our system.
You might admire your guy for being uncompromising and relentless in blocking and fighting the other side and never acting as a moderate, but those moderates are usually the grease that gets things done.
Though this isn't a call for moderation. I say all this while recognizing that I very much want my guy to never support the other side. I'd much rather the Federal Government be crippled and paralyzed than potentially used as a tool to crush me. But I think most voters don't make this bargain explicitly, it's just the product of their choices.
Oh yes, China has a long and glorious tradition of doing the "no one will be punished for honest opinions" thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign
Stephen Kotkin makes the interesting point that competing parties always weaken communist party control. If you allow any liberalization, in other words, the diversity undermines the ideology of remaking individuals according to a communal idea; whereas diversity strengthens the ideology of individual difference. In that regard, the ideal communist leader embodies the ideal communal type - hence, Xi Jinping does not appear to western eyes as someone striving to make an individual footprint on the sands of time.
Regarding the Scalia point about the Bill of Rights, I think what sets the US apart is having it alongside really strong norms about the rule of law. Autocrat constitutions (Gaddaffi’s is a great example) tend to be straight up lies, but other rule of law countries rarely have anything remotely as strong as the US. Europe’s answer to the first amendment, Article 10, is a good example:
“1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.”
If you’re wondering about all the stuff it’s illegal to say, it’s normally caught under “necessary in a democratic society” if it’s racism/sexism/criticism of religions (but occasionally prevention of disorder or public safety - this is more so for homophobia). Crazy libel laws come under protecting the reputation of others, and protection of morals is left for obscenity and what’s left of blasphemy laws. In practice, you have freedom of speech unless there’s a sufficient elite consensus for both judges AND politicians not to want you to say something.
Most countries’ bill of rights equivalents look a lot like this (albeit this is a particularly funny example of paragraph 2 looking like the small print).
The broader cultural point is bang on about the separation of powers and “checks and balances” though - the UK had none of this until 2005, and still barely has it, but in practice is basically the US.
By and large Europe is as free as the US in speech, a few exceptions aside. By and large it’s also not as heavily policed.
Then the policing isn’t working out, is it?
As motteposting says, the few exceptions are what matters.
This is one such exception:
A woman in Austria was sentenced to a fine of €480, or 60 days in prison, because during a seminar she reportedly said:" A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? What do we call it, if it is not paedophilia?” The case eventually ended up in the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) who upheld the decision.
Summary here:
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22002-12171%22]}
Just found other examples:
On Dec. 11, 2009, Catholic clerics in Vienna sued the cartoonist Manfred Deix for two drawings on the website NEWS.at which depict God and the EU prohibition against crucifixes in schools, respectively.
And, bordering on the absurd:
On Dec. 11, 2010, 63-year-old Helmut G. was convicted for offending his Muslim neighbor by yodeling while lawn mowing. The neighbor claimed Helmet was trying to mock and imitate the Muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer.
Source:
https://end-blasphemy-laws.org/countries/europe/austria/
That's a weird pull quote. She was referring to Mohammed, for anyone else who thought this woman was fined for insulting pedophiles in general
So... stating facts about about long since dead historical figures is forbidden when those figures also happen to be the founders of a religion? Does this apply to all religions, or only to major ones? Or even only to Islam? What if the historical figure didn't found a religion, but a country or a city, are you allowed to freely speak about him then?
The justification given by the court is utter bullshit:
> "The domestic courts made a distinction between child marriages and paedophilia. In their opinion, by accusing Muhammad of paedophilia, the applicant had merely sought to defame him, without providing evidence that his primary sexual interest in Aisha had been her not yet having reached puberty or that his other wives or concubines had been similarly young. In particular, the applicant had disregarded the fact that the marriage with Aisha had continued until the Prophet’s death, when she had already turned eighteen and had therefore passed the age of puberty."
Any man today that has sex with a nine year old girl would be widely labeled a "pedophile", and it wouldn't make one iota of a difference whether he stayed married to her until after her puberty.
You shouldn't be fined for insulting Mohamed, that's very bad that she faced legal penalties. If you agree, and are willing to argue the point on its own merits, then there's no need to quote things out of context to make it seem like Europeans are getting fined for insulting pedophiles. The "pedophilia vs child marriage" distinction is pretty wild, lead with that next time instead of the misleading version
Have you considered that if you looked at all legal cases in the USA you'd find similar exceptions?
I mean, there's a wikipedia page which lists numerous exceptions to free speech in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching, it's really not something I want to search for - but one of the exceptions is obscenity, and I found this report from 2008:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533543/new-obscenity-charges-raise-questions-in-internet-age.html
"But a debate that's been largely abstract for years has recently changed as the U.S. Department of Justice successfully prosecuted two Web site operators for obscenity. Last Friday, Paul F. Little -- also known as Max Hardcore -- was sentenced to 46 months in prison, as well as fined $7,500 for distributing adult videos online and through the mail."
And it looks like even discussing or joking about harming the president may be a risk.
Arrests for this seem to be pretty common. E.g.:
"Columbus Man Pleads Guilty To Tweeting Threats Against President Of The United States"
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/columbus-man-pleads-guilty-tweeting-threats-against-president-united-states
I think the question would be: are these examples of things that were prosecuted in the U.S. but would not be in Europe? If not, it doesn't matter to the larger point regarding relative freedom.
It's the most egregious examples which make the news; one or two punitive rulings don't mean it's the standard.
Also, you should consider the converse. Can you be prosecuted for things in America which you wouldn't be in the Europe?
Out of interest, I thought I'd compare the freedom index ( https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/freedom-index-by-country ) of Europe and the USA. There are some difficulties with the specification of this; I tried to do what was 'fair':
I decided "Europe" was - countries in the EU, plus Norway, Switzerland and UK. I think this is what is usually meant.
I am using the index of "personal freedom", not "economic freedom" or the composite.
I am looking at the weighted average by population, and I got those populations from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_Union except UK, Norway and Switzerland, which are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_European_countries
I used an excel spreadsheet with some manual typing, so E&OE.
So the USA has a personal freedom index of 9.09 (max 10, higher is better).
Europe has a score of 9.06 (interestingly this is true whether you weight by countries or not.)
So on average, Europe as a whole has a slightly lower personal freedom than the US. But this hides significant variation between them. The Nordic countries are the best; Sweden is 9.63, and Eastern Europe is the worst; Hungary is 7.88.
I imagine there is some variation between the American states although probably less than within Europe. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be broken out in the data.
For what it's worth, though, Austria has a personal freedom score of 9.25.
> . By and large it’s also not as heavily policed.
The US is around the middle-of-the-back by western standards. Police per 100k people by country:
Sweden: 198
England and Wales: 211
United States: 239
Australia: 264
Germany: 336
France: 422
This is one of many areas where Anglosphere is different from continental Europe and Scandinavia is like an extreme Anglosphere.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers
David Friedman's book on law system has a pretty genius idea: it bundles US law system together with Islamic law - they're both based on a holy book. The comparison is not just a metaphor, they actually have the same kind of problems and solutions - i.e. the book quickly becomes obsolete, but can't be easily changed because it's holy. The solution is to have a committee to reinterpret it for the times (supreme court in US), up to having it say the exact opposite of the holy book with only the barest of pretense.
Anyways, US is just as norms based as UK is. The constitution and bill of rights are just a focus or shorthand for that - just look at how often people mention them by name, vs how often they mention non-trivial content from them.
What about the money? A memorable recent "free world" debacle was Canada's designation of the trucker convoy and its supporters as "terrorists" and ejecting them from the financial system without legal recourse. Is this impossible in the US?
