I strongly recommend Acemoglu, Robinson classic book "Why Nations Fail"
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity/d...
It's very accessible, no economics background required. Along with Krugman and Kahneman, one of the few economics scholars that take the time to write a book for layman.
I also recommend Acemolgu's recent book "Power and Progress" on the relationship between labor and technology [0].
If you don't like reading, Acemoglu gave a talk about it at HKS recently [1]
[0] - https://ig.ft.com/sites/business-book-award/books/2023/longl...
I read the summary from the review and I am not convinced that neoliberal US and EU have a less extractive governance structure than China has, as the authors seem to claim. It's been a decade since the book was published and China is still going strong. We will see.
China has become more and more authoritarian under Xi, its GDP growth stats may be dodgy, and recently its housing bubble has popped big-style. It could go the way of Japan. I agree with your last sentence, all the same.
How do you know this?
I don’t want to single this out but tangible proof of a net increase in ‘authoritarian’ decision making, compared to say a decade ago, has never been posted on HN, as far as I know.
Most of the in depth analysis I’ve seen suggests that although enforcement actions have become stricter over the past decade, the actual number of new laws and regulations has gone down.
And more importantly, the number of contradictory laws and regulations (between central authorities, and between the centre and provinces) has gone way way down.
So there’s much less leeway to punish on a whim or trap someone in a double bind, compared to a decade ago. Which suggests a net decrease, if anything.
It depends on if you’re talking about authoritarianism as it relates to the average person or the political and ruling class. There have been a lot of reports of Xi getting rid of a lot of potential adversaries when he announced himself ruler for life and the imprisonment of Jack Ma and stripping him of his wealth for making challenging statements against Xi seems pretty authoritarian.
Does it makes sense to discuss it relative to the ‘political and ruling class’?
Since they pretty much all have party cards already. And the moment they give it up means they’re kicked out from any decision making, from what I understand.
Yes internal factions within the party can arbitrarily punish each other for made up reasons all day long, every day of the year.
So in a sense it was already authoritarian without limit.
But that’s not new, nor different from any other big political party.
The kind of punishment authoritarian regimes dish out is much more severe in ways that you couldn’t do in the US (imprisonment, seizure of assets, death). In fact I’d argue it’s the only kind that matters. Authoritarian regimes rarely go after normal people unless they speak out actively against the government (which China does) and instead focus on controlling and censoring anyone in a position of power and let the implicit censoring of the entire population flow downstream from that.
If the party membership is revoked first, then the person wouldn’t be part of the ‘political and ruling class’ any longer.
Then they would just be a citizen who might formerly have been some bigshot, i.e. the second case.
It still doesn’t seem to make sense to discuss any increases relative to the first case, since in 2012 it was already unlimitedly authoritarian.
Revoking party membership doesn’t mean much necessarily if you still wield influence and power. Imagine if Barack Obama or Bill Clinton were kicked out by Joe Biden trying to consolidate power. They’d still have a voice and be influential outside of their party membership. That’s why Xi needs to imprison his rivals and root them out beyond just revoking their membership. And again I’ll point you to the example made of Jack Ma who wasn’t in the political party except maybe nominally but had wealth. I think you’ve never lived under an authoritarian regime and never talked with people who lived under it to understand what life is like.
The difference between oligarchy that deliberately maintains balance of power and interests between, say, dozens or hundreds of prominent players, and a one-man rule where the "courtiers" are just richer than an average citizen, but equally subjugated to the Dear Leader, is enormous.
Both Russia and China developed since 2000 from one to the other, and I wonder what the end game will be. In Russian case, the development led to re-establishment of the imperial idea and an attempt to conquer formerly held lands by force; that is something that the oligarchs wouldn't start, but a neo-Tsar absolutely did.
Communist China used to be way less externally aggressive than Russia / USSR, but I don't like the current military gestures by Xi. Not at all.
In your mind, having an army to defend your country like China does is a crime... Better being like Japan that is defenseless against the very people who invaded them and continue there for 75 years.
So the degree of authoritarian decision making felt by ‘courtiers’ within the party can vary from year to year?
I guess that is possible, but if that’s the case, wouldn’t that naturally be their goal? To concentrate power and authority in one place, or person, that they can more readily manipulate.
People were saying when the PRC was founded 75 years ago it would collapse any day now. They were saying this during the cultural revolution. They were saying it earlier this year, as China sent a robot to the far side of the moon to collect moon rocks and bring them back to earth. And they're still saying it. I'm not holding my breath.
Just because PRC didn't collapse doesn't mean PRC perform well. On the contrary, the current strength of PRC is probably a reversion to mean, what China would be like if it wasn't so mismanaged, and yet decades late from where they could be.
