China and the pursuit of happiness
Under Mao Zedong China had a communist system so rigid it made the Soviet Union seem positively capitalist by comparison. Since then, the Chinese government allowed farmers to control their own plots of land, allowed private rural enterprises, then welcomed $100s of billions in private foreign investment, then allowed private urban entrepreneurs, then privatized urban dwellings, then privatized many state-owned enterprises, and then set up two stock markets. That’s a lot of capitalism. Yet it’s also true that the Chinese state still dominates many parts of the economy, owns all the land, and has lots of controls that make it far less market-oriented than a place like Hong Kong.
Let’s suppose neoliberalism works. What should have happened as a result of all those Chinese reforms. Here are three choices:
1. China stays as poor (in relative terms) as in 1976. Comparable to central Africa, or Bangladesh.
2. China grows rapidly, but even in 2010 remains much poorer than Mexico.
3. China grows at explosive rates, and became a fully-developed country by 2010.
Which would be the outcome that would vindicate neoliberalism? And which would refute it? I could imagine reasonable people saying #2 would vindicate the neoliberal reforms. That’s what I’d say, and that’s what happened. I could imagine someone hostile to capitalism insisting that only #3 would count as success. But I must admit that until I read this book review from John Gray, I could never have imagined someone arguing that only outcome #1 would vindicate neoliberalism. At least that’s what I think he is saying. See what you think:
Disdainful or ignorant of the past, Ridley is uninterested in the forces that shape events. He writes hundreds of pages about the wealth-increasing virtues of free markets, but allots post-Mao China only a few lines. This brevity is symptomatic, as China falsifies Ridley’s central thesis; the largest burst of continuous economic growth in history has occurred without the benefit of free markets. Wealth has been created as never before, not as a result of evolutionary change, but as a product of revolution and dictatorship.
Am I misreading Gray, or is he actually saying that all that growth that followed Mao’s death is evidence that market reforms don’t work? If I met him I’d love to ask him what sort of outcome for China would count as success for their neoliberal reforms. I’ve noticed that when people have a strong aversion to a particular ideology, the answer is often a null set. Is it just me, or do you guys think that if China was still as poor as sub-Saharan Africa, Gray would be using that fact as evidence neoliberal reforms don’t work?
At the opposite extreme, this is from an excellent book review written by Ronald McKinnon:
John Williamson (1990) did all a great favor by writing down the rules for what he called “The Washington Consensus” for developing countries to follow to absorb aid efficiently:
1. Fiscal policy discipline.
2. Redirection of public spending from subsidies (“especially in discriminate subsidies”)
toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary
education, primary health care, and infrastructure;
3. Tax Reform””broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates:
4. Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;
5. Competitive exchange rates;
6. Trade liberalization””with particular emphasis on the elimination of quantitative
restrictions; any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;7. Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;
8. Privatization of state enterprises;
9. Deregulation””abolish regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudent oversight of financial institutions.
10. Legal security for property rights.
To provide perspective on these ten rules, the year 1990, when Williamson wrote, is important. It was just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the complete collapse of confidence in Soviet-style socialism. The rules reflect the hegemonic confidence that most people then had in liberal market-oriented capitalism””think Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But, 20 years later, should the meteoric rise of socialist China””both in its own remarkable growth in living standards, and in the effectiveness of its foreign “aid” to developing countries, undermine our confidence in Williamson’s Washington Consensus?
Surprisingly, no. The Chinese economy itself has evolved step-by-step (feeling the stones) into one that can be reasonably described by Williamson’s 10 rules!
At first glance McKinnon can seem just as out of touch as Gray, albeit in the opposite direction. After all, we all know that China is following its own “Beijing consensus” which is much more state-led that the US system. That’s partly true, but McKinnon makes a good case that China is gradually moving in the direction of the Washington consensus, even as we move in the opposite direction. The book review (which is quite long) also has some very interesting information about China’s involvement in Africa.
McKinnon may be a bit over-optimistic, but he’s much closer to the truth than Gray. And Gray isn’t just wrong about the China’s economy, he also misses important changes in China’s political system, which is much less based on the whims of a single dictator than Gray suggests. This book review from The Guardian does a nice job of showing what happens when you really do give absolute power to a single man:
The book’s title is somewhat misleading. Horrific as it was, with its cannibalism and people eating mud in search of sustenance, the famine generated by the Great Leap’s failure and the diversion of labour from farming was only part of a saga of oppression, cruelty and lies on a gargantuan scale. Initially launched to enable China to overtake Britain in steel production, Mao’s programme took on a deadly life of its own. At the apex of the system, the chairman refused to recognise reality, spoke of people eating five meals a day, insisted on maintaining food exports when his country was starving and indulged in macabre throwaway remarks such as: “When there is not enough to eat, people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”
. . .