Fifth amendment makes it unconstitutional for the US to order accounts frozen indefinitely without some sort of legal process (though in practice it's frequently a "your accounts are frozen, you get to argue in court that they should be unfrozen, hope your lawyer's fine with not getting paid unless they win" sort of deal). I don't think there's any protection against being blacklisted by the banks themselves (i.e. shadow regulation), though I could be wrong.
He declared a national emergency, I think every country is vulnerable to that. Even if I support their right to protest, I'm not convinced that Trudeau was wrong here. If you block roads for long enough the government can make you leave, even if you're blocking the roads as part of a political statement
I too think that if they were breaking laws then the government could use force to arrest them and bring them to trial. Why it wasn't doing that for a long time and then decided to call it an "emergency" is still mysterious to me, and that proudly hyperpartisan propaganda passes for reporting these days doesn't help.
I live in Ottawa. The convoy was clearly breaking all kinds of minor laws, and the police were simply not doing their jobs. Shortly after the (very dubious) emergency declaration, the police chief was replaced and the convoy was dealt with pretty efficiently.
My understanding is that the scary authoritarian political measures were mostly driven by the inadequacy of the police response. Which was in turn pretty clearly related to the right-wing ideology of our police force.
Incidentally, it's worth noting that the right-wing provincial government declared a state of emergency several days before the center-left federal government did.
Yes, that's kinda what I gathered, but it's still strange. Police is right-wing-leaning pretty much everywhere, and apparently was easily brought under control here after the bogus "emergency". Why couldn't they replace the chief or whatever earlier and without the brouhaha?
I really wish I knew.
This stuff is pretty difficult to understand, because its all thing you don't have any feel for unless you're immersed in the arcana that is Canadian Federal-Provincial division of powers politics, both the theory and actual practice.
First issue, local policing response. The Ottawa police is lead by an import from Toronto with a mandate to clean up their image after some incidents. As a result he had very little pull with the rank and file and didn't have the suction to get his manpower on board with either hard or soft measures to deal with the occupation. So Ottawa police mainly floundered and sent up the bat signal to the Federal and Provincial governments to get them some help. However, Ottawa police was too dysfunctional to even present operational plans for how to use the reinforcements they requested and were functionally useless until the chief was replaced.
The way Ottawa policing worked, either a police board (not the city government itself, but a body with representatives of the city and the province) can replace the chief, or the Provincial government can step in and do whatever it wants directly because this is all ultimately under their control. So the police and the police chief don't really work for the mayor or city council.
Next up, the Provincial government. By rights, this was their problem. It was first a city problem, but Canadian cities are the slaves of the Provincial governments, they can give orders and directions or take control. And because cities are Provincial, under Canadian conlaw rules that means the Federal government cannot touch them. That there are two co-sovereign levels of government and they have to either play nice or not touch each other's stuff is the fundamental principle of Canadian constitutional law.
So this is Ford's rodeo and under the principles of responsible government, he's the guy who is the one responsible. Ford congenitally hates being responsible for hard decisions, being the bad guy or saying no to people. Also the occupations are an issue that splits his political coalition so he had a political interest in not being involved in the crisis that its his job to be involved in. So the Provincial government dragged its feet on doing anything and did its level best to both duck the issue and put it on the Federal government's plate.
Its also important to point out, in many ways the Premier of Ontario's biggest political job is to be the super-mayor of the Greater Toronto Area and he can let the rest of the province hang if he manages that. And he made damn sure there was a firm police response in Toronto that kept the protests away from his capital area and seat of government. Meanwhile, in Canadian political psychic geography, Ottawa is the Federal government even if the bulk of the actual governing in one of the countries largest cities is handled by the Province.
Enter the Federal government. They were pretty keen for this not to be their problem too, and they have a pretty strong case that it shouldn't have been. But the protests are on their home turf, directed primarily about them. This is not because of policy substance, the substance of the policies supposedly being complained about were always the Provincial governments. This isn't unusual most active governing in Canada is Provincial. The Federal government is essentially an inter-governmental affairs board that collects taxes and sends the money to where it needs to go.
Legally, this is basically a crisis of local policing. Local policing is firmly a Provincial responsibility. However, two levels of government are yelling to them upstairs that we can't handle this problem. That this inability to handle it is more a matter of dysfunction rather than lack of powers is the big reason the clusterfuck is so large and the response is so unusual and confusing. Basically, to deal with a local policing matter that's gotten out of hand, the Federal government can only use one tool in its box and is a big hammer, the Emergencies Act. In theory, they could just send reinforcements of federal police to aid local and provincial police, but as discussed above, its not just a matter of bodies but also policy and direction. The Federal government is also legally prohibited from ever taking control of Provincial or local police except for basically a state of war.
So the Trudeau government basically has to use a big hammer to sweep up a mess. Its the wrong tool for the job in many ways, but they don't have a broom, they have a hammer. They're also the only people in this chain of command trying to act remotely responsibly to the people of Ottawa who've been subjected to an ongoing break down in law and order and who will most likely start imposing street justice on the protesters for abusing their welcome if the police don't do something now. Emergencies Act is used, direction from on high for the police to collectively do their jobs happens and they end up doing a bang up job dispersing the occupiers with minimal actual violence.
So if you're looking for who is responsible for things getting out of hand, its mainly the police chief who got replaced, and the Premier who did everything possible to avoid taking any responsibility for something it was inconvenient for him to be responsible for. One lost his job, the other basically skated off scot free because he successfully deflected focus onto the Prime Minister, who had to step in to awkwardly repair his total fuck up.
The critique I've seen has been over process issues (i.e. Trudeau enacted punitive - as opposed to preventative - measures with emergency non-appealable powers, which is essentially attainder), over the proportionality of the punishment (i.e. debanking, in a society where people are heavily encouraged to not interact with debanked people), and over the broad swathe of people either hit or threatened with that punishment (this comes uncomfortably close to the sort of measures you'd use to dismantle effective opposition parties and entrench power).
Yes, obviously removing the trucks was the right thing to do. But that's not the same as Trudeau being in the right.
There is a great deal of inflation on what the financial measures were, particularly by the time this story got to foreign markets who were chasing a man bite dog story of boring Canada in crisis.
There were two elements to the Emergencies Act financial aspects. Firstly, making charitable donations subject to FINTRAC monitoring. That was a known loophole that hadn't been addressed previously that became relevant as GofFundMe and equivalents were effectively being used to fund illegal activities, and were being done so out of foreign jurisdictions which literally every sovereign state would take issue with.
The other element that was a lot more controversial was temporarily freezing the bank assets of about 200 bank accounts identified by the police as involved in "blocking infrastructure and borders." This appears is claimed by the police to be limited to either blockade organizers or owners of the trucks in question. So the degree that this was targeted and proportionate tends to be overlooked. There was a concerted effort to claim that people who were merely donors got their accounts frozen but that doesn't seem to have turned up anyone real that happened to. These measures were also revoked right after the main occupation was cleared.
This isn't the kind of measures that would be at all effective in dismantling opposition political parties and the like. First, extremely time limited, second identified by arms length institutions, and third rationally connected to ongoing illegal activity. Lastly, if they were connected to legal political speech, everything would be subject to a court challenge because these measures are required to be Charter compliant (despite breathless foreign reporting, no civil liberties were suspended by invoking the Emergencies Act).
What I heard (from Zvi) was that they *threatened* to debank donors. This is not as bad as doing it (obviously), but still bad. Was this wrong?
