I actually miss most of the commenters who have been banned during my roughly 2 decades here. Does anybody have the full list?
I don't have a list, but we may have different definitions of banning. In my definition, we've only 'banned' a few people while I have had the keys, which to me, means blocking them from commenting. There is a longer list of people who caused issues and were contacted off list and issues were discussed and at the end of that, the person said something to the effect that they didn't, for reasons said and unsaid, want to change and so stopped. Some might say that was 'banning', but there seems to be a difference, at least to me. of asking someone to leave and they choose not to come back and having to do something to stop that person from coming.
I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity. So I'm not how we diversify ideology without dealing with those other categories.
This is an interesting video between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, but more specific to the observation of lack of diversity is the fact that both Klein and Hayes, after talking about how Mamdani used the TikTok genre to win, confess that they could not do it, or at least it would take a long time to get to the level that Mamdani showed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2KYhDLDQY&t=3s
Just curious, has anyone here made a Tiktok video? If not, does anyone have a Tiktok account?
Well, libjpn@gmail address is working and he's not written. I don't want to pile thing up that he has to do, but I'd add that he also needs to admit that he snuck back here to try and set commenters against each other. In the normal cut and thrust, you can suggest that some person agrees with you, but trying to gin up conflict is really not acceptable and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that.
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
But would they prefer a person in Flint getting potable water from their faucet to another million dollars? That is a bit more opaque.
when I say 'make them just like us', it's less that economists can 'make' Chinese be like us, it is that they are assuming that they are just like us in those areas and by getting them to save less and consume more, it will 'fix' the problems of the Chinese economy.
It was either on this youtube video or another one, but someone pointed out that because the Chinese basically threw money at a number of problems, it actually was better because a more efficient distribution would have necessarily been more limited. Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
About Charles' video, I share nous' hesitancy, but in this case, mine is less worry about astroturfing/misrepresentation, it is more that the assumptions of Western Economics may not apply to other societies and cultures in the same way. I've plowed through a shit ton of videos about economics related to China and Asia and while the balance seems to be very bearish on China, they all look at China through the lens of Western econ. I think one should consider that Western Economics is based on a number of cultural principles that may not be operating in China.
This might seem very strange if one thinks of Economics as a science, but I'm not totally convinced it is.
As folks here may know, there is no actual Nobel prize in Economics. The prize initiated and awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden and falsely dubbed as the Nobel in Economics has acted as an institutional vehicle to endorse and establish Neo liberal ideas (mostly Free market fundamentalism) within Economics (Offer & Söderberg, 2016). https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusion-why-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-needs-to-be-abolished/
I probably wouldn't be as harsh, because, as I have often noted, I don't know economics very well. Call me agnostic. I do note that a loud vocal group that thinks Thomas Sowell should receive the Economics neo-nobel, which simultaneously suggests that if the whole enterprise is a scam, at least they have enough taste to keep Sowell out. https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/09/is-thomas-sowell-a-legendary-maverick-intellectual-or-a-pseudo-scholarly-propagandist
But it seems to me that some of the root cultural assumptions made in economics may not hold for China.
This is a typically bearish video, by Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2b4TjQa4gk&t=3371s
and you could ask 'how could he be wrong? He's actually been to China and spoken to principals' Well, he does present a narrative that China has been moving from a model of competence to an authoritarian model. A couple of quotes First I want to be careful to say that they listen to everybody. The Chinese are way better than we are at hearing a hundred different views. Mine would be one of many that they heard. I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. I actually gave a lecture in the Party’s training school where, if you’re a mayor, a provincial governor, any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. Of course there were various loyalty things. But when you met the leaders—and I met a lot of them when I was at the school—they actually asked really raw questions too. They said things I couldn’t believe they were asking. And I was told that within the school, you're allowed to say anything. So they had that system for a long time. When you met Chinese technocrats—or even the mayor of Shanghai—they were impressive. I'm not saying ours aren't, but it's a mix. I think you know that.
