This week on Sinica, I'm delighted to be joined by Dan Wang, formerly of Gavekal Dragonomics and the Paul Tsai Law Center at Yale University, now with the Hoover Institute's History Lab.
This was a very insightful and thought-provoking session. I'm an American lawyer that has taught innovation for many years in a Korean engineering & technology management program (at Seoul National University), while also working in legal risk management & trade compliance for Korean conglomerates (with operations in China as well as the US), and this topic is very interesting to me. I ordered the book within the first five minutes of listening to this interview, and I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you for this fascinating discussion. Spot-on timing, too!
Excellent discussion, as usual. But I don't understand the settled view that the One Child Policy was a failure. Leaving aside the personal pain it caused along the way, as a social engineering project, why is it considered unsuccessful? Authorities have said it prevented 400 million births and that's a lot of environmental impact and mouths to feed avoided. It coincided with enormous economic growth, China having a current fertility rate similar to Japan or S. Korea is not attributable simply to that policy. And the earth could still benefit from a several billion fewer people. Reproduction rates will eventually balance out (in maybe a few decades) but meanwhile China and other forward thinking countries can automate their way to higher standards of living.
I think there's definitely an environmentalist case to be made in favor of the One Child Policy. I argued the points you made above for several years, but even those I hold in high esteem who were inclined toward this view told me that they believed rigid enforcement of it should have ended 15 years earlier than it did. Good question, though: I'll raise it with some economists I know.
This was a very insightful and thought-provoking session. I'm an American lawyer that has taught innovation for many years in a Korean engineering & technology management program (at Seoul National University), while also working in legal risk management & trade compliance for Korean conglomerates (with operations in China as well as the US), and this topic is very interesting to me. I ordered the book within the first five minutes of listening to this interview, and I'm looking forward to reading it. Thank you for this fascinating discussion. Spot-on timing, too!
Excellent discussion, as usual. But I don't understand the settled view that the One Child Policy was a failure. Leaving aside the personal pain it caused along the way, as a social engineering project, why is it considered unsuccessful? Authorities have said it prevented 400 million births and that's a lot of environmental impact and mouths to feed avoided. It coincided with enormous economic growth, China having a current fertility rate similar to Japan or S. Korea is not attributable simply to that policy. And the earth could still benefit from a several billion fewer people. Reproduction rates will eventually balance out (in maybe a few decades) but meanwhile China and other forward thinking countries can automate their way to higher standards of living.
I think there's definitely an environmentalist case to be made in favor of the One Child Policy. I argued the points you made above for several years, but even those I hold in high esteem who were inclined toward this view told me that they believed rigid enforcement of it should have ended 15 years earlier than it did. Good question, though: I'll raise it with some economists I know.