I love when a couple bloggers I read start discussing a book that is somewhere on my queue of to-read, but the queue is realistically growing faster than books are moving forward on it.
It sure feels like most success stories use the variables in some idiosyncratic combination - export discipline, land reform, financialisation - with the idea that implementing those variables also brings with it state legibility and accountability (not a guarantee). Which means it kind of comes down to the state, in some deep meaningful sense, deciding that it wants progress and aligning the various parts to act in concert. If there are factions fighting against it insidiously (as opposed to outright opposition, which is fine) through delays or corruption, this wouldn't work. The ur-capability seems to be to engender some level of professionalism within the state capacity to get things done.
100%. A key ingredient in the "How Asia Works" recipe is the development of institutional capacity and competence. While it's not the purpose of the book to explain how to develop this, it somewhat brushed over as a requirement.
Here's where you start to dig into the uncountable and immeasurable details of human behavior.
I enjoy thinking about these things, but when you look at history, describe a few key variables, and then try to build a prescriptive model, you realize there are too many moving parts.
But yeah, we can learn and see where we might push things here and there.
Also, this doesn't seem to even ponder external factors. "X worked well (while everyone else did Y)"
Seems like lack of corruption/cronyism/favoritism/factionalism (or at least keeping it down to an acceptable level) seems to be a pretty key factor. Which probably is helped by homogeneity. All of the “star” countries discussed either are very homogeneous to begin with or had an autocratic government that tried very hard to enforce cultural homogeneity (at least among the vast majority of the population).
But I do wonder if this is just a nice “just so” story. From my understanding, Bangladesh is still dominated by a few rich families, but they have been progressing. For that matter, much of SE Asia _doesn’t_ possess cultural homogeneity (or did much land reform, from what I understand) but they are also progressing.
Noah -- on Scott's post there's a lot of comments about Land Reform, and people are pointing out that "Land Reform" is a really vague category that can include everything from "Land to the Tiller" to "Murder all the landlords and give away the land to politically connected cronies." Kind of like how "Church reform" can mean anything from "Tweak the Catholic Church a bit on the edges" to "Enforce state Atheism" to "Let's all become Amish," etc.
What's your personal take on what the most effective kind of "Land Reform" that actually works is?
Studwell has a very specific prescription for land reform (basically, Land to the Tiller exactly). Force landlords to sell to the government at relatively low prices, then distribute this land to former tenant farmers, and allow them to sell that land (or buy other land) as they please. But most countries don't follow exactly this formulation! That's what makes Studwell's model hard to test empirically.
Hi. May I share a female perspective? The fitness of soil to furnish food for plants - in order that the plants may in turn furnish food for animals. Life is the vapor that distends for the moment the bubble called an animal or a vegetable or a man; and good soil is a soil from which that vapor can freely emanate. Protoplasm is the only thing that lives ; and good soil is the soil that can furnish to the Protoplasm of the plants the food from which the Protoplasm can build up animals. Ten substances found in good soil , BIG ONE CARBON, hydrogen ,oxygen,phosphorus, potassium,nitrogen, sulphur, calcium,iron,and magnesium. Soot is carbon : illuminating gas is mostly hydrogen, oxygen, is the vital principal of the air and is given as a gas to some patients by physicians ; phosphorus is what glows in the dark when you rub a damp match on your hand ; potassium is a soft metal which gives the name to common potash ; nitrogen is a gas , hard to find pure and obtain but which forms the bulk of the air , and is important in compounds the names of which begin with nitrous NITRIC, or NITRO, SULPHUR EVERYBODY knows about; calcium is a brilliant , lustrous light yellow element, which combined with oxygen forms ordinary quicklime , and with carbon is the carbide of the acetylene lamp; iron we all know but rarely see chemically pure ; and magnesium is the chief element in common magnesia but is not often seen pure outside of chemical laboratories . these formulas are chemical symbol elements. Only four elements give the farmer trouble on account off the scarcity , nitrogen , phosphorus sulphur and potassium , the rest are found in plenty ..references to the presence in the deck dust called soil. All of them presents a wonderful world problem in future peace as well as our future plenty and great enough for books a library of books..and the chameleon feeds on air.... I could go on for hours .... Plant food must be found by the roots or they die. All animal life is based on plant life. Knowledge is knowing what worked and didn't and why and what to do in care of. We ought to be concerned about our writers and literary documents that reserve our rights and our rights to record such past present future events correctly and freely whether it damages a belief or ridiculous condemnation. Keep and guard your libraries which hold the answers and the keys to development of a decent loving human being of person first and foremost you need capable minds bodies spirits and that my friends requires something not mentioned much anywhere so I will leave this final word LOVE AND PATIENTS AND STEWARDSHIP... Create one of those ones and give them someone equally sound mind at its time and LET THEM LOVE A LONE WITH WHAT EVER THEY quench bc there is no other power that can rescue the life and living of it then simple pure lending light of warm sun then REAL TRUE IN LOVE .... Xoxo should I be crying right now? 😔😬😪
What's a good source to read up on the empirical tests of various land reform policies? I'm interested in learning more about comparing and contrasting land reform programs like "Land to the Tiller" versus various implementations of Land Value Tax, 99-year leases, etc.