I think Xi Jinping has really changed that. He’s been the president since 2013, and over time he’s pushed out that system and moved more toward loyalists, people who are less technocratic. Probably the most important talk I ever gave in China was at what's called the China Development Forum in 2016. It's this giant hall that had most of the top leaders in the party. A lot of the elite of the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg and many others were there. I said, “Okay, I'm looking at your housing. I'm looking at your infrastructure. It looks to me like you're going into a classical housing crisis problem. Your catch-up is over. Your demographics don’t look good.” I gave a list of things. “And by the way, it looks like power is becoming very centralized in the economy.” And I said, “I'm a Western economist. You're doing an amazing job. What do I know? But I don’t think that would be good for growth.” After I gave the talk—I just figured you only live once, you just have to say what you have to say—a couple of top leaders came up to me and said, “Professor Rogoff, we very much appreciated your remarks.” I was thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to put me in jail or something at the end of this.”
I’m less impressed by them now. And I’m worried. Let’s say they get into a crisis—which I think they’re in now. I think they're still in a deep crisis—or somehow hotter heads prevail between the United States and China and we get into some kind of entanglement nobody wants. I worry that we’re not as competent. I’m speaking about right now. We have some very good people, but the average quality at the very top, I think, has gone down. And China’s not as competent either. That’s a recipe for having bad things happen.
It's a story and it's a plausible one. But you go down a bit and Rogoff says this The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. First of all, there’s nothing like our Social Security system. You need to save for your old age. There’s nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you healthcare, but otherwise you’re on your own. They’re not allowed to invest abroad. It goes in waves, but they’re not allowed to put their money abroad. So they’re trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There’s nothing to do overnight. But fundamentally, if you’re looking at China and asking what’s wrong, it’s that the consumer isn’t spending enough.
And I hear 'make them just like us'. Economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that. You go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. They happen periodically. Maybe Brookings puts one together, maybe the government does. My former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know. But my gut instinct is that what’s happening to China is what’s happened to Japan. It’s what’s happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union. We have a more dynamic economy. We’re not perfect. Maybe we’re screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and deglobalization. But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places—at least other large economies—just can’t replicate. They can build stuff. The French have better high-speed trains than we do. I hope you don’t ride on the train from Boston to New York. It’s nicer than it could be, but it’s no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible. They’re good at that. But the really creative stuff? I don’t want to say they don’t have any. There are some amazing Chinese companies. But let me say that the US is really good at it. We’ve kept that in our DNA. I think it’s very important, to preserve it.
Getting in an argument about who is the most dynamic and creative is a mug's game.
It's hard to contest the points that Rogoff makes, but when he says 'they have to consume more', I have to wonder if at the heart of a lot of discussion about China's economy is the idea that they have to be us. Yes, the social safety net is nothing compared to western societies, but how do you factor in the fact that a society built on confucian values is going to take up a lot of that. Certainly, there is a lot of grumbling, and there are a lot of knock on effects. But given the way the US and UK safety nets are unravelling before our eyes, I have to wonder if we are just using different measuring sticks.
This resonates with some of the comments in the substack, like this one There's this perfect example: a Democratic delegation visited Japan recently, and several congresspeople toured the Shinkansen—which, by the way, was built in the 1960s with American funding.1 What's almost laughable is that even today, this public transportation system—which isn't exactly cutting-edge anymore—still managed to "shock" American congresspeople. This tells you that even the highest-ranking political elites don't really have opportunities to experience or understand the kinds of lifestyles other countries have built.
[...]
I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing's public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.
I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they're less likely to be misunderstood as depending on "authoritarian order" for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this "authoritarian scratch"— people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They'll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries' inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.
But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what "ideal life" looks like.
I really like the point of 'authoritarian scratch'. It extends to Japan and Korea, and when you point out some aspect of life, it sends some scurrying to find counter examples.
