Category: Political Science
Was there ever a Chinese tea party?
…best estimates are that during the second half of the 18th century imperial taxes captured only 5 percent of the gross national product in China, compared to 12-15 percent in Russia, 9-13 percent of national commodity production in France, and 16-24 percent of national commodity production in Britain. During the 18th century in Russia, moreover, corvees and military service were far more onerous than in China, where most labor services had been commuted. If we consider that under the Northern Song in 1080, imperial revenue averaged about 13 percent of national income, and under the Ming in 1550 6-8 percent, we find some support for Skinner’s thesis that percentage of the surplus captured in imperial taxes shrank steadily relative to the share retained by local systems.
Victor Lieberman presents “philosophical commitment to low taxes” as a major reason for this pattern. Further explanations are a lack of foreign threats and that the Chinese state did not always have the capacity to collect much more.
Those points can be found in Lieberman’s quite interesting Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800-1830, volume 2, Mainland Mirrors: Europe, Japan, China, South Asia, and the Islands. The book is even longer than that title, clocking in at 947 pp. and that is only the second part of the whole.
North Korea: The Long Coma
How has the dictatorship in North Korea survived despite mass starvation and economic failure? One factor that comes out of reading Nothing to Envy is that the North Korean iron curtain has been much more impenetrable than that of Eastern Europe. Consider:
In the nearly half a century that elapsed between the end of the Korean War and Mi-ran’s defection in October 1998, only 923 North Koreans had fled to South Korea. It was a minuscule number if you consider that while the Berlin Wall stood an average of 21,000 East Germans fled west every year.
The border with China is longer and more porous than the border with South Korea but until the 1990s there wasn’t much of an incentive to escape in that direction since China wasn’t much better off than North Korea. Moreover, if North Koreans are caught in China then even today they will be sent back,probably to a North Korean gulag; so many defectors try to cross from China to Mongolia through the forbidding Gobi desert. Mongolia will then “deport” them to South Korea.
North Korean propaganda has also been very effective because unlike leaders in Eastern Europe, Kim Il-sung “wasn’t merely the father of their country, their George Washington, their Mao, he was their God.” Here is Nothing to Envy:
Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il’s birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a “general who will rule the world.”
To us this sounds ludicruous but I think Demick is correct when she writes:
…consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers, that for the subsequent fifty-years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity. Who could possibly resist?
When Kim Il-sung dies, Demick describes one woman’s reaction:
Mrs. Song went blank. She felt an electric jolt shoot through her body as though the executioner had just pulled the lever. She’d felt this way only once before, a few years back when she’d been told her mother had died but in that case the death was….This couldn’t be true. She tried to concentrate on what the television broadcaster was saying. His lips were still moving, but the words were incomprehensible. Nothing made sense. She started to scream
“How are we going to live? What are we going to do without our marshal?” The words came tumbling out….She rushed down the staircase and out into the courtyard of her building. Many of her neighbors had done the same. They were on their knees, banging their heads on the pavement. Their wails cut through the air like sirens.
(See also this short video.) FYI, Demick also shows that not everyone believed and preference falsification certainly occurred, although until the regime collapses it is difficult, of course, to say by how many.
All of this works I think to explain the first few decades. Kim il-sung did help to expel the Japanese, and after the Korean war, North Korea was in fact getting better. Without knowledge of the outside world, claims of being the most developed nation on earth could be sustained. But by the 1990s it was clear things were getting worse and as China grew and starvation took hold in North Korea, the North Korean’s could see that the grass was greener on the other side. As a result, defections to China increased tremendously (see my previous post). Moreover, the transfer wasn’t only in one direction, goods and information from China came into North Korea and some North Koreans even traveled back and forth across the Chinese border. Yet, even with this increase in communication and the death of Kim Il-sung the regime held together.
Can North Korea continue to hold together after Kim Jong-il passes? It wasn’t easy to reintegrate Germany after the Berlin Wall fell and the ties there were much greater. North Koreans, it is said, still do not know that a man has walked on the moon let alone that South Korea has a far higher standard of living. What will happen when the regime in North Korea falls and North Koreans awake from their long coma?
Addendum: For more see this National Geographic video with secret footage from inside North Korea. Hat tip on the latter to Dan Klein and Fred Foldvary.
