Political rulers don't say to themselves, "I'll keep my country poor so that I can be wealthy".
Rather, they say, "My nephew broke a contract with another company, and they're suing? I'll just tell the judge to dismiss the case." "Mary is the best person to be in charge of roading but she is not related to me. I'll appoint my good-for-nothing son." "Newspapers are saying bad things about my rule. I'll shut them down." "A sewer system or a safe water supply is not a fitting monument for me. I'll start an airline instead. The banks will lend for it; I'll see to that all right."
It's not high-level, abstract deliberateness. It's a thousand little decisions that undermine and destroy institutions like the rule of law, transparent government, meritocratic bureaucracy, and evidence-based investment.
There are plenty of whites in Eastern and Southern Europe that are still doing this, and every country can find examples if they look back in their history. Heck, I think many are currently accusing either Biden or Trump from engaging in these specific problems, look at the situations with their children and for a start. Meanwhile, Obama was accused of many things, but cronyism wasn't one I remember, and at least not to the extent of the last administrations.
I have no evidence, but my gut feeling is that countries in which there are long-standing traditions of "speaking truth to power", being able to criticise policy decisions without fear of losing your life (and without the ruler fearing for his life or his rule because of the criticism), and of mass public protest, get things that improve the lives of ordinary people.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory attracts me, especially the notion of "power distance": the degree to which people want to have a say in decisions that affect them. Low power distance means being close to decisions; high power distance means doing what those in charge decide for you. The Anglo countries, the Nordics, and northwestern Europe generally, score relatively low for power distance; the Philippines and other similar countries score high. Eastern and southern Europe are middling high.
Power distance is pervasive: it affects interactions with minor authority figures like parents, doctors and your supervisor as well as those in government. Low power distance leads to demands for explanations, which those in charge feel compelled to provide...eventually. Thus transparent government at all levels, and eventually rules-based government at all levels, from the family up, and rules-based peaceful resolution of internal conflicts, which is what I think most people mean when they say "democracy" - orderly, peaceful regime change that is accepted gracefully by the losers, and without reprisal against them by the winners.
Beware single-factor explanations, though. And especially beware things which you want to believe.
"A sewer system or a safe water supply is not a fitting monument for me. I'll start an airline instead."
The first two need constant, unsexy maintenance or they kill people. The second can stagger along on government subsidies for decades (see Air Canada).
It's hard to avoid politicians spending on highly visible stuff at the expense of utterly necessary but invisible (when it's done) maintenance in the First World. In the Third World? Good luck.
Unmaintained planes kill lots of people too. Aeroflot used to be notorious for this. I don't think that maintenance ever crosses the minds of this kind of ruler.
I think you're mixing two definitions of "elites". Taxi-driving immigrants might have been in the top income and/or wealth decile, but they were never elite in the sense it's being used in the review - i.e. political decision makers like dictators, magnates, cabinet members, generals, etc.
I forget the name now, but a former Pakistani general did emigrate to the US and his daughter became a PBS journalist. I looked this up a few months ago when I recognised the surname of this woman (I studied South Asia a lot). So even the very top elites do in fact emigrate because they make the calculation that their offspring will probably be better off in the long run (and that's probably rational in many cases).
There's three breakpoints that make it much more likely an elite leaves their power base.
-Strong/growing potential of being killed or ruined by those in charge
-Strong/growing potential of being overthrown by a different group
-Maximizing the potential extraction from the poor country you are in (that is, you have lots of money but poor institutions in your country mean you live at a low qualify of life unless you move)
In each case, while it made sense to stay as a powerful elite for a while, there was a point where it made more sense to leave.
Oh, lord. If your theories of economic growth don't even try to explain Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Cold War South Korea, or Cold War Taiwan, what the hell good are they?
IDK about early Korea or Taiwan, but Germany and Japan didn't work out so well. I think nations probably fail for lots of reasons, not just one or the other. Listening to Lex Fridman talk with Magatte Wade, I'm totally down with bad institutions being one of many pitfalls.
Both countries grew quite well economically after the war, and the conclusion one can draw is that the destruction of physical capital didn't matter that much because each still contained so many people who'd been economically productive beforehand.
Hmm the OP used imperial Germany and Japan, which I take to mean before WWII. Germany after the war is a pretty good example of why institutions matter.
Imperial Japan would be during WW2 as well. And it would be quite odd to consider Imperial Japan to be a "failure". Pseudoerasmus discusses how they got ahead of other places industrially here https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ Japan's military victories over Europeans were major inspirations for anticolonial movements, and I think their successes on that front are evidence against them being a "failed state" in the way that so many post-colonial countries wound up being. The very high frequency with which post-colonial regimes wound up being "extractive" failed states in Acemoglu's terms should raise questions about what the actual cause of that is. This paper citing Acemoglu https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/63/2/406/5377578?login=false has that finding, but because they explicitly aren't making any comparison of non-colonized countries (like Ethiopia & Thailand), they also fail to question whether colonialism was the actual cause of these countries' outcomes.
Post-war US economic aid confounds our ability to easily assess it, but both Germany and Japan grew significantly after the war as well. I don't know the trajectories they were on before or after, but by the 1950s at least, both were doing well and rapidly improving, despite having most of the industrial base destroyed in the war.
Sure, the Nazis/Emperor were no longer in charge, but for AR's theories that really shouldn't matter either.
The argument isn't that it can't happen, but that it can't be sustained long-term outside a democracy, because the authoritarians in power are always ready to ditch growth in order to maintain control.
China is actually a perfect example - it had a good run, but now the autocrats have cracked down, and China will peak fairly soon, never having overcome the U.S..
The kind of rapid growth China experienced is generally only possible during periods of "catch up" development, where a lagging country sprints towards the global technological frontier. Once at the frontier (which China more or less is now), growth slows to the (low) level of other countries at the frontier.
The slowing was inevitable and entirely unavoidable regardless of policy.
Parts of Shanghai look better than NYC or any other major global city, then just outside of Beijing's last ring road it looks like Afghanistan, so I get confused trying to assess its current state of development.
Similarly a lot of the growth has come from urbanization, which might be cresting, but if you just count the working age population who haven't migrated to the coasts yet you're looking at numbers larger than most other countries' entire populations. Actually the number of Chinese citizens who will migrate to urban areas this year will undoubtedly be larger than the median country's entire population.
I don't much know what to make of this all, just that China is weird and hard to predict. I lean with you that this probably peaks soon, but if I'm wrong it's going to be because I couldn't wrap my head around the scale of the place.
My main point might have gotten lost above, that data about PRC population trends can be misleading. These underscore that point.
Meng and Long note that cities in China are shrinking "in the context of rapid urbanization."
That might be confusing at first glance, what does it mean for cities to shrink during urbanization (prior to 2020)? If you look at the broader work of their Shrinking Cities Research Collective, it's clear they really see economic migration as the major driver here, they would agree with me that people are flooding into Beijing. When they talk about declining populations in the northeast they're not talking about Beijing, but about cities in Heilongjiang, like for example the Yichun case study:
My main point was that there are unique complexities to data in China that make it hard to concretely follow trends. One specific such oddity is the hukou system, which undermines official locality population statistics. Many of the people who live and work on the coasts aren't technically residents there, which just messes with all the numbers.
Meng and Long's research has pointed out another way stats in the PRC are confusing, which is that politicians frequently shift the boundaries of administrative districts, sometimes to intentionally alter local population statistics to make themselves look progrowth, sometimes to limit their responsibility for struggling areas, it's a very noisy effect.
Of course, we could easily have increasing urbanization simultaneously with declining urban populations, contradictory as those might seem at first glance. In fact, we are very likely to see that in the coming years as national population decline accelerates and as urban migration continues. I suspect we're still 2-5 years out from that, but, only like 60/40 on that, I could easily be wrong. Maybe zero covid was shock therapy for the economic migration patterns and this has flipped already. There were some dramatic images of economic migrants returning to rural areas on foot last year to avoid quarantines. Frustratingly I cannot find up to the month numbers on Beijing's population that include migrant data that I trust to even gesture at the true picture.
All that said, I appreciate the references, but they bolster rather than detract from my main point above, which was that stats and realities in the PRC are confusing, so drawing strong conclusions from statistics and trendlines there is risky. I lean that China is cresting too, like GP, I'm just urging caution here.
I mean, sure, it's a hypothesis. The problem is, there's no obvious evidence to distinguish the hypotheses "pluralistic institutions are essential to sustained growth" and "The United States was simply in a position to impose its favored political arrangements on Japan and (West) Germany after WWII, and to demand the adoption of the same from South Korea and Taiwan at the end of the Cold War as an implicit condition of continuing to defend them from dangerous neighbors".
The current trouble in China might be evidence for it, sure, but then you'd either have to count Japan's growth collapse since the early 1990s as counter-evidence, or treat Japan as having "extractive" institutions even after WWII. One obvious counter-argument would simply be that the sort of export-oriented industrialization that was behind the Japanese and Chinese "miracles" has inherent limits (for example, in how much the rest of the world can import, based on the size of the world economy). and China hit those limits earlier because it's an order of magnitude larger in population.
I don’t think the idea is that institutions are a panacea - if you’re undergoing demographic collapse (or in another case, get your country raped by Russia) that’s going to hurt the economy no matter what.
While if you average Japan from 1945 to now, that’s still going to look pretty great.
The trouble there is, if someone's going to throw out the Japanese Lost Decade(s) as data point against the importance of pluralistic institutions on "demographic collapse" grounds, they have to explain why they won't let the other side throw out the recent Chinese slowdown as evidence for the importance of those same institutions on the same demographic basis.