I had to reconstruct this from last night, so I better stop here.
This will be broken into a couple of comments.
First, I got a copy of Abundance and made notes to make a post, but nous basically said what I would have said, only more succinctly. Klein is a wonk, which I say respectfully. However, I don't think his wonkiness serves him well in writing something which is essentially utopian. He writes as if all of the drag in the system is the result of progressives constantly screwing up the system. But a lot of it was trying to win over stakeholders and make sure they were included. That many of those procedures were hijacked to stymie progress shouldn't be blamed on progressives, unless you demand a level of cynicism from progressives that has never been apparent.
It's interesting that there was a flowering of interest in the book, but, afaict, it's all dried up. I'm not sure how any solution can gain a hearing, but the speed at which the book bloomed and then passed away is telling.
Second comment might take a while, I have to check some sources
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “An open thread on July 4th”
I actually miss most of the commenters who have been banned during my roughly 2 decades here. Does anybody have the full list?
I don't have a list, but we may have different definitions of banning. In my definition, we've only 'banned' a few people while I have had the keys, which to me, means blocking them from commenting. There is a longer list of people who caused issues and were contacted off list and issues were discussed and at the end of that, the person said something to the effect that they didn't, for reasons said and unsaid, want to change and so stopped. Some might say that was 'banning', but there seems to be a difference, at least to me. of asking someone to leave and they choose not to come back and having to do something to stop that person from coming.
"
I'm not positive, but I'm thinking that we are a pretty narrow group in terms of age, gender and probably ethnicity. So I'm not how we diversify ideology without dealing with those other categories.
This is an interesting video between Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes, but more specific to the observation of lack of diversity is the fact that both Klein and Hayes, after talking about how Mamdani used the TikTok genre to win, confess that they could not do it, or at least it would take a long time to get to the level that Mamdani showed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E2KYhDLDQY&t=3s
Just curious, has anyone here made a Tiktok video? If not, does anyone have a Tiktok account?
"
And I should add, that's just me talking, we would have to discuss it between Russell, wj, Janie and me and that might be a pretty fraught discussion.
"
Well, libjpn@gmail address is working and he's not written. I don't want to pile thing up that he has to do, but I'd add that he also needs to admit that he snuck back here to try and set commenters against each other. In the normal cut and thrust, you can suggest that some person agrees with you, but trying to gin up conflict is really not acceptable and there needs to be an acknowledgement of that.
On “From the Chinatalk substack”
So it's entirely possible for a very wealthy person to prefer a weekend's leisure to another million dollars.
But would they prefer a person in Flint getting potable water from their faucet to another million dollars? That is a bit more opaque.
"
when I say 'make them just like us', it's less that economists can 'make' Chinese be like us, it is that they are assuming that they are just like us in those areas and by getting them to save less and consume more, it will 'fix' the problems of the Chinese economy.
It was either on this youtube video or another one, but someone pointed out that because the Chinese basically threw money at a number of problems, it actually was better because a more efficient distribution would have necessarily been more limited. Obviously, efficiency is a good thing, but if you think of it as superseding all other things, you may miss a lot.
"
About Charles' video, I share nous' hesitancy, but in this case, mine is less worry about astroturfing/misrepresentation, it is more that the assumptions of Western Economics may not apply to other societies and cultures in the same way. I've plowed through a shit ton of videos about economics related to China and Asia and while the balance seems to be very bearish on China, they all look at China through the lens of Western econ. I think one should consider that Western Economics is based on a number of cultural principles that may not be operating in China.
This might seem very strange if one thinks of Economics as a science, but I'm not totally convinced it is.
As folks here may know, there is no actual Nobel prize in Economics.