Isn't there a general problem with the "Development is about getting policy right" approach without addressing why "correct policies" seems to be so highly geographically correlated? Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, etc. tend to have relatively similar development trajectories (with the occasional outlier), so while these might be driven by similar policy prescriptions, it raises the question of why certain policies are pursued in certain areas rather than others.
Somewhat relatedly, it seems an often neglected variable is the intention of the leaders. Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and the Kim dynasty didn't just fail at implementing the correct policies, they had no desire to improve the lot of their citizens, whereas (arguably) Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew and others did. This again raises the question of why "Development autocrats" tended to emerge more in some regions than others. But this approach, linking politics and geography, seems to be an important part of the story, no?
Perhaps, but I think it would be a little odd if it's just a matter of "attention to neighbors", especially in the 20th century when countries around the world were both aware of, and capable of closely following and trying to imitate, other countries' policies (sometimes with and sometimes without success). My assumption is that it's more like a diffusion of institutions over specific regions, and those diffusions make certain policies more likely to succeed if adopted, or more likely to be adopted in the first place. But exactly why institutions diffuse in this way, and whether it's more a cause or consequence of economic development, is something I think about often and don't have a straight answer for as of yet.
Diffusion of institutions is a good way of thinking about it.
Distance is a barrier to diffusion. Language is another (Quebec francophones pay attention to what's happening in France). Dissimilarities in culture and existing institutions. All of these suggest diffusion will be easiest in geographic proximity.
Diffusion certainly does seem to be geographically correlated, but distance being about "attention" again seems suspect to me. And the institutional similarity among England's "descendants"-- America, Canada, Australia, NZ-- suggests it isn't just about proximity. Language is a possibility-- but consider that the original post is about the joint success of (among others) China, Japan and S. Korea, which are mutually unintelligible and possibly have zero linguistic links between them (there's apparently some disagreement on Japanese and Korean). And Western and Eastern European countries with mutually unintelligible languages seem to have (broadly) similar institutions as well.
I'm not saying this is wrong! I'm really not sure how institutional diffusion works. Maybe it's something about "culture", though I'm always very wary of this (and culture could just be standing in for some more ultimate cause). These challenges are just underlying why I still don't feel I have the answer, but glad to hear further thoughts on this :)
Geographic clustering of success argues against the efficacy of policy (barring very wrong-headed approaches like totalitarian communism) and for other variables (culture, network effects of trade, war, etc.)
Or at least, it argues against these being sufficient for the explanation. They may be necessary; it may be that certain policies are required to work, but that these policies never can or never will be tried without certain conditions being met, and these conditions are regional. As mentioned, there's surely a reason why East and Southeast Asia seem full of "Development autocrats", whereas e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa at the moment mostly has autocrats without the "Development" part (with exceptions such as Rwanda's Kagame or Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi). To me that question of the endogeneity of politics is the most interesting one.
I'm big fan of How Asia Works and Noah's tireless campaign to draw attention to it. I think it even has lessons for democratic advanced countries (we could use a little land reform and some financial dirigisme).
