“Both economic growth and stability are essential. The economy without stability [and] there is no way to sustain economic growth and the peace of whole of society cannot be maintained; [conversely] without a certain growth rate, many contradictions grow even more acute…to use the law of value to stabilize the economy, [we] must also use the law of value to promote economic development. According to the objective requirements of law of value, we can analyze and manage new problems of economic life….[Comrades] should solemnly raise this question: Swimming in the [turbulent] waters of the commodity economy, we must learn what we were least familiar with in the past,” Zhao Ziyang, the discredited Chinese reformer who remained in house arrest from Tiananmen massacre until he passed in 2005. This excerpt (March 1988) is from Vol. 4 of his collected speeches and writings, unlike the celebrated Chinese package reformers, relegated to the Hong Kong University press (emphasis mine).1
“It is neither necessary nor desirable that measures for Rebuilding should wait until the Stabilisation process is achieved…But is is important, in our minds to separate the two. While Stabilisation is possible, with or without subsequent Rebuilding, Rebuilding will not be possible without Stabilisation. To attempt it would be like trying to pitch a tent in the middle of a landslide. This is what Governments have tried to do in the past…[and] get swept away,” John Hoskyns, Thatcher’s mastermind in a 1979 memo.
“Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself,” Vilfredo Pareto.
I started my previous entry2 with a reflection on reading and the “problem” of retention.3 Before I dive into the statistics I collected on a select group of ten African countries to tell five stories of stabilization during the “permanent” crisis (1979-99), I want to reflect briefly on writing and the analogous problem of taste. On occasion, when surfing the web or sorting through your email inbox, I stumble onto an analysis which just hits every single criteria I am looking for in beautiful writing. An online friend, Nihal Sahu, told me that the Matt Levine epic essay in Bloomberg, The Crypto Story, is his ideal of beauty, writing stripped bare of ornamentation without overstructuring to the point that it dissuades playful speculation. For me, both the Levine essay and Tooze’s latest installment of Chartbook fit the bill of beauty because they observe The Economist’s principle of inviting the reader into the reflection. The highest praise I ever received regarding my meandering meditations is that they refreshingly mimic this style .
If a commentary is a closed loop, it can be technically competent in the sense that it allows the reader to extract useful information. But aesthetically the writing falls short because it fails to summon signals within knowledge communities. My standard of beauty is not about demonstrating mastery, but the extent to which it inspires others.
I suspect that many young people in winner-take-all knowledge markets intensely feel a problem that is similar in kind, if not by engagement metrics, to the self-esteem crisis on Instagram. Though even a premier expert may only attract a few dozen favorites that pale in comparison to the Instagram model’s engagement, both occupy a similar position in the distribution of desirability, in each instance deriving from their beauty. Everybody below them asks—why should I post on a topic when I know in my heart that I can only muster poor imitations of the very best work that exists—the world-class 0.01%?
Needless to say, I think this is the kind of vulnerability is understandable but ethically ruinous. I recently ordered a book I recall admiring when researching the potential of technology to transform government for an essay at the LSE, Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence can Change the World. I decided it was deserving of a closer read both in light of recent advances by OpenAI and how I failed to notice the core argument as resonating with my favored stage theory of development, the ladder of causality:
Responding to an op-ed in the FT by Simon Kuper also discussing the malcontents of distribution to those who are made to feel those at top have just desserts, I glibly told PolicyTensor that Tooze is a revolutionary. I should clarify. PolicyTensor is right in the literal sense. He is the court’s philosopher who has an open invitation climb the towers of the New York skyline to enter the lion’s den of neoliberalism, Warburg Pincus. A revolutionary of the Rosa Luxemburg/Emma Goldman type is down below on the ground floor resisting at every moment risking arrest with their civil disobedience. It’s a reversal of Hannah Arendt’s quip, not the feminine to influence, but the masculine—to understand.
Revolutionary to me means something more than is implied by the binary. The structural dualism comes from a deeply disturbed fin-de-siècle understanding of revolutionary without scrutinizing the genealogical roots. Do the masses have the capacity for self-reflection and interpretation or do messages need to be delivered to them from on high? If the Here Comes Everybody vision, the potential to incorporate all voices and ascend to a novel form of modernity, is something that appeals because you feel the Calvinist and Brahmic4 lineages in your bones, then you are in my sense of the term— a revolutionary.
So allow me to be a revolutionary. And true to the spirit of Marxist-Leninism as interpreted by Chairman Mao, there will be nothing “beautiful” about the evolution of trade statistics following a period of crisis I’m about to report, even if some of you might find them “useful”.