The reason I said that this (the threat) is close to the sort of things that would dismantle *effective* opposition is that the threat is enough to chill donations and political parties do actually need some amount of money to have a chance of winning.
(I'm envisioning more of a Putin's Russia scenario, in which opposition parties are allowed to exist but state power is applied covertly to prevent them actually winning.)
I have no idea on what Zvi based his notions on, but it isn't anywhere in the Emergencies Act measures. It doesn't appear to be in any of the government communications about the measures either.
Also keep well in mind that this is politics, and there is a veritable cottage industry in taking shit the government does out of context to pretend it's something it's not, on top of the stuff that's essentially lying.
Here is a really wonderful demonstration of Scalia's point about corruption. UN diplomats used to not be forced to pay parking tickets. NY didn't like this and still tracked them. The number of tickets a country's diplomats got was highly correlated with corruption in their home countries: http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/corruption-norms-and-legal-enforcement-evidence-from-diplomatic-parking-tickets/
Great reference. Thank you.
Too bad US diplomats are not tracked, presumably because they had to actually pay their tickets.
They are tracked in other countries.
Traffic fees and fines in London for US diplomats are a perennial sore sore spot between them and the UK.
India strikes me as being lower than I would have expected.
super interesting!
> Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations.
Don't know about China, but that's not how Chrushchev got selected. I think every member of politbyro was very acutely aware of what would happen to them personally if Beria won. It was more like a fight for survival.
Despite what The Death of Stalin says Khrushchev didn't succeed Stalin. Malenkov did. Malenkov and Beria got into what amounted to a policy struggle where Khrushchev supported Malenkov in the struggle then used some of Beria's dirt on Malenkov (and some of his subordinated) to stab Malenkov in the back. In part because he promised a more moderate, traditionally Marxist-Leninist course than Malenkov and Beria. In part because he was cleaner of various sins than either due to being less important. And in part due to internal Kremlin politics.
The events of the Death of Stalin really took place over two years. And if Beria hadn't messed things up in Germany and been so heterodox on policy he might have survived.
That Khrushchev quote in full:
"I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight."
The more I learn about China, the more I update toward "China has a very high functioning, innovative and strategic government focused on long-term economic and military primacy. The US has a sclerotic government mostly occupied with internal hostilities, buying votes with handouts (to citizens and corporations) and culture war red meat."
There seems to be a lot of wishful thinking otherwise -- I also wish it wasn't true since one of their primary goals is to bury the US -- but it seems like the simplest synthesis of everything I read. I'd love for someone to talk me out of it.
I live in HK - the protests were not violently crushed, not by any reasonable definition of the word 'violent', so that's a lie in your post.
wow. so they were gently crushed then. okay
"Mostly peaceful crushing"
Though I would also say that being threatened with 20 years in prison for incorporating wrongthink into a meme is rather violent crushing HK is now subject to.
Yeh but the first few months of the virus China was having a “Chernobyl moment”. Then that rhetoric all but died off as the west clearly did much much worse. The US is way up there on deaths per million, which is after all the main metric we should be concerned about.
On the Ukraine the Russians pretty much handed that victory to the west.
This is a good example of US cope. Firstly you argue against the lockdowns but China managed an initial lockdown so effectively that it could open up, so much so that it’s economy came back into growth in 2020 which was pretty much unique in the covid affected world. So if lockdowns were bad policy then the west did it worse, and the US amongst the worst.
And of course deaths per millions is the way of evaluating policy of combatting an epidemic.
I’m going to go with the official count of deaths per million from the WHO and the US is 18th worst in the world, worse than most African and low to medium income countries, about 3.5 times the world average. It’s also about 1000 times worse than China. I’m dubious that there’s that level of undercounting there.
I also find the “come back when you have…” comments to be far from instructive. Particularly when you didn’t even do your own workings out correctly. To be polite.
The US is a younger nation than most of the west - at 38 years compared to Germany’s 45 for instance. Yet it did much worse.
China has a slightly higher median age than the US. Come back when you’re able to do a simple google search. As for obesity, the US is indeed a grossly obese nation, is that enough to explain a discrepancy of 100,000%.
Locking down until elimination, then waiting for vaccines, was a good plan in early 2020 (it would have been an even better plan in late 2019, then the virus might never have escaped Wuhan in the first place).
But in 2022 it's a terrible plan. For starters, everyone is vaccinated so the threat is fairly low. Secondly, we have omicron, so eradication is either completely impossible or at least many times more expensive than it was with original-recipe Wuhan strain. And thirdly, the virus is endemic in the rest of the world so covid zero requires permanently closed borders plus regular lockdowns every time there's a quarantine leak. I guess the second point is the most important though, because if something is impossible then the cost-benefit questions don't matter.
If there's a lesson here it's that democracies and dictatorships screw up in different ways. When a democracy screws up, it's because they failed to commit to a single plan of action and hence failed to execute. When a dictatorship screws up, though, it's because they committed to the wrong plan of action and dictatorships have no safety release valve, no way of correcting themselves when they commit to the wrong course of action. So it's no coincidence that while democracies fuck up in many little ways all the time, to fuck up in a really _big_ way (like Hitler or Mao or Pol Pot or more recently Putin and Xi) you have to be a dictatorship.
>Russians pretty much handed that victory to the west.
Russia was already defeated, in the Cold War most recently. The separation of Ukraine was probably the most humiliating part of that, and the West of course continued to fuel anti-Russian sentiments there non-stop. So, the choice was to continue being humiliated quietly, or to punish Ukraine for its impertinence, whatever the cost.
The only people fueling anti-Russian sentiments are the Russians themselves with their general conduct
Is it better to stay silent and have people suspect that you're a fool, or speak up and confirm it without a doubt? Russia is far more humiliated now than they were before
Nah, those who buy into that narrative don't think so. They see it as Russia finally claiming its rightful place on the world stage and facing the open full-strength opposition of the American hegemony as the result, and having some minor inconveniences and setbacks due to that is to be expected.
Here's one attempt I saw:
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-if-xi-jinping-just-isnt-that?s=r
The zero Covid policy is looking like a disaster recently, much more so than when the above was written. And they seem to be stuck with it for reasons inherent to their system of government (inability to reverse course once leadership has chosen a direction).
Also of note is that post's description of Chinese foreign policy blunders, which you can contrast with what seems so far to be a clear US foreign policy success in marshalling the Western response to the Ukraine invasion. To the extent China's (assertive, nationalistic) approach to "focusing on long term primacy" has alienated other countries, it may have been counterproductive.
China, like most authoritarian regimes, has greater capacity to "get things done" because it has greater capacity to ignore consent and costs. The advantage of democracy is that all that consultation means what does get done is more likely to be useful. For example, China's Zero Covid or One Belt, One Road or national railways certainly looks impressive to people who wish for a heavy handed government intervention. But they built a lot of trains that are losing money and made a lot of dubious investments and they have definitely killed people and damaged the economy with the lockdowns.
Also, the Chinese government operates on the initiative of individual or local cadres with widely varying results. There's also a lot of internal tension the system generates. And if all that doesn't convince you they're about to undergo pretty severe population decline. By 2100 they're supposed to have less than a billion people. The US population is supposed to double in that time.
The US will only double in population with significant immigration. In fact all of that population increase has to be from immigration as the US also has a demographic crisis.
(Demographic crises are apparently something that only the other guy can have).
The US population is growing year over year and looks set to continue growing into the future. The Chinese population does not. In part because of differential immigration policies and in part because of the One Child policy and its after effects. So no, the US doesn't have a demographic crisis and China does.