Finally, somebody had to confront the leader. As China descended into catastrophe, the second-ranking member of the regime, Liu Shaoqi, who had been shocked at the conditions he found when he visited his home village, forced the chairman to retreat. An effort at national reconstruction began. But Mao was not finished. Four years later, he launched the Cultural Revolution whose most prominent victim was Liu, hounded by Red Guards until he died in 1969, deprived of medicines and cremated under a false name.
The Cultural Revolution is widely remembered, the Great Leap much less so. Having gone through those two experiences, not to mention the mass purges that preceded them and the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989, it is little wonder if the Chinese of today are set on a very different course that rejects ideology in the interests of material self-advancement.
In my view the most important engine of human progress is not science, but rather the growing acknowledgement that governments should be at least somewhat utilitarian. Not chasing grand dreams of one sort or another, but rather focused mostly on the well-being of the average person. China’s hardly a model in that regard, but despite all its problems it is definitely moving in that direction. It’s a pity that Gray doesn’t understand that the dramatic progress he describes has occurred precisely because China is far less dictatorial and far more market-oriented than in the 1970s.
Another person who doesn’t seem to get it is Adam Phillips, who seems positively disdainful of the “pursuit of happiness.” Oddly, he seems to think the monsters of the 20th century were not out fanatically pursuing glorious crusades, but rather merely engaged in the mundane task of making the German, Russian, Chinese and Cambodian people more comfy:
What exactly might it mean to have an “unalienable right” to “the pursuit of happiness”, given that it is fairly obvious that the pursuit of happiness is so morally equivocal – could be, among other things, a threat to the society that promoted it? At first sight it seems to be a pretty good idea; if we are convinced of anything now we are convinced that we are pleasure-seeking creatures, who want to minimise the pain and frustration of our lives. Or at least a “we” could be consolidated around these beliefs. We are the creatures who, possibly unlike any other animal, pursue happiness. But the pursuit of happiness, like the pursuit of liberty – the utopian political projects of the 20th century – has legitimated some of the worst crimes of contemporary history across the political spectrum.
Think about it. Do you really think Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot were trying to make people happier? Does the description of Mao’s reaction to the famine sound like he’s a utilitarian?
One guy who does get it is V.S. Naipaul:
Familiar words, easy to take for granted; easy to misconstrue . . . This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the civilization to so many outside it or on the periphery. I find it marvelous to contemplate to what an extent, after two centuries, and after the terrible history of the earlier part of this century, the idea has come to a kind of fruition. It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away. (Talk given in 1991)
That’s right, the key word isn’t happiness, it’s ‘pursuit.’ Life should be a sort of adventure. The philosopher kings that are disdainful of markets and democracy want society to embody their ideas. The utilitarian says “let 6.7 billion adventures bloom.”
HT: John Taylor, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson
Tags: Book Review, Books
6. September 2010 at 19:00
“In my view the most important engine of human progress is not science, but rather the growing acknowledgement that governments should be at least somewhat utilitarian.”
Gah!
That statement is only true if you follow it up with Bacon and Rawls by saying therefore… we need to let scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs run free and undisturbed.
Let’s say it backwards… because scientists, technologists, and entrepreneurs are the only people who can systematically improve the lives of the poorest and weakest, a utilitarian government will stay out of their way.
6. September 2010 at 20:24
Well said!
BTW, I found this old Hoover pub. in which Milton Friedman tells Japan how to end its woes. They should have listened
http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/6549
7. September 2010 at 00:38
A slightly different (but still pro-market) narrative, by Delong, which builds a political-economy element in. If the PRC had attempted an ideological shift towards neoliberalism, it is likely the hardliners would have triggered a revolt. They nearly did so in 1989 anyway. Neoliberalism as a national ideology would have been simply untenable pre-1989 – Deng held on and legitimized non-revolutionary authoritarian rule, but he did so by being cautious.
—
On Gray: you’re misreading him. China is invoked to disprove Ridley’s claim of market-driven evolution of ideas (the context of the previous paragraph). Hence “Wealth has been created as never before, not as a result of evolutionary
change, but as a product of revolution and dictatorship”.
