Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2013

Reasons not to be fearful of “China’s economic threat”

Filed under: China, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:50

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll probably have picked up some of my disdain for the “OMG! China’s going to eat our (economic) lunch!” meme that is pretty much a copy-paste of the same worry over Japan in the 1980s. In Maclean’s, Colby Cosh explains why you shouldn’t put too much effort into worrying about the Chinese economic Colossus crushing us any time real soon:

What I always wonder when I encounter a China bull or a Chinaphobe — for they are two sides of the same coin — is this: Even if they think “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is economically superior to ordinary capitalism, where in China are the parallel cultural institutions to support prolonged capitalist-style growth? Maybe China doesn’t need reciprocal free trade to blow our doors off in the race to utopia. Maybe it doesn’t need untidy democratic quarrelling. One presumes it won’t need a high level of achievement in basic science, either, judging by the Nobels: It is well-documented that the Chinese civilian research establishment is awash in fraud and plagiarism, to say nothing of the destructive favouritism inherent to a one-party state.

Rowan Callick’s new book The Party Forever: Inside China’s Modern Communist Party makes a simple, compact judgment on the general state of Chinese higher education: Just look where the Party leadership sends its own children to university: the U.S. Another important leading indicator of cultural progress is press freedom, which, if history has anything to say on the matter at all, appears to be utterly integral to sustained prosperity. But Mainland China has no newspapers as we understand them; it is not even clear that the regimented, spoon-fed “reporters” there could assemble one, even if the Party would allow it.

The Diane Francises of the world would have us reject the relevance of the Soviet experience to China’s future, to the point of ignoring familiar Soviet themes that are increasingly apparent in China: the vast infrastructure projects standing unused in the middle of nowhere, the blind environmental despoliation, the dodgy economic statistics. Beyond mastery of trading, interior China has simply never possessed much of the cultural technique upon which the advanced stages of economic development would seem to depend. Hong Kong is the exception, but having taken it over, China shows little appetite so far for imitating its social openness and individuality — or for those of Taiwan or Japan or South Korea. It still requires a strange leap of faith to believe it possible for China to economically surpass these neighbours, and ourselves, without becoming a great deal more like us.

Regular visitors to the blog know that I’ve been rather skeptical about the official statistics reported by Chinese government and media sources.

Mismeasuring American poverty

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

It’s always headline-worthy to say that some absurdly high number of Americans are living in poverty — that the richest country in history still has desperately poor people in vast numbers. It’s shocking to see … and it’s mostly bogus:

We get told they do often enough I know, the latest example being this:

    About 15% of Americans live in poverty, so why is no one talking about it?

It isn’t true.

    In a nation where, according to the US Census Bureau’s poverty statistics released last month, 46.5 million people (roughly 15%) of the nation’s population lives in poverty,

Sorry, but their repeating it does not make it true.

The correct formulation is that 15% of Americans would be living in poverty if it were not for the things that are done to alleviate poverty.

There are two things that make this correction really rather important. The first being that everyone else measures poverty after all the things that are done to alleviate it. Thus any comparison across countries is going to leave the US looking very bad indeed: for others are talking about the residual poverty left after trying to do something about it and the US is talking about the poverty before alleviation. Very different things I hope you’ll agree.

There are reasons why this meme won’t go away (aside from it being a handy eye-catching headline to attract readers for newspapers and websites), including the fact that many civil servants are employed in federal, state, and local organizations to work on programs intended to alleviate poverty. If they are too successful, their caseload goes down and so will their budget and headcount. Any bureaucracy has a prime directive quite separate from their original reason for existing — organizations have primal motivations for surviving and growing. Their incentive is thus merely to ease the problem, not to solve it, or else they’re working to put themselves out of business.

England performs poorly in literacy and numeracy survey

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Education, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:50

In the Guardian, Randeep Ramesh reports on a recent OECD ranking of literacy and numeracy which shows England in a poor light:

England is the only country in the developed world where the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults, according to the first skills survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

In a stark assessment of the success and failure of the 720-million-strong adult workforce across the wealthier economies, the economic thinktank warns that in England, adults aged 55 to 65 perform better than 16- to 24-year-olds at foundation levels of literacy and numeracy. The survey did not include people from Scotland or Wales.

The OECD study also finds that a quarter of adults in England have the maths skills of a 10-year-old. About 8.5 million adults, 24.1% of the population, have such basic levels of numeracy that they can manage only one-step tasks in arithmetic, sorting numbers or reading graphs. This is worse than the average in the developed world, where an average of 19% of people were found to have a similarly poor skill base.

When the results within age groups are compared across participating countries, older adults in England score higher in literacy and numeracy than the average among their peers, while younger adults show some of the lowest scores for their age group.

As with any sort of survey of this kind, it helps to know how they went about assessing skills in various countries and how similar countries rank:

Literacy for people aged 16-24

6 Australia
15 Canada
17 Ireland
19 England/N Ireland
20 United States

Literacy for all adults

5 Australia
10 Canada
14 England/N Ireland
16 United States
19 Ireland

Numeracy for people aged 16-24

14 Australia
16 Canada
18 Northern Ireland
20 Ireland
24 United States

Numeracy for all adults

13 Australia
14 Canada
16 England/N Ireland
19 Ireland
20 United States

If there’s reason for English authorities to be concerned with their middle-of-the-Anglosphere ranking, there’s even more reason for American educators to take note.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

Craft brewers against the big breweries in North Carolina

Filed under: Business, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:33

The rising tide of craft brewing runs up against the entrenched political interests of the big brewers in Raleigh:

North Carolina politicians in Raleigh like to say they’re pro-jobs and pro-business.

But what happens when lawmakers are forced to pick sides between new, small businesses growing jobs and big legacy businesses trying to hold on to the market share they’ve got? Would it help you to know that the big legacy companies give hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions and the new small businesses are not yet organized?

There’s just such a battle brewing in North Carolina over beer — and who gets to distribute and market it. It pits a growing number of small craft brewers against big distributors. And the big distributors who are among the largest campaign contributors have state lawmakers on their side.

The number of craft breweries in North Carolina is growing rapidly. The state ranks 10th in the country in the number of craft breweries (70) but drops to 19th in overall beer production. Some small brewers say they could grow faster and generate more local jobs in North Carolina if lawmakers weren’t forcing them to hire outside distributors.

Lawmakers capped the amount of beer brewers can make before they are forced to hire outside distributors to transport and market their product. The law sets the cap at 25,000 barrels per year or 775,000 gallons.

One Charlotte brewer is joining others in pushing back against the cap — saying it’s bad for business and a job killer.

Update: I guess it would help if I included the link to the original article…

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