One thing people from an English speaking background might not be aware of is how advanced the East Asian economies were pre-industrialisation (not to be patronising, this was me until the age of 25). Even though they were super poor on a per-capita basis, the urban consumer economy was very advanced, on a par with the richest cities of Europe. At least, that was my impression of reading some old Japanese and Chinese novels and memoirs. So when the industrial revolution finally started, it was playing into an environment that already had a long history of paper money, literacy, futures markets, consumer fashions, entertainment industry and so on. It may have been a small percentage, but a small percentage of a huge population. For places like Central America or sub-Saharan Africa that had a different history and pattern of population density, the jury is out whether they can get to 10% GDP growth. But I think it's worth a try, and Ethiopia seems to be making a go of it without a lot of natural advantages.
The chart doesn't seem to show that much SE catch-up, given that they're poorer, outside of Vietnam. And Vietnam is called out as one of the ones implementing the studwell formula.
I believe Vietnam has *not* implemented the kind of land reform Studwell recommends; instead it followed roughly the China model of "confiscate, collectivize, then privatize". As for export discipline, I am not sure what methods Vietnam uses for the "discipline" part of the formula; it promotes exports across the board, but I'm not sure what it does in terms of winding up or cutting off support to firms that fail at the export game! So, something to look into there.
North and South Vietnam pursued different land reform schemes. South Vietnam did Prosterman's land to the tiller (after a several decades of other failed land reform schemes).
I feel like we've raised the ante for development over time. Things like a developed energy sector, communications, even specialized skills like cyber security are increasingly required to keep everything running and produce consistent output.
I don't know if that comes up in any models, but seems relevant, and might explain why some countries that seem ready have to wait in line, they are working on all the invisible prerequisites to reliability.
Interesting article. Hopes Bangladesh is on the queue next after these other countries are done. The zero-sum-game might because these countries rely on exports to develop and they might be competing with each other in the market. But I don't know enough about the supply chains in Asia to make that judgement.
BTW I liked your article on Bangladesh. If you don't mind reading subtitles, you should this video (https://youtu.be/rdC4BsMYUEQ). This cunt used to work for the World Bank and he covered some extra stuff that you missed. Let me know what you think.
This was LOUD and I enjoyed it very much .. Reminded me of some other writings I once knew and had forgotten. Beautiful really a book published early 1920s by Herbert Quick . it's one of the shares test of time and it grand and someday I shall think it be even held as a bigger prize of treasure my copy happened to be signed and inscribed by the author. Also have you ever read ARGUING WITH IDIOTS? BY GLEN BECK? ITS delightful and a real ball buster. Deff recommend that for a future read it's many years past now old. Thank you for sharing again great stuff. Some time ago I suffered from maybe head trauma of some sort never told or confirmed to my knowledge and the past 3 years suffer from black mold spores mildew hiding in my walls and floors from hurricane water damage never inspected over many different storms , this has since suffered me greatly and my memories have been erased , I have nothing of past and it's prevented me from courage in stepping to a positive future. The mold has almost shut me down if it weren't for bible and books and faith alone I wouldn't even made up this far ... Taken some much abuse from a man suffering fro. Worse exposure then myself from chemical liquid gas plant conversion and both have been in a mold infestation trapped unhappy and unhealthy no one told us and it is still happening today. I can't remember much and no one allowed me the truth and I continue to overcome and represent myself with strange amounts of priceless knowledge and so much treasures has found its way back to me by universal law. Still I cry and am yet forced to start over again each day and frustrated to the controlling man who holds me here in the wet wood . I don't have much family or friends bc I don't get to leave my house often and I'm a strong willed tradition women. I have lost confidence from abusive relationship I live in and someday I pray to be set free and to understand all the questions I need to ask and to so all the answers the world needs to hear and know. It's far to much ya know for one person to hold inside its a shame I wasn't told more. I know who I am really though, no one told me that much , it rescued me from a hell I had made good living In and would of continued that way. However myself found myself and fell in love and then found my other self and my love Soul mate twin spirit that I am still missing ..... I knew who I was bc I would scream myself crying dying alone and poor broke down held down and controlled like a doll, the pain is never left and I know it lives and YET I can't find it in my entire body and mind to stay hating it longer then a couple hours and that is the strength of my life and it scares me bc I need some one to draw the line in the sand for me bc I have forgotten the will it takes to do so. Thank you again. Best of wishes to you and yours. Xo!!!! Regretfully no memories left.