It doesn’t really work as a argument; what it shows is that Ridley’s evolving ideas are not a necessary condition, when what Ridley seeks to claim is that they are sufficient (presumably?).
—
To be fair: “Let’s say X works. What should have happened…” is a terrible argument – one could easily claim that, say, China’s 1989 mishmash of policies is the ideal policy and thus proclaim that the more rapid growth prior and slower growth thereafter vindicates your claim. Or whatever.
—
Again, your use of “neoliberalism” is quirky – if you substituted “Scandinavian economic system” in, which is how you typically use the term, this would be better understood.
When most people compare, say, the US with the “neoliberalism” as referred to here, the most striking element is not the lower corporate taxes and labor market flexibility but the greater progressivity and more expansive welfare state.
7. September 2010 at 01:23
I’m kind of confused by what you mean when you say that government should be somewhat utilitarian. The choice of language suggests a rejection of both Rawlsian liberalism and Marxist radicalism, but when you say that government should mostly care about the well-being of the average person, it doesn’t seem like you’re very strictly adhering to the principle of average utility.
In any case, the philosopher king/utilitarian dichotomy strikes me as odd. Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism can be characterized as expressions of Platonism. But there are plenty of non-Platonists who are dedicated to letting “6.7 billion adventures bloom” yet think that market societies are just one of many social arrangements in which this is possible. You don’t have to be a philosopher king to wonder if markets, in any given iteration, are compatible with democracy.
7. September 2010 at 05:15
Morgan, A utilitarian government should stay out of the way more than it currently does in most areas, and get involved more in a few areas.
Benjamin, Yes, I’ve seen that one. I should probably do another post on that.
David, I have no problem with DeLong’s argument, but I fail to follow your argument. Gray says the growth of China refutes Ridley’s argument. What sort of observed growth in China would support Ridley’s argument? If Gray can’t specify the counterfactual that would have supported Ridley’s argument, then his assertion makes no sense.
I think it’s fairly clear that Gray is implying that if Ridley was right, we should not have seen rapid growth in China. How else can you interpret his statement?
I also don’t think I am using neoliberalism in a quirky way in this post. I’ll grant you that my view that Denmark is neoliberal is quite quirky. But surely everyone agrees that China is much more neoliberal today than under Mao? So what’s the problem?
Nuveen, Strictly speaking utilitarianism tries to maximize total utility. More commonly average utility is used (as population is usually assumed to be a given.) I understand there is a bit of a conflict between total and average utility, as maximizing total utility might call for a much large population. I’d rather sidestep those issues, and take population as a given. In that case the goal is highest average utility. As a practical matter the easiest way to boost average utility it to raise the utility level of those who are at the bottom. It’s pretty hard to raise the utility of someone that is already doing well, but there is a lot of scope for raising the utility of the suffering. I realize that there is no rigorous proof for what I just said, but I think that in the real world it is usually the case.
You said;
“But there are plenty of non-Platonists who are dedicated to letting “6.7 billion adventures bloom” yet think that market societies are just one of many social arrangements in which this is possible. You don’t have to be a philosopher king to wonder if markets, in any given iteration, are compatible with democracy.”
Sure, you can make any argument (as we’ve seen with Gray) but the question is whether the argument is plausible or not. The history of the last few hundred years shows a strong correlation between markets and democracy. Far from perfect, but nonetheless very strong. Someone can make the argument that markets are incompatible with democracy, but since real world non-market economies have been so horrific, the advocate of non-market economies will have a quite difficult time making their case.
But yes, any argument is possible. One could argue that slavery would have benefited African Americans if only it had been done right. But how plausible is an argument like that? Obviously not plausible at all. And how plausible is it that the horrors of communism were not caused by the lack of markets, but by the fact that the non-market economy was not run in the correct way? Again, not very.
7. September 2010 at 06:24
I might be wrong here, but I believe the “pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence should NOT be read with the meaning “pursuing what makes you happy” but instead read with the meaning “keeping/owning the fruit of your labors”. The phrase arose with regards to a property rights debate among the Founding Fathers, and I believe the phrase is firmly grounded in that context. To say “the pursuit of happiness” means everyone should do anything they want is to remove the very strong property rights context that the Founders meant in the phrase.
7. September 2010 at 06:25
I’m not Gray and, as I said, I find that his argument doesn’t work. But as I read him, a counterfactual would have been a post-Mao PRC explicitly and to some measure successfully committing towards laissez-faire economic development (and achieving the same growth we observe in history, presumably). Hong Kong writ large, perhaps.