Fundamentally, the problem of this book's thesis of "development requires democracy" (as also exists with the once-fashionable argument that "development causes democracy") is that each of the three great struggles of the 20th Century (the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War) ended in a US victory. Thus any evidence for a link between development and democracy might simply be "as a country developed, it either conformed to the expectations of the United States, or was crushed as a threat to the United States."
Well, the US is probably the number one data point in their theory, and they likely see the US's victory (largely due to overwhelming economic advantage) as the ultimate result of the democratization of the US's politics.
Of course, if they're wrong then the US just confounds everything and there's a lot less to see.
Acemoglu's issue is that if he follows his thesis to its conclusion it leads to right wing politics in a way the left wing Acemoglu doesn't want. (This is not speculating on his political allegiances: he's called himself a social democrat.) If you really believe that extractive elites are the issue and then define extraction and elites in a principled way you cannot escape that a lot of his favored policies fall under his definition of extraction. You can see this in Brazil, for example, where his left wing politics blinded him to the ways the Brazilian state was extracting and then not using such extracted resources wisely.
Of course, I find this rather easy to resolve: I do think extraction is bad but it's possible the good done with the money overwhelms the bad. In short we should be suspicious of extraction but sometimes the good it supports really is sufficient to justify it. But in that case he would have to admit that his central thesis (elite extraction bad!) is wrong. He would have to rework everything to be about how extraction occurs (and how much damage it causes) vs what determines what the resources created by extraction are spent on (and how effective that is). Which would be a more interesting and better book in my opinion but wouldn't be Acemoglu.
Yes, the immediate question which popped into my mind was, "what if there were an institution that tried to be inclusive of some people by being extractive from other people?"
That question summarizes the entire project of first world left wing politics. Extract from powerful and dominant groups (at least in their opinion) and use that to create a more inclusive society by transferring the extracted resources to weaker or less dominant groups (at least in their opinion). That this fact escaped Acemoglu is still baffling to me. I think he's quietly drawing the definition of extraction so that it just doesn't include things he likes. But that's a rather damning criticism, isn't it?
Yes. This is reminding me of the book review about medieval Catholic marriage rules. It's fine to embrace the controversial topic or reject it, arguing for it or against it. Even putting up a pro forma cookie-cutter BS argument against it is useful as a signal. But completely ignoring the controversial topic feels like scientific malpractice.
Seems off-topic, but I've been trying to understand what you are referring to, and I'm stumped. Are you talking about Henrich's book ("marriage rules")? What controversial topic did it ignore?
It talked about a millennium-long program to exert control over human mating, and didn't address the question of whether 30ish generations of this had a genetic-level effect on the group of humans it was done to. Generally speaking, even considering the hypothesis can get you called a racist, and I'm only discussing it here because I'm pseudonymous.
Off the top of my head, there seem to be some good reasons that the policy wouldn't have a strong effect. The policy might have been poorly enforced (although that undermines the main thesis). There wasn't any positive direction, just removal of some options, so there's no a priori reason to assume that any sort of evolution would occur. (Or is there? What criterion filled the gap left by kinship?) It's entirely possible that humans have a baked-in instinct to treat kin well, but when that isn't given a strong clan to focus on, it fades away. (Alternatively, the instinct might re-focus onto constructed groups such as religions, states, ideologies, corporations, or internet subcultures, leading in the first three cases to bloodier wars.)
There's a lot of fascinating questions that could be asked and investigated, but mostly no one does, because they'd be accused of being Nazis.
Ah OK, thanks. Well, it seems that you and I are in agreement on this.
But Henrich does address the genetic issue. He has a whole chapter on it. His conclusion is that the changes induced by the Church's policies were entirely cultural, not genetic. How they changed the culture is the entire point of the book. The argument for why it isn't genetic is that the changes promoted urbanization and that cities are "genetic death traps", what he calls "the urban graveyard effect". (There is another rarely discussed argument in the book about the Cistercians, and there again Henrich mentions a "genetic death trap".)
In other words, at least according to him natural selection wouldn't favor WEIRD psychology. It had to be a cultural transmission, not genetic.
He may be right or wrong, but he does not ignore the issue.
It was this review, of a book whose main thesis was that the West's rise to pre-eminence arose from the Catholic Church's marriage rules, which weakened kin networks:
Yes, Acemoglu & Robinson think the problem with post-apartheid South Africa is that the state doesn't redistribute enough ("inequality" is their big complaint) rather than that the state can hardly keep basic utilities running. They also thought on Hugo Chavez' death that he hadn't created a political machine to dominate Venezuela and that this gave hope for a democratic Venezuelan future despite his dictatorship. https://web.archive.org/web/20140809144200/http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2013/3/14/paradoxes-of-chavismo.html
I'm a bit confused by their take that you need a strong central government. Not that I can't see arguments for it, but (at least as presented here) the arguments aren't fleshed out enough to take them seriously.
It seems, based on the rest of their arguments, that a weak central government with strong inclusive institutions would be much better than a strong central government interested in extraction. Which at that point you might as well just drop the strong central government angle and concentrate on the inclusive institutions.
So their argument is that strong government is necessary but not sufficient for a good society? That inclusive institutions will be overrun if not supported by a central government capable of defending them?
If so I'm still uncertain, but can definitely follow the logic and don't have an immediate criticism.
I think they address this exact issue in "The Narrow Corridor". Basically, they argue that balance is needed between "society" and "the state" (not scare quotes, those are their terms) to prevent either from running amok.
I disagreed with some aspects of the book, but I won't get into that here.
I agree that that's the common term for it, and that it's not what AR are referring to. But the question is, **should** they be referring to it? If they take their theory seriously, and fearlessly pursue its implications, why isn't this one of the things the book focuses on?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think a reasonable person would argue that redistribution is the key to economic growth, just in the sense that you need to have assets to redistribute from one group to another, before that becomes relevant. Ie, You have to figure out the the puzzle of how to build and acquire assets in the first place, which is what the authors are addressing. Figuring out what to do with them comes later.
I think the point is that if one “extracts” from the haves to “redistribute” to the have nots one might also kill the golden goose of good institutions and economic growth.
At what point a society is well off enough and institutions are sufficiently robust that “redistribution” doesn’t have the downsides of “extraction” is an interesting question.
To expand on this, when AR use the term extractive institutions, I think what they're referring to (I haven't read the book but I recall listening to a podcast with Acemoglu once upon a time) is something akin to the "natural state" that Douglass North and his coauthors described in Violence and Social Orders. Here's a good summary:
"In order to have a stable order, a society must deal with the potential for organized violence. In a limited-access order, which the authors often refer to as a “natural state,” groups with the potential for organized violence join in a (possibly fragile) coalition to rule the country. This coalition excludes others from key economic activities, reserving rents for its members. Satisfied by these rents, coalition members refrain from violence. To the extent that limited-access orders are corrupt by American standards, such corruption serves an important role in providing its members with an incentive to remain in the coalition.
Reviewing their description of "inclusive", it occurs to me that a rather horrifying example might be the antebellum South, where in the same geographical region resources were extracted from one part of the population and distributed to another. The distribution itself wasn't done with an eye toward growth and development, and focused most of the extracted wealth back on agriculture and aspiring aristocrats, so it's not a very successful example of their concept. But if I try to imagine the Confederacy crossed with some bizarro version of socialism, where slaves were public property and their labor used to fund a UBI for non-slaves... Ugh. It starts to sound like something Ursula K. Le Guin might have written in one of her grimmer phases.
"According to Aristotle, Phaleas ... recommended setting up dowries for the rich to give to the poor in order to level property ownership over time. In addition to equality of land and education, Phaleas proposed that all artisans be publicly owned slaves."
They actually discuss this topic to my memory and explain Soviet and Antebellum South successes with idea re-allocation of resources to more profitable sector gave more than losses on extraction
I don't recall that in the book. But even if they mention it it's a small part that isn't well integrated into the thesis of a 500 page book. And you also have cases that don't involve slavery and executions to keep the suppressed people in line. Of course, any thorough treatment would have to in turn distinguish the times it worked from the times it didn't with a pretty thorough interrogation of what 'worked' means.
For example, a lot of the Soviet Union was kind of cosplaying modernity rather than pursuing actually economically viable industries. I think this actually works fine when it comes to domestic living standards. If you build a bunch of apartment blocks to cosplay that you have urban culture people will move into them and you will actually have an urban culture, if not exactly the one you wanted. But if you cosplay high productivity then you might have steel factories producing real steel but you might not have really raised productivity.
And then there are just bad bets. Like South Carolina betting on agricultural export markets just before a massive crash.
Nah, Acemoglu's thesis (as presented in the review above, I'm not familiar with it first-hand, nor have I been encouraged to by the review in question) seems just outright right-wing to me. I mean, how else would you classify the claim that the institution of private property is the non-extractive end of the scale of more to less expropriation?
Surely, "extraction by elites can be fine, actually" is a much more internally consistent position, but his project is still about defending the very institution that contemporarily facilitates this extraction. I don't think you should make much of the fact he's (superficially and instrumentally) accepting left-coded assumptions to do that.
The examples of E/W Germany and N/S Korea are so seductive! It must, must be the institutions!
But doesn’t work elsewhere, mostly. Poverty, corruption, and violence are the norm; it is the peace and prosperity and the rule of law that are really exceptional and fragile, and we just don’t really know why they happen.
Those examples don't seem to contradict culture/genetics acting partly through institutions if you consider which states actually imposed those institutions(the west/the Soviet Union).
If all European and East Asian countries without a history of communism have those things to a high enough degree to become developed countries then it seems like two factors explain a lot of the variation in those four big things.