I don't want to get any discussion on state development, but giving the state officials the role of "Cut off support to companies that try to export and fail" seems very obviously myopic.
Re PPP, if you haven't dug into the data and examined why Taiwan gets a much bigger PPP adjustment than South Korea, then you don't know, and a hand-wavey "probably" is worth nothing. And I'm not sure you could get an answer if you tried: perhaps the process has become more transparent recently, but when I last looked, PPP was mystery meat, without enough published detailed ingredients to allow the public to understand exactly why one country's PPP factor was bigger than another's. Anyway, PPP GDP is not a good measure of living standards because it wasn't designed to be. PPP is meant to internationally standardize the values of products and services. Standardizing values of housing is indeed a very big problem, as is government, health care, military, infrastructure, much else. PPP is not relevant to comparing the successes or failures of policy.
That's logical though their CB has in recent years relaxed FX targeting somewhat. If you haven't seen the detailed PPP ingredients you can't really know. And by the way adjusting for currency suppression is an example of a way PPP doesn't correlate with living standards (you need to work through some math to understand why not).
In a nutshell, adjsuting for suppressed currencies makes it look like people can afford more imports and internationally traded goods than they really can.
The chart doesn't seem to show that much SE catch-up, given that they're poorer, outside of Vietnam. And Vietnam is called out as one of the ones implementing the studwell formula.
I love when a couple bloggers I read start discussing a book that is somewhere on my queue of to-read, but the queue is realistically growing faster than books are moving forward on it.
It sure feels like most success stories use the variables in some idiosyncratic combination - export discipline, land reform, financialisation - with the idea that implementing those variables also brings with it state legibility and accountability (not a guarantee). Which means it kind of comes down to the state, in some deep meaningful sense, deciding that it wants progress and aligning the various parts to act in concert. If there are factions fighting against it insidiously (as opposed to outright opposition, which is fine) through delays or corruption, this wouldn't work. The ur-capability seems to be to engender some level of professionalism within the state capacity to get things done.
100%. A key ingredient in the "How Asia Works" recipe is the development of institutional capacity and competence. While it's not the purpose of the book to explain how to develop this, it somewhat brushed over as a requirement.
If smart policy is required to grow, that leads to the question: Why are some countries able to implement smart policy?
Here's where you start to dig into the uncountable and immeasurable details of human behavior.
I enjoy thinking about these things, but when you look at history, describe a few key variables, and then try to build a prescriptive model, you realize there are too many moving parts.
But yeah, we can learn and see where we might push things here and there.
Also, this doesn't seem to even ponder external factors. "X worked well (while everyone else did Y)"
Seems like lack of corruption/cronyism/favoritism/factionalism (or at least keeping it down to an acceptable level) seems to be a pretty key factor. Which probably is helped by homogeneity. All of the “star” countries discussed either are very homogeneous to begin with or had an autocratic government that tried very hard to enforce cultural homogeneity (at least among the vast majority of the population).
But I do wonder if this is just a nice “just so” story. From my understanding, Bangladesh is still dominated by a few rich families, but they have been progressing. For that matter, much of SE Asia _doesn’t_ possess cultural homogeneity (or did much land reform, from what I understand) but they are also progressing.
Noah -- on Scott's post there's a lot of comments about Land Reform, and people are pointing out that "Land Reform" is a really vague category that can include everything from "Land to the Tiller" to "Murder all the landlords and give away the land to politically connected cronies." Kind of like how "Church reform" can mean anything from "Tweak the Catholic Church a bit on the edges" to "Enforce state Atheism" to "Let's all become Amish," etc.
What's your personal take on what the most effective kind of "Land Reform" that actually works is?
Studwell has a very specific prescription for land reform (basically, Land to the Tiller exactly). Force landlords to sell to the government at relatively low prices, then distribute this land to former tenant farmers, and allow them to sell that land (or buy other land) as they please. But most countries don't follow exactly this formulation! That's what makes Studwell's model hard to test empirically.