Story #0: Japanese Structural Transformation in Reverse (The hinge)
Whenever I begin a statistical exploration through time, I always begin by setting some arbitrary period divisions, which I do not doubt, and it is only through the suspension of doubt that allows me to commence with the exercise, extracting useful observations. I recently learned this process intuits Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions. These hinge propositions are the reason why narratives are nonsense. And yet the nonsense serves a useful function because without it, you would quickly find yourself drifting into the loop of “why”, seen most commonly in the wild when interacting with an inquisitive toddler, “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”
There are some analysts who write so elegantly that suspending doubt does not impose any burden. The Nigerian economist, Charles Soludo, delivered a tour de force exposing the politics of World Bank statistical reporting in a volume co-edited by another giant of African political economy, Thandika Mkandawire. His message is a companion to Thomas Sankara’s United Front Against Debt, though with a parenthetical twist that is more aligned with my personal disposition. Workers of the World Unite (for macroeconomic balance) and Seize the Means (of Statistical Accounting) from the World Bank are two slogans that pull exactly the right strings. The outlines of that argument serve as the basis of this post. The first point Soludo demonstrates is that the years in which the researcher selects to analyze can substantially skew the results. Following Soludo’s criticisms, the years selected within the two-decade period from 1979 will be 1983 and 1993. They are arbitrary, but the idea is to avoid the kinds of errors which visited the World Bank authors, neglecting to mention the famine of the mid-80s which afflicted many of the nonadjusters criticized. The opposite kind of error could result if one failed to account for the distant but visible effects stemming from the buoyancy of global demand in the mid-90s.
The second point regarding Soludo’s call to action to develop evaluation metrics on their terms, the book is subtitled Our Continent, Our Voice, is a project that is now achievable. Today, we do not have the luxury of simply dismissing lack of statistical analysis to poor collection, often ethnographically conducted by the comprador intelligentsia with little stake in the task of development. No, Soludo’s pleas were successful, and we now largely have the exhaustive type5 statistics of the operative factors which have spearheaded growth-enhancing reforms:
We propose a broader criteria…the Composite Economic Development Index (CEDI)…Under the CEDI, the current SAP/stabilization measures on the one hand, and the broader development indicators on the other…the SAP evaluation criterion should be broadened to focus on…structural realignment—shift from nontradeables to tradeables, switch from agriculture to manufacturing, and the diversification of the export base. This index not only enables us to gauge the extent of policy misalignment, but also indicates the extent of capacity in the economy and thus its long-term "competitiveness" in the global context….some of the seemingly poor performers on account of macroeconomic stance could turn out as star generals when other indices are considered.
Soludo’s ambition had his eyes set no less than to turn the Washington Consensus view upside down. The then standard view neglected that value can be had in a fruitful error bursting with its own corrections, so long as fatal errors are avoided, Soludo wrote echoing Pareto. Poverty is not socialism, and instability is not conducive to exploring the agency-enhancing vistas beyond the deflationary bias promoted by IFI’s.
To illustrate why instability is not conducive to development, let’s begin with a paradigmatic case. My thesis on structural transformation in East Asia began in a similar fashion, showcasing the pattern of 60’s and early 70’s Japan not to scrutinize that case to further study rather only to suggest that it was more pronounced forerunner of what would become general pattern. In opposite fashion, we might say post-Rhodesia Zimbabwe from 1979-83 was a harbinger of the ghastly form adjustment often took. The statistics are so dramatic that I wonder if there is a History PhD somewhere who can independently confirm the story they tell with archival research from the period. Wittgenstein said without facts, we doubt words. A German scientist who preceded him said the reverse is just as often true. Facts cannot attain full value without the ideas and historical narratives which are developed from it.
