Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
May all Chicagoboyz writers & all Chicagoboyz readers have a pleasant Thanksgiving. Good turkey, good talk, good family times.
My oldest & her husband are home & we feel very thankful for them, their choices in life, and their warmth. My mother-in-law is 88 and will be bringing the salad & dessert. We are quite lucky.
This is the story of my best Halloween ever.
Back when I was in high school, the speech and drama departments put on an elaborate haunted house every Halloween. Since we studied set design and makeup, our haunted houses rocked. They were sight and sound extravaganzas. We even planned to use some decayed meat for that authentic zombie smell but our teacher shut us down.
Fall is a time for endings.
The evening is pleasant. The scorching heat of summer has passed and winter’s chill and wet has not yet arrived. The sun sets slowly across a clear sky. We’ve had a couple of weeks of such evenings.
(My good friend whom I’ll call Singapore Pundit is a businessman who speaks Chinese and has been in Asia, first Hong Kong, then Beijing, now Singapore for many years. SP read this post, and had a few comments. I pass on his thoughts with his permission.)
I read your post on the blog. It is a little like a University of Chicago dinner conversion in cyber-space.
China versus India? Well, I think that both the Chinese in power and the Indians in power both believe that economic development via free markets is the right path. They know that FDI and WTO are important. They also seem to agree that social and international stability are critical factors to economic growth. Interestingly, India has the Kasmir issue and China the Taiwan issue which are both lighting rods for the nationalist in their respective countries. A wrong step by either country over these issues could derail their economic development and unfortunately these issues are so emotional and sensitive that they could blow up.
I would observe that both China and India are very complex countries in all dimensions. Just think of the US and how complicated a place it is and add a few thousand years of history and triple the population and speed up the growth rate and social change and the place is wildly complex and difficult to fully understand.
So, both China and India are difficult to comprehend, hence I agree that the average American doesn’t have a good change to really understand what’s going on either place. Frankly, even the experts don’t agree on many points and have what are strange opinions and outdated views.
I have mentioned to you before that I don’t think that the central government in China and the party are that all powerful and in control. If they are unable to provide steady economic growth and the resulting prosperity and social stability, their reign of power is not going to last and they know it. They very much look to the west and other countries developed countries for models and experience to help them succeed. The big threat to the “Communist” is regional leader completely going their own way and destabilizing the whole country. The leadership in China must look at what is happening in Iraq in fear and cite it as an example of what could happen if they lose control. My impression is that debate and information is much more free in China than what people in the US realize. There is also I believe a desire in large parts of the government to get to more democratic institution and more open society. Deng Xiaoping completely changed China from a truly Soviet-style state to something that in the seventies the US government would identify as a free society (something like Korea, Thailand or Taiwan). Now all of the countries have become democracies with relatively little bloodshed (Taiwan didn’t have any major unrest, where both Korea and Thailand had their militaries killing a significant number of their citizens). This should give us hope. It is possible that China could behave like Germany and Japan in the thirties, but my gut tells me that leader don’t have that mentality.
Most of my Indian friends think that it is very difficult to get things done in India. If the government want to build a road, getting the rights-of-way is almost impossible so infrastructure needed for economic growth is not getting built fast enough. This is hampering economic growth. They actually like the way thing get done in China. It seems that India has a well developed legal system, but it is undermined by corruption.
I am going to slightly change the subject and try to rap up my comments. I saw the national day rally speech of the Singapore Prime Minister. I think you would find it very interesting. All kinds of stuff on being open and critical, taking risk, being Singaporean and patriotic. Singapore is a special one party state. And I suspect that both China and India are interested in what Singapore says and does. Perhaps this is a model of English institutes/ideas married with Chinese administration and politics.