Loading presentation…
Opening in Keynote for Mac...
Choose Media…
Your browser isn’t fully supported.
For the best Keynote for iCloud experience, use a supported browser.
Learn More
Cancel
Continue
2020-11-10
Adam Frost
:
Entrepreneurial Transformation of Socialist China
<
https://ysi.ineteconomics.org/project/5f316897689c756fb5c52785/
event/5f6b2b94a21037043d0c1458
>: ‘China’s socialist era (1957–
1980) is often described as having been void of entrepreneurial
activity. Generations of scholars argued that beginning with the
Communist’s victory over the Nationalists in 1949 and culminating
until the establishment of collective economic institutions in 1957,
private entrepreneurship was effectively purged from the Chinese
economy. It was only with the introduction of market-oriented
reforms in the early 1980s, that Chinese entrepreneurs began to
reemerge.... [But] capitalist entrepreneurship was an enduring feature
of the modern Chinese economy.... 2,600 cases of “speculation and
profi teering” that were prosecuted by local government agencies in
the 1960s and 1970s....
‘
Private entrepreneurial activity... was far greater in scale and scope
than previous scholarship leads us to believe. Of the millions of
entrepreneurs who were prosecuted by the socialist state, the mean
individual was engaged in the production and exchange of goods
whose value represented years’ of income for the median worker....
‘
The socialist state was not unifi ed in its suppression of private
entrepreneurial activity. A statistical analysis of the punishments in
“speculation and profi teering” case demonstrates that local
government offi cials did not faithfully execute central directives.
Rather, they adopted overtly protectionist strategies, sheltering
entrepreneurs who were engaged in large-scale pursuits or activities
that they viewed as more productive in the local economy.
Collectively, these fi ndings overturn longstanding ideas about the
evolution of the modern Chinese economy and the historical
antecedents of China’s market-oriented reforms…
Adam Frost: Entrepreneurial Transformation of Socialist
China
<
https://ysi.ineteconomics.org/project/5f316897689c756fb5c52785/event/5f6b2b94a21037043d0c1458
>
<
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0z0Btdoy-vo9Rm1GKFxXBwoBw
>
John Maynard Keynes
(1925):
Soviet Russia I
<
https://newrepublic.com/article/
77318/soviet-russiai
>: ‘This system does not mean a complete leveling down of
incomes—at least at the present stage. A clever and successful person in Soviet
Russia has a bigger income and a better time than other people. The Commissar with
$25 a week (plus sundry free services, a motor-car, a flat, a box at the ballet, etc., etc.)
lives well enough, but not in the least like a rich man in London. The successful
Professor or Civil Servant with $30 or $35 a week (minus sundry impositions) has,
perhaps, a real income three times that of the proletarian worker, and six times those
of the poorer peasants.
'Some peasants are three or four times as rich as others. A man who is out of work
receives half pay, not full pay. But no one can afford on these incomes, with high
Russian prices and stiff progressive taxes, to save anything worth saving; it is hard
enough to live day by day. The progressive taxation and the mode of assessing rents
and other charges are such that it is actually disadvantageous to have an
acknowledged income exceeding $40 to $50 a week. Nor is there any possibility of
large gains except by taking the same sort of risks as attach to bribery and
embezzlement elsewhere—not that bribery and embezzlement have disappeared in
Russia or are even rare, but anyone whose extravagance or whose instincts drive him
to such courses runs serious risk of detection and penalties which include death.
'Nor, at the present stage, does the system involve the actual prohibition of buying
and selling at a profi t. The policy is not to forbid these professions, but to render them
precarious and disgraceful. The private trader is a sort of permitted outlaw, without
privileges or protection, like the Jew in the Middle Ages—an outlet for those who
have overwhelming instincts in this direction, but not a natural or agreeable job for
the normal man.
'The effect of the social changes has been, I think, to make a real change in the
predominant attitude towards money, and will probably make a far greater change
when a new generation has grown up which has known nothing else. A small,
characteristic example of the way in which the true Communist endeavors to
influence public opinion towards money is given by the campaign which is going on
about the waiters in communal restaurants accepting tips. There is a strong
propaganda to the effect that to give or to receive tips is disgusting: tip in a public
way, and a not unknown thing for a tip to be refused!
'Now all this may prove Utopian, or destructive of true welfare, though, perhaps, not
so Utopian, pursued in an intense religious spirit, as it would be if it were pursued in
a matter-of-fact way. But is it appropriate to assume, as almost the whole of the
English and American press do assume, and the public also, that it is insincere or that
DeLong’s Questions:
John Maynard Keynes in 1925 wrote of the post-War Communism
Soviet Union of the NEPmen: “The private trader is a sort of
permitted outlaw, without privileges or protection, like the Jew in
the Middle Ages—an outlet for those who have overwhelming
instincts in this direction, but not a natural or agreeable job for the
normal man…”
How different was Maoist China’s attitude in those districts w
h
ere
the government was relatively tolerant
of China’s wannabee
NEPmen
?
As I understand how the centrally-planned economies worked, they
controlled a few hundred key commodities and their flows through
material balances under imposed semi-military discipline. But that
was only a small part of the economy. The rest of it? The center
made that factory managers’ an commune directors problem. Hence
they had to beg, borrow, buy, barter, blatt, and steal all resources
other than those that were tracked by material balances and that
they could command by fi at and pointing to the plan.
Highly ineffi cient, highly corrupt…
But exchange, beggary, barter, blat, and plan—understood as a
desire to accomplish the organization’s primary goals—in a mixture
is not that different from the internal workings of a capitalist
corporation in a market economy. How different is what the NEPmen
in the USSR in the 1920s and the profi teers in the 1970s in China
were doing different from what people were doing who were simply
trying to fulfi ll their places in the plan?