In 1979, Zimbabwe had an economic complexity index of 1.15, a structure of production that of course did not compare to the rich world by volume, but extraordinarily favorable nonetheless. That position plummeted to only slightly above the regional average, below that of Kenya, Mozambique, and Zambia in spite of the fact that the number of products in the product space remained roughly constant. Graphically, it demonstrates the kind of Volcker Shock/debt crisis decomplexification exactly as you might imagine it—with all the green breakthrough products on the left side of distribution for product complexity index (PCI) corresponding with primary goods and all the red regression products on the right side corresponding with industrial equipment, machinery and chemicals:
This clear-cut result will not be replicated in any other country in the sample, but it is nonetheless included as a theoretical standard for which other countries can be analyzed. After all, analysis simply means to formulate a structure for systematic comparisons, my intro to Financial Accounting professor frequently reminded. On one end of the spectrum, we have 60’s Japan with red on the left and green on the right. On the other end of the spectrum, postcolonial Zimbabwe. The task is to determine where other countries fall along that spectrum, as well as to emphasize the operative element of time. Over a period of decades, the position on the spectrum is, as Japan suggests, malleable. A single decomplexification shock, rippling across many African countries, did not necessarily condemn them to the periphery of production system. In spite of the overwhelming challenges in the 80s, so severe that they registered in a substantial way in the careful tabulation of otherwise consistent long-run growth statistics, many countries responded. They generated only meager returns in the way of growth in the 90’s, but brought unrealized gains for the new millennium.
Story #1: Stabilization with only a Little Turbulence at the Krísis Kink (Thesis)
While promoting his book, Martin Wolf raised eyebrows by claiming that all self-respecting social scientists are methodologically Marxist. That’s a very interesting claim straight from the horse’s mouth. He is, after all, arguably the ring leader of a growing contingent of radicalized elites, all espousing The FT as their manifesto. Though, the label should not be misinterpreted. He was I suspect making a narrow claim, thematically similar to my instinct to uphold Tooze’s “revolutionary” credentials. In fact, it helps to go back to Tooze’s review of Sperber’s Marx biography in the FT for clues as to his strange adoration within the belly of the beast. Marx had a 19th century life, meaning he was constantly scrambling for morsels of meaning to digest the cogs and monsters of industrial capitalism. His analysis was inherently observational and synthetic due to the scarcity of information. During the 19th century, the ability to cohere observations was an intellectual pursuit which did not presuppose any formal academic training.
That all changed in the 20th century. Industry specialists, regulatory bureaucrats and technical engineers involved in the distributed production process became much better at classifying to the point that whether in the Carbon soft infrastructure of the U.S. or the Silicon system of the USSR, there was real hope that that problem of scarcity could be overcome and the science of administration established. As the 20th century went on and Soviet project began to falter, the sharpest minds, including Herbert Simon, argued that the problem of scarcity had changed form from Marx’s day from information to attention. Enter the model—all are wrong, but some were useful for solving this problem of attention. The difficulty is the model only worked as a governing device if actually existing human behavior was manipulated to match the model. Failing that, the social scientist finds himself back at square one, scouring resources like Twitter for fragments which piece together narratives of industrial [for us, hyperdrive?] modernity which no longer make sense. In this reflective sense, Marx is as relevant as ever, the title of Tooze’s review and the topic I often felt compelled to revisit for research assignments in high school and college.
I have always been an old soul to the point that in my childhood and found myself decorating my room with devices made to look 50’s retro and was utterly obsessed by both the statistical and cultural traditions of baseball. Though most of those hobbies have been dropped, the behavior persists intellectually as I am naively oblivious to the cutting edge and drawn to anachronisms. The Wolf rallying cry is, as far I can tell, to embrace the methodological anachronism, applying that instinct not to obstruct novel dimensions, but to enlighten them. The machines envisioned by Turing and made into our living reality do episteme far better than most of us. The alternative phronesis machines are at the very least a distant prospect conditional on herculean advances in quantum computing, and my ignorant view would venture to guess that those advances are impossible.6 Do not conflate linear thinking for thought. Thought is only forthcoming after the tedious work of sifting through statistical tables of production inputs to refine that which accords to your theory, which necessarily differs from that of your colleague looking at a different set of tables who sports another theory. Dragonfly eyes.
My purpose of unpacking the meaning of Marxist social science and revolutionary as interpretative both signifying returns to pre-20th century conceptions lies within my intent of summoning the dragonfly eyes of overlapping visions. The narratives I am spinning here are ridiculously ambitious for blog posts and provisional. Each chart simply takes the form of topic-comment, without taking particular care to closing the iterative structure in a well-sourced narrative. I honestly cannot claim to hear the thunder of fiscal history in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana, where more informed observers possess the background knowledge to speak authoritatively of contrast, I spot a pattern:
I can imagine the pattern telling a story, a steep drop in economic complexity in Cote d’ Ivoire and Ghana due to contractions of the product space during the decade of crisis from 1983-1993, and a modest drop in Zambia in spite of a substantial expansion of the product space. The inclusion of Zambia suggests that decomplexification can imply two distinct empirical trends:
The absolute retreat of productive capabilities and;
The alteration of the distribution of productive capabilities so the balance tipped against ISI-favored complex products that the standard theory of the case alleged were produced inefficiently (Mkandawire p. 17-18) to primary products and minerals extracted in line with revealed comparative advantage.
