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Perspectives on China

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The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism by Keyu Jin is quite an interesting read. As I’m not at all a China expert it’s hard for me to evaluate its claims, but the framing is persuasive. This is that the combination of political centralization and economic decentralization is not widely understood and makes China unique. Local officials have strong incentives to encourage local entrepreneurship or ‘inward’ investment from other parts of China. “The link between local growth and political promotion is what makes China’s case unique.” (I like the joke the book recounts: ‘GDP figures roduce officials and officials produce the GDP figures’.) This close public-private relationship is also cemented by the weak public but non-party institutions, meaning businesses have to overcome many barriers through such relationships. She writes: “China has strong state capacity and weak institutions,” which she contrasts to the strong formal instituions but weakening capacity in the US.

The book has some fascinating early chapters on the new phase of state mobilization and also the political/cultural/economic implications of so many Chinese people being only children. On the latter, she argues that it is a psychological burden being ‘only’ because of the expectation that they are the only people able to look after elderly parents. Later chapters go into more familiar territory such as the economy’s debt levels, and the financial system – the book is far more sanguine about the implications for stability than are other commentators. And the final chapter looks at innovation, the country’s impressive ability to adopt, manufacture and diffuse new technologies (“the Chinese are particularly good at making existing technology both better and cheaper”), and its focus on attaining the technology frontier in some areas.

All in all, the book is an optimistic take on China’s economic (and political) model, albeit expressing some reservations. For what it’s worth, the book has stellar back cover praise from Tony Blair, Ken Rogoff and Kai-Fu Lee. It’s well worth a read as a counterbalance to more pessimistic takes, even if one emerges as more sceptical than the author about the strengths or otherwise of the Chinese model.

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A taste of economics

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Ha-Joon Chang’s Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes is an entertaining read, and a nice introduction to some economic questions. Regular readers of his will not be surprised by the economic analysis – heavy on infant industry protection as the path to development for low income countries. But I did very much enjoy the food links – each chapter is an ingredient (rather than a dish), garlic, anchovy, strawberry and so on. There were nice nuggets from food history – the corporate history of Oxo and corned beef for instance, or that Koreans used to snack on fried silkworm pupae as a cheap source of protein as it was a byproduct of the silk export industry.

On the economics, the world has moved significantly towards Ha-Joon’s emphasis on active industrial policy, so he can feel vindicated in that respect. He also acknowledges here that it can go wrong, which I hadn’t spotted stated so clearly in his previous books. I’m not sure his perception of the economics profession as a monoculture with a few brave heterodox souls, set out again in the intro here, is as correct as it used to be; my perception is that it is broadening considerably and has been for a while, certainly outside the US.

The fact in the book that really surprised me is its claim that Switzerland and Singapore are the most manufacturing-intensive economies in the world – the World Bank data suggest this is a bit of an overstatement but they do have higher manufacturing sectors relative to GDP than one might imagine and are in the Germany?Japan clud (Our World in Data figure below.) As my colleague Jostein Hauge – cited here – has written about in his book The Future of the Factory, the economy no longer divides cleanly into manufacturing vs services, as many high value services serve the manufacturing sector. I think we’d do well to get away from that as a key distinction but do believe – as Ha-Joon doesn’t seem to – that there has been an important shift in the structure of the advanced economies. Manufacturing is central as it’s one of the highest value activities, but the way in which it is central has changed.

Anyway, it’s a good debate and the book is a good read, super-accessible for non-economists. I prefer it to some of his earlier popular books because there are far fewer sideswipes at other economists, and I learned a lot about the history and culture of some of the selected foods too. All that’s missing are recipes.

manufacturing-value-added-to-gdp

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Defeated by this book

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The blurb on the back should have been a warning: “A stimulating book that perhaps leaves the reader with more questions than answers. That, in case you are wondering, is intended as praise.”

Well, I should have done more wondering. The Mathematics of the Gods and the Algorithms of Men: A Cultural History by Paolo Zellini looked promising. I found it in the Tate Modern bookshop when Christmas shopping; it’s a wonderful shop with an intriguing book selection. This is the joy of in-person shopping, isn’t it – the serendipity? I’m very interested in algorithms. The book’s published as a Penguin paperback so intended for a wide audience.

But no. No idea what it’s about. I turned over most of the pages. There is a lot about the ancient Greeks. Even when you get to Russell, Frege and the like toward the end – no idea. It also seemed rather too literal a translation from the original Italian. Perhaps a mathemician reader has read it and can explain. Not recommending this one though!

