Attitudes have become so extreme that anyone who even *attempts* to tackle hard, important questions are scorned as unscientific, while scorners dedicate their lives to precisely proving points everyone already knows. Anything less than definite & airtight is not publishable… So naturally incentives gear toward trivial questions that can be (a) precisely & perfectly answered, (b) accepts conventional wisdom and wins approval.

A preview of my talk at IMF in 5⃣ slides

(Spoiler: China is only as exceptional as the West)

As construction projects came to a screeching halt, a downward spiral of falling land prices & more defaults followed. The depression lasted 4 years, local governments fell into deep financial holes.

Describing China 🇨🇳 today? Peak China?

No, America 🇺🇸 in the Panic of 1837

Classical economists: America's development began with "the European form of good institutions"

Really?

Nope 🙅‍♂️

Jack Katzenstein's review of CHINA'S GILDED AGE is so articulate and accurate that it helps me understand my own book better. Seriously. 😇

This week, sharing 7⃣ ideas 💡-

4⃣: Institutions that build markets ≠ good/strong institutions needed to preserve markets

Think start-up vs. Fortune 500 company

What's right ✅ for one isn't right ❎ for the other Contrary to conventional wisdom, the good/strong institutional forms found in rich democracies are NOT universal preconditions for development

So, why have we believed that?

Because victors 👑 not only write history; they write political economy

This week, sharing 7⃣ ideas 💡-

1⃣: We cannot study complex social systems using concepts and tools designed for complicated objects

We conflate "complicated" & "complex," but in fact they describe two completely different worlds.

Complicated = toaster 📠

Complex = tree 🌴

Complicated objects are made up of many separate parts that do not interact and change with one another (e.g., toasters).

Complex systems interacts, evolves; produce unpredictable outcomes while displaying distinct patterns of organization and change, (e.g., trees, societies).

America 🇺🇸 is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century 🪙 Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology.

noemamag.com/the-clash-of-t…

https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1725228522040406193

Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves.

noemamag.com/the-clash-of-t…

"Endogeneity" is a big, ugly social science jargon

Here's a simpler way to understand it ♻️

https://twitter.com/yuenyuenang/status/1646899233612771329

Endogeneity (mutual causation), like ambiguity 👇, is a fact of life

As social scientists, we should not aim to "treat endogeneity" and eliminate it like it's a dreadful disease

We should study and explain it. That's all.

https://twitter.com/yuenyuenang/status/1645955035077935105?s=20

Extremely useful resource following dominant linear logic ▶️ in political economy: state capacity is either cause (independent variable) or outcome (dependent variable)

But what if it's BOTH cause and outcome? ▶️◀️

It wouldn't fit in a linear, 2D template

https://twitter.com/Pavithra_Suri/status/1646852849286905857

A template, like any infrastructure, is a powerful thing, constraining what you look for

The binary - cause (IV) and outcome (DV) - forces social scientists to look for linear stories

This runs into limits with outcomes like
DEVELOPMENT
That are inherently bi-causal ▶️◀️

Bk rec 🧵To understand China's modernization 🏙️🏭& China-Taiwan's fraught relationship, essential to read about Sun Yat-Sen's revolutionary mission.

No coincidence that former TW president Ma Ying-Jeou began tour of China with a visit to the mausoleum where Sun is entombed. Sun's defining thesis, "The International Development of China" (1919), reads like a boring blueprint of what China has been doing since the 1980s. But in those days, Sun was seen as a utopian, even a crackpot, for his vision of modernizing China's infrastructure. 🚆

✅From @AndrewJPerrin @SNFAgoraJHU ✅

"But you can’t fix an echo chamber by throwing more voices into it."

Agreed: Having two extreme and equally biased, flimsy arguments doesn't make a good debate

bostonglobe.com/2023/03/29/opi… Debates on China is a good example

EITHER
"China is bad. The West is beyond reproach."
OR
"The West is bad. China is beyond reproach."

If placed in one room, one extreme argument doesn't balance out another extreme argument

Both must be critiqued & given due credit

Meant to be a story of foreign aid, but really it's an account of why central planning fails. Students of Soviet and Maoist systems should read this 📕 by @ninamunk alongside historical texts to know why central planning fails in different times and places.
#globaldev In one "model village" (Millennium Village), local cadres preselected a list of crops for planting, expecting they will sell. Maize: bumper crop but local consumers don't like corn. Farmers dump crops, price crash, losses.

That's familiar to anyone who studies central planning