Refining the data granularity to account for these movements over time confirms this distinction. In Cote d’ Ivoire, there were more productive capabilities to lose in 1983, so more red appears on the chart than in Ghana even as the essential pattern held in both places. Contrast contraction with Zambia where green breakthroughs are littered throughout the chart, but they are concentrated at the low-end of the product complexity distribution:
Just as significantly, when the tide turned positive during Radelet’s Africa Rising period in the 90’s, it was driven by an expansion of the product space in all above cases. They are a subset of a larger group of countries, Emerging Africa, which were not too hampered by Washington Consensus orthodoxy to deliver gains to engineering competencies. In the cases that shed a significant portion of their product space during retrenchment, upper-end productive capacities were regained, which were more complex in Code d’ Ivoire than in Ghana. To be sure, neither case resembled a classic developmental trajectory. Gains in machinery and chemicals were modest relative to the primary end of the distribution. In Zambia, the gains could not be explained according to the logic of lifting product space contraction, but product breakthroughs which were more centrally distributed.
Story #2: The Paradox of Development (Antithesis)
An interesting point of observation is that generally countries that were slightly better anchored in the global/regional structure of production, such as the case we already visited, Zimbabwe, saw precisely the reverse of the pattern exhibited in Story #1. In keeping with the medicine metaphors, this is immediate effect with undisclosed side effects rather than treatment that offers deferred benefits. Both Zimbabwe and Kenya closely tracked each other on complexity indices. As somebody whose only encounters with Zimbabwe are via my cousin, a former UN rep, stories of navigating the country during its hyperinflation episode, the ascent from 1989-93 surprises. Sure enough, Times reports from the period describe Harare as “neat and prosperous capital”. Dashcam footage of street scenes from a YouTube uploader more or less confirms that observation. Prosperous Zimbabweans today harbor dreams for recreating that version of Harare with grand plans of building a cloud city removed from the grime of the current capital.
The expansions were very substantial in both places after 1989, and for the most part distributed in the right direction. In this respect, the decomplexification that followed is a puzzle without historical background. The short answer is limitations in the policy background at initial stages can enter the foreground at intermediate ones. The product space contracted in Zimbabwe and shifted unfavorably in Kenya:
Story #3: Not all Product Spaces are Created Equal (Digression)
An axiom for very poor countries is that an expansion into new productive capabilities will invariably improve that countries’ complexity score, all other things being equal. The types of products produced at takeoff only matters to the extent that certain products limit the paths forward at intermediate stages. But it is a mistake to imply that density of the product space predicts complexity, even for takeoff countries. It’s only the change in density that is related to the change in complexity. Even that relation dissipates as researcher moves up value chains to the vanguard technologies which are determinative at the top of the hierarchy. For countries like Japan in the 70’s and 80’s, it becomes about dynamic replacement, specializing in that narrow set of competencies in automobiles and information tech. Exhibit A: compare two countries which started with identical number of products in their respective product spaces. They did not have the same levels of economic complexity at those snapshots in time (1979 & 1983).
Fresh off hosting the African Cup of Nations, Senegal in 1993 was among the stars in developmental Africa knocking on the door of crossing into positive territory because it successfully transitioned into upper-end products, the desired strategy for a country with its starting position. In contrast, Tanzania pursued an all-of-the above aggressive expansion with primary products playing a substantial role, an equally effective strategy given the need to develop opportunities near the development floor:
The great difficulty of development is not how to sustain energies in a country in Tanzania’s 1999 position, but how to ensure energy does not turn entropic for a country in Senegal’s 1993 position, just as its about to unlock the fruits of development.7 The optimism of those segments of Emerging Africa with promising developments toward complexity obscured a dark kernel hidden within. That the best way to get to Dublin might not be from there.
Story #4: Ground Shifting Underneath Just as Developing Africa got their Bearings in 90’s (Synthesis)
In the suggestions for further research section of my thesis, I wrote that there is a highly unusual decomplexification beginning in the 90’s. Decomplexification is not unusual in itself. The sickness of the 80’s, which again registered in long-run growth statistics, was explained by the virulence of the so-called treatment. What was unexplained, and will remain unexplained, is that many model students who accepted orthodoxy were sliding substantially in the period that followed. Moreover, countries were expanding out the product space and yet had little success in translating those gains into transformation vis-a-vis building a competitive niche with the rest of the world. This obviated the principle stated above that increase density and increase complexity, it turns out no axiom. Density is little more than a heuristic.
