Is this good or is it bad?
Now if you were to be literal about it and honestly answer the question you would say it is a good chart. For it shows that everybody's income per capita is increasing. How could this be bad? How could anybody complain? People are better off than they were before.Of course leave it to the left to find something to complain about.
For you see while rural incomes are going up, they are not going up as fast as urban incomes.
And this is a bad thing in the world of socialism.
Thus, the emphasis is no longer on whether or not people are better off than they were before. Oh, no, that would be too simple. It's about the fact that other people are more better off than others.
Thus you get retarded measurements like the gini coefficient which leftists will always point to as conclusive proof that the system is failing, despite everybody doing better. And in the case of China, the gini coefficient has been rising showing a widening gap between rural incomes and urban incomes.
What gets me is all the layers of irony afoot here.
A "communist" country is complaining about income distribution, which was brought on by effectively implementing a radically free-market economic system, which has brought standards of living up for everybody.
Heads must be swimming in China's "Communist" Party.
What about urbanization? What % of people people move from rural to urban every year (and therefore increase chances at getting wealthier)?
ReplyDeleteI don't think rural Chinese peasants have property rights, either. Therefore perhaps they have less incentive to produce more and thus reap the benefits of their increased production.
Market reforms aren't failing anyone in China. I would just say rural areas have yet to see the market reforms.
Yes, there's a fair amount of immigration into the cities. But I mean, China is just such a perfect example of the power of capitalism. They do not have 100% total property rights, especially in the rural areas, but look at what lowering the taxes, allowing private businesses and opening up to free trade has done for them.
ReplyDeleteLord knows where they'd be know if they had gone full guns capitalism and privatized their SOE's.
Welcome to have you aboard Seth. The truth is the best stuff I've written/data I've compiled is posted down further in the blog. I hit busy season in about September, so I don't have enough time to do a quality job as much as I would like.
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest just scanning down because some of the best data for stopping liberals dead in their tracks are down there.
Also, BEST THING EVER to win an argument, bet them. Make sure you know for a fact you have the data handy and that you agree upon the terms, but bet the old man $100 that he's wrong, and then pull it up on the web site or what have you. Tends to shut socialists up real quick.
Well, there is a non-leftist reason, I think, to worry about this disparity, too. I have been surprised by the fact that the Financial Times editorialists generally seem to lean to the idea that India will beat out China economically. Not sure I buy it, but. Anyway, one of their issues seems to be that in fact growth in India has been accompanied by a lot of change in quallity of life/education/resources in rural areas -- which in India as China bascially means, everywhere. So Chinese growth is limited to a small part of the population and it's not as clear how they keep generating the people/productivity to keep it going, wheras India is rapidly expanding its pool of personnel who can participate in the new economy.
ReplyDeleteScore one for the leftists, I suppose, in that Inidan investment in rural areas is a remnant of central planning --- but I think that's safe to say here since (1) anyone who wants to try using Indian economic figures to try to justify government control of markets is going to have a real real hard time and (2) after alll central planning went exactly the other way in China.
Hey Sanjay,
ReplyDeleteHow would you speculate the caste system in India would have an affect on bringing up the poorer masses as opposed to China where (I assume) they do not have such a caste system? Most of my research has been on China, not terribly much on India.
I'm not sure -- I'm a lifelong American but of course I've visited India some and know a bit about the culture. Off the top of my head guess, it would help some --- caste politics are quite involved and politicians go to great lengths to buy off votes of specific interest groups. Quotas certainly favor the education fo so-called "low" castes, and "high" castes chafe horribly at them. But I suspect that the effects inasmuch as India has gone to great lengths to "share the wealth" are measurable but not dominant --- fact is there was a lot of central planning and a determined effort to modernize. Probably not as effective as markers doing it? But it has paid dividends.
ReplyDeleteAnd as to how easy it is to make that kind of investment -- wow. My grandfather's little house gets high-speed Internet access better than I can get in Berkeley (and it's not something he really knows how to use). Labor's cheap so if they need to lay down fiber-optic cable, screw it, put a hundred guys on it.
Intersting to note anyway that the Taiwanese -- or at least Chen --- appear to be trying to figure out how to get more in bed with India while less with China. Which certainly seems to make sense for Taiwan though, easier said than done.
ReplyDelete