Good question. Capital markets allocate capital. You can have weird state-owned enterprises that still rely on capital markets for bond financing, for example.
But it yes, our dialog points to the underlying complexity of these institutions: there’s no absolute property rights, and there are no perfect capital markets, everything has a degree and a measure. This is why simple explanations using prime colors rarely suffice.
CAF isn't common enough to have a wide-ranging effect, at least for most law-abiding citizens. Career criminals who get caught up in it probably have very low feelings of property rights already, even without CAF.
Individual cases of outright government theft are serious but rare. It seems that our institutions are pushing back against it and preventing it from becoming widespread. Or in AR's terminology, while a small group of elites are attempting to set up an extraction system, the larger inclusive institutions are preventing wide-spread adoption and may be reversing what exists now.
If it stays rare, that would indeed be fortunate. I'm having trouble finding good, recent, statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States says "According to government records, Justice department seizures went from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993 and $4.2 billion in 2012." Admittedly small compared to the scale of the economy as a whole.
I do agree that there has been some push back from some of our institutions, which is a help.
Ah, sure, and again points to diminishing returns of simplistic explanations. “Germany” is a young country, its constituent parts had / still have distinct cultures, etc. The “!” In my comment was there sarcastically. Same for N/S Koreas: I bet we could easily split Italy in the same way. Heck, the US for that matter.
The book review commented on this, but it's worth looking in more detail. The difference between the economy in the US and the rest of the world is huge. And the difference between high-wealth countries and low wealth countries is also huge.
Alabama is the US state with the lowest per-capita GDP, at ~$51,000. That is enough to be the same as or higher than any other North American country (just shy of Canada's second place), 5th highest in Asia, almost top 10 in Europe, highest in Africa (over 2.5x the next highest), etc. If you exclude tiny countries with unusual economies (Singapore, Luxembourg), Alabama rates even higher.
Sure, you could split the US or other countries between high income and low income sections, but really the difference between even the poorest parts of rich countries and most of the rest of the world is still very stark.
Thanks for the link! Learned some more about my country. But as I know some: I shrug. Yep, the southern part - Bavaria et al. - was still rural, some areas in the north-west, too (cow-pasture-country). So? "Fundamental differences" between East and West those were not - the T-Rex in the room is two generations of socialist state monopolism. Taking pics every 500 meter in Germany 1989, you would clearly see one country in color and one in dirty-grey. Otoh: 33 years later, one still sees differences (a magnitude smaller, as before 1944). If anything, the East had all the "non-institutional" pre-requisites to succeed as a modern industrialised country. As did the North of Korea. Politicians can do limited good, but unlimited bad.
There is a whole book about "spotting the GDR long before it came to be" and I found it extremely insightful about my own life's experiences, not just in Germany but across Northwestern and Southeastern Europe in general: "The Shortest History of Germany".
It might be criticised for its tendency to paper over too many details, but I think that is exactly its strength: Describing a long arc of history short enough that you can get the larger picture.
> Alert readers may notice a problem here. If you don't know if X causes Y or vice versa, how can you possibly tell if Z causes X and doesn't otherwise affect Y? You can't.
Well, for example, Z may precede X and Y, which excludes reverse causality. In general, Z is a much simpler variable to analyze, and the stories you have to tell in order for Z to affect Y directly get pretty wild. It may not be possible to prove completely that Z is a valid instrument in all cases, but it's probably better than "control for some observables and pray" or "don't even try" which, in many cases, is the alternative.
Maybe the most classic example of IV is the Israeli school experiment, when Israel limited class sizes to 40. A class of 41 would be split up; one of 40 would not. Whether a class has 40 or 41 students effectively random, and shouldn't have any impact on students (or confounders, like neighborhood income) other than through the effect of class size. (Note that we don't look at actual class size, since some 40-student classes will actually be broken up and some won't, which will not be random). While many of AR's instruments are much less clear-cut than this, reducing all of IV to "In reality, what you are mainly hoping for is that the causal effect of Z through X on Y is more intuitively appealing to journal editors and referees than the simple effect of X on Y." is pretty harsh...
> This is why economics is such fun and has such a high reputation among non-economists. Also, the camp-following whores thing.
I think the law was for public schools, is that possible in Israel? In the US that seems like it would require the student to move or enroll in private school.
For those not aware, like me 10 minutes ago, this is a reference to an article James Buchanan (Nobel laureate for public choice theory) wrote in the Wall Street Journal against economists that believed increased minimum wage could lead to increased employment.
> Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teachings of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp–following whores.
I would like economists to advance from proving the scientifically obvious (or becoming camp-following whores) to advancing blatantly superior options
As in say 90% of economists will find a negative effect on hiring and that's nice but there will be a roughly inverse effect on voter choice towards higher minimum wages and therefore, for the love of god, prominently contrast the costs and benefits of that and an earned income tax credit or a reverse payroll tax at low salaries
I’ve actually felt that Why Nations Fail was overly maligned, as its bearish opinion about China seemed more and more wrong as the years went by. Until, fairly swiftly, it didn’t.
Koyama & Rubin’s recent book, How the World Became Rich, tried its best to be fairly balanced across theories, and seemed to mostly be in favour of the Why Nations Fail world view. So it seems to have survived a bit of time now. It doesn’t fit explain everything in world history, and we can definitely critique the vagueness of parts, but the core emphasis on democracy, rule of law, and other “inclusive institutions” seems to be on the right track.
Democracy is only associated with good countries because it only WORKS in good countries. There are countries that try and build democracy and fail, and then their crappiness as countries is blamed on a lack of democracy and vice versa for successful democracies. But in both cases, democracy was entirely secondary - the underlying properties of the countries explain why democracy did or didn't work, not the other way around.
Knock China all you want, but there are numerous countries that are vastly more democratic than China that haven't acheived a fraction of their success. Sure, (without AGI etc) China might not be as wealthy as the US in the next century, but all those more-deomcratic-than-china countries won't even get close enough for it to even be considered. And yet, China not beating the US is blamed on a lack of democracy, but China being better than much of the world says nothing negative about democratic countries poorer than china.
It's even more rigged than you describe: it's only CALLED "democracy" when it's in "good" countries. Otherwise, it's an "electoral autocracy." And whatever works in good countries gets called "democracy" even as they literally crown kings.
Crowning a figurehead king who has no influence on policy while a competitive electoral process elects a parliament that controls policy does not make a country undemocratic. The people still rule.
Presence of elections alone does not make a democracy. Even if the dictator/ruling party does not cheat (which they usually do, but astonishingly often they would have won the election even without cheating, only not so overwhelmingly) this is empty without independent judiciary and free speech and journalism, because public cannot make an informed decision, and government is not bound by procedures, and it is too easy to eliminate sufficiently popular political alternatives. And of course dictators are often (at least for a time) genuinely popular, and they gain power because they do some good things. Until things go wrong (as they always do), and by that time it is impossible to remove the dictator in peaceful way, and worse, there are usually no real alternatives when you need them, because the dictator ensured that earlier by destroying all outstanding personalities and authorities who do not submit to him/her completely.
> Democracy is only associated with good countries because it only WORKS in good countries. There are countries that try and build democracy and fail, and then their crappiness as countries is blamed on a lack of democracy and vice versa for successful democracies.
There is some truth in that, but it is also misleading. Yes, for a democratic or otherwise country to work its institutions must work, and the government must have actual power, and building institutions people will implicitly listen to and obey (more or less) is very difficult when you are starting from anarchy. Theoretically, it is not that difficult to kickstart development of a very poor country, any half sane economic policy will put them on the (initially) fast development track. However this is useless if you do not have the authority to implement those policies. And free elections and judiciary are not very useful when the actual power (also to deal violence) lies within mafia, criminals, warlords, etc. (see e.g., attempts to introduce elections in Iraq). This is why sane dictators often do a better job (initially) than poor attempts at democracy. Problem is, dictators do not remain sane for long, but even if they do not go insane, they do a very good job of destroying all the people with authority and skill which are not completely beholden to them, and the institutions which they build work better than anarchy, but are ultimately dysfunctional because of inherent corruption and distrust of initiative. Genuine functioning democracy is always better than dictatorship (there is no contest about it) but building it is non-trivial. And it is also non-trivial to pass from dictatorship to democracy when the dictator outlives his/hers welcome. And sane dictatorship may be better than anarchy (for a time at least).
As to China: Yes it seems (for now) richer than many democracies. However,
1. It is all now going to hell, though I suspect the system was rotting for a very long time, it is just now too rotten for CCP to be able to hide it anymore.
2. I am not a specialist on China, but as far as I know, communist China is a society divided into classes, where citizens of first tier cities enjoy (or enjoyed until recently) western level of life or better (though far fewer rights), but rural China is still a very poor third world, with peasants having even fewer rights than urban Chinese. So China is very rich in some places, but very poor in other, and comparison with other countries is complex.
3. While I would prefer China to to a complete mafia ridden anarchy, I would still prefer living in a much poorer democratic country enjoying protection of law against vagaries of government and fellow citizens: It is better to be poorer but secure in what you have, than very rich when your property can be taken from you any moment.
4. It is hardly a miracle that China developed very fast after insanity of Mao, after they introduced some sane economic reforms, permitting private initiative by citizens. It is telling though that Chinese policies were more or less sane (not completely, of course, see the demographic policies, three gorges dam, etc) as long as there was some internal democracy within the party. Yes, it was "collective decision making and balance of powers, and free exchange of information" only for the very narrow elites (not even the rank and file of the party) but it existed. A fast decline correlates nicely with Xi taking over and eliminating internal criticism, balance of power and collective decision making.