The prize initiated and awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden and falsely dubbed as the Nobel in Economics has acted as an institutional vehicle to endorse and establish Neo liberal ideas (mostly Free market fundamentalism) within Economics (Offer & Söderberg, 2016).
https://developingeconomics.org/2024/10/22/the-nobel-illusion-why-the-nobel-prize-in-economics-needs-to-be-abolished/
I probably wouldn't be as harsh, because, as I have often noted, I don't know economics very well. Call me agnostic. I do note that a loud vocal group that thinks Thomas Sowell should receive the Economics neo-nobel, which simultaneously suggests that if the whole enterprise is a scam, at least they have enough taste to keep Sowell out.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/09/is-thomas-sowell-a-legendary-maverick-intellectual-or-a-pseudo-scholarly-propagandist
But it seems to me that some of the root cultural assumptions made in economics may not hold for China.
This is a typically bearish video, by Ken Rogoff, former chief economist of the IMF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2b4TjQa4gk&t=3371s
and you could ask 'how could he be wrong? He's actually been to China and spoken to principals' Well, he does present a narrative that China has been moving from a model of competence to an authoritarian model. A couple of quotes
First I want to be careful to say that they listen to everybody. The Chinese are way better than we are at hearing a hundred different views. Mine would be one of many that they heard. I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. I actually gave a lecture in the Party’s training school where, if you’re a mayor, a provincial governor, any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. Of course there were various loyalty things. But when you met the leaders—and I met a lot of them when I was at the school—they actually asked really raw questions too. They said things I couldn’t believe they were asking. And I was told that within the school, you're allowed to say anything. So they had that system for a long time. When you met Chinese technocrats—or even the mayor of Shanghai—they were impressive. I'm not saying ours aren't, but it's a mix. I think you know that.
I think Xi Jinping has really changed that. He’s been the president since 2013, and over time he’s pushed out that system and moved more toward loyalists, people who are less technocratic. Probably the most important talk I ever gave in China was at what's called the China Development Forum in 2016. It's this giant hall that had most of the top leaders in the party. A lot of the elite of the tech world, Mark Zuckerberg and many others were there. I said, “Okay, I'm looking at your housing. I'm looking at your infrastructure. It looks to me like you're going into a classical housing crisis problem. Your catch-up is over. Your demographics don’t look good.” I gave a list of things. “And by the way, it looks like power is becoming very centralized in the economy.” And I said, “I'm a Western economist. You're doing an amazing job. What do I know? But I don’t think that would be good for growth.” After I gave the talk—I just figured you only live once, you just have to say what you have to say—a couple of top leaders came up to me and said, “Professor Rogoff, we very much appreciated your remarks.” I was thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to put me in jail or something at the end of this.”
I’m less impressed by them now. And I’m worried. Let’s say they get into a crisis—which I think they’re in now. I think they're still in a deep crisis—or somehow hotter heads prevail between the United States and China and we get into some kind of entanglement nobody wants. I worry that we’re not as competent. I’m speaking about right now. We have some very good people, but the average quality at the very top, I think, has gone down. And China’s not as competent either. That’s a recipe for having bad things happen.
It's a story and it's a plausible one. But you go down a bit and Rogoff says this
The ticket to getting people to spend more is to provide more security than they have. First of all, there’s nothing like our Social Security system. You need to save for your old age. There’s nothing like our health system. If you work at one of the big state-owned factories, they give you healthcare, but otherwise you’re on your own. They’re not allowed to invest abroad. It goes in waves, but they’re not allowed to put their money abroad. So they’re trying to be careful about all of that and not do things suddenly. There’s nothing to do overnight. But fundamentally, if you’re looking at China and asking what’s wrong, it’s that the consumer isn’t spending enough.
And I hear 'make them just like us'.