Greece fact of the day (not much of a bailout sir, is it?)
The uncertainty caused by the deal has led Greek bonds to plummet in recent days, with yields on Greece’s benchmark 10-year bonds breaching 18.5 per cent on Thursday, a new euro-era high, wiping away all gains achieved after the bail-out deal was reached.
There is more interesting information at the link, which is about whether there will be a bailout deal at all.
Nothing to Envy
Based on hundreds of interviews with escaped North Koreans, the novel-like Nothing to Envy is a fascinating portrait of North Korea, a sociological investigation of how a totalitarian state operates and a love-story with an O. Henry like ending. Here is one stunning excerpt that describes a defector as she crosses over into China.
Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village.…
Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer – it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark.
Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plain in the face; dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.
Highly recommended. I will say more in future posts.
Hat tip: Bryan Caplan.
Who will receive the next national holiday?
Adam Burns, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Who do you think will be the next person to receive a national holiday in the US?
Or, if they are currently unknown, what characteristics/achievements will this person have to earn themselves that recognition?
Someone Latino sounds about right, since there is a growing number of Latino voters. Yet who exactly should that be? It’s been a long time since Cesar Chavez and in any case his cause is no longer fashionable. Picking “an invisible Latino” won’t quite do the trick either. American Latinos seem to have less mainstream canonicity, at least qua Latino. There is no equivalent of Martin Luther King. Nor are we about to dedicate a day to all the people who run across the border, no matter how persuasive Michael Clemens may be.
How about a day named after a generic old person? They vote too, and this could be done while limiting the “doc fix” to trick them into submission before preparing the ice floes. But how to make it polite? “Oldies Day” won’t cut it, even if they can get away with a version of that in baseball or on the radio.
Most likely is that a naming opportunity will be sold to the highest bidder, in the midst of our forthcoming fiscal crisis, 侯逸凡 Day anyone?
Toward a theory of autocracy
The Russian head of the World Chess Federation said he spoke Tuesday with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and that he remains in Tripoli and defiant.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov has known Gadhafi for years. His visit to Tripoli in July was among the last times the Libyan leader was seen in public after NATO airstrikes began.
…He said Gadhafi sounded full of vigor and told him he was “certain we will win.”
Ilyunzhinov said he also talked to Gadhafi’s son Mohammed, Libya’s Olympic chief, who said his father’s forces would “drive the rats out of
the city.”
The link is here, via @JamesCrabtree and Natasha. Of course I also could have titled this post “Toward a theory of the World Chess Federation.”
Eurobond points
How many Op-Eds can people write saying that without a eurobond the eurozone will fall apart? I don’t think SPD would support the idea if they were in power; it is instead a way to set up an “I told you so” on Merkel, when things go badly, as they will. It is hard to imagine that all the eurozone countries would sign off on it, and how does the market handle the political uncertainty in the meantime? Finland has been demanding collateral for its loans to Greece and other countries wish to follow suit, and that is what any agreement would look like ex post. That’s assuming every country finds it constitutional, a heroic leap. Or what if German bond rates skyrocket after a eurobond announcement? Does everyone go read Jean Tirole on renegotiation-proof agreements? A eurobond without Germany, and possibly without France, also collapses inductively. Or say Merkel agreed tomorrow to a eurobond and managed to hang on to power. What fiscal management conditions would be demanded in return and would anyone expect Greece to accede to them? How long does it take seventeen nations to agree anyway? Does all borrowing get run through the eurobond or just some? How are borrowing adjustments at the margin to be settled? What if a country won’t put its fair share into a eurobond reimbursement fund, instead preferring to prioritize its individual creditors? Who or what punishes them? Are markets these days good at picking apart bundled assets?
It’s easy fodder to criticize Merkel for saying no to the eurobond idea, but it’s a non-starter which could not make it off the drawing board. I haven’t even considered the extreme moral hazard problems which would result from actually doing the idea.
War and Peace
In fact, the last decade has seen fewer war deaths than any decade in the past 100 years…If the world feels like a more violent place than it actually is, that’s because there’s more information about wars — not more wars themselves.
From Joshua Goldstein in Foreign Policy. Cato Unbound covered some of the reasons for the outbreak of peace earlier this year.