The US could have a demographic crisis like China's. We could, for example, limit the number of children women have and cut off immigration. But we haven't done that so we aren't.
If you want to argue immigration has other negative effects that's still an entirely different problem than a population that is set to decline overall.
that’s just a restatement of the original position and doesn’t really refute my point about US demographics in the absence of immigration. European demographics are even worse. Right now the US has an annual fertility rate which if it continues isn’t enough to replace the population. Populations can increase in these circumstances for a while if life expectancy increases, or because of previous population momentum. In general though the population will eventually decline as these factors decrease, in the absence of immigration.
Yes, it is just a restatement. I was hoping you'd notice that we are agreeing that the US is not experiencing a demographic decline (as you yourself have just restated). Yet for some reason you say it is.
To be clear, the US population is set to expand and China's is set to contract so China has challenges the US will not face. If you want to separately discuss immigration or its effects then you can. But it's irrelevant to the point that the US population will grow and the Chinese population will shrink.
And the US has challenges that China won’t face, including integrating immigrants - something that becomes harder over time. I’m not agreeing that chinas population will fall dramatically by the way, or that the population of the US will continue to increase. The present TFR of China looks like it was covid related.
In any case immigration doesn’t necessarily increase GDP per capita, nor does a declining population halt GDP per capita increases.
This seems to be a cope in the US, right now.
Many countries in Europe seem to acknowledge their difficult demographic future. Not sure that it's always the other guy?
Also, the US is really, really good at interesting immigrants and there are many people around the world who would like to migrate to the US. Why shouldn't the US play to tar strength?
In general theres no discussion about demographics in Europe outside the internet, or parties considered far right.
I think that China used to be a lot more high-functioning before Xi Jinping's pivot to authoritarianism. At the same time, everything you say about the US government is accurate; it's completely dysfunctional, and likely broken far beyound repair. As the result, the current decline of the global power of the US (cultural/political/technological/economic) is irreversible, and will likely accelerate; but it's not 100% clear who will step in to fill that gap. China is still the best candidate, but if they stay their current course, they may end up destroying their own power base before they can solidify their grip on the world.
The US private sector is still the envy of the world.
The operative term here is "still". China's manufacturing sector is the industry standard; if you want to build something, "made in China" is pretty much your only option (plus or minus government contracts). Meanwhile, China is making major investments (and already reaping tangible gains) into AI and genetic research. China is also pretty much the only remaining nation with a viable space exploration program; the US has a thriving commercial space industry, but it's mostly focused on launching commercial satellites (and/or tourists) into low Earth orbit. The US does still have an edge in R&D, but the pipelines are running dry, due to dysfunctional schools and a restrictive IP regime. Meanwhile, the US entertainment industry is increasingly focused on sales in China these days. Overall, perhaps we can coast on inertia for some time, but the engine is dead.
It is really difficult to overestimate just how weird China's post-Omicron COVID response is right now, and I have absolutely revised down my opinion of China's competence as a result of it.
Like, in the main sense (and across the whole pandemic) it is of course a big success relative to America's—fewer people died! But in the moment, here in 2022, they have learned seemingly nothing at all from the rest of the world's successes and failures. Not just in the obvious ways, like "their vaccines are worse than ours and they don't have anything like Paxlovid," but "they're using their formidable state capacity to spray down streets with disinfectants instead of forcing old people to get vaccinated."
Theoretically a country with essentially unlimited authority over its populace plus two years of global experience fighting this disease should be in a position to succeed gracefully and easily. But they aren't doing that, and in attempting to keep Zero COVID going indefinitely in the face of much more transmissible variants they're basically committing to closing their borders indefinitely.
You can come up with reasons for that related to authoritarianism ("this is an excuse to do what they'd like to do anyway") or incompetence ("they literally haven't read the literature about who's most vulnerable and where transmission happens, or they have and think they must be right because they're China") but neither one paints the picture of an unstoppable geopolitical foe.
Just to put my cards on the table, my imagined Tool-Assisted Omicron Speedrun version of China—with the ability to lock everyone up in their apartments and send people in Hazmat suits out for groceries + up-to-date knowledge of COVID prevention and safety—would have required every senior citizen to get vaccinated and boosted, stockpiled antivirals and antibodies to mandate for anybody who tests positive, and pushed its economic advantages over the rest of the world by going back to normal faster than its competitors.
That would be much easier work, and much better for nearly everyone, but they're basically doing the opposite—focusing on the suppression of the virus in a way that is going to cause a bunch of problems for their industries and obviously is not very pleasant to live through either. (And it's wrong, too! The strange focus on outdoor transmission and implacable urge to herd people who are testing and quarantining into big indoor spaces suggest they know less about COVID now than Japan was able to communicate to its citizens in February 2020.)
I think it's hard to see 2022 to date as anything but a massive W for "The Free World" writ large. Don't get me wrong, I hate living in today's American political environment. But the alternatives are looking even worse! Russia swan-dived onto a landmine for no reason—simultaneously revitalizing "Western" identity/militaries/political organizations and demonstrating that basically no Western European country should be afraid of its conventional war machine—and China has decided for reasons that are totally opaque to me to shut down its economy and ensure that the roads are free of COVID.
Meanwhile, I get to drive to McDonalds whenever I want without supervision, and I can bitch about our stupid government, and if—despite the effective American vaccines I participated in a massive and transparent clinical trial for—I were to get COVID, I would just take the free cure that we invented for it in 18 months. U S A!
There's plenty of alternatives to the US that don't look worse.
I quite enjoy my time in Singapore for example. But there's also South Korea, Switzerland, Denmark, Estonia, the Czech Republic etc. Surely there's one that would suit you, if you dislike the US?
What does that have to do with someone's decisions on where to live?
(Slightly off-topic: I think Europe could get their own security umbrella, if they needed to. It's just cheaper to pay homage to the Americans. They aren't bad overlords all things considered.)
It might be that America’s burden of defending the free world is one cause of its toxic political environment. I’m not sure I believe that, and it may not be what Dan Moore thinks, but I can imagine the outline of an argument to that effect.
I actually think that's great advice for anybody able to put it into practice, since (from my limited experience) I think it's way easier to bear stupid or depressing cultural events from a place you're not "from," but ultimately I'm stuck here—I hate what America is frequently like, but I like being where I'm from, if that makes sense. Even within the US I feel a connection to my home state that's different from the one where I've lived for ~10 years now.
Friends have suggested to me that even China's theoretically unlimited authority over its populace runs into a few speed bumps when going up against culture. In this case, mandating senior citizens to get vaccinated necessarily implies the possibility of having to use violent force on the recalcitrant- which in filial, elder-loving Chinese society is as close to verboten as you can get.
Totalitarian as the CCP/CPC is, they derive a nonzero amount of legitimacy from public trust, which would nosedive if they were to be seen dragging poor Grandma through the streets to be jabbed with a needle. Which could partially explain why the current vaccination push features incentives (free food! coupons! outright cash!) so heavily.
Vaccinating the elderly is difficult everywhere (think Western antivaxxers too!). Taiwan (similar culture but a democracy) also struggled not just with vaxxing but with getting the elderly to follow basic covid precautions.
However, Taiwan has opened up (veeery recently). Granted I think they've also looked at their recent mortality rates (10k ish daily cases, currently single digit deaths but that's lagging and will go up). They also didn't have a political agenda that prevented them from using foreign vaccines, which does help here.