And let's not forget the time virtually every Western democracy put its entire population under house arrest for an indefinite period of time. So much for "protection of law against vagaries of government".
Without going into discussion whether this was necessary (I think it was, at least initially) there was some effort to compensate businesses for lost income, unlike in China. Also, even the toughest lockdowns in the west did not involve literally welding doors to people houses as actually was quite common in China. Also lockdowns ended relatively quickly after vaccines were available (it would end much quicker if not for Omicron). In China lockdowns ended only at the end of last year when the west already forgotten about masks and lockdowns. It is a pity people underestimate how hard can the situation be in authoritarian countries, and then they say: yes our freedom are also infringed, it is the same or worse as on autocracies. No, it isn't. It really isn't.
Firstly, even if our lockdowns didn't go quite as far as China's, they would still have been regarded as cartoonishly totalitarian just a few years ago, and so are still a valid counter-example.
Secondly, China's just one country. Were the lockdowns in other authoritarian countries, like Russia or Singapore, notably more severe or brutal than those in the West?
This book is arguing they are the only thing that is important. Pretty strongly too. And poorly.
I would love to take them and slap them in Antarctica with a bunch of amazing institutions and see how the economy develops. Better yet if we can do it with them and a bunch of afghans or Somalis.
> I would love to take them and slap them in Antarctica with a bunch of amazing institutions and see how the economy develops.
This sounds intuitive, but it runs into the problem that, for example, sub-Saharan countries were widely predicted to have brighter futures than South Korea because of their superior natural resources, or that Iceland was very successful by establishing itself as a finance hub. I believe Singapore established itself as an oil refinery, despite having no oil production.
In the case of Singapore, that worked well in part because Singapore is very strategically located. But Iceland isn't. There's a lot of work that can be done anywhere. Korea is a good place to grow grain - like Iceland! - but if it had to import all of its food, it would still be a rich country.
What’s the problem? No one is claiming geography is everything. But it isn’t nothing either.
Iceland was already a fairly successful country, there isn’t much to explain in terms of its development. Well off countries with small populations have lots of options for parasitizing off the larger global economy.
The problem is that geography is the only reason to expect an Antarctic colony to fail. By implying that it will, you're endorsing the idea that geography is everything.
Iceland actually is relatively resource rich because of the cheap electricity, fish, and natural beauty. It has very cheap electricity (they produce more electricity per capita than any other country) because of the natural environment that allows for extensive hydro power and geothermal power. That cheap electricity means that aluminum can be made very cheaply and exported. Iceland also catches a huge amount of fish, more than the UK (which has 200 times the population!). And the natural beauty draws a large tourism industry. Those three things alone are more than half of the GDP, and all would work without it being a finance hub.
Of course, it does have a finance hub, but that happened after it was already getting rich from those resources. And it was historically resource-poor, since it didn't have the resources to bootstrap those industries, but after it got investment from other countries it was able to succeed.
> Iceland also catches a huge amount of fish, more than the UK (which has 200 times the population!).
But Iceland doesn't have 200 times the amount of fish that England has, so it's not immediately obvious how we should interpret this fact.
It looks a lot like "in England, they've got better things to do than catch fish, but in Iceland they don't", which would make Iceland a poor country, not a rich one. Kind of like arguing that some hypothetical country's huge production of shepherd's crooks meant that that country was an industrial powerhouse.
Catching fish might not be as profitable per person as finance, but it's certainly not a poor-person activity like sheep herding. There's big money in it.
The real reason Iceland catches more fish than any other European country is because it's got a) a long cultural history with associated support from government and b) a huge, productive section of ocean all to itself. Same with Canada and Alaska.
It’s really too early to say anything about China. At the moment the group-think in the west seems to want to believe that there’s a permanent slowdown to very low numbers. The recent hysteria is based on one quarter of gdp increases, which was then annualised.
Um, no. The group think was that China is exceptional. The west is now waking up to the reality, which is not based just on GDP data, but many other economic indicators. All of this might not have fatal, if not for the insane politics. Xi is destroying private market in China (such as it was). And there is this:
I do not need to know anything more than that to understand that this is very bad, and the era of "forget about politics, earn money" is over. Maybe it won't be as bad as during Mao (let us hope for the sake of Chinese citizens), but regardless of economic crisis China is now dragged down by Xi into a nightmare faster and faster
China is little different in authoritarianism than when Xi was feted in the west. If there was a groupthink then, the anti Chinese rhetoric is clearly another form now.
First, do you seriously believe those numbers? Or any official data coming from authoritarian regimes, not just China? Incidentally, they stopped publishing some economic indicators (like about unemployment) which are so bad they cannot be even realistically falsified. And yes, authoritarianism in China a few years ago was already horrible, but it can get far worse. But yes, the West ignored the China's and Russia's authoritarianism and human rights violations because it was good for business. And then comes 2020's and the sudden realization that all this profit also feeds hostile militaries, and also that perhaps putting your vital production facilities in, or becoming energy dependent on a potentially hostile country which does not respect property rights and has nuclear weapons is not the brightest idea. And if this was not argument enough, at least in case of China Covid closures, industrial espionage and hostile political climate soured business relationship. So yes the West was stupid and shortsighted, but now at least it is able to look at China without pink glasses.
I do accept the GDP figures. Precisely because they do in fact curtail other data.
What you are saying in your last paragraph is that you are ok with bad dictatorships if they are on your side. There’s no morality there, so let’s not pretend there is.
My feeling is that the west (ie America) is actually panicking about losing total dominance across the world. If China were as authoritarian internally but not challenging American hegemony then the concern about internal repression would be non existent.
We know this because when Xi visited the U.K. not that long ago he got the biggest state visit in U.K. history and few protests.
At that time the Western media had not decided that China was the new existential threat, it was probably still Islam. Anyway at least you admit that you were not always at war with east Asia.
> What you are saying in your last paragraph is that you are ok with bad dictatorships if they are on your side.
I said no such thing. I pointed out that the already morally reprehensible decision to do business with China came back to bite the West, and so it was not just immoral, but also irrational. Please do not put in my keyboard opinions which are not there. It is unfortunate (but constantly repeated error) on the side of many western powers to ignore human rights issues when it seems to serve their short term interest. It is never a good policy long term.
Communist China will not dominate the world (future democratic China, why not, maybe, I have nothing against). But before it falls hard it can do a lot of damage to their own people and other nations
I don't believe that China GDP figures reflect reality.
I tend to believe Noah Smith who says that China is in big trouble. It has had a good growth and everything but it is going to hit a wall.
Something similar happened with the Soviet Union. It had industrialization, a good growth and everything. And yet it had immense structural problems and people couldn't enjoy this growth due to constant shortages, lack of free market produced a lot of consumer goods that people didn't like. Ultimately it hit a wall and crashed.
The "sudden realization" did not come in the 2020s. Trump ran his whole campaign on de-globalization and "tough on China" stances in 2015 and 2016. It just took until the 2020s for the elites to realize he was right.
There were many people criticizing business relations with China even long before Trump, they were just not mainstream enough to influence the policy. I am not sure Trump took "tough on China" policy for the right reasons:
I do not appreciate his judgement of Xi character above (wrong and creepy in the mouth of former, and what is even worse possibly future president of US), but, yes, in his tough on China policy he was generally right (I cannot judge details of implementation). I doubt Trump was some sage seeing deeper than others. I think of him rather like a randomization procedure, and as machine learning teaches us such procedures are often very useful for escaping from local minima (when used in moderation!). In this case the "random" choice was spot on, and helped to break the spell:
Still, the real jolt came with Covid, when people saw how vulnerable are supply chains, and that economic hyper efficiency which excludes security is not the path to economic development but to early extinction.
Political rulers don't say to themselves, "I'll keep my country poor so that I can be wealthy".
Rather, they say, "My nephew broke a contract with another company, and they're suing? I'll just tell the judge to dismiss the case." "Mary is the best person to be in charge of roading but she is not related to me. I'll appoint my good-for-nothing son." "Newspapers are saying bad things about my rule. I'll shut them down." "A sewer system or a safe water supply is not a fitting monument for me. I'll start an airline instead. The banks will lend for it; I'll see to that all right."
It's not high-level, abstract deliberateness. It's a thousand little decisions that undermine and destroy institutions like the rule of law, transparent government, meritocratic bureaucracy, and evidence-based investment.
Okay, and why do they make these decisions but whites and (many) east asians don't?
White people (and Asians) absolutely do. The reasons that some mostly-white countries have managed to do it less are, well, what the book's about.
There are plenty of whites in Eastern and Southern Europe that are still doing this, and every country can find examples if they look back in their history. Heck, I think many are currently accusing either Biden or Trump from engaging in these specific problems, look at the situations with their children and for a start. Meanwhile, Obama was accused of many things, but cronyism wasn't one I remember, and at least not to the extent of the last administrations.
To be fair, though, both Obama's children were still minors when he left office, which would limit options for cronyism.
Check out Russia, or Ukraine. You're going to tell me these societies are not corrupt?
I have no evidence, but my gut feeling is that countries in which there are long-standing traditions of "speaking truth to power", being able to criticise policy decisions without fear of losing your life (and without the ruler fearing for his life or his rule because of the criticism), and of mass public protest, get things that improve the lives of ordinary people.
Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory attracts me, especially the notion of "power distance": the degree to which people want to have a say in decisions that affect them. Low power distance means being close to decisions; high power distance means doing what those in charge decide for you. The Anglo countries, the Nordics, and northwestern Europe generally, score relatively low for power distance; the Philippines and other similar countries score high. Eastern and southern Europe are middling high.
