China envy

Whethet you agree with or not Glenn always has interesting perspectives on China. I always learn something from his tweets:

“China has gotten ‘pretty good’ at developing its economy” is something that many people are clearly loathe to admit. That is why many seem to gravitate towards flawed, simplistic macro-based explanations that primarily attribute its development to other reasons like “unfair subsidies” and “beggar thy neighbor” policies. But the most logical, evidence-based explanation here is that over the decades Chinese industrial planning institutions have simply gotten pretty good at it. This doesn’t mean that it was always good or avoided all mistakes. Like any skill worth pursuing, it took time to build this muscle. And the way one builds muscle is by learning from mistakes + studying others. This also doesn’t mean there is zero merit in raising issues around IP theft, macro imbalances and subsidies. It is simply a recognition that these things either (i) pale in significance to the developmental institutional capacity that China has accumulated over time or (ii) are tools that other countries have arguably utilized even more heavily than China in the past to aid in their own national development. One of the key implications here is that focusing all effort on “winning the narrative” or “containment” has limited real-world impact, even if one takes a completely zero-sum view of national development as a winner-take-all geopolitical race. Instead, the most effective approach is for others to raise the quality of their own institutional capacity and resource allocation processes. Not only is it going to be more impactful in the long run, it is also something that one should actually theoretically have much more control over.