I would say the heavy handed state control of media helped stem the spread of vaccine misinfo somewhat. Not completely, but vaccine misinfo was just so horribly managed in English language media. Why was a major news outlet allowed to publish content directly counterproductive to health efforts?
Because freedom of speech is important? In 2020, the worst covid misinformation was coming form official government sources, and our ability to get accurate information depended on the free speech of internet bloggers.
Aside from the US there is still Europe, there is still India (albeit one wonders about its democracy), and there is still Japan-Korea-Taiwan (and Australasia).
The US is not the sole bastion of democracy and not the only capable opponent of China in the world. If the US fails the rest of the world will carry on.
The big questions are "who's going to take up the US's military spending?" and "what's going to happen to the NPT?". The EU needs a unified military with compulsory spending before it can even begin to take up the US's mantle (this applies to Free Asia to a lesser extent because there are fewer countries), and Japan/(S)Korea/Taiwan/Australia have all ratified the NPT which means no deterrence.
Not sure they actually need it?
It's relatively easy for Europe to outspend Russia's military. That's the most important thing. And they seem to be willing to unite against Russia.
I don't think Europe would like outspend China, but it's also not clear that they need to?
Dissuading the PRC from going a-conquering in Asia requires either a huge conventional military, a huge pile of nukes under the control of someone who'd be toast anyway if Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo fell, or both.
Maybe, I don't know. But Europe doesn't need to play world police in that part of the globe.
The obvious candidates there are various combinations of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia. The problem being that all four of those put together have less than half the GDP of China and maybe 15% of the population. Adding in Vietnam and the Philippines as potential/likely allies helps some, especially in terms of population, but not enough to come anywhere near parity in conventional military potential without being able to call on the US (or at the very least Britain and France) to take center stage in any war with China.
A huge pile of nukes is more doable. Japan and Australia especially are in good technological shape to go nuclear in short order if so inclined (Japan has an extensive civilian power industry, and Australia has enormous uranium ore reserves and manufactures uranium enrichment equipment for export). Both have strong domestic political reasons not to build a nuclear arsenal, but that could change quickly if the US nuclear umbrella no longer seemed sufficient. Japan in particular seems to have started seriously considering developing an independent nuclear deterrent in response to House Kim's Family Atomics (i.e. the North Korean nuclear arsenal).
The big issue with the nuclear option is that it's difficult for nation X to provide a credible deterrent against nuclear nation Y invading non-nuclear nation Z with nukes (due to this resulting in X getting nuked back, hence my note about "someone who'd be toast anyway"), although given the strategic realities of the First Island Chain* one could see Japanese or Korean nukes credibly deterring an invasion of Taiwan. Not Australian, though.
*The big issue here, for anyone who doesn't know, is that Japan and Korea are fully dependent on international seagoing trade (they are not self-sufficient in food or minerals, and have no land borders except with China itself and NK's little sliver with Russia), and without the First Island Chain (Philippines/Taiwan/Ryukyus/Japan) the PLAN would immediately be in a position to threaten blockade of Korea and Japan. Australia doesn't have this dire prospect, as it's much further from China and is self-sufficient in the essentials, so it would have a much harder time threatening nuclear war over Taiwan.
> Dissuading the PRC from going a-conquering in Asia
What's your evidence for this hysterical assertion? Sounds like paranoia mixed with ignorance.
My evidence for Beijing intending to conquer Taiwan is the Anti-Secession Law that literally legally requires them to do it if peaceful reunification can't be achieved (spoiler alert: it can't, at least while the PRC is in substantially its current form). Calling *that* hysterical is nonsense.
My evidence for Beijing intending to conquer the Ryukyus is that they've recently started the groundwork to dispute them (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/world/asia/sentiment-builds-in-china-to-press-claim-for-okinawa.html).
Korea's further off, I'll agree, but Korea was a Chinese tributary until the Century of Humiliation (which the PRC is founded on ending) and Chinese official history now teaches that Goryeo was a Chinese state. I wouldn't say they'd invade out of the blue, but if Taiwan falls I could very easily see an attempt to bring South Korea back into puppet status with the threat of blockade.
That's enough to qualify as "a-conquering" for me.
(None of this except maybe Taiwan is happening while Uncle Sam's significantly in the picture, but this comment chain is about what happens if he falls ill.)
What do you wonder about India's democracy which is not a 'No true Scotsman' fallacy? There is no doubt that India IS a democracy. It functions about as well as any other democracy (which is to say, not very well, but many people seem to regard this as better than the other options available).
I fully agree that India is a democracy right now, but so is South Africa. They are likely to be on the same path for a while, one where only one party is capable of winning for decades in a row. When something like that happens is no longer really a successful democracy.
But that's not really what I was getting at, it's more that I wonder if India will remain whole in a few decades; I think a breakup of India is a real possibility. The other possibility is that India becomes more authoritarian in order to try to hold the country together and, sadly, this is probably the more likely outcome.
If you think about it, I hope you'll find that's a no true Scotsman and slippery slope fallacy rolled into one post.
Ugh, fine.
A dysfunctional democracy is one where the ruling party doesn't change for 20 years.
The change from empires to nations began during World War I, ever since then empires have been breaking up. India is of empire size and is very likely to break up or at least break down. There are a lot of potential cleavage points: the Muslim minority, the Dravidians, state borders even. We are near the end of a long process with India as one of the final empires; this isn't the start of a slippery slope it's nearing the end.
In India, the ruling party didn't change for the first 40 or so years of independence, and has rarely not changed since then. I assume you think it is now a more functional democracy than it was before?
There is a reason that many of the wealthiest and most powerful governments in the world are democracies now, and it's not entirely coincidence. The reason is that democracies (even sclerotic ones) have the ability to change course when things get bad enough. In an authoritarian regime you can have periods of high competence, but you can also have Mao. And when you get Mao, you just have to wait for him to die.
I must not be understanding what the person is claiming, who is alleging that catch-up growth isn't a thing. Let's look back at the chart they posted: https://ourworldindata.org/economic-growth-since-1950
First, I don't see the specific trendline that they're claiming has slope greater than 1. It's true that the bottom envelope of the data points has slope greater than 1, but the top envelope of the data points has slope *far* less than 1. The biggest thing that chart clearly shows is that low-income countries have much greater *variance* in their growth, while high-income countries have much lower variance in growth. It's true that the only countries that had negative growth are countries whose GDP per capita in 1950 was below $5,000. But it's also true that the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 10x were below this line, and the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 15x were even lower, and the only countries whose growth was above a factor of 30x were even lower.
What you'd want to properly let your eyes see the relevant trends is a graph where the x-axis is GDP per capita in 1950, but the y-axis is growth rate from 1950-2016, rather than the y-axis being GDP per capita in 2016.
In any case, looking at the chart, it seems that the catch-up growth idea is very strongly supported for countries that were above $5,000 GDP per capita in 1950. The top 5 countries are all below the world average (other than Luxembourg, which barely beats it), and the next 20 or so countries are almost all above the world average, with the ones that nearly double world growth being towards the bottom of that range. The only members of that top 20 that grew slower than the top 5 are South Africa, Lebanon, USSR, Uruguay, and Argentina. Three of those countries had famously dysfunctional regime changes in that period, and Argentina had some famously bad financial crises, though Uruguay is hard to explain.
It's very hard for me to tell if there is much support or counter-evidence for the catch-up growth thesis for the countries that started poorer. I would dismiss most of the actually shrinking low-income countries as exceptions due to war, though the opponent of the catch-up growth thesis would presumably claim that these conflicts are in fact endogenous to the poverty.