Hi. May I share a female perspective? The fitness of soil to furnish food for plants - in order that the plants may in turn furnish food for animals. Life is the vapor that distends for the moment the bubble called an animal or a vegetable or a man; and good soil is a soil from which that vapor can freely emanate. Protoplasm is the only thing that lives ; and good soil is the soil that can furnish to the Protoplasm of the plants the food from which the Protoplasm can build up animals. Ten substances found in good soil , BIG ONE CARBON, hydrogen ,oxygen,phosphorus, potassium,nitrogen, sulphur, calcium,iron,and magnesium. Soot is carbon : illuminating gas is mostly hydrogen, oxygen, is the vital principal of the air and is given as a gas to some patients by physicians ; phosphorus is what glows in the dark when you rub a damp match on your hand ; potassium is a soft metal which gives the name to common potash ; nitrogen is a gas , hard to find pure and obtain but which forms the bulk of the air , and is important in compounds the names of which begin with nitrous NITRIC, or NITRO, SULPHUR EVERYBODY knows about; calcium is a brilliant , lustrous light yellow element, which combined with oxygen forms ordinary quicklime , and with carbon is the carbide of the acetylene lamp; iron we all know but rarely see chemically pure ; and magnesium is the chief element in common magnesia but is not often seen pure outside of chemical laboratories . these formulas are chemical symbol elements. Only four elements give the farmer trouble on account off the scarcity , nitrogen , phosphorus sulphur and potassium , the rest are found in plenty ..references to the presence in the deck dust called soil. All of them presents a wonderful world problem in future peace as well as our future plenty and great enough for books a library of books..and the chameleon feeds on air.... I could go on for hours .... Plant food must be found by the roots or they die. All animal life is based on plant life. Knowledge is knowing what worked and didn't and why and what to do in care of. We ought to be concerned about our writers and literary documents that reserve our rights and our rights to record such past present future events correctly and freely whether it damages a belief or ridiculous condemnation. Keep and guard your libraries which hold the answers and the keys to development of a decent loving human being of person first and foremost you need capable minds bodies spirits and that my friends requires something not mentioned much anywhere so I will leave this final word LOVE AND PATIENTS AND STEWARDSHIP... Create one of those ones and give them someone equally sound mind at its time and LET THEM LOVE A LONE WITH WHAT EVER THEY quench bc there is no other power that can rescue the life and living of it then simple pure lending light of warm sun then REAL TRUE IN LOVE .... Xoxo should I be crying right now? 😔😬😪
This reads like a bot post. :(
What's a good source to read up on the empirical tests of various land reform policies? I'm interested in learning more about comparing and contrasting land reform programs like "Land to the Tiller" versus various implementations of Land Value Tax, 99-year leases, etc.
In the book, it's basically redistribute land to the peasants on an equal basis, in case you were wondering.
Very interesting this article about this book because I already read and loved this brilliant little summary.
Isn't there a general problem with the "Development is about getting policy right" approach without addressing why "correct policies" seems to be so highly geographically correlated? Western Europe, East Asia, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, etc. tend to have relatively similar development trajectories (with the occasional outlier), so while these might be driven by similar policy prescriptions, it raises the question of why certain policies are pursued in certain areas rather than others.
Somewhat relatedly, it seems an often neglected variable is the intention of the leaders. Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and the Kim dynasty didn't just fail at implementing the correct policies, they had no desire to improve the lot of their citizens, whereas (arguably) Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew and others did. This again raises the question of why "Development autocrats" tended to emerge more in some regions than others. But this approach, linking politics and geography, seems to be an important part of the story, no?
"why 'correct policies' seems to be so highly geographically correlated?"
Copying policies from successful neighbors? In Canada we pay pretty close attention to what happens in the US.