Which would have been impossible, of course, the country would just have disintegrated – which is Gray’s point: revolution and dictatorship, not a straightforward leap into the embrace of the free market. We cannot separate political institutions from economic policy – a non-cautious Deng would have lost China.
There is, as McKinnon points out, policy evolution, but not via the market process Ridley emphasizes.
Ridley describes the free market as a arena for evolution of ideas. Gray is, I think, reading an inverse argument that he does not explicitly identify Ridley as asserting – that non-free-market arenas cannot support such evolution. So he identifies a non-free-market arena that evolved policies and ideas rapidly and thus proclaims a counterexample…
The argument doesn’t work, unless Ridley does make the inverse claim in his book and Gray has just omitted to inform his readers of such.
7. September 2010 at 06:30
“As a practical matter the easiest way to boost average utility it to raise the utility level of those who are at the bottom. It’s pretty hard to raise the utility of someone that is already doing well, but there is a lot of scope for raising the utility of the suffering. I realize that there is no rigorous proof for what I just said, but I think that in the real world it is usually the case.”
Scott, have you read Rawl’s? He makes a very rigorous proof of exactly that, but his conclusions don’t make many liberals happy.
7. September 2010 at 06:49
What with the Cultural Revolution and all, the Mao-era state was pretty shoddy at providing education, healthcare, and other social services. In fact, it shut down the schools and sent the doctors to grow rice. But China today can manage to do these things. So China is much more socialist today than under Mao!
etc. Defining a state as having become ‘more’ or ‘less’ neoliberal makes sense holding other factors constant. Otherwise, not so much… I doubt that ‘neoliberal’ is the best way to describe the direction the PRC has moved in, even if it did become more neoliberal (and a lot of other things) along the way.
I note that the PRC had (roughly speaking) one development direction between Mao and 1989, and another, somewhat different, direction thereafter, so we’re glossing over a lot of important details here. Reading this as a steady movement in the vague direction of neoliberalism would be definitely a mistake.
7. September 2010 at 07:11
Mr. Sumner,
I would love to read your thoughts on the opinion that China’s example neither makes a good case for “neo-liberalism,” nor for command/control economies, but rather that China’s recent economic development is the direct and predictable result of the massive influx of savings and capital into China.
Of Williamson’s 10 points listed above, I would argue that only trade liberalization and foreign direct investment have made any significant impact on the Chinese economy. China discovered a trade model that happened to coincide with a historical accident: the Western world’s consumption binge of the past 20-30 years. Rather than saving, the West was consuming as much as possible, and China was the recipient of that consumption. Spending on “primary health care vs. subsidies” pales in comparison to the West’s appetite for cheap production goods. Even industry privatization can’t compete with that. We saw in the Soviet Union that the West’s willingness to trade (and even donate) food to the USSR kept that country’s communism alive much longer than it otherwise would have.
So are we maybe just skirting the real issue, i.e. the capital issue? I hate to be “the crazy Austrian School guy,” but it’s a position worth considering in this case, in my opinion.
7. September 2010 at 07:52
Marxism was about improving the conditions of the masses. Marx just happened to be completely wrong about how to do that. You’d have to go back to pre-liberal reactionary doctrines to find ideologies that reject something like utilitarianism as an end. Orwell noted that fascism (in contrast to socialism) relied partly on that rejection of happiness as an end for its appeal.
7. September 2010 at 09:47
Gray has a few more things to say about neoliberalism here:
http://www.newstatesman.com/non-fiction/2010/01/neoliberal-state-market-social
“An increase in state power has always been the inner logic of neoliberalism, because, in order to inject markets into every corner of social life, a government needs to be highly invasive. Health, education and the arts are now more controlled by the state than they were in the era of Labour collectivism. Once-autonomous institutions are entangled in an apparatus of government targets and incentives. The consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.”
So maybe in Gray’s view China’s reforms are the opposite of neoliberalism. Or maybe everything he says about China is driven by the necessity of opposing neoliberal ideas for Britain.
Anyway, you certainly can’t argue with this:
“Neoliberalism and social democracy are not entirely separate political projects; they are dialectically related, the latter being a kind of synthesis of the contradictions of the former.”
7. September 2010 at 12:18
Prof. Sumner,
I’m a huge fan of this blog.
