Thread by @BaldingsWorld

I would disagree with the stay out of policy but the rest is totally true. They're are a couple things that are stunningly clear. Especially in China, the "data" academics and tankies dealing with is so old and top level as to be worthless stale and moldy. Any academic 1/n

https://twitter.com/leemakiyama/status/1451906480660168706

Paper on China is probably five years out of date from release. The data quality academics and tankies use is really really poor. It is policy papers, official data, and top line data. This effectively makes "censorship" part of the data set. Academics and tankies are 2/n

Censoring on behalf of their funders or they are relying on effectively censored data to conduct studies. The sad part is they either don't understand this or they don't care. If you want to understand China watch ONLY how people behave. Words are very very poor signals 3/n

Professors and tankies also have awful understanding of what is actually possible or