Perhaps, but I think it would be a little odd if it's just a matter of "attention to neighbors", especially in the 20th century when countries around the world were both aware of, and capable of closely following and trying to imitate, other countries' policies (sometimes with and sometimes without success). My assumption is that it's more like a diffusion of institutions over specific regions, and those diffusions make certain policies more likely to succeed if adopted, or more likely to be adopted in the first place. But exactly why institutions diffuse in this way, and whether it's more a cause or consequence of economic development, is something I think about often and don't have a straight answer for as of yet.
Diffusion of institutions is a good way of thinking about it.
Distance is a barrier to diffusion. Language is another (Quebec francophones pay attention to what's happening in France). Dissimilarities in culture and existing institutions. All of these suggest diffusion will be easiest in geographic proximity.
Diffusion certainly does seem to be geographically correlated, but distance being about "attention" again seems suspect to me. And the institutional similarity among England's "descendants"-- America, Canada, Australia, NZ-- suggests it isn't just about proximity. Language is a possibility-- but consider that the original post is about the joint success of (among others) China, Japan and S. Korea, which are mutually unintelligible and possibly have zero linguistic links between them (there's apparently some disagreement on Japanese and Korean). And Western and Eastern European countries with mutually unintelligible languages seem to have (broadly) similar institutions as well.
I'm not saying this is wrong! I'm really not sure how institutional diffusion works. Maybe it's something about "culture", though I'm always very wary of this (and culture could just be standing in for some more ultimate cause). These challenges are just underlying why I still don't feel I have the answer, but glad to hear further thoughts on this :)
Geographic clustering of success argues against the efficacy of policy (barring very wrong-headed approaches like totalitarian communism) and for other variables (culture, network effects of trade, war, etc.)
Or at least, it argues against these being sufficient for the explanation. They may be necessary; it may be that certain policies are required to work, but that these policies never can or never will be tried without certain conditions being met, and these conditions are regional. As mentioned, there's surely a reason why East and Southeast Asia seem full of "Development autocrats", whereas e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa at the moment mostly has autocrats without the "Development" part (with exceptions such as Rwanda's Kagame or Ethiopia's Meles Zenawi). To me that question of the endogeneity of politics is the most interesting one.
I'm big fan of How Asia Works and Noah's tireless campaign to draw attention to it. I think it even has lessons for democratic advanced countries (we could use a little land reform and some financial dirigisme).
One thing people from an English speaking background might not be aware of is how advanced the East Asian economies were pre-industrialisation (not to be patronising, this was me until the age of 25). Even though they were super poor on a per-capita basis, the urban consumer economy was very advanced, on a par with the richest cities of Europe. At least, that was my impression of reading some old Japanese and Chinese novels and memoirs. So when the industrial revolution finally started, it was playing into an environment that already had a long history of paper money, literacy, futures markets, consumer fashions, entertainment industry and so on. It may have been a small percentage, but a small percentage of a huge population. For places like Central America or sub-Saharan Africa that had a different history and pattern of population density, the jury is out whether they can get to 10% GDP growth. But I think it's worth a try, and Ethiopia seems to be making a go of it without a lot of natural advantages.
The chart doesn't seem to show that much SE catch-up, given that they're poorer, outside of Vietnam. And Vietnam is called out as one of the ones implementing the studwell formula.
I believe Vietnam has *not* implemented the kind of land reform Studwell recommends; instead it followed roughly the China model of "confiscate, collectivize, then privatize". As for export discipline, I am not sure what methods Vietnam uses for the "discipline" part of the formula; it promotes exports across the board, but I'm not sure what it does in terms of winding up or cutting off support to firms that fail at the export game! So, something to look into there.
And yet, Vietnam and China both are following the trajectory of the Asian tigers and Japan. Kind of an argument against Studwell if anything.
North and South Vietnam pursued different land reform schemes. South Vietnam did Prosterman's land to the tiller (after a several decades of other failed land reform schemes).
Do you ever plan to create a post about the economic history of Costa Rica? It strikes as a relative success story in the Central American region.
I feel like we've raised the ante for development over time. Things like a developed energy sector, communications, even specialized skills like cyber security are increasingly required to keep everything running and produce consistent output.
I don't know if that comes up in any models, but seems relevant, and might explain why some countries that seem ready have to wait in line, they are working on all the invisible prerequisites to reliability.