However, I find this totalitarian/utilitarian dichotomy to be odd. I think it is quite easy to conceive of a dictator who says, “I want to kill/imprison/enslave 10% of the population so that the other 90% might prosper.” Maybe that 10% consists of capitalists, Jews, kulaks, intellectuals, or whomever else. I don’t want to call Mao, Hitler, Stalin, et al. utilitarians, but I don’t see how state-sponsored murder and tyranny is per se opposed by utilitarianism.
As Robespierre said: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”(Or words to that effect.) Well, let’s say the omelette is “making the average person better off.” You see that one can justify pretty ghastly things in the name of helping the average joe. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Mao, Hitler, Stalin et al. thought of themselves as helping the many (at least within their own countries) at the expense of some hated minority group.
What am I missing?
I may go into this topic on my own blog: redonkulusblog.blogspot.com
Best wishes,
r.d.
7. September 2010 at 16:14
Instead let’s consider neo-liberalism for what it is… a weaker effort at statism than the last generation was able to muster. Obama is what FDR would be today – a loser.
Because we are after all far smarter than our grandparents 70 years ago.
The most logical progression then will be towards even lower marginal taxes, even greater primacy of commerce, and even less collective bargaining.
Thus, China and the US move in the same direction, though our paths are different – we grow towards the same light:
A absolute respect for productivity and profit. A rule of law based on some historical cultural norms. Human improvement through technology and choice.
In my visits to China, which I loved, I came to view the government as basically what you’d have here if our local and state governments were weaker, and the national government was more concerned with maintaining power in a non-electoral setting – so they didn’t have much time to worry about what everyone was doing. It certainly doesn’t fit our sense of human rights, but it sure tickled my sense of “everything is for sale.”
In India a large English speaking democracy, I routinely had a guy with a gun come over and ask to see my papers. Bribes seemed routine.
In China, it just tasted more like the US.
7. September 2010 at 17:37
Ryan, I believe they originally were going to say life liberty and property, and changed it for some reason. I don’t know the reason, but I prefer the version they ended up with.
I agree they didn’t intend allowing people to do whatever they wanted, but I think the change does indicate that they saw people as having a wide scope of freedom, and not just property rights.
David, you said;
“I’m not Gray and, as I said, I find that his argument doesn’t work. But as I read him, a counterfactual would have been a post-Mao PRC explicitly and to some measure successfully committing towards laissez-faire economic development (and achieving the same growth we observe in history, presumably). Hong Kong writ large, perhaps.
Which would have been impossible, of course, the country would just have disintegrated – which is Gray’s point: revolution and dictatorship, not a straightforward leap into the embrace of the free market. We cannot separate political institutions from economic policy – a non-cautious Deng would have lost China.”
You misunderstood my point. I am not asking what China should have done. They did what they did. That has no bearing in whether free markets work. My question is what sort of economic growth rate in China would have supported Ridley’s argument, GIVEN WHAT THEY DID. He says the actual growth rate in China decisively refutes Ridley’s argument. OK, so what growth rate would have supported it? If he answers that there isn’t any, then he is simply using bad logic. He’s a distinguished philosopher, and surely must understand that you can’t make that sort of argument without a counterfactual that would support the other side.
As I read the passage, he implies that if China had stayed very poor, it would support Ridley’s argument. I think that is beyond nuts. What do you think he meant the relevant counterfactual growth rate to have been?
You said:
“Ridley describes the free market as a arena for evolution of ideas. Gray is, I think, reading an inverse argument that he does not explicitly identify Ridley as asserting – that non-free-market arenas cannot support such evolution. So he identifies a non-free-market arena that evolved policies and ideas rapidly and thus proclaims a counterexample… ”
I have no idea what this means. China started as a completely non-market economy, and moved toward markets. Are you saying that Ridley claims only market economies can reform? If so, then Ridley would have to believe that China could never reform, after all, in 1976 it was a non-market economy. He would have to believe China was doomed for all eternity. Somehow I doubt he made that claim.
You said;
“etc. Defining a state as having become ‘more’ or ‘less’ neoliberal makes sense holding other factors constant. Otherwise, not so much… I doubt that ‘neoliberal’ is the best way to describe the direction the PRC has moved in, even if it did become more neoliberal (and a lot of other things) along the way.”
OK, under Mao on a scale of zero to 100, where zero is no neoliberalism, and 100 is Hong Kong, then China was close to a zero under Mao. I don’t care where you put it today, before or after 1989, it is massively more neoliberal than before 1976. That was my point.
The Great Leap Forward was what happens when egalitarianism goes so far that MTRs hit 100%: Mass starvation.