States can endure a lot of mismanagement. Look at North Korea for instance. What we won't know is when we hit the breaking point.
What is happening in Russia may lead to an eventual collapse, though unlikely. There are some signs of a loss of monopoly on violence as the system is pushed to its breaking point. Hopefully that won't happen, but it's a scary possibility nonetheless.
There are HN posters with the ability to see hard data inside America's largest tech and manufacturing businesses, but don't investigate the question, "How much of what you buy every day was made in China?"
Do you actually think China has fairer courts, more open financial markets, and better business environment than the EU or US? For the longest time Hong Kong had to fill those gaps for China in order for the country to attract capital.
Regardless, even if China does today the explanation still holds considering China only transformed a few decades before the book was written.
> Krugman
Not sure I'd spend time on a Krugman book. He predicted in 1998 that the internet would cease having an economic impact by 2005 and that it would be no greater than fax machines. He's like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of economics.
Krugman is controversial at times, but he is a serious economist. The quote is also taken out of two important contexts. 1. It was not a serious academic prediction but rather part of a fluff piece by the Times about future precitions. 2. The quote also exists in the context of a debate that was raging during the advent of the internet whether or not the internet would hyper charge productivity and economic growth. In hindsight, especially after the late 1990s, the truth is far closer to the fax machine rather than a new era of prosperity. The lack of visible productivity growth from a technology that has so visibly transformed our society is one of the bigger questions in economics today.
> Krugman is controversial at times
Kind of like saying Lysenko was controversial at times.
He's not "controversial," he's just a bloviator. His credentials as a serious economist expired long ago when he signed up with the leftist team and agreed to never challenge them again, on anything.
When you have to spend many words on explaining the "context" in which someone's quotes should be viewed, you are losing.
The lack of visible productivity growth. In particular, it's not as visible as you expect in the GDP statistics.
Take TV Guide, for instance. Now, if anybody watches broadcast television, they can use the internet to find out what's on when. Is that better or worse for users than having a paper TV guide? In many ways it's better. But it shows up in the GDP as a negative, because nobody's buying TV Guide any more.
Or take Google. I can search for any information I want, for free. That creates immense value - immense in every sense except the GDP, where it doesn't show up at all, because it's free.
Wikipedia. Linux. gcc. The Wayback Machine. Even HN. All this is available to us, whenever we want it, for whatever purpose we want, for free. There's great value to us. Just nothing that shows up on the GDP statistics, because it's all free. (Yeah, I know, RedHat sells Linux, and Wikipedia asks for donations. They aren't Microsoft selling Windows and The World Book, though. You can still use them for free, and not get sued or jailed.)
Sure, there's a lot of value. There's also a lot of slops and negative value. These days I don't even use wikipedia that much even though I googled things constantly.
GDP is a very gross measure of things to be sure, but also difficult to fake.
Very cool to see public econ and history of economics represented! On top of the popular release, there's usually some advanced background info (https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/advanced-economic...) which is admittedly pretty massive but gives a lot of background about the Prize.
If interested, this page has context: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/pop...
Well deserved. Acemoglu is the economist everyone respects.
Very technical, but not for the sake of mathiness. His models have a meaning. They clarify thought and ideas. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=l9Or8EMAAAAJ&hl=en
Seems like one conclusion that can be drawn is that the indigenous people who get colonized should just shut up and enjoy their new reservations. The political, societal, and economic benefits of colonization were not intended to help them. Those changes were only to help those who did the colonizing build a new society that was free from the institutions that prevented them having a voice in how they were able to conduct their lives back in the old (European monarchy) country. Shit rolled downhill in the new country and the oppressed became the oppressor.
It worked out in the end though for those who survived since they now have representative government with members elected who are beholden to the people and who remember the main lesson of the past - grassroots organization against oppression is the only tool that works to preserve freedom for the majority of the people in a country.
i don’t fully understand your post, but I don’t think
“grassroots organization against oppression is the only tool that works to preserve freedom for the majority of the people in a country”
is a good takeaway for native americans and i struggle to imagine a counterfactual where native americans having this knowledge at the start of colonization would make any significant difference to the course of events
Their seminal book literally opens with explaining how most colonial institutions were created to extract the wealth of natives and slaves, institutions that live on today through the authoritarian regimes that inherited them.
Well it’s kind of a moot point if we only care about “those who survive”.
> Seems like one conclusion that can be drawn is that the indigenous people who get colonized should just shut up and enjoy their new reservations
Colonial institutions ARE extractive.
This is a fairly prominent point in Acemoglu, Simon, and Robinson's works.