Hat tip: Mike Makowsky.
Sentences to ponder
Already, hundreds more American troops have been killed in Afghanistan during the less than three years of the Obama administration than during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.
Here is more. I don’t think that “# of Americans killed” is a good final standard for right and wrong, still I believe many Americans would be shocked to see this comparison.
Since the 1980s, spending cuts no longer cause riots
Interestingly, though, since the late 80s, this relationship has broken up and vanished. According to the results, in modern, industrial societies, there is no longer any palpable link between spending cuts and rioting.
In fact there is a correlation in the opposite direction, though it is not statistically significant. Here is much more, about the study which everyone is citing. It doesn’t show what people are saying it shows, unless they see today as like 1926. Arguably the democratization of Eastern Europe is a key factor in changing the results.
The political backlash against S&P
Keep in mind it was the federal government, and the regulatory state, that elevated the power of these agencies in the first place.
If all they do is take away the protected political status of those agencies, I am fine with the outcome but still I do not like the process. That the agencies were a) often mistaken in the past, and b) lobbied the government for privileges in the past, does not appease me. Exercising free speech rights should not lead to regulatory retaliation from Congress, even if some of the changes are good ones.
The economics of riots
Has anyone linked to the DiPasquale and Glaeser 1996 paper on riots yet?
We examine the causes of rioting using international data, evidence from the race riots in the 1960s in the U.S., and Census data from Los Angeles, 1990. We find some support for the notions that the opportunity cost of time and the potential costs of punishment influence the incidence and intensity of riots. Beyond these individual costs and benefits, community structure matters. In our results, ethnic diversity seems a significant determinant of rioting, while we find little evidence that poverty in the community matters.
Here is a well-known political science paper on economic conditions and riots in India. Here is an economics paper on riots in India, AER 2008. Here is Alex’s piece on riots (gated). In London, the riots are getting closer to the LSE.
Which intellectuals have influence?
Ben Casnocha suggested to me that I have harsh standards. I don’t mean “influencing lots of other minds,” I mean changing the world. Here are a few intellectuals who have had real influence:
1. Jane Jacobs: City planners heed her strictures in many different locales, sometimes too much.
2. Rachel Carson, and numerous environmentalists: Obvious.
3. Milton Friedman: He inspired market-oriented reformers around the world, eased the way to floating exchange rates, helped legitimize early derivatives, and focused attention on monetary policy and away from fiscal policy, among other achievements.
What about today?
1. Peter Singer: Many fewer people eat meat and he has given the animal rights movement greater intellectual credibility.
2. Muhammad Yunnus: He popularized micro-credit and spread the notion to many countries, even though he is by no means its inventor.
3. Richard Posner: Many more judges use economic concepts when issuing judgments or writing up opinions.
Most of the people in this category have spent a big chunk of their lives pushing a single, fairly specific issue or method. You could add Bernanke (a special case, but still a yes), Charles Murray on poverty, and Germaine Greer. Art Laffer maybe. Friedman is a throwback to the time when generalists could be quite influential.
Who hasn’t had much influence over events? I would cite Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Slavoj Žižek, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Krugman, Tony Judt, Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama, Charles Taylor, Steven Pinker, Naomi Klein, and Niall Ferguson, among many others including virtually all economists.
Perhaps these individuals will have long-run influence on people’s broader views, and thus on longer-run events, but I wonder. Not everything feeds into a long and powerful stream, and every now and then there is a reset. We do not know, but we do know that some very focused individuals have had real influence.
I would put Esther Duflo, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Romer, and Jacob Hacker (public option) in the “still have a good chance to have a big influence” category.
There is also the “futile crusaders” category, for instance Thomas Friedman for pushing for a centrist movement for green energy and Larry Lessig for IP reform and campaign finance reform, although of course subsequent events could upgrade them. We may well end up with green energy and IP reform but more likely as the result of technologies and market prices, rather than from successful intellectual battles.
Overall it is very hard to have much influence.
Very good sentences
…in the wake of the weekend’s downgrade, we need them to govern as though that final victory might never quite arrive.
That is from Ross Douthat, here is more.
Jack Goldstone is now blogging
*The* Jack Goldstone, who by the way is a colleague at GMU. Find his posts here.