I speculated in my thesis that it is likely the goalposts were moved, and again on this blog with the Daoist metaphor of the bellows. Since complexity is a relative measure, with one of its determinants the ubiquity of products under sphere of competence, it’s likely that entrepreneurs engaged in activities that would have carried complexity gains in the past, and were in fact reflected in the indices for 1993, but those gains dissipate entirely as they approached the new millennium and the growth of Asian production assemblages to major population clusters like China, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. More decisively, it appears that retaining the local edge of productive capabilities is at least as important, if not more, for developing countries seeking opportunities as AI superpowers leveraging dominance. Uganda, a woefully underdeveloped country in the 90’s that should observe general rule that any breakthroughs will register positively, lost its few complex lynchpins. Senegal also lost its products offering the most opportunity for upgrading, among the most complex in this sample with index values of approximately 2. With breakthroughs on the other end of the distribution, many countries shifted to lower complexity production, and Dublin drifted further from their sights.
Grasping for a Narrative: How do these Data Points Add up?
“Complexity thinking is trying to put life back into theory…does trying to capture everything in all its glorious technicolour detail make it impossible to say anything for certain? Better that, argue complexity theorists, than saying something that captures next-to-nothing of the reality,” Diana Coyle on a 2001 BBC radio segment titled Cogs and Monsters, now a book.
Though Dublin was unreachable, many African countries wandered into some charming Irish towns. Brad Delong likes to categorize books that are excellent histories, employing intriguing social science methods, but which have the misfortune of being published at precisely the moment the trends they document decisively reverse. So it was with Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, proving conquest was obsolete before WWI, and 1928 volume Republican Germany, arguing that we may look back on Germany’s decade of turmoil and decide that it served a productive function in the consolidation of Weimar norms and institutions after all.
Tragically, drawing with a ruler can lead even sober analysts astray. I like to imagine Nicolas Van de Walle’s African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis (1979-99) on the opposing end of the same shelf. The post-1999 trend in Sub-Saharan Africa is less familiar than the events of 1914 or 1929, but the reversal is no less clear. As Dwayne Woods argued in a critical review of the book, the neo-patrimonial syndrome did not condemn countries to permanent crisis because growth can quite easily occur under neo-patrimonial conditions if leveraged appropriating, turning to steroid and access capital sources of growth. Sub-Saharan Africa’s growth experience, as we’ll see not to be conflated with its development experience, as the “permanent” crisis that came to an end bore this out:
In fairness to De Walle, he was self-aware anticipating that the title could prove to be spectacularly wrong, even recognizing that it was perhaps related to his syndrome diagnosis. Under one set of conditions, what is dysfunctional can become functional under a different set of conditions:
At the end of what is fairly pessimistic account of Africa’s contemporary political economy, it may be useful to remember how wrong these earlier outside observers have proved to be. I hope that this account, too, has missed a key trend or a critical new development, which will in time prove my pessimism to be unwarranted. (1) democracy progresses in its fits and starts, and even small islands for democratic practice can pave the way for real change in time [my note: mutatis mutandis product space development] (2) Other structural changes are [also] taking place….the growth megacities is not always pretty but [Tilly has taught us] it may in time alter the political and economic dynamics that today appear permanent. (3) Finally, perhaps neopatrimonialism holds within itself the prospects of change…[frustrated by the lack of growth prospects] at least in some cases the interest of political elites is to shift in the direction of favoring policies that promote capitalist accumulation. (number bullets added)
Relying on democratization, urbanization, and unmentioned, but no less critical, nascent productive capabilities, those elites can overcome the “syndrome” by gambling on development. While extreme poverty stubbornly persists in the region, many of my African classmates told me they were distressed by how the aloof view mediated through BBC TV screens has not been updated for the policy wins they have worked hard to achieve.
In other words, the policy background is often more key than the strategic policies themselves. One of the clarifying principles of product space analysis is that development and the mismeasure of Man8 are of the same problem. With men, sometimes the size of his heart and brain does not reflect the opportunities he has to deploy them and unify the mind-body. Aldous Huxley once offered a simple thought experiment: what would happen to children with 170 IQ born into a tribal society? They would become hunters and foragers because they simply would not have the opportunities to develop their other desirable potentialities.9 Conversely, for cultural reasons that have little to do with economics, countries have stocks of human capital which do not measure up with their low levels of income. At the most prestigious echelons of scientific expertise, countries like economically backward pre-WWI Sweden were competitive with the richest countries of the world. Just as would be true over a century later when the World Bank visited China in 1983, those levels of education facilitated a compressed modernization relative to traditional capital-led strategies. Owing to the Maoist legacy followed up by the 80's reforms, when it was as the poorest of Sub-Saharan Africa, China's product space was similarly mismeasured, much more complex than its level of income would predict. The World Bank couldn't have foreseen the country that exists today, but an observer would only need to tilt the ruler constructed by its analysis 45 degrees upwards to get a glimpse of the future.