Power distance is pervasive: it affects interactions with minor authority figures like parents, doctors and your supervisor as well as those in government. Low power distance leads to demands for explanations, which those in charge feel compelled to provide...eventually. Thus transparent government at all levels, and eventually rules-based government at all levels, from the family up, and rules-based peaceful resolution of internal conflicts, which is what I think most people mean when they say "democracy" - orderly, peaceful regime change that is accepted gracefully by the losers, and without reprisal against them by the winners.
Beware single-factor explanations, though. And especially beware things which you want to believe.
This explanation seems to dovetail nicely with WEIRD from Henrich.
"A sewer system or a safe water supply is not a fitting monument for me. I'll start an airline instead."
The first two need constant, unsexy maintenance or they kill people. The second can stagger along on government subsidies for decades (see Air Canada).
It's hard to avoid politicians spending on highly visible stuff at the expense of utterly necessary but invisible (when it's done) maintenance in the First World. In the Third World? Good luck.
Unmaintained planes kill lots of people too. Aeroflot used to be notorious for this. I don't think that maintenance ever crosses the minds of this kind of ruler.
I think you're mixing two definitions of "elites". Taxi-driving immigrants might have been in the top income and/or wealth decile, but they were never elite in the sense it's being used in the review - i.e. political decision makers like dictators, magnates, cabinet members, generals, etc.
I forget the name now, but a former Pakistani general did emigrate to the US and his daughter became a PBS journalist. I looked this up a few months ago when I recognised the surname of this woman (I studied South Asia a lot). So even the very top elites do in fact emigrate because they make the calculation that their offspring will probably be better off in the long run (and that's probably rational in many cases).
There's three breakpoints that make it much more likely an elite leaves their power base.
-Strong/growing potential of being killed or ruined by those in charge
-Strong/growing potential of being overthrown by a different group
-Maximizing the potential extraction from the poor country you are in (that is, you have lots of money but poor institutions in your country mean you live at a low qualify of life unless you move)
In each case, while it made sense to stay as a powerful elite for a while, there was a point where it made more sense to leave.
Oh, lord. If your theories of economic growth don't even try to explain Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Cold War South Korea, or Cold War Taiwan, what the hell good are they?
They flatter peoples feelies.
IDK about early Korea or Taiwan, but Germany and Japan didn't work out so well. I think nations probably fail for lots of reasons, not just one or the other. Listening to Lex Fridman talk with Magatte Wade, I'm totally down with bad institutions being one of many pitfalls.
(I didn't like this book review.)
Both countries grew quite well economically after the war, and the conclusion one can draw is that the destruction of physical capital didn't matter that much because each still contained so many people who'd been economically productive beforehand.
Hmm the OP used imperial Germany and Japan, which I take to mean before WWII. Germany after the war is a pretty good example of why institutions matter.
Imperial Japan would be during WW2 as well. And it would be quite odd to consider Imperial Japan to be a "failure". Pseudoerasmus discusses how they got ahead of other places industrially here https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/ Japan's military victories over Europeans were major inspirations for anticolonial movements, and I think their successes on that front are evidence against them being a "failed state" in the way that so many post-colonial countries wound up being. The very high frequency with which post-colonial regimes wound up being "extractive" failed states in Acemoglu's terms should raise questions about what the actual cause of that is. This paper citing Acemoglu https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/63/2/406/5377578?login=false has that finding, but because they explicitly aren't making any comparison of non-colonized countries (like Ethiopia & Thailand), they also fail to question whether colonialism was the actual cause of these countries' outcomes.
Huh, I guess I figure they failed because they started a war with us and then lost. But sure, while they lasted they were awesome.
Post-war US economic aid confounds our ability to easily assess it, but both Germany and Japan grew significantly after the war as well. I don't know the trajectories they were on before or after, but by the 1950s at least, both were doing well and rapidly improving, despite having most of the industrial base destroyed in the war.
Sure, the Nazis/Emperor were no longer in charge, but for AR's theories that really shouldn't matter either.
The argument isn't that it can't happen, but that it can't be sustained long-term outside a democracy, because the authoritarians in power are always ready to ditch growth in order to maintain control.
China is actually a perfect example - it had a good run, but now the autocrats have cracked down, and China will peak fairly soon, never having overcome the U.S..
While Taiwan and South Korea switched over to democracy in time to keep growth politically sustainable long-term.
The kind of rapid growth China experienced is generally only possible during periods of "catch up" development, where a lagging country sprints towards the global technological frontier. Once at the frontier (which China more or less is now), growth slows to the (low) level of other countries at the frontier.
The slowing was inevitable and entirely unavoidable regardless of policy.
Parts of Shanghai look better than NYC or any other major global city, then just outside of Beijing's last ring road it looks like Afghanistan, so I get confused trying to assess its current state of development.
Similarly a lot of the growth has come from urbanization, which might be cresting, but if you just count the working age population who haven't migrated to the coasts yet you're looking at numbers larger than most other countries' entire populations. Actually the number of Chinese citizens who will migrate to urban areas this year will undoubtedly be larger than the median country's entire population.
I don't much know what to make of this all, just that China is weird and hard to predict. I lean with you that this probably peaks soon, but if I'm wrong it's going to be because I couldn't wrap my head around the scale of the place.
Actually, many of China's largest cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, are shrinking. Just a few examples:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3223647/chinas-falling-birth-rate-may-have-more-disastrous-effect-declining-numbers-major-cities &
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X221076499
Thanks for those links!
My main point might have gotten lost above, that data about PRC population trends can be misleading. These underscore that point.
Meng and Long note that cities in China are shrinking "in the context of rapid urbanization."
That might be confusing at first glance, what does it mean for cities to shrink during urbanization (prior to 2020)? If you look at the broader work of their Shrinking Cities Research Collective, it's clear they really see economic migration as the major driver here, they would agree with me that people are flooding into Beijing. When they talk about declining populations in the northeast they're not talking about Beijing, but about cities in Heilongjiang, like for example the Yichun case study:
https://www.beijingcitylab.com/projects-1/15-shrinking-cities/
My main point was that there are unique complexities to data in China that make it hard to concretely follow trends. One specific such oddity is the hukou system, which undermines official locality population statistics. Many of the people who live and work on the coasts aren't technically residents there, which just messes with all the numbers.
So for example, the stats that informed SCMP made the rounds in multiple press outlets. Those numbers fully excluded migrants, who make up over a third of the population in Beijing. Reuters updated its coverage with a caveat after a demographer weighed in: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-capital-beijing-experiences-first-population-decline-since-2003-2023-03-21/
Meng and Long's research has pointed out another way stats in the PRC are confusing, which is that politicians frequently shift the boundaries of administrative districts, sometimes to intentionally alter local population statistics to make themselves look progrowth, sometimes to limit their responsibility for struggling areas, it's a very noisy effect.
Of course, we could easily have increasing urbanization simultaneously with declining urban populations, contradictory as those might seem at first glance. In fact, we are very likely to see that in the coming years as national population decline accelerates and as urban migration continues. I suspect we're still 2-5 years out from that, but, only like 60/40 on that, I could easily be wrong. Maybe zero covid was shock therapy for the economic migration patterns and this has flipped already. There were some dramatic images of economic migrants returning to rural areas on foot last year to avoid quarantines. Frustratingly I cannot find up to the month numbers on Beijing's population that include migrant data that I trust to even gesture at the true picture.
All that said, I appreciate the references, but they bolster rather than detract from my main point above, which was that stats and realities in the PRC are confusing, so drawing strong conclusions from statistics and trendlines there is risky. I lean that China is cresting too, like GP, I'm just urging caution here.
I mean, sure, it's a hypothesis. The problem is, there's no obvious evidence to distinguish the hypotheses "pluralistic institutions are essential to sustained growth" and "The United States was simply in a position to impose its favored political arrangements on Japan and (West) Germany after WWII, and to demand the adoption of the same from South Korea and Taiwan at the end of the Cold War as an implicit condition of continuing to defend them from dangerous neighbors".
The current trouble in China might be evidence for it, sure, but then you'd either have to count Japan's growth collapse since the early 1990s as counter-evidence, or treat Japan as having "extractive" institutions even after WWII. One obvious counter-argument would simply be that the sort of export-oriented industrialization that was behind the Japanese and Chinese "miracles" has inherent limits (for example, in how much the rest of the world can import, based on the size of the world economy). and China hit those limits earlier because it's an order of magnitude larger in population.
I don’t think the idea is that institutions are a panacea - if you’re undergoing demographic collapse (or in another case, get your country raped by Russia) that’s going to hurt the economy no matter what.
While if you average Japan from 1945 to now, that’s still going to look pretty great.
The trouble there is, if someone's going to throw out the Japanese Lost Decade(s) as data point against the importance of pluralistic institutions on "demographic collapse" grounds, they have to explain why they won't let the other side throw out the recent Chinese slowdown as evidence for the importance of those same institutions on the same demographic basis.
Fundamentally, the problem of this book's thesis of "development requires democracy" (as also exists with the once-fashionable argument that "development causes democracy") is that each of the three great struggles of the 20th Century (the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War) ended in a US victory. Thus any evidence for a link between development and democracy might simply be "as a country developed, it either conformed to the expectations of the United States, or was crushed as a threat to the United States."
Well, the US is probably the number one data point in their theory, and they likely see the US's victory (largely due to overwhelming economic advantage) as the ultimate result of the democratization of the US's politics.
Of course, if they're wrong then the US just confounds everything and there's a lot less to see.