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Saving and spending time

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My first read of the New Year has been an eccentric book, Jam Tomorrow: Why Time Really Matters in Economics by Charles Crowson. I bought it because of a very positive although short FT review that called it: “an important exposition of why economists ought to think deeper about how we value time — past, present and future.” I’m about four fifths of the way through writing my next book, which is all about my research on economic measurement over the past decade or so. (BTW I need ideas for a title – current working title is ‘The Measure of Progress’.)

Most of this is concerned with measuring the digital economy (we don’t). But one of my preoccupations is a paper I wrote with my friend Leonard Nakamura about whether time use would be a useful accounting framework. Productivity is about saving time. On the consumption side, what wellbeing (or utility) we get from how we spend time is surely what matters to people. The paper is open access.

Anyway, there are relatively few books on this subject so I thought Jam Tomorrow might be interesting. It is quite interesting but not what I thought. It’s about money, assets and interest rates – the price of time. The central point is that ‘we’ in general (in the high income west) have been too short-termist and borrowed to consume, at great environmental cost, and also leading to a malfunctioning housing market in the UK, where housing is seen mainly as an asset. I don’t disagree at all. But reading the book was a bit like sitting at dinner next to someone with lots of strong opinions who is speaking a slightly different language (and there’s an obligatory but irritating chapter about why all economics is rubbish … sigh). There are long chunks of text I either found obvious or alternatively hard to understand – and not a few cliches – but with some really thought-provoking formulations popping up.

For example: “If the price of bread or milk rose sharply in a given week we would instinctively cal it inflation. Yet of the Dow Jones stock index were to rise by 2% on a given day, we don’t say, ‘The Dow inflated by 2% today.” One could rationalise the difference but the point about language is really interesting (and there’s a whole chapter about language and analytic philosophy).

So it’s a sort of mixed review from me; interesting but could have done with quite a hands-on edit. The core argument is summed up nicely: “The central idea in this book is that economic decisions are fundamentally decisions about time, reflecting a basic choice between consumption in the present or delaying that consumption by saving for the future.” Yes indeed. But economists have in fact thought quite deeply about this choice. I’m thinking of a different time margin, how we use – ‘spend’ – our time in the present, the 24 hours a day we cannot save to carry over for tomorrow.

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The beauty of infrastructure

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How Infrastructure Works by Deb Chachra is a good complement to Brett Frischmann’s now-classic Infrastructure, which has more of a focus on the economic analysis. Chachra is an engineer, which leads to her focusing more on the physical aspects and affordances of the technologies involved. Having said that, there were two aspects of the book I really appreciated. One is that she links access to infrastructure to Sen’s capabilities approach, and the fact that it gives people agency to lead their lives as they see best. It is also progressive – those with fewer private assets get more value out of public assets.

The other is the emphasis on the collective character of infrastructure assets – which is one reason my colleagues and I recently called for a Universal Basic Infrastructure (rather than income, or even services, both of which involve an individual perspective). The ability of a society or community to invest in and indeed maintain infrastructure – now very complicated and multi-layered – is a thermometer of its political and social health. Something Chris Arnade recently pointed out with regard to the US: decaying transport system, declining polity.

As Chachra points out, the lens of economic efficiency is inadequate. It leads to under-investment in systems that need redundancy, to create resilience at all, and all the more necessary now to enable the needed energy transition.

She’s optimistic about the possibility of shifting to green energy – more so than Brett Christophers in his excellent forthcoming book The Price is Wrong – perhaps because Chachra assumes the state will undertake a lot of the needed investment. Although she adds, “Stability of all sorts, including political and economic stability, is what makes it feasible to front-load large investments of resources with the expectation of continuing benefits over a long period.”

“The true value of these [infrastructure] systems is literally incalculable … because they enable systems and behaviours that wouldn’t be possible without them,” she writes. Above all, what I like about the book is its recognition that “the political and the engineering questions are inextricably linked.” I’ve been slightly obsessed with the dysfunction of applying cost-benefit analysis to major infrastructure, and the need to maintain and upgrade it to at least mitigate deep spatial inequalities. Bennett Institute colleagues have worked on social infrastructure and we have a new British Academy project on a measurement framework for social and cultural infrastructure. The term has recently been more widely used, and perhaps the definition needs revisiting. But the focus on the collective rather than the individual, on the future not just the immediate present, and on the inadequacy of the static efficiency lens when we need an “ethics of care rather than utilitarianism”, is surely correct.

The Guardian had a taster essay extracted from the book, but it is well worth a read as a whole. It’s thoughtful, informative and also very well written.

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