The ambition of the 1990’s reformers in Sub-Saharan Africa, laying the groundwork for takeoff, was along the lines pioneered by John Hoskyns in the West and Deng Xiaoping in the East. The model was to produce the structure of incentives that would empower private sector entrepreneurship and incubate nascent communities of engineering practice.
The limits of that model are a function of the ambition. What they (and I) choose to count influences our objectives and results. The significant caveat of this exercise is that it does not document the substantial harm done to the other components of the broader CEDI measure imagined by Soludo beyond the diversification of engineering competencies delineated. If it's poverty we care about, why focus on growth which, especially in a developing country context, may or may not reduce poverty, the intended aim of international development?10 An IMF report on Senegal, published at the end of the permanent crisis period, concludes with the tension between relying on the modern sector for growth and poverty alleviation. Without abrogating the IMF's mandate to structural reform, the report acknowledges that GDPism is no substitute for process which mediates public value, even in LIC's like Senegal:
Given the prohibitively high entry cost of creating industrial jobs in the modern sector…any meaningful poverty reduction strategy will have to be based on a furthering on a furthering of these small enterprises in the tertiary sector…This entails, foremost, to convince policymakers that export-led growth will not be sufficient to eradicate poverty and that the engine of growth in the Senegalese economy lies with these small enterprises in the tertiary sector.
All policy questions boil down to for whom do you want the policy to benefit? The economic historian Joel Mokyr articulated a position that would strike many as harsh but I believe is correct for countries lower in Buddenbrooks dynamics. He flatly stated that he did not care about the bottom 95 percent of the population, only the top 5 percent relevant for releasing the innovative capacities of the nation. In a developing nation, a substantial portion of the top 5 percent of interest to Mokyr will be in the informal tertiary sector, which requires the transfer of managerial know-how not the knowledge diffusion favored by the textbook model. That task should not be carried out lightly as it brings substantial benefits when conducted rigorously, Professor Vilcassim lectured to me in Beijing in 2019 on his field research in Uganda.
Mokyr added not to take the first part of the statement too literally as the bottom 95 percent can certainly impinge on the efforts of the top, particularly if they are squeezed to the brink when overcoming backwardness. Development, in any meaningful sense of the term, cannot be attained if the mass of the population on the periphery is impoverished, illiterate, and unhealthy11 no matter how many complex breakthroughs are gained in the core. Incubated in insular pockets of efficiency, complexity cannot be viewed as favorable to long-run development when it aggravates the sustenance of the very human capacities which development seeks to unleash.
The irony of Hoskyns looms, as Britain itself is one of the countries that took too much of the medicine he peddled, and as result jeopardized the engineering empowerment he sought to initiate. In a previous post on the failed attempts to reform second world largesse, reviewing Bartels’ essential history in which Hoskyns is centered as the main character, I opened with what I believe is the operative metaphor. The Polish poet presented the image of the sea-serpent that keeps those aspects of the self which are essential and surrendering the rest for devouring by the world.
I eagerly insert myself into these historical topics because I believe participation from amateurs like me, even as that participation is increasingly difficult to sustain, is vital. I have certain disadvantages—I agree with this thesis that material inequality and social elitism sets an individualist ethic as the default form of (post)politics. But like the sea-serpent, I’m afforded a critical advantage. I can salvage those ways of knowing from the discipline which I find helpful and toss all that is not. It’s an open secret that the academic humanities is dying to the point that voices ranging from Sam Altman to Viktor Shvets to Nils Gilman to this depressingly hilarious New Yorker report shout in unison that the model of the university as something distinct from competitor to Google’s research labs is dead. And yet, if people like me continue committed study without suffocating conventions, history can adopt the sea-serpent’s motto, non omnis moriar—I shall not wholly die.