Acemoglu's issue is that if he follows his thesis to its conclusion it leads to right wing politics in a way the left wing Acemoglu doesn't want. (This is not speculating on his political allegiances: he's called himself a social democrat.) If you really believe that extractive elites are the issue and then define extraction and elites in a principled way you cannot escape that a lot of his favored policies fall under his definition of extraction. You can see this in Brazil, for example, where his left wing politics blinded him to the ways the Brazilian state was extracting and then not using such extracted resources wisely.
Of course, I find this rather easy to resolve: I do think extraction is bad but it's possible the good done with the money overwhelms the bad. In short we should be suspicious of extraction but sometimes the good it supports really is sufficient to justify it. But in that case he would have to admit that his central thesis (elite extraction bad!) is wrong. He would have to rework everything to be about how extraction occurs (and how much damage it causes) vs what determines what the resources created by extraction are spent on (and how effective that is). Which would be a more interesting and better book in my opinion but wouldn't be Acemoglu.
Yes, the immediate question which popped into my mind was, "what if there were an institution that tried to be inclusive of some people by being extractive from other people?"
That question summarizes the entire project of first world left wing politics. Extract from powerful and dominant groups (at least in their opinion) and use that to create a more inclusive society by transferring the extracted resources to weaker or less dominant groups (at least in their opinion). That this fact escaped Acemoglu is still baffling to me. I think he's quietly drawing the definition of extraction so that it just doesn't include things he likes. But that's a rather damning criticism, isn't it?
Yes. This is reminding me of the book review about medieval Catholic marriage rules. It's fine to embrace the controversial topic or reject it, arguing for it or against it. Even putting up a pro forma cookie-cutter BS argument against it is useful as a signal. But completely ignoring the controversial topic feels like scientific malpractice.
Seems off-topic, but I've been trying to understand what you are referring to, and I'm stumped. Are you talking about Henrich's book ("marriage rules")? What controversial topic did it ignore?
It talked about a millennium-long program to exert control over human mating, and didn't address the question of whether 30ish generations of this had a genetic-level effect on the group of humans it was done to. Generally speaking, even considering the hypothesis can get you called a racist, and I'm only discussing it here because I'm pseudonymous.
Off the top of my head, there seem to be some good reasons that the policy wouldn't have a strong effect. The policy might have been poorly enforced (although that undermines the main thesis). There wasn't any positive direction, just removal of some options, so there's no a priori reason to assume that any sort of evolution would occur. (Or is there? What criterion filled the gap left by kinship?) It's entirely possible that humans have a baked-in instinct to treat kin well, but when that isn't given a strong clan to focus on, it fades away. (Alternatively, the instinct might re-focus onto constructed groups such as religions, states, ideologies, corporations, or internet subcultures, leading in the first three cases to bloodier wars.)
There's a lot of fascinating questions that could be asked and investigated, but mostly no one does, because they'd be accused of being Nazis.
Ah OK, thanks. Well, it seems that you and I are in agreement on this.
But Henrich does address the genetic issue. He has a whole chapter on it. His conclusion is that the changes induced by the Church's policies were entirely cultural, not genetic. How they changed the culture is the entire point of the book. The argument for why it isn't genetic is that the changes promoted urbanization and that cities are "genetic death traps", what he calls "the urban graveyard effect". (There is another rarely discussed argument in the book about the Cistercians, and there again Henrich mentions a "genetic death trap".)
In other words, at least according to him natural selection wouldn't favor WEIRD psychology. It had to be a cultural transmission, not genetic.
He may be right or wrong, but he does not ignore the issue.
It was this review, of a book whose main thesis was that the West's rise to pre-eminence arose from the Catholic Church's marriage rules, which weakened kin networks:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-the-weirdest-people
It’s absolutely the work “extractive and inclusive” are doing. They are there to be normative about policies he disapproves of.
Yes, Acemoglu & Robinson think the problem with post-apartheid South Africa is that the state doesn't redistribute enough ("inequality" is their big complaint) rather than that the state can hardly keep basic utilities running. They also thought on Hugo Chavez' death that he hadn't created a political machine to dominate Venezuela and that this gave hope for a democratic Venezuelan future despite his dictatorship. https://web.archive.org/web/20140809144200/http://whynationsfail.com/blog/2013/3/14/paradoxes-of-chavismo.html
I'm a bit confused by their take that you need a strong central government. Not that I can't see arguments for it, but (at least as presented here) the arguments aren't fleshed out enough to take them seriously.
It seems, based on the rest of their arguments, that a weak central government with strong inclusive institutions would be much better than a strong central government interested in extraction. Which at that point you might as well just drop the strong central government angle and concentrate on the inclusive institutions.
Mark Koyama presents an argument for the necessity of state building for inclusion:
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/liberalism-and-jewish-emancipation/
So their argument is that strong government is necessary but not sufficient for a good society? That inclusive institutions will be overrun if not supported by a central government capable of defending them?
If so I'm still uncertain, but can definitely follow the logic and don't have an immediate criticism.
I think they address this exact issue in "The Narrow Corridor". Basically, they argue that balance is needed between "society" and "the state" (not scare quotes, those are their terms) to prevent either from running amok.
I disagreed with some aspects of the book, but I won't get into that here.
Isn't the term for that 'redistribution?' I think AR deliberately use a different word because that's not what they're referring to.
I agree that that's the common term for it, and that it's not what AR are referring to. But the question is, **should** they be referring to it? If they take their theory seriously, and fearlessly pursue its implications, why isn't this one of the things the book focuses on?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think a reasonable person would argue that redistribution is the key to economic growth, just in the sense that you need to have assets to redistribute from one group to another, before that becomes relevant. Ie, You have to figure out the the puzzle of how to build and acquire assets in the first place, which is what the authors are addressing. Figuring out what to do with them comes later.
I think the point is that if one “extracts” from the haves to “redistribute” to the have nots one might also kill the golden goose of good institutions and economic growth.
At what point a society is well off enough and institutions are sufficiently robust that “redistribution” doesn’t have the downsides of “extraction” is an interesting question.
To expand on this, when AR use the term extractive institutions, I think what they're referring to (I haven't read the book but I recall listening to a podcast with Acemoglu once upon a time) is something akin to the "natural state" that Douglass North and his coauthors described in Violence and Social Orders. Here's a good summary:
"In order to have a stable order, a society must deal with the potential for organized violence. In a limited-access order, which the authors often refer to as a “natural state,” groups with the potential for organized violence join in a (possibly fragile) coalition to rule the country. This coalition excludes others from key economic activities, reserving rents for its members. Satisfied by these rents, coalition members refrain from violence. To the extent that limited-access orders are corrupt by American standards, such corruption serves an important role in providing its members with an incentive to remain in the coalition.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Klingtwoforms.html
Reviewing their description of "inclusive", it occurs to me that a rather horrifying example might be the antebellum South, where in the same geographical region resources were extracted from one part of the population and distributed to another. The distribution itself wasn't done with an eye toward growth and development, and focused most of the extracted wealth back on agriculture and aspiring aristocrats, so it's not a very successful example of their concept. But if I try to imagine the Confederacy crossed with some bizarro version of socialism, where slaves were public property and their labor used to fund a UBI for non-slaves... Ugh. It starts to sound like something Ursula K. Le Guin might have written in one of her grimmer phases.
See the Draka series from S.M. Stirling (starts with Marching through Georgia, where the title refers to the country not the state I think).
Alternative history where the South lost in the American Civil War and a lot of them ended up emigrating to South Africa instead of going west.
Yes, it's extremely grim.
"According to Aristotle, Phaleas ... recommended setting up dowries for the rich to give to the poor in order to level property ownership over time. In addition to equality of land and education, Phaleas proposed that all artisans be publicly owned slaves."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaleas_of_Chalcedon
"Being inclusive of Paul by being extractive from Peter."
They actually discuss this topic to my memory and explain Soviet and Antebellum South successes with idea re-allocation of resources to more profitable sector gave more than losses on extraction
I don't recall that in the book. But even if they mention it it's a small part that isn't well integrated into the thesis of a 500 page book. And you also have cases that don't involve slavery and executions to keep the suppressed people in line. Of course, any thorough treatment would have to in turn distinguish the times it worked from the times it didn't with a pretty thorough interrogation of what 'worked' means.
For example, a lot of the Soviet Union was kind of cosplaying modernity rather than pursuing actually economically viable industries. I think this actually works fine when it comes to domestic living standards. If you build a bunch of apartment blocks to cosplay that you have urban culture people will move into them and you will actually have an urban culture, if not exactly the one you wanted. But if you cosplay high productivity then you might have steel factories producing real steel but you might not have really raised productivity.
And then there are just bad bets. Like South Carolina betting on agricultural export markets just before a massive crash.
Nah, Acemoglu's thesis (as presented in the review above, I'm not familiar with it first-hand, nor have I been encouraged to by the review in question) seems just outright right-wing to me. I mean, how else would you classify the claim that the institution of private property is the non-extractive end of the scale of more to less expropriation?
Surely, "extraction by elites can be fine, actually" is a much more internally consistent position, but his project is still about defending the very institution that contemporarily facilitates this extraction. I don't think you should make much of the fact he's (superficially and instrumentally) accepting left-coded assumptions to do that.
The examples of E/W Germany and N/S Korea are so seductive! It must, must be the institutions!
But doesn’t work elsewhere, mostly. Poverty, corruption, and violence are the norm; it is the peace and prosperity and the rule of law that are really exceptional and fragile, and we just don’t really know why they happen.
Those examples don't seem to contradict culture/genetics acting partly through institutions if you consider which states actually imposed those institutions(the west/the Soviet Union).
But that’s just the thing, groping for one big explanation is probably futile. Bernstein in “Birth of Plenty” argued that it takes four big things:
Property rights / Rule of law
Capital markets
Education
Transportation
You have to have all four, or things don’t work. But each one is in turn enormously complex, and not a binary.