In most settler-colonial situations during history, unless strict separation between races and nations was maintained, the conquerors intermingled with the conquered so thoroughly that you cannot tell them apart nowadays (Who is a Norman and who is an Anglo-Saxon? Who is a Roman and who is a Celt?). That included a lot of Amerindians in the US.
This is pretty much the norm across the ages. You could probably say that it is wise from the vanquished to adapt at least partially the culture of the conquerors; after all, it might be better suited for victories in wars, and that was a major factor in survival until recently. (In some places, still is.)
Which is why the pro-Trump tech folks are playing with fire. Exchanging potentially faster approvals/lower regulation for favored projects, for an environment where rule of law and institutions are weakened.
More rules doesn’t mean stronger rule of law.
Having lots of weakly enforced or discretionary laws is net worse for rule of law and a stable non-corrupt society.
you've misread the comment, weakened rule of law and lesser regulations are two different things that (according to the comment) are being exchanged. For example firing Comey had nothing to do with regulations.
More law, better regulation comes from the same school as more code, better product. It’s obviously bullshit but novice practitioners and non-practitioners support the idea because they think all problems are solvable with more something.
The slow and messy process of reaching consensus (or close) via a complex web of institutions help “western” (in the sense that Kotkin uses) societies avoid really bad policy and adapt to mistakes.
Some people are frustrated by this and think it would be much better to substitute their judgment for this process. They don’t necessarily hold this view selfishly or maliciously, they are just short sighted.
Yes. Their judgment. Everyone else gets to shut up and take it. It's a very selfish view, whether or not they are consciously selfish about it.
I guess I agree. I tend to try to view others actions in best reasonable light, so I default to the idea that they are simply blind to their own limits, but mean well.
I guess I'd better assume the best about such people, given how easy it is for me to have the same attitude...
The pro-Trump tech folks are 90% about crypto. It's single-issue politics, like abortion or gun rights.
Scratch the surface on a SV Trump supporter like Marc Andreessen, and you'll find a big bag of crypto that they want to keep dumping on retail investors.
Which crypto Bill Ackman is trying to dump on retail?
Ackman is not a tech folk.
It’s not really about crypto. It just self interest.
Terrible decision. Very bad and sloppy economics, a simplified version of what sociology and political science have been doing much better for over 40 years, as if before these crucial contributions we had no idea that institutions, forms of power and social conflict affect economic outcomes.
Branko Milanovic has aptly and rather amusingly defined Acemoglu's naive theorizing as "Wikipedia entries with regressions" https://glineq.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robi... and he is right.
Acemoglu's strand of institutional social science is known to be painfully racist and clueless about realities on the ground https://africasacountry.com/2016/09/africa-why-western-econo... The narrative that you can get economic growth with "good institutions" is a fable, and cases like China are also completely outside their narrative. Not only is their narrative historically inaccurate, if not ideological, it can't explain why Western economies like the US have prospered despite being as corrupt as China is today.
Here is what your boy Branko Milanovic says: https://x.com/BrankoMilan/status/1845850368221032590
> Good decision. They deserve it. Obviously, there is a lot to disagree with in their work, but AJR initial papers were excellent, and broadened economic work to include politics and economic history. Congratulations!
There’s nothing racist about stating that strong institutions and rule of law lead to economic success.
It’s an obvious truth, which many Africans reject for some reason. I’m Nigerian, and my country is a clear example of how excessive corruption and dependence on a natural resource (oil) makes a country mediocre.
Dan Rogger published an interesting paper 13 years ago digging into this from a Civil Service standpoint [0]
Some of the recommendations were implemented, but it's still very much a work in progress.
[0] - https://www.danrogger.com/files/survey%20reports/Nigeria%20C...
> defined Acemoglu's naive theorizing
It sounds like you are parroting arguments without explaining those arguments.
"Wikipedia entries with regressions" is a facile argument that can be applied to Picketty and Milanovic as well.
Plus, Milanovic congratulated AJR and agreed to a number of their initial works in the space (which are the ones that won them the Nobel)
> The narrative that you can get economic growth with "good institutions" is a fable
Bullshit. We don't invest in Uganda or Kenya because we know we won't be able to get a contract enforced.
A major reason FDI to PRC skyrocketed in the 2000s was because individual provinces worked on building SEZs with ease of contract enforcement, as well as a number of harmonizing business regulation reforms (eg. the Guiding Cases Project).
And that same FDI outflow from China that we are now seeing is due to the opaqueness that now permeates the judicial and regulatory environemnt in China after a number of backwards reforms in 2018-22.
> it can't explain why Western economies like the US have prospered despite being as corrupt as China is today.
Over a century of major reforms and regulations.
This was a major reason why the PRC began the Guiding Cases project.
I, for one, am waiting for the field of economics to be colonized by AI folks