Tom Pepinsky

Month: July 2012

  • Do People Really Believe What They Write About China?

    Eye-catching tweet by @niubi

    Sina has now shut weibo accounts of Bloomberg, new York times & us government. And yet they enjoy all the benefits of the us capital markets

    This comes hot on the heels of two interesting pieces for those interested in what’s going on in the world’s second largest economy: a Times op-ed on China’s “Humane Authority” under a “Confucian Constitution” and a investment analyst’s note on China’s economy and its implications for the Australian economy (h/t FT Alphaville, see also Noah Smith).

    China-model bashing has become something of a hobby here at Indolaysia. See here. And here. And here. Oh and here. What can we say, every self-respecting Southeast Asianist has a chip on his/her shoulder about China! It’s part of the job description, and it goes back to the Trưng sisters and Kertanegara. So it’s hard to let what passes for the cutting edge in popular China commentary pass us by.

    Let me just pull out some zingers from these two pieces. I’m not going to go into context, but suffice it to say that context will not make any of these things seem any more reasonable than they seem here. (Check it out for yourself if you don’t believe me.) On Humane Authority:

    1. In modern China, Humane Authority should be exercised by a tricameral legislature: a House of Exemplary Persons that represents sacred legitimacy; a House of the Nation that represents historical and cultural legitimacy; and a House of the People that represents popular legitimacy.
    2. The leader of the House of Exemplary Persons should be a great scholar….The leader of the House of the Nation should be a direct descendant of Confucius; other members would be selected from descendants of great sages and rulers….members of the House of the People should be elected either by popular vote or as heads of occupational groups.
    3. To protect the primacy of sacred legitimacy in Confucian tradition the House of Exemplary Persons would have a final, exclusive veto.

    On China’s economy:

    1. The Chinese don’t play chess. They play wei qi. Wei qi is a game of strategy played on a larger board with black and white pieces each of equal value. The Chinese government views the economy as though it’s wei qi. Each piece has its own role in the economy, but each is no more important than another.
    2. In China, capital is just one piece on the board where the aim is to raise living standards of all households.
    3. China views competition as an important means of raising living standards by lowering the cost of goods and services. This encouragement of a hyper-competitive industry structure drives innovation through the threat of failure; there is no carrot for innovation. Investors understand that achieving scale and productivity growth is the only way to sustain a profitable business model.
    4. China manages urbanisation. It does not allow the ad hoc urbanisation prevalent other emerging economies.

    Yes, all of this about China, the same regime that has banned Western press coverage of the Chinese economy and political system from Weibo. That is the regime that can be trusted to govern humanely, that treats capital just like any other part of the economy.

    Do people really, honestly, believe these things about China?

  • Cranky Thoughts on "Global Challenges" and the Social Sciences

    Via the Monkey Cage and the Freakonomics blog, an article by Luk Van Langenhove in Nature about the future of funding for social science research. Van Langenhove’s argument appears take a return-on-investment perspective on the social sciences, and claims that we ought to fund the research that solves big problems in interdisciplinary contexts.

    this enormous resource [social science research] is not contributing enough to today’s global challenges, including climate change, security, sustainable development and health. These issues all have root causes in human behaviour: all require behavioural change and social innovations, as well as technological development….some are up in arms over a proposal to drop a specific funding category for social-science research and to integrate it within cross-cutting topics of sustainable development. This is a shame — the community should be grasping the opportunity to raise its influence in the real world.

    The author is a social scientist but seems unaware of the reasons why disciplinary debates exist and the point of basic research. Disciplinary debates—the good ones, not the personality conflict ones—exist because of real disagreement about how some aspect of the social world functions. The disciplines are well-poised resolve these disagreements. Basic research exists because, well, it’s basic: applied social research or social engineering will be for naught if it doesn’t build on solid foundations. I’m not sure how we could contribute to a big project to save the world without a good sense of what the expected outcomes of various interventions are, and I don’t know where these come from if not from basic research.

    Basic social science (from Hayek to Scott) also gives us good reasons to be just a tad suspicious of the “social innovations” that this author believes social science research could produce.

    I certainly don’t believe that social science research cannot or should not be relevant for whatever global challenge all the Thomas Friedmans are animated about today. But it is presumptuous to decide ex ante that funding for social research will be awarded on the basis of a committee’s beliefs about what constitutes a global problem and whether the social scientist is embedded in an interdisplinary effort to solve it. Basic social science should tell you exactly what sort of rent-seeking behavior that will incentivize, and what sorts of research will accordingly disappear.

    On this note, there is also a poll at Freakonomics on which social science to eliminate. I will not participate until I get the chance to vote on which science to eliminate. Based on the fact that I don’t know much about chemistry, I didn’t like Mr. Zerbe (and he didn’t like me), and I just don’t understand how it relates to global challenges, I vote that we get rid of chemistry. Chemistry is just either a subfield of physics or a subfield of biology anyway. In today’s budget climate we have eliminate the redundancies, you can’t expect taxpayers to keep paying for beakers and reagents unless we’re solving climate change. You don’t get innovation unless you’re willing to destroy some sacred cows, and I am tired of the chemists sitting there in their lab coats—pfff, titrating—without working to solve the world’s problems, which will certainly require both molecules and particles.