Morgan, Yes, I’ve read Rawls, but he makes an absurd argument that only the welfare of those on the bottom matter. If you could raise their welfare a tiny but, at the expense of making everyone else massively worse off, then do it. Or at least that’s what I think he said.
Ryan, You asked;
“I would love to read your thoughts on the opinion that China’s example neither makes a good case for “neo-liberalism,” nor for command/control economies, but rather that China’s recent economic development is the direct and predictable result of the massive influx of savings and capital into China.”
That’s an easy one. I think they are wrong, as savings are massively flowing out of China, not in. Part of the US housing boom was financed by Chinese saving. That outflow of course slows the growth rate of the Chinese economy.
There are many factors besides trade that have contributed to Chinese growth. The most important single factor was agricultural reform, not trade. Recently they have privatized urban housing, which unleashed a huge housing boom. Trade is only one part of the Chinese story, there is much more.
Wonks Anonymous, I agree about fascism, but don’t know enough about Marxism to comment. I will say this, if you are right about Marxism, then Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot (And Kim Jung Il) are not Marxists, as they sure aren’t utilitarians. I was describing real world dictators, not an abstract ideology.
Anon/portly;
You quote Gray as saying:
“An increase in state power has always been the inner logic of neoliberalism, because, in order to inject markets into every corner of social life, a government needs to be highly invasive. Health, education and the arts are now more controlled by the state than they were in the era of Labour collectivism. Once-autonomous institutions are entangled in an apparatus of government targets and incentives. The consequence of reshaping society on a market model has been to make the state omnipresent.”
So the state is even more involved when companies are privatized? When prices are decontrolled? When public housing is sold to the occupants? I find that almost equally bizarre to the comment on China. It requires great intellectual skill to be so creative and counterintuitive, I’ll give him that.
r.d. You said;
“However, I find this totalitarian/utilitarian dichotomy to be odd. I think it is quite easy to conceive of a dictator who says, “I want to kill/imprison/enslave 10% of the population so that the other 90% might prosper.” Maybe that 10% consists of capitalists, Jews, kulaks, intellectuals, or whomever else. I don’t want to call Mao, Hitler, Stalin, et al. utilitarians, but I don’t see how state-sponsored murder and tyranny is per se opposed by utilitarianism.”
People often make this argument against utilitarianism, but I think it is wrong. Someone could say “Suppose a father loved his 10 children, and therefore felt that the total happiness of the 10 would be improved if one was killed.” Yes, a father might believe that, but he would almost certainly be very misguided, as the extra utility of the other nine children (say having a few more toys that they didn’t need to share) would be trivial as compared to the loss of utility of the child who was killed. No sensible utilitarian father would do such a thing, except in the most extreme case (say a famine.)
Countries with a utilitarian approach only sacrifice a minority under an extreme duress. In the US one example was WWII, where the threat to our liberty caused us to sacrifice man young men to defend the rest of us. But that’s a rare case. The Holocaust or slavery were not motivated by utilitarian values, just the opposite. The oppressors moral code excluded the suffering of Jews and slaves from consideration.
Morgan, I agree that China can seem quite free to a tourist. And there are a few ways in which it is freer than the US. But it’s also true that the average Chinese person has to put up with a huge amount of corruption and inefficiency and oppression that we rich tourists hardly notice.
7. September 2010 at 17:41
Morgan, You said;
“In India a large English speaking democracy, I routinely had a guy with a gun come over and ask to see my papers. Bribes seemed routine.
In China, it just tasted more like the US.”
That’s actually a pretty shrewd observation regarding China. I haven’t been to India, so I won’t comment on that country. But I do think the Chinese culture resembles American culture more than does the culture of many other poor countries. That’s one reason I don’t think China will be poor for long.
Long term, I’m also optimistic about India–its total GDP will be huge in 100 years (by which time it may have double China’s population.)
8. September 2010 at 06:48
“No sensible utilitarian father would do such a thing, except in the most extreme case”
If you accept total-utilitarianism (which makes more sense to me than average utilitarianism), we do it all the time by not having the tenth kid. And if you don’t accept that example, I would also that a father of ten taking risks (or failing to take precautions) leading to the benefit of nine children and loss of one is quite plausible. J. B. S. Haldane (though a communist) could explain to you precisely why we should expect to see such behavior. We don’t in part because fewer families have ten children (or more). But that will change as the post-industrial economy becomes our new evolutionarily adaptive period.
How do you know the dictators weren’t just mistaken utilitarians? Like Robespierre, they could well have thought it was necessary to break some eggs to reach the glorious new future. I’ll admit that Pol Pot was a really extreme case and possibly not like the others.