If all European and East Asian countries without a history of communism have those things to a high enough degree to become developed countries then it seems like two factors explain a lot of the variation in those four big things.
How are "capital markets" separate from "property rights"? If you can't own things, what are you selling?
Good question. Capital markets allocate capital. You can have weird state-owned enterprises that still rely on capital markets for bond financing, for example.
With no property rights, why not just take the financing?
(Actually, I'm aware of 𝘸𝘩𝘺 - the question is really "in what sense do the financiers not possess property rights?")
Oh, easily: bondholders don’t own the enterprise.
But it yes, our dialog points to the underlying complexity of these institutions: there’s no absolute property rights, and there are no perfect capital markets, everything has a degree and a measure. This is why simple explanations using prime colors rarely suffice.
Re: Property rights
Has the rise in civil asset forfeiture created a natural experiment on the loss of reliable property rights? Have the results been analyzed?
CAF isn't common enough to have a wide-ranging effect, at least for most law-abiding citizens. Career criminals who get caught up in it probably have very low feelings of property rights already, even without CAF.
Individual cases of outright government theft are serious but rare. It seems that our institutions are pushing back against it and preventing it from becoming widespread. Or in AR's terminology, while a small group of elites are attempting to set up an extraction system, the larger inclusive institutions are preventing wide-spread adoption and may be reversing what exists now.
If it stays rare, that would indeed be fortunate. I'm having trouble finding good, recent, statistics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States says "According to government records, Justice department seizures went from $27 million in 1985 to $556 million in 1993 and $4.2 billion in 2012." Admittedly small compared to the scale of the economy as a whole.
I do agree that there has been some push back from some of our institutions, which is a help.
It is worth noting that there were (and are) fundamental differences between East and West Germany (the border wasn't drawn randomly either).
This Twitter thread is pretty good to visualize some of the differences:
https://twitter.com/essobecker/status/1238013473948200962
Ah, sure, and again points to diminishing returns of simplistic explanations. “Germany” is a young country, its constituent parts had / still have distinct cultures, etc. The “!” In my comment was there sarcastically. Same for N/S Koreas: I bet we could easily split Italy in the same way. Heck, the US for that matter.
The book review commented on this, but it's worth looking in more detail. The difference between the economy in the US and the rest of the world is huge. And the difference between high-wealth countries and low wealth countries is also huge.
Alabama is the US state with the lowest per-capita GDP, at ~$51,000. That is enough to be the same as or higher than any other North American country (just shy of Canada's second place), 5th highest in Asia, almost top 10 in Europe, highest in Africa (over 2.5x the next highest), etc. If you exclude tiny countries with unusual economies (Singapore, Luxembourg), Alabama rates even higher.
Sure, you could split the US or other countries between high income and low income sections, but really the difference between even the poorest parts of rich countries and most of the rest of the world is still very stark.
Thanks for the link! Learned some more about my country. But as I know some: I shrug. Yep, the southern part - Bavaria et al. - was still rural, some areas in the north-west, too (cow-pasture-country). So? "Fundamental differences" between East and West those were not - the T-Rex in the room is two generations of socialist state monopolism. Taking pics every 500 meter in Germany 1989, you would clearly see one country in color and one in dirty-grey. Otoh: 33 years later, one still sees differences (a magnitude smaller, as before 1944). If anything, the East had all the "non-institutional" pre-requisites to succeed as a modern industrialised country. As did the North of Korea. Politicians can do limited good, but unlimited bad.
There is a whole book about "spotting the GDR long before it came to be" and I found it extremely insightful about my own life's experiences, not just in Germany but across Northwestern and Southeastern Europe in general: "The Shortest History of Germany".
It might be criticised for its tendency to paper over too many details, but I think that is exactly its strength: Describing a long arc of history short enough that you can get the larger picture.
> Alert readers may notice a problem here. If you don't know if X causes Y or vice versa, how can you possibly tell if Z causes X and doesn't otherwise affect Y? You can't.
Well, for example, Z may precede X and Y, which excludes reverse causality. In general, Z is a much simpler variable to analyze, and the stories you have to tell in order for Z to affect Y directly get pretty wild. It may not be possible to prove completely that Z is a valid instrument in all cases, but it's probably better than "control for some observables and pray" or "don't even try" which, in many cases, is the alternative.
Maybe the most classic example of IV is the Israeli school experiment, when Israel limited class sizes to 40. A class of 41 would be split up; one of 40 would not. Whether a class has 40 or 41 students effectively random, and shouldn't have any impact on students (or confounders, like neighborhood income) other than through the effect of class size. (Note that we don't look at actual class size, since some 40-student classes will actually be broken up and some won't, which will not be random). While many of AR's instruments are much less clear-cut than this, reducing all of IV to "In reality, what you are mainly hoping for is that the causal effect of Z through X on Y is more intuitively appealing to journal editors and referees than the simple effect of X on Y." is pretty harsh...
> This is why economics is such fun and has such a high reputation among non-economists. Also, the camp-following whores thing.
Ah, yes, that's useful and productive.
I do wonder what number of 41-student classes just had one student transferred instead.
I think the law was for public schools, is that possible in Israel? In the US that seems like it would require the student to move or enroll in private school.
> Also, the camp-following whores thing.
For those not aware, like me 10 minutes ago, this is a reference to an article James Buchanan (Nobel laureate for public choice theory) wrote in the Wall Street Journal against economists that believed increased minimum wage could lead to increased employment.
> Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teachings of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp–following whores.
I would like economists to advance from proving the scientifically obvious (or becoming camp-following whores) to advancing blatantly superior options
As in say 90% of economists will find a negative effect on hiring and that's nice but there will be a roughly inverse effect on voter choice towards higher minimum wages and therefore, for the love of god, prominently contrast the costs and benefits of that and an earned income tax credit or a reverse payroll tax at low salaries
Do AR, in their analysis of Brazil, examine how (unlike South Korea) the ISI policies never expired on time?
No.
I’ve actually felt that Why Nations Fail was overly maligned, as its bearish opinion about China seemed more and more wrong as the years went by. Until, fairly swiftly, it didn’t.
Koyama & Rubin’s recent book, How the World Became Rich, tried its best to be fairly balanced across theories, and seemed to mostly be in favour of the Why Nations Fail world view. So it seems to have survived a bit of time now. It doesn’t fit explain everything in world history, and we can definitely critique the vagueness of parts, but the core emphasis on democracy, rule of law, and other “inclusive institutions” seems to be on the right track.
Democracy is only associated with good countries because it only WORKS in good countries. There are countries that try and build democracy and fail, and then their crappiness as countries is blamed on a lack of democracy and vice versa for successful democracies. But in both cases, democracy was entirely secondary - the underlying properties of the countries explain why democracy did or didn't work, not the other way around.
Knock China all you want, but there are numerous countries that are vastly more democratic than China that haven't acheived a fraction of their success. Sure, (without AGI etc) China might not be as wealthy as the US in the next century, but all those more-deomcratic-than-china countries won't even get close enough for it to even be considered. And yet, China not beating the US is blamed on a lack of democracy, but China being better than much of the world says nothing negative about democratic countries poorer than china.
Begin with the end in mind!
It's even more rigged than you describe: it's only CALLED "democracy" when it's in "good" countries. Otherwise, it's an "electoral autocracy." And whatever works in good countries gets called "democracy" even as they literally crown kings.
Crowning a figurehead king who has no influence on policy while a competitive electoral process elects a parliament that controls policy does not make a country undemocratic. The people still rule.
Presence of elections alone does not make a democracy. Even if the dictator/ruling party does not cheat (which they usually do, but astonishingly often they would have won the election even without cheating, only not so overwhelmingly) this is empty without independent judiciary and free speech and journalism, because public cannot make an informed decision, and government is not bound by procedures, and it is too easy to eliminate sufficiently popular political alternatives. And of course dictators are often (at least for a time) genuinely popular, and they gain power because they do some good things. Until things go wrong (as they always do), and by that time it is impossible to remove the dictator in peaceful way, and worse, there are usually no real alternatives when you need them, because the dictator ensured that earlier by destroying all outstanding personalities and authorities who do not submit to him/her completely.
> Democracy is only associated with good countries because it only WORKS in good countries. There are countries that try and build democracy and fail, and then their crappiness as countries is blamed on a lack of democracy and vice versa for successful democracies.
There is some truth in that, but it is also misleading. Yes, for a democratic or otherwise country to work its institutions must work, and the government must have actual power, and building institutions people will implicitly listen to and obey (more or less) is very difficult when you are starting from anarchy. Theoretically, it is not that difficult to kickstart development of a very poor country, any half sane economic policy will put them on the (initially) fast development track. However this is useless if you do not have the authority to implement those policies. And free elections and judiciary are not very useful when the actual power (also to deal violence) lies within mafia, criminals, warlords, etc. (see e.g., attempts to introduce elections in Iraq). This is why sane dictators often do a better job (initially) than poor attempts at democracy. Problem is, dictators do not remain sane for long, but even if they do not go insane, they do a very good job of destroying all the people with authority and skill which are not completely beholden to them, and the institutions which they build work better than anarchy, but are ultimately dysfunctional because of inherent corruption and distrust of initiative. Genuine functioning democracy is always better than dictatorship (there is no contest about it) but building it is non-trivial. And it is also non-trivial to pass from dictatorship to democracy when the dictator outlives his/hers welcome. And sane dictatorship may be better than anarchy (for a time at least).
As to China: Yes it seems (for now) richer than many democracies. However,
1. It is all now going to hell, though I suspect the system was rotting for a very long time, it is just now too rotten for CCP to be able to hide it anymore.