It seems very plausible to me, given just this chart, that by "default", lower-income countries have higher growth rates than higher-income countries, but that low income countries have a possibility of awful conflict and war that leaves them even worse off which high income countries don't have.
Agreed that Jonathan's point isn't actually a refutation of Scott's. Jonathan seems to be saying that because rich countries generally grow faster than poor countries in any given year, it's implied that as a country gets richer, its growth will accelerate, but that's not what his data is saying. His data is just saying it's rare to have cases in which there even is rapid growth of a poor country.
So Jonathan is right that China is something of an exception in that it escaped the poverty trap, but of those that do jump from low to middle income status, China is actually following the same trajectory (and broad economic policies) as Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc, which is the rapid industrialization followed by leveling out at "modern" technological levels that Scott described.
Except it doesn't even seem all that rare for there to be rapid growth of a poor country. When I look at the countries below $1,000 on the 1950 axis, four of them (Romania, China, Mongolia, Equatorial Guinea) outperformed the world by a factor of 3 or 4. Only three or four of them (Liberia, Burundi, Malawi, and maybe Madagascar) underperformed the world by a factor of 3 or 4.
Catch-up growth is a thing that is unlocked when (and to the proportion that) the cause of the lag is eliminated. In 3/4 countries listed that cause of lag was clearly and obviously its economic system. The other one is Equatorial Guinea which found oil and probably shouldn't be included in any discussion of catch-up.
Catch-up is much more achievable when you have similar nearby countries that are far more developed (after discounting natural resource windfalls). It hints that there's big and obvious source of lag as well as a ready model for development. It seems highly plausible that Ukraine should be able to catch up to Poland or at least Belarus, or that North Korea should be able to catch up to South Korea, with some very obvious reforms. It's far more of a stretch to say that Burundi should be able to catch up to Canada.
And over time as reforms are achieved and more countries catch up, there's less low-hanging fruit, more Burundis in the mix and fewer South Koreas, and thus fewer examples of catch-up underway.
The visual correlation seems to be driven entirely by the cluster of poor, low-to-negative growth African countries at the bottom of the chart. I can't get a good sense of what it would look like if restricted to e.g. only Asian countries or only European countries. Possibly the correlation would reverse?
So I think unique dysfunction in central Africa is a hypothesis that would explain the observations more simply.
>What you'd want to properly let your eyes see the relevant trends is a graph where the x-axis is GDP per capita in 1950, but the y-axis is growth rate from 1950-2016, rather than the y-axis being GDP per capita in 2016.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-gdp-growth-rate-1960-2011-versus-gdp-per-capita-in-1960
Is that roughly what you were looking for? The trend looks reversed there.
Yes, exactly. This graph seems to suggest that catch-up growth is in fact a thing.
>It seems very plausible to me, given just this chart, that by "default", lower-income countries have higher growth rates than higher-income countries, but that low income countries have a possibility of awful conflict and war that leaves them even worse off which high income countries don't have.
I decided to do a quick check, using Gapminder ( https://www.gapminder.org/data/documentation/gd001/ ) and a spreadsheet to compare growth rates over various subperiods, stopping in 2019 since that's when their source data stops.
1900 - https://i.imgur.com/BKzkydk.png
1928 - https://i.imgur.com/OnSAA2u.png
1950 - https://i.imgur.com/tYMBh2N.png
1960 - https://i.imgur.com/pPZu67X.png
1992 - https://i.imgur.com/2XUx3xO.png
Overall, the trendline was for separation for long time horizons, but flipped towards catchup at some point between 1928 and 1950 (not sure exactly when, cbf to do that). The strength of the trend lines was somewhat exaggerated by microstates, particularly Brunei, which hit a GDP per capita (PPP) that wouldn't be out of place in 2019 back in 1950 (it's the weird outlier in those graphs), but when I cut the microstates out (any country with a pop lower than Bahrain's, which excludes Brunei but keeps in Singapore), the trend (pre-1950 rich-get-richer, post-1950, poor-get-richer) was the same, even if the specific angle was somewhat less exaggerated.
Confidence: not great? Possibly this data is corrupted somehow, but a flip happening sometime between 1928 and 1950 would technically fit with my preexisting knowledge (I know over the 1928-1970 period, catchup was very hard, but there was obviously colonization going on then to fuck it up). On the other hand, I am confident in the "middle income trap" escape list being quite restrained geographically (East Asia, Europe, oil-rich). Possibly there's just enough countries that fit into this category that it overpowers African, South Asian, etc, countries having failed, or possibly it's that a lot of these countries haven't hit the high income threshold just yet - Vietnam's had average >5% GDP per capita (PPP) growth since 1992, but still has a GDP per capita (PPP) of $10.8k, which would still be sub-high income even if it was nominal (its nominal GDP is $3.5k).
Interesting! Just eyeballing the first couple charts, where you have that trendline suggesting separation, it seems plausible that there might be a better fit curve, that is upward sloping at the low end and downward sloping from the middle to the high end. Which I guess suggests the opposite of a "middle income trap". But obviously, I am not a development economist.
The middle income trap kicks in at ~12.5k nominal in modern dollars (these are in 2017 USD, so it'd be about the same), which is ~20% of the modern US GDP per capita (and is inflation adjusted), so keep that in mind. Countries in the "bump" are, mostly, going to be "high income" already, like France or Austria; the "upper middle income" countries with GDP per caps of just under 25% the US's in 1928 would be Lebanon, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Libya, Costa Rica, Syria, Namibia, Palau, and Mexico, for example.
The last few decades have seen catch up growth
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
> Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics.
So that's how you weed out power seekers! You simply have to select people for ideological reasons!
Well, look through Soviet history, for example, and you will see that ideology differences of Party groups strangely happens to coincide with their political interests.
Yes, and looking through Catholic church history the theological doctrines of various popes seem to weirdly correspond to their political interests. This does not mean there weren't a lot of believing Catholics or that "Catholicism" didn't exist. And it's a pretty strong explainer of a lot of pope's actions and also why there's never been a Protestant pope. Politics in general tends to be a combination of the ideological and pragmatic.
Also, I say in the original comment it's a combination of ideology "combined with pragmatic political considerations."
I've noticed a similar effect where dictatorships predict that western leaders will act in a cynical power-maximising way and are repeatedly surprised when they end up working to advance western ideals even when it's costly and not power-maximising. Is it really that hard to believe that the CCP leadership believes in communism for communist reasons, in the same way that western leaders believe in liberalism for liberalist reasons?
The CCP doesn't seem to believe in Communism at all, but something else which is sometimes called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" and which amounts to "take all the stuff from Communism that lets us keep power and get rid of the rest".
"The CCP doesn't seem to believe in Communism at all, but something else which is sometimes called 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'"
Granted
"which amounts to 'take all the stuff from Communism that lets us keep power and get rid of the rest'."
What makes you believe this? Why can't "socialism with Chinese characteristics" be its own genuine ideology with real believers, instead of an excuse to maximize power?
It'd sure be nice if politicians who believe in liberalism for liberalist reasons were on my ballot for the upcoming elections.... (I mean, they are, but only minor parties with negligible chance of winning)
Just fyi "oikonomia" is also the Orthodox term for latitude given to priests to bend the rules in response to local conditions. One example might be allowing Americans to break the Nativity Fast on Thanksgiving because it's a God-centered holiday and therefore to be approved of.
The first thing I thought of was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Rites_controversy (involving the Catholic Church, not the Eastern Orthodox Church). That was a while ago.
In this era, do Eastern Orthodox priests have more such latitude/discretion than Catholic priests?