8. September 2010 at 07:12
anon/portly Anyway, you certainly can’t argue with this:
I always take these sorts of statements as a challenge.
“Neoliberalism and social democracy are not entirely separate political projects;
Agreed, for some definitions of social democracy. Roger Douglas, the 1980s Minister of Finance, who appears to be generally agreed to be neoliberal, was in the NZ Labour Party for a good reason. The lessons he derived from the failures of communism and state planning was that one should use markets to produce wealth, and then transfer payments to the worst-off in society. Clearly many other people who call themselves social democrats disagree with it.
they are dialectically related,
Again, I can’t argue, anything can be dialectically related. All it requires for two people to have a debate where they attempt to find agreement by seeking truth. Roger Douglas managed that within his own brain. I also note though that neoliberalism and social democracy are also related by debating, and by rhetoric. Claiming that two items are dialectically related is one of those statements that is inarguable because it’s so uninformative.
Hmm, I’ve had to concede two points as inarguable. It’s getting tough here.
the latter being a kind of synthesis of the contradictions of the former.”
No it doesn’t. Social democracy doesn’t answer for example how we can manage to combine freedom of action with the fact that what we do always affects others. Typically, for no apparent reason (and with many exceptions, eg Roger Douglas) social democrats are all in favour of freedom of action in lifestyles, but very little freedom in economic activity (Roger Douglas favoured freedom in both). They don’t have any clear argument for why the difference. Nor do social democrats have much of an answer at all about how governments can obtain the knowledge to carry out all the things that social democrats think the government should do. One of the noted events of social democratic regulation is that it is impossible for a firm with a dominant market position to set prices in an unreproachable way – if a firm sets prices lower than its competing firms it’s engaged in predatory pricing, if a firm sets prices higher than the other firms it’s using its monopoly power, if a firm sets prices the same as the other firms it’s engaging in price collusion. But those are the only 3 options firms have, for setting prices. Social democracy has no answer to that that I’ve ever heard of.
Phew, that was a tough challenge. You had me worried there for a bit. Thanks for the intellectual stimulation.
On the other hand, while I can’t argue with you that neoliberalism and social democracy aren’t entirely separate political projects, I know people that would deny left right and centre that Roger Douglas is a social democrat, and thus would argue with your first statement too.
8. September 2010 at 09:12
The best thing about China as an example is its adaptability to any situation. Since it’s part communist and part free market, everybody wins. Hate capitalism? Credit China’s recent success to socialism and blame the poor working conditions on capitalism. Hate socialism? Credit China’s recent success to market reforms and blame persistent human rights abuses on socialism. You can’t lose.
8. September 2010 at 10:14
Scott, great reply to my question, very informative! Thanks. 🙂
8. September 2010 at 15:00
Professor Sumner,
You make interesting points, but again, I’m not really arguing that these dictators were literally utilitarians. But maybe crimes of a smaller magnitude could make sense from a utilitarian perspective.
E.g. The U.S. displaced, say, 1 million American Indians and drove them into reservations. This led the way (e.g. gave us the land we needed) to the wonderful country we have now with 300 million people and very high standard of living and lots of freedom. So, we gave a million people a raw deal, but roughly 300 million people are better off than they would’ve been otherwise (we can debate this, but let’s grant it for the sake of argument).
Doesn’t the massive utility gain of the 300 million outweigh the utility loss of the 1 million? And if so, wouldn’t the utilitarian say that overall the various Indian removal policies were justified? (Yes, maybe there were nicer ways of doing it, but the point is that we got more than we gave up.)
I’m fine with a moderate dose of utilitarianism here or there. E.g. It makes sense in much of our economic policy. But I think it cannot consistently be a pure utilitarian without justifying all sorts of terrible things. This might be why some people believe in something like utilitarianism + natural rights (or natural law).
Maybe there should be a song: “I’d do anything for utilitarianism, but I won’t do that.” [“That” being genocide, nuclear destruction of civilian populations, etc.]
9. September 2010 at 02:04
Speaking of ideologically motivated famines, don’t forget the laissez-faire famines of British Empire, and how prosperous British India was – undoubtedly one of the most capitalist places in the world at a time.
Soviets were mostly trying to follow British model of rapid industrialization, as far as they understood it.
I would probably be helpful if you stopped using labels like “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” when you mean something far closer to Scandinavian-style or East-Asian-style mixed economy with big and strong government coexisting with big and strong private sector than to any kind of traditional laissez-faire capitalism.