The theme of this post is that personal development, realizing the desirable potentialities of Man, is fractally related to international development, and so reviving development prospects is a bit like resuscitating academic history. Tanner Greer, blogger-cum-think tanker, wrote to save the humanities those trained in their discipline(s) must know those fuzzy yet vital qualities which release student energies. They must engage reflexively, recalling personally the moment when they discovered Rosas resonance as well as be historically aware of the mission that vitalized their discipline into genesis. So rediscovery of that which summons educated energies is essential. After all, productivity can be reduced to knowledge, information, and education, James Cordata concluded in his Engelsian history of information. While Cortada’s book covers U.S. economic development, the story is generalizable to Hamiltonian China and Mkandawire’s emphasis on African knowledge systems.
In knowledge, there is another broad relation between history and development, reforming stability in order to cohere energies into a perceptual vision. Will the Fed and associated Committees to Save the World pluralize decision making for developing country expertise, an unheavenly chorus, who in the past had neither the material prosperity nor social status to spare them from Geithner’s red marker? Or is that still a polyphony they can’t bear listening to, and lack the wisdom to appreciate when they pass by?
All of the more subtle development thinkers, from Zhao Ziyang to Charles Soludo, intuited the power of the sea-serpent that remains out of grasp to those operating in the lineage of Hoskyns. That is, to take just enough so the opportunities within the product structure are developed, without taking so much as to ruin the human capacities which all but quash their realization. In the new secular era, countries like Ghana face severe financing constraints that rhymes with the prior era studied here. Their current conditions should not be conflated with their antecedents precisely because they took the low hanging fruit offered to them in Emerging Africa period. As the Chinese said in their own crisis of success brought on by their guerrilla-led expansion of the product space, a no choice kind of choice (没有选择的选择). During the decision point of the 1988/89 crisis, the stakes escalated because of the success of their prior decisions in 40's, 60's, and 80's.12 Today, will we appropriately recognize the elevated stakes to incorporate Sub-Saharan Africa into the perceptoral vision, globally transcending the post-political stalemate?
Postscript: Given my mostly unsupported claim that 19th century intellectual history is contemporary history, this an enlightening observation from an undergraduate thesis situating Hayden White with Roland Barthes, Edmund Burke, Frederic Jameson, Michael Oakeshott, and others. The conclusion is just as intriguing—the trajectory of his work in the age of hyperpolitics toward pessimism. I should have considered to apply her interpretation of White’s philosophy of historical narratives reflexively to the stories outlined above:
Drawing from Foucault’s The Order of Things, White asserts that historians harbored a “deep fear that ‘reality,’ and especially social reality, had slipped from the grasp of the instruments of knowledge designed to discover and control it.” Nineteenth century historians’ ‘passion for the real’ was ‘symptomatic’ of that fear, evidenced by their vehement rejection of literary techniques in historical writing. They harbored a ‘desire to objectify historical studies’ in order to preserve a comforting, fixed realism: to portray the past as it really happened through “innocent” language, the form of which was narrative.
Chinese, as my translation skills are severely out of practice: “经济的增长和稳定,都是必需的。经济不稳定,无法保持经济持续增长和整个社会的安定; 没有一定的增长速度,许多矛盾会更尖锐…要运用价值规律来稳定经济,也要运用价值规律来促进经济发展, 按照价值规律的客观要求来分析和处理经济生活中的新问题…郑重地提出这个问题: 在商品经济的海洋中游泳,学会我们过去最不熟悉的东西,” 赵紫阳.
Keep in mind that this newsletter started as a journal that migrated here when I noticed that I was more frequently citing statistics and commentaries I encountered online, a sort of organization device.
Follow my appeals to the Chinese philosopher Xunzi’s notion of the heart-mind to understand why I put scare quotes around problem.
I must say I am revealing my basic ignorance of the world’s religious traditions. While refreshing my memory of the Reformation, I encountered an interesting detail. In France, there was a split between “Huguenots of religion” (Calvinists) and “Huguenots of the state”, those who opposed the monarchy. On the Brahmic side of the ledger, Mulgan proposes a different source of inspiration in the book cited above, the Buddha. The path to nirvana runs through doubt. The reason why I summoned both of these examples from the East and West is their contemporary resonance. Does the path to nirvana run through the Brahmic order of Smart America, one that is easy to rule, but hard to change? Or is it properly located in the reaction to Smart America, Just America? Or is the binary itself misleading? As suggested by Packer, and even more forcefully in a recent essay by the Future of Capitalism fellows, Nils Gilman and Yakov Feygin, on the Designer Economy, the path to nirvana may lie in tracing the etymology of Huguenot, simply those who study together. Fortunately, in the 21st century, we have our own New World to retreat to in order to facilitate studying amongst a diverse group, lively online debates.