Interesting article. Hopes Bangladesh is on the queue next after these other countries are done. The zero-sum-game might because these countries rely on exports to develop and they might be competing with each other in the market. But I don't know enough about the supply chains in Asia to make that judgement.
BTW I liked your article on Bangladesh. If you don't mind reading subtitles, you should this video (https://youtu.be/rdC4BsMYUEQ). This cunt used to work for the World Bank and he covered some extra stuff that you missed. Let me know what you think.
The book is called on board the good ship earth signed and dated inside jacket 1913. Aug.15th beautiful inscription too.
This was LOUD and I enjoyed it very much .. Reminded me of some other writings I once knew and had forgotten. Beautiful really a book published early 1920s by Herbert Quick . it's one of the shares test of time and it grand and someday I shall think it be even held as a bigger prize of treasure my copy happened to be signed and inscribed by the author. Also have you ever read ARGUING WITH IDIOTS? BY GLEN BECK? ITS delightful and a real ball buster. Deff recommend that for a future read it's many years past now old. Thank you for sharing again great stuff. Some time ago I suffered from maybe head trauma of some sort never told or confirmed to my knowledge and the past 3 years suffer from black mold spores mildew hiding in my walls and floors from hurricane water damage never inspected over many different storms , this has since suffered me greatly and my memories have been erased , I have nothing of past and it's prevented me from courage in stepping to a positive future. The mold has almost shut me down if it weren't for bible and books and faith alone I wouldn't even made up this far ... Taken some much abuse from a man suffering fro. Worse exposure then myself from chemical liquid gas plant conversion and both have been in a mold infestation trapped unhappy and unhealthy no one told us and it is still happening today. I can't remember much and no one allowed me the truth and I continue to overcome and represent myself with strange amounts of priceless knowledge and so much treasures has found its way back to me by universal law. Still I cry and am yet forced to start over again each day and frustrated to the controlling man who holds me here in the wet wood . I don't have much family or friends bc I don't get to leave my house often and I'm a strong willed tradition women. I have lost confidence from abusive relationship I live in and someday I pray to be set free and to understand all the questions I need to ask and to so all the answers the world needs to hear and know. It's far to much ya know for one person to hold inside its a shame I wasn't told more. I know who I am really though, no one told me that much , it rescued me from a hell I had made good living In and would of continued that way. However myself found myself and fell in love and then found my other self and my love Soul mate twin spirit that I am still missing ..... I knew who I was bc I would scream myself crying dying alone and poor broke down held down and controlled like a doll, the pain is never left and I know it lives and YET I can't find it in my entire body and mind to stay hating it longer then a couple hours and that is the strength of my life and it scares me bc I need some one to draw the line in the sand for me bc I have forgotten the will it takes to do so. Thank you again. Best of wishes to you and yours. Xo!!!! Regretfully no memories left.
I don't want to get any discussion on state development, but giving the state officials the role of "Cut off support to companies that try to export and fail" seems very obviously myopic.
Re PPP, if you haven't dug into the data and examined why Taiwan gets a much bigger PPP adjustment than South Korea, then you don't know, and a hand-wavey "probably" is worth nothing. And I'm not sure you could get an answer if you tried: perhaps the process has become more transparent recently, but when I last looked, PPP was mystery meat, without enough published detailed ingredients to allow the public to understand exactly why one country's PPP factor was bigger than another's. Anyway, PPP GDP is not a good measure of living standards because it wasn't designed to be. PPP is meant to internationally standardize the values of products and services. Standardizing values of housing is indeed a very big problem, as is government, health care, military, infrastructure, much else. PPP is not relevant to comparing the successes or failures of policy.
That's logical though their CB has in recent years relaxed FX targeting somewhat. If you haven't seen the detailed PPP ingredients you can't really know. And by the way adjusting for currency suppression is an example of a way PPP doesn't correlate with living standards (you need to work through some math to understand why not).
In a nutshell, adjsuting for suppressed currencies makes it look like people can afford more imports and internationally traded goods than they really can.
The chart doesn't seem to show that much SE catch-up, given that they're poorer, outside of Vietnam. And Vietnam is called out as one of the ones implementing the studwell formula.