9. September 2010 at 06:13
Wonks Anonymous, Based on what I have read about the dictators of the 20th century, they were mostly sadists; extremely cruel people. Hitler used to joke around about the Holocaust with his aides. Does that sound like someone who cared about the well-being of Jews? Mao’s biography said he was very cruel, ditto for Stalin. I don’t find it at all plausible that they were utilitarians.
Indeed I doubt whether even many less crimes can be justified on utilitarian grounds. I doubt the firebombing of German and Japanese cities would have occurred if US and British leaders had been true utilitarians, placing equal weight on the lives of foreign civilians, as on their own people. But I would admit that is a closer call.
I agree that total utilitarianism creates some problems regarding the unborn, and I don’t have any good answers.
Tracy, Those are good points.
BTW, Social democracy is a vague term–does it apply to relatively neoliberal Denmark?
Kailer;
“The best thing about China as an example is its adaptability to any situation. Since it’s part communist and part free market, everybody wins. Hate capitalism? Credit China’s recent success to socialism and blame the poor working conditions on capitalism. Hate socialism? Credit China’s recent success to market reforms and blame persistent human rights abuses on socialism. You can’t lose.”
That would be right, but only for people foolish enough to ignore China’s history. It was 100% communist in the 1960s and 1970s. How’d that work out? Things are certainly much better on average, even for the bottom 10%
Ryan, You’re welcome.
r.d.;
“You make interesting points, but again, I’m not really arguing that these dictators were literally utilitarians. But maybe crimes of a smaller magnitude could make sense from a utilitarian perspective.
E.g. The U.S. displaced, say, 1 million American Indians and drove them into reservations. This led the way (e.g. gave us the land we needed) to the wonderful country we have now with 300 million people and very high standard of living and lots of freedom. So, we gave a million people a raw deal, but roughly 300 million people are better off than they would’ve been otherwise (we can debate this, but let’s grant it for the sake of argument).”
Imagine this thought experiment. You can push a button and the Nazi Holocaust never happened. Do you push it? Obviously. (Or at least probably, unless you had an extreme horror at tinkering with history.) You can push another button and have Europeans stay away from the Americas. Do you push it? Most Americans then would never have existed. I probably wouldn’t push that button. At the same time, I think the Europeans should have treated the Native Americans much better. If they had bought the land, rather than stealing it, the outcome (in terms of population growth) probably wouldn’t have been that different in the long run.
But you raise a good question, and I’m not at all certain that I have a good answer.
Tomasz, You said;
“Speaking of ideologically motivated famines, don’t forget the laissez-faire famines of British Empire, and how prosperous British India was – undoubtedly one of the most capitalist places in the world at a time.”
That’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone equate the British east India company with laissez-faire. People on the left use the term ‘capitalism’ to refer to evil economic systems, of whatever type, not free markets.
You said;
“Soviets were mostly trying to follow British model of rapid industrialization, as far as they understood it.”
Something must have gotten lost in translation–like private property.
You said;
“I would probably be helpful if you stopped using labels like “capitalism” and “neoliberalism” when you mean something far closer to Scandinavian-style or East-Asian-style mixed economy with big and strong government coexisting with big and strong private sector than to any kind of traditional laissez-faire capitalism.”
With all due respect this makes no sense. There are obviously no real world countries that meet your description, instead we talk about this terms in a relative sense. Some countries have freer markets than others, or smaller governments. I usually use the term ‘neoliberal’ to refer to relatively free markets, and ‘laissez-faire’ to refer to both free markets and small government. By those definitions, two East Asian countries are the most laissez-faire on Earth according to every single economic freedom ranking that I have ever seen. Regarding free markets, Denmark ranks number one if you take the Heritage economic freedom rankings, and leave out the 2 related to size of government. Hence I regard Hong Kong as RELATIVELY laissez-faire, and Denmark as relatively neoliberal.
9. September 2010 at 07:48
Scott Sumner, if I can apply the term social democracy to Roger Douglas, I can apply it to Denmark’s politicians.
But I seldom find much benefit in arguing about the meaning of words. If someone wishes to define social democracy as covering Denmark but not Roger Douglas, then so be it. What interests me is how Roger Douglas’s thinking differs from Ruth Richardson’s, or Margaret Thatcher’s, not which label in particular gets stuck on it.
10. September 2010 at 13:33
Tracy, I completely agree.
12. September 2010 at 14:03
Thanks for the thoughtful response.