Economists at least consider ourselves terrible at that. You go back and look at any of these commissions that were supposed to figure out what was going on. They happen periodically. Maybe Brookings puts one together, maybe the government does. My former colleague, the late Dick Cooper, had a whole list of these. So it is very hard to know. But my gut instinct is that what’s happening to China is what’s happened to Japan. It’s what’s happened to Asia, what happened to the Soviet Union. We have a more dynamic economy. We’re not perfect. Maybe we’re screwing it up right now with all the tariff wars and deglobalization. But we have this dynamism and creativity that other places—at least other large economies—just can’t replicate. They can build stuff. The French have better high-speed trains than we do. I hope you don’t ride on the train from Boston to New York. It’s nicer than it could be, but it’s no high-speed train. You mentioned China. Oh my gosh, their high-speed trains are just incredible. They’re good at that. But the really creative stuff? I don’t want to say they don’t have any. There are some amazing Chinese companies. But let me say that the US is really good at it. We’ve kept that in our DNA. I think it’s very important, to preserve it.
Getting in an argument about who is the most dynamic and creative is a mug's game.
It's hard to contest the points that Rogoff makes, but when he says 'they have to consume more', I have to wonder if at the heart of a lot of discussion about China's economy is the idea that they have to be us. Yes, the social safety net is nothing compared to western societies, but how do you factor in the fact that a society built on confucian values is going to take up a lot of that. Certainly, there is a lot of grumbling, and there are a lot of knock on effects. But given the way the US and UK safety nets are unravelling before our eyes, I have to wonder if we are just using different measuring sticks.
This resonates with some of the comments in the substack, like this one
There's this perfect example: a Democratic delegation visited Japan recently, and several congresspeople toured the Shinkansen—which, by the way, was built in the 1960s with American funding.1 What's almost laughable is that even today, this public transportation system—which isn't exactly cutting-edge anymore—still managed to "shock" American congresspeople. This tells you that even the highest-ranking political elites don't really have opportunities to experience or understand the kinds of lifestyles other countries have built.
[...]
I was talking to a professor at Columbia—one who’s knowledgeable, well-traveled, worldly person. He told me how impressed he was by Beijing's public safety: at 1 AM, he saw a woman in fur and jewelry walking alone on the street, eventually taking the subway home without any worry. He cited this as positive evidence of modern urban life.
I politely reminded him: if you want to use an example to illustrate good urban safety, you should really mention Tokyo or Seoul instead. Because these cities are equally safe, but they're less likely to be misunderstood as depending on "authoritarian order" for maintenance. When you use Beijing as an example, in the American context, it easily activates this "authoritarian scratch"— people who are culturally inclined to believe order can only be achieved through strongman rule will instinctively equate urban safety with authoritarian governance. They'll think only highly centralized power systems can achieve clean, safe, orderly urban life. This imagination further reinforces their pessimism about democratic countries' inability to govern cities well, providing psychological support for rationalizing some kind of authoritarian governance logic.
But this is actually a very dangerous misreading. We have to dismantle this binary thinking: cities can be both safe and free; public life can be both efficient and democratic. This kind of life exists not only in Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam, Zurich, but could absolutely be realized in America, provided we first culturally change our assumptions about what "ideal life" looks like.
I really like the point of 'authoritarian scratch'. It extends to Japan and Korea, and when you point out some aspect of life, it sends some scurrying to find counter examples.
I had to reconstruct this from last night, so I better stop here.
"
This will be broken into a couple of comments.
First, I got a copy of Abundance and made notes to make a post, but nous basically said what I would have said, only more succinctly. Klein is a wonk, which I say respectfully. However, I don't think his wonkiness serves him well in writing something which is essentially utopian. He writes as if all of the drag in the system is the result of progressives constantly screwing up the system. But a lot of it was trying to win over stakeholders and make sure they were included. That many of those procedures were hijacked to stymie progress shouldn't be blamed on progressives, unless you demand a level of cynicism from progressives that has never been apparent.
It's interesting that there was a flowering of interest in the book, but, afaict, it's all dried up. I'm not sure how any solution can gain a hearing, but the speed at which the book bloomed and then passed away is telling.
Second comment might take a while, I have to check some sources
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.