2. I am not a specialist on China, but as far as I know, communist China is a society divided into classes, where citizens of first tier cities enjoy (or enjoyed until recently) western level of life or better (though far fewer rights), but rural China is still a very poor third world, with peasants having even fewer rights than urban Chinese. So China is very rich in some places, but very poor in other, and comparison with other countries is complex.
3. While I would prefer China to to a complete mafia ridden anarchy, I would still prefer living in a much poorer democratic country enjoying protection of law against vagaries of government and fellow citizens: It is better to be poorer but secure in what you have, than very rich when your property can be taken from you any moment.
4. It is hardly a miracle that China developed very fast after insanity of Mao, after they introduced some sane economic reforms, permitting private initiative by citizens. It is telling though that Chinese policies were more or less sane (not completely, of course, see the demographic policies, three gorges dam, etc) as long as there was some internal democracy within the party. Yes, it was "collective decision making and balance of powers, and free exchange of information" only for the very narrow elites (not even the rank and file of the party) but it existed. A fast decline correlates nicely with Xi taking over and eliminating internal criticism, balance of power and collective decision making.
Your property can be taken from you at any moment in "democracies" too; eminent domain seizures aren't unique to authoritarian dictatorships.
And let's not forget the time virtually every Western democracy put its entire population under house arrest for an indefinite period of time. So much for "protection of law against vagaries of government".
Without going into discussion whether this was necessary (I think it was, at least initially) there was some effort to compensate businesses for lost income, unlike in China. Also, even the toughest lockdowns in the west did not involve literally welding doors to people houses as actually was quite common in China. Also lockdowns ended relatively quickly after vaccines were available (it would end much quicker if not for Omicron). In China lockdowns ended only at the end of last year when the west already forgotten about masks and lockdowns. It is a pity people underestimate how hard can the situation be in authoritarian countries, and then they say: yes our freedom are also infringed, it is the same or worse as on autocracies. No, it isn't. It really isn't.
Firstly, even if our lockdowns didn't go quite as far as China's, they would still have been regarded as cartoonishly totalitarian just a few years ago, and so are still a valid counter-example.
Secondly, China's just one country. Were the lockdowns in other authoritarian countries, like Russia or Singapore, notably more severe or brutal than those in the West?
No one would argue institutions aren’t important.
This book is arguing they are the only thing that is important. Pretty strongly too. And poorly.
I would love to take them and slap them in Antarctica with a bunch of amazing institutions and see how the economy develops. Better yet if we can do it with them and a bunch of afghans or Somalis.
> I would love to take them and slap them in Antarctica with a bunch of amazing institutions and see how the economy develops.
This sounds intuitive, but it runs into the problem that, for example, sub-Saharan countries were widely predicted to have brighter futures than South Korea because of their superior natural resources, or that Iceland was very successful by establishing itself as a finance hub. I believe Singapore established itself as an oil refinery, despite having no oil production.
In the case of Singapore, that worked well in part because Singapore is very strategically located. But Iceland isn't. There's a lot of work that can be done anywhere. Korea is a good place to grow grain - like Iceland! - but if it had to import all of its food, it would still be a rich country.
What’s the problem? No one is claiming geography is everything. But it isn’t nothing either.
Iceland was already a fairly successful country, there isn’t much to explain in terms of its development. Well off countries with small populations have lots of options for parasitizing off the larger global economy.
The problem is that geography is the only reason to expect an Antarctic colony to fail. By implying that it will, you're endorsing the idea that geography is everything.
No I am endorsing the idea of individually necessary and jointly sufficient criteria. An important concept and one this book throws in the garbage.
Institutions aren’t enough.
But there aren't individually necessary criteria. How is that an improvement?
Iceland actually is relatively resource rich because of the cheap electricity, fish, and natural beauty. It has very cheap electricity (they produce more electricity per capita than any other country) because of the natural environment that allows for extensive hydro power and geothermal power. That cheap electricity means that aluminum can be made very cheaply and exported. Iceland also catches a huge amount of fish, more than the UK (which has 200 times the population!). And the natural beauty draws a large tourism industry. Those three things alone are more than half of the GDP, and all would work without it being a finance hub.
Of course, it does have a finance hub, but that happened after it was already getting rich from those resources. And it was historically resource-poor, since it didn't have the resources to bootstrap those industries, but after it got investment from other countries it was able to succeed.
> Iceland also catches a huge amount of fish, more than the UK (which has 200 times the population!).
But Iceland doesn't have 200 times the amount of fish that England has, so it's not immediately obvious how we should interpret this fact.
It looks a lot like "in England, they've got better things to do than catch fish, but in Iceland they don't", which would make Iceland a poor country, not a rich one. Kind of like arguing that some hypothetical country's huge production of shepherd's crooks meant that that country was an industrial powerhouse.
Catching fish might not be as profitable per person as finance, but it's certainly not a poor-person activity like sheep herding. There's big money in it.
The real reason Iceland catches more fish than any other European country is because it's got a) a long cultural history with associated support from government and b) a huge, productive section of ocean all to itself. Same with Canada and Alaska.
It’s really too early to say anything about China. At the moment the group-think in the west seems to want to believe that there’s a permanent slowdown to very low numbers. The recent hysteria is based on one quarter of gdp increases, which was then annualised.
Um, no. The group think was that China is exceptional. The west is now waking up to the reality, which is not based just on GDP data, but many other economic indicators. All of this might not have fatal, if not for the insane politics. Xi is destroying private market in China (such as it was). And there is this:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/08/01/china-mi5-social-media-snoop-neighbours/
I do not need to know anything more than that to understand that this is very bad, and the era of "forget about politics, earn money" is over. Maybe it won't be as bad as during Mao (let us hope for the sake of Chinese citizens), but regardless of economic crisis China is now dragged down by Xi into a nightmare faster and faster
The nightmare being 6.3% growth this year.
China is little different in authoritarianism than when Xi was feted in the west. If there was a groupthink then, the anti Chinese rhetoric is clearly another form now.
First, do you seriously believe those numbers? Or any official data coming from authoritarian regimes, not just China? Incidentally, they stopped publishing some economic indicators (like about unemployment) which are so bad they cannot be even realistically falsified. And yes, authoritarianism in China a few years ago was already horrible, but it can get far worse. But yes, the West ignored the China's and Russia's authoritarianism and human rights violations because it was good for business. And then comes 2020's and the sudden realization that all this profit also feeds hostile militaries, and also that perhaps putting your vital production facilities in, or becoming energy dependent on a potentially hostile country which does not respect property rights and has nuclear weapons is not the brightest idea. And if this was not argument enough, at least in case of China Covid closures, industrial espionage and hostile political climate soured business relationship. So yes the West was stupid and shortsighted, but now at least it is able to look at China without pink glasses.
I do accept the GDP figures. Precisely because they do in fact curtail other data.
What you are saying in your last paragraph is that you are ok with bad dictatorships if they are on your side. There’s no morality there, so let’s not pretend there is.
My feeling is that the west (ie America) is actually panicking about losing total dominance across the world. If China were as authoritarian internally but not challenging American hegemony then the concern about internal repression would be non existent.
We know this because when Xi visited the U.K. not that long ago he got the biggest state visit in U.K. history and few protests.
At that time the Western media had not decided that China was the new existential threat, it was probably still Islam. Anyway at least you admit that you were not always at war with east Asia.
> What you are saying in your last paragraph is that you are ok with bad dictatorships if they are on your side.
I said no such thing. I pointed out that the already morally reprehensible decision to do business with China came back to bite the West, and so it was not just immoral, but also irrational. Please do not put in my keyboard opinions which are not there. It is unfortunate (but constantly repeated error) on the side of many western powers to ignore human rights issues when it seems to serve their short term interest. It is never a good policy long term.
Communist China will not dominate the world (future democratic China, why not, maybe, I have nothing against). But before it falls hard it can do a lot of damage to their own people and other nations
I don't believe that China GDP figures reflect reality.
I tend to believe Noah Smith who says that China is in big trouble. It has had a good growth and everything but it is going to hit a wall.
Something similar happened with the Soviet Union. It had industrialization, a good growth and everything. And yet it had immense structural problems and people couldn't enjoy this growth due to constant shortages, lack of free market produced a lot of consumer goods that people didn't like. Ultimately it hit a wall and crashed.
The "sudden realization" did not come in the 2020s. Trump ran his whole campaign on de-globalization and "tough on China" stances in 2015 and 2016. It just took until the 2020s for the elites to realize he was right.
There were many people criticizing business relations with China even long before Trump, they were just not mainstream enough to influence the policy. I am not sure Trump took "tough on China" policy for the right reasons:
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/ex-u-s-president-donald-trump-praises-chinese-president-xi-jinping/articleshow/101992752.cms?from=mdr
I do not appreciate his judgement of Xi character above (wrong and creepy in the mouth of former, and what is even worse possibly future president of US), but, yes, in his tough on China policy he was generally right (I cannot judge details of implementation). I doubt Trump was some sage seeing deeper than others. I think of him rather like a randomization procedure, and as machine learning teaches us such procedures are often very useful for escaping from local minima (when used in moderation!). In this case the "random" choice was spot on, and helped to break the spell:
https://www.axios.com/2021/01/19/trump-china-policy-special-report
Still, the real jolt came with Covid, when people saw how vulnerable are supply chains, and that economic hyper efficiency which excludes security is not the path to economic development but to early extinction.
Also, by a nightmare I meant police state, not just economy (it was always a police state, but it is getting worse)
Fewer people in jail than the US.
I really thought we are having a serious discussion.