The terms exhaustive and ethnographic draw from a book by a Harvard historian, Making it Count, on those critical post-1949 statistical modernization efforts in the PRC and the tensions contained therein, which cast a long shadow to this day, as Jeremy Wallace has written. The book is interesting as a redirecting exercise within China studies departments. Rebuilding state capacity of the bureaucracy following the fallout of the Cultural Revolution is well-trodden ground. Ghosh chooses to tell a story that is less well known by emphasizing that China circa 1949 was after decades of turmoil completely hollowed out even from the Qing dynasty Paper Leviathan to an Absent Leviathan. Even today, China is not quite the Despotic Leviathan many claim it to be because the institutional incentives are, to somebody like Mao attuned enough to the rhythms of Chinese dynastic history, to weaken the state apparatus (see Yuhua Wang), often fatally so without intervention from somebody other than the original principal.
See discussion in aforementioned Mulgan’s Big Mind tracing the Greek roots of different types of thinking and envisioning their machine counterpart, the Japanese thought experiment of the road not taken with respect to machine intelligence (p.40-43), as well as road not taken offered by Latour methodologically in the social sciences (p.125).
There is perhaps another explanation for why development turned entropic in Senegal related to the reference point of 1999. From an IMF progress report on the country published in 2000 describing how it was of the stars of 90’s Emerging Africa contingent sustaining 5% per annum growth against significant tailwinds first to primary sector then secondary sectors likely affecting the export industries analyzed, “These good results were achieved despite adverse shocks: unfavorable climatic conditions hampered agricultural production in 1997 and 1998, while severe electrical shortages in 1999 adversely affected production in the secondary and tertiary sectors.” The larger point is that more complex economies are likely to experience these shocks because of bottlenecks relating to insufficient power generation, a problem that also emerged in Deng’s China, yet they also have the tools to render themselves anti-fragile. Hence, growth is entropic, but entropy is desirable. In economics as in life, too much stability is the tell-tale sign that that desirable potentialities are prematurely obstructed.
Reading on, another shock mentioned which is the reason I gave for selecting 1999 as the end period because the buoyancy of world demand at apex of Emerging Africa period would not be sustained, “Senegal’s trade performance has been affected by the general downturn in world demand in 1998.” The privatization program was also carried out in the 93-99 period, notably the power company, SENELEC, in March 1999. The main railroad line from Dakar to Barnako, also suffered severe disruptions in 1999, resulting in a contraction of international freight by 12.1 %.
An aside about this report: it mentions the proceeds of a loan in 1997 from “Taiwan, Province of China”, indicative of the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Wittgenstein is often referenced in development (“kicking away the ladder”) for a reason. See Mulgan’s discussion again on Wittgenstein and embodiment.
In this respect, Mkandawire’s obituary, published in Africa is a Country and Jacobin, states it is truly remarkable that he made a “giant leap” from the Malawian village and the all-black school he attended in his youth to the LSE and realized his desirable potentialities.
A similar argument can be made with respect to homelessness in the developed world. If it is homelessness we care about, why not provide the thing the unhoused lack rather than provide supportive services, good but indirect proxies, which prevent homelessness? There might be something to the comedian George Carlin’s cynicism—they don’t know a way to make people rich by housing the homeless. That’s why the problem persists in a wicked fashion.
Give People Money is increasingly an argument that resonates globally. The seamlessness in which Tom Stevenson transitions from the stubborn persistence of poverty in the developing world ex-China to the ways Europeans (and even Wang Huning) are appalled by the racial caste system visible for all to see in many American cities makes it one of the best essays I will read this year. And yet the horrors of caste, and the corrosiveness of multi-generational poverty, are beginning to emerge just as visibly in Little Britain, Stevenson emphasizes. Martin Luther King Jr booming voice echoed in my internal hallucinations while reading it, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
As Mkandawire once wrote, development is “the eradication of the unholy trinity.”
On pgs. 254-55 of Weber’s masterful contemporary history, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, she gives a detail which hints at the crisis of success underscored by complexity. Complexity makes economics, then politics unworkable, as Coyle speculated in 2001 interview above—“In the 1940s price stabilization…refereed to rice, cotton, and coal [simply] the most essential goods for feeding and clothing the people and for industry. In the 1960’s, the list of prices had been refined, reflecting China’s more diversified economy, to include 18 essential goods. The 1988 price stabilization now targeted the prices of 383 goods.”