I honestly don't know what we would do with such a controversy. A quick browse of Orthodox Wiki suggests that we're fine with the title "Shangdi" for God, and I imagine we'd accept "Heaven" as an acceptable term, since in general we don't split hairs the same way. Ancestor veneration is certainly out as a part of worship, and whether it is allowable at all would depend on some very fine linguistic combing of what is meant by "veneration." It appears (still going by Orthodox Wiki) that we were tolerated even after Catholics were booted, so either we had better political connections or we were better at being conciliatory.
As for today, we had no Vatican II so our practices are more regular and old fashioned, though we never AFAIK had any objection to worship in the local tongue. Catholics seem to allow a prodigious amount of latitude in some particulars (like that weird mass with statues of the Peruvian deity Pachamama) while being very strict in others (Francis seems to have all but banned the traditional Latin mass because it's associated with people who hate his guts). As we're decentralized, it's something of an apples-and-oranges question. One national church might allow a local custom, but other churches might or might not respect that indulgence as legit.
"Economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier."
I think this needs to be looked at more carefully. Which I think I'll do and report back in an open thread. The data is here: https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/releases/maddison-project-database-2018?lang=en
(1) Should we weight by population? I haven't done the calculation, but if I look at only China, India, USA, & Indonesia (the 4 biggest countries), the slope does look less than one.
(2) This is looking at the total change between 1950 and 2016, so the data is integrated in some sense. If you look at every year for every country, a different picture might emerge.
(3) I think that the biggest conclusion will be that high income countries have lower variance than low income countries. They're likely to have good institutions (or they wouldn't be high income), so they're unlikely to do too poorly. They're at the technological frontier, so they're unlikely to grow too quickly. Lower income countries with good institutions can grow much more rapidly, so catch up growth is a real phenomenon. Lower income countries are more likely to have terrible institutions than high income countries, so they also might perform worse.
The last few decades have seen catch up growth
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
> And though he is still alive, Jiang certainly couldn't just march back into power the way Deng could have.
He certainly can't *just* march back into power, but I do think he's trying to retake power. There have been some fires, plane crashes, and other incidents which are consistent with someone trying to publicly humiliate Xi in advance of his reelection this Fall. Jiang, who certainly consolidated control over the secret police during his tenure and still has a lot of connections if not outright control there, is the logical culprit. Plus, Jiang's power base is in Shanghai. The "bungled" early lockdown there followed by the much stricter one currently in place is consistent with a calculated ploy to create a crisis in Shanghai which Xi can use as an excuse to bring in military and civil authorities to crack down on Jiang's supporters. Clearly this has gotten out of hand and, if this theory is true, Xi created a much bigger problem than he was trying to solve, since now he has the failure of COVID Zero and a potential civil revolt in Shanghai to deal with, but that's consistent with the sorts of mistakes Chinese autocrats have historically made.
That’s interesting. I had heard a similar theory recently, albeit without the details you provide that make it more compelling.
Jonathan Ray isn't quite wrong, but he's also not really correct. It's true that catch up growth isn't a hard law of economics (pretty much nothing is lol). Just because you're currently poor (meaning low GDP/cap) does not mean that you will grow quickly. There are lots of countries that used to be poor, and still are. However, the idea of catch-up growth is useful as a prediction of the limits of potential growth. That is, being poor doesn't mean you *will* grow fast -- but the cap on how fast you can grow will be higher than a more developed economy. Starting off poor is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high growth. If you manage your economy poorly, all bets are off -- but an ideally-managed developed economy can't grow nearly as fast as an ideally-managed developing economy. The US today, for example, could never achieve the growth of Japan in the 70s/80s.
Source: I'm currently taking a course on economic growth and development from a prominent scholar in the field at a top-10 school.
To be clear, the cap isn't on growth, but on the rate of growth. We're still growing, but slowly -- I think around 2-3%/year.
With regards to "impressively rapid growth" in the 18th/19th centuries, what are you referring to? I don't see that https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-gdp-in-the-uk-since-1270?yScale=log -- it looks to me that the UK has been growing remarkably steadily since ~1500, with an increased rate around 1900, and a couple dips for obvious reasons.
Yes. Bu modern standards growth during the industrial revolution was nothing to write home about.
It was just such a shock compared to thousands of years of almost no sustained growth per capita around the world.
maybe "growth" just starts to take on other forms that are harder to measure? past a certain point of development, the excess gets funneled off into more qualitative improvements that are harder for us to recognize presently? like, was "growth" (or at least gdp) refined and reified enough in the minds of enough smart people in these 18th/19th century countries for them to look around and all agree "yeah, this is great, everything's just peachy, full steam ahead", or were they too overcome with latent anxiety over some other supposed bellwether that was stagnating back then?
The last few decades have seen catch up growth
https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
> oikos (household, family, private area as opposed to public)
Gotta love how in "ecology" it ended up meaning pretty much the complete opposite of that.
Yes, because the word was invented by a 19th century German. The idea was that ecology meant the affairs of the specific species and its relation to the outside environment. Evolution was seen as creating a sort of "home" for the species, both in the features of the species and its natural environment. This species then interacted with other ecologies.
As with many terms of the time it's really a German idea/term that's being rendered in a Classical language because 19th century Germans were HUGELY pretentious.
Wait, re: “Economies usually have a period of impressive catch-up growth as they develop, then stagnate as they near the technological frontier.”
I'm not sure the “fact check” / update is correct. I think what you originally said/thought is true for developing countries. See the last chart in this Paul Romer blog post: https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/
Or, an updated version of the same: Fig. 3 in this paper: https://paulromer.net/speeding-up-and-missed-opportunities-evidence/JonesRomer2010.pdf
What those charts show is that the wealthiest countries grow at a moderate/average rate, while the poorest countries have a wide spectrum of growth rates. Editorializing a bit: if they keep doing the things that made them poor in the first place, they grow slowly or shrink; if they get in gear and grow, they can grow faster than any wealthy country; and they can do anything in between.
On the Our World in Data chart that Jonathan Ray linked to, this corresponds to the fact that there's nothing above the top of the chart. E.g., the only countries that grew 30x from 1950–2016 are those that started from at most ~$2500/person, the only ones that grew 10x started from at most ~$8000, etc. (And also that there's nothing in the upper right corner: countries that started wealthy but grew slowly, instead of moderately.)
I called this the Anna Karenina principle of economic growth: “Wealthy countries are all alike (in growth rate); every poor country has its own growth rate.”
See also this Twitter thread where Nathaniel Bechhofer claims that, in recent years, the triangle has tilted, so that on average, “low and lower-middle income countries are doing better than high-middle and high income countries as measured by growth rates”: https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1512211228248064002
You are right - I have also commented on this. See this discussion - https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
The scalia quote is from a speech that's on youtube. I highly recommend giving it a watch: it's both hilarious and insightful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0
"I have a good example - if you’re in Japan or Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal. Even with no car to be seen for miles. In the US most folks would just jaywalk."
It always tickles me that jaywalking is a thing in the land of the free.
I don't think this is actually true for Germany. There is some social pressure to avoid jaywalking when there are young kids observing who might learn the wrong lesson from it, which I think is reasonable.
I was actually running a red light on a bike lane after dark a few years back, not noticing that the car waiting next to me on the intersection was a police cruiser. Had to pay a fine, 40 Euro or something. I certainly learned my lesson: now I push my bike over an intersection instead of riding it, which means I am a pedestrian and the fine would be much lower.
Of course, in a car (a.k.a. a ton-heavy death machine), considerations are quite different. While many drivers will eventually cross with a 'kirschgelbes Licht' (cherry-yellow light) because they overestimated the yellow signal duration, almost nobody will run a red light even at 3am. (Mostly, municipalities are intelligent about figuring out at which times the roads are mostly empty and turn off the traffic signals during the night.)
They have fines for jaywalking in Germany?
There are places where you don't have a fine for jaywalking? ;)
Not totally serious question
Does it? I've never interpreted "The land of the free" as meaning "no rules exist, not even road rules"
It does!
I too have never interpreted "The land of the free" as meaning "no rules exist, not even road rules". But you'd think the 'land of the free' might manage without one about how you cross the road.
"From my perspective, this elimination of cash bribery has been a massive benefit. Whatever the intentions behind it, it's made life much better."
I would like to hear more about how this was achieved. Low level bribery (just to get someone to do their job) was just a fact of life when I was in China a couple of decades ago. How was the cultural change enabled?
I'm not enough of an insider in anything to really know the answer to this. Things I have seen and heard about include:
Some quite serious attacks on displays of conspicuous consumption. At the end of the year, if you were part of a patronage chain (I'm getting this from my father-in-law, who is in some district-level patronage groups), you would take your patrons for fancy meals, and maybe give them some cash; and your clients would take you for fancy meals. People within the Party were told that they could not be seen doing this, and real cases of punishment occurred when people were caught engaging in overly lavish banquets. Things like being demoted or kicked out of the Party. Big national level cases of this were publicised nationally. This didn't exactly make conspicuous consumption go away, but it feels to me like there has been a change in the last ten years. A decade ago I heard a lot of very tedious discussion of the price of food and alcohol (because the whole point of those banquets was not to enjoy them, but to demonstrate the transmission of value). I hear that less now. (But this is complete anecdote, so don't give it any more credence than it's worth. My circle of acquaintance has changed, we gotten older... I have no idea how representative my experience is.)
Second was institutional punishments for accepting cash bribes. Again, real cases were brought, a few people got canned.
Third, wages for state employees rose a lot. I know some teachers, and their wages have gone up a lot - moving with the rest of the economy around them. Like, 15 years ago, teachers couldn't really buy handbags on their wages, and now they can. For some, it's quite lucrative; for most, it's a living wage. (If I have time in the next couple of days, I'll try to find some actual numbers.)
I don't know which of these factors has been important, if any, but they are the ones that seem vaguely relevant to me.
Erusian's first point is utterly naive. China is communist in name only.
So your position is that Xi Jing Ping, a rather important guy whose time is valuable, spent tens of thousands of hours writing Marxist theory after being educated in Marxism and being born to Marxist parents and then ordered a hundred million people to spend hours and hours every week reading, thinking about, and expounding on Marxism is not in any way Marxist?
What this usually boils down to is the writer thinking their personal definition of Communism is the one, true definition and everyone who disagrees with them is secretly lying about being a Communist. I think that is strikingly arrogant.
Do you have any evidence that doesn't boil down to "they do X and I think Communism is Y so they're not Communist! No, I haven't read any of their justifications for why X is Communist and I don't know anything about Deng Xiaopeng thought. Why do you ask?"
My prior would be that there is signalling and performative value to compliance with stated ideology, but that actually, it is public choice theory that drives actions within an equilibrium, not ideological positions.
Under what circumstances would you believe an action is genuinely ideological in part or whole?
Actions where sticking to the ideology is easily identifiable as reducing your well-being, prospects, or chances of success in whatever it is that you're otherwise trying to achieve would likely satisfy me as being ideological. Generally speaking my prior would be people who succeed (and thus are typically optimising to succeed) are not also optimising for ideological purity or correctness. It would take significantly stronger evidence than ideological essays (that were likely ghost written by a staff member) to convince me.
While they may have had other writers involved a significant number are speeches, meaning Xi actually traveled to some place in the country and took several hours to prepare and say the words. Also, Xi was a writer and theoretician BEFORE he was a leader and has a very large output. Unlike, say, Putin.
But here's what I don't get about your definition: "chances of success in whatever you're trying to succeed." How do they decide what they're trying to succeed? My argument is not they're ideological idiots. My argument is that they're Communists whose goals are informed by Communist ideology. That Xi, like Deng, got into power in large part because the party believed that he would be likely to succeed at what they, as CCP members, wanted to do. (Plus or minus oligarchal patronage neworks.)
Likewise, ideology is not static. They change in response to external events. And I don't see how, "The Soviet Union fell, we need to re-exaimine some of our assumptions in order to keep the CCP alive and Communist" is different from optimizing along power lines.
Your assumption appears to be that CCP, just because it calls itself communist, is mainly communist and tries to institute and spread communism. My assumption is that it is mainly a collection of people who want power and wealth for themselves and those close to them, and are exploiting whatever means are available to them to perpetuate that. I think the fact that the Chinese economic model now looks nothing at all like socialism/communism, and a lot more like market capitalism implies that my assumption is more correct.
The Chinese Communist Party has 95 million members, by far outweighing every other Communist Party in the world put together.
I think it's fair to say that "Communism" these days means whatever the CCP says it means. Karl Marx might disagree, but he's dead.
I taught English at a high-level university in Wuhan for years, from 2010-2015. I was allowed to teach whatever I wanted, and I did. So did my colleagues. Universities were definitely allowed more leeway up until recently.
Probably the funniest part is when I told my students casually that Vietnam won the war against China in 1979. They protested that China had in fact won, because that's the lie they'd been taught, and I told them it was okay to accept the truth of their defeat because America had lost to Vietnam as well. They thought that was hilarious.
It always seems weird to me to say that America lost to "Vietnam". There wasn't a Vietnam to lose to in those days, there was a North Vietnam (which won) and a South Vietnam (which lost).
The thought is; south Vietnam was basically a post colonial rump; no real there there as it were.
So, it was Vietnam vs. Americans and Collaborators/mercenaries/colonial profiteers.
Not sure how true that is, but it's the maximally cynical take I've seen.
Scott - you may want to hold back your update on the convergence of poor economies to rich ones. There is some debate that the last three decades have been different from the comment you cite - https://www.cgdev.org/blog/everything-you-know-about-cross-country-convergence-now-wrong
".... We simply want to point out that while economists were busy refining the econometric tools for studying divergence, the basic facts about economic growth around the world turned completely upside down a quarter century ago—and the literature doesn’t seem to have noticed.
While the Johnson-Pageorgiou review notes in passing that “[s]ince the early 1990s the pace of growth of income per capita in many developing economies has accelerated to unprecedented levels and is substantially above that in high income countries,” it goes on to perpetuate the pessimistic no-unconditional convergence view, even and especially drawing on literature for the recent past (see emphasized text above). But this view is plain wrong. While unconditional convergence was singularly absent in the past, there has been unconditional convergence, beginning (weakly) around 1990 and emphatically for the last two decades."
“ Germany at 2am and there are pedestrian at an intersection they will dutifully stand there until the they get a walk signal.”
I live in Japan and I see people blowing red lights literally every day, jaywalking, etc. The whole Japanese people are law abiding thing is not as true as people make it out to be.
Where is the original blog post on this? Or was it a comment in one of the open threads?
Responding to Phil H on corruption: I lived in China from 2016-2017 and I did a *lot* of cash bribery, and was advised it was an unavoidable fact of life by all Chinese friends and colleagues.
Perhaps this stamping out happened since then. Or perhaps my large (almost 10 million) but not especially prominent city was well behind on that modernisation. But it seems like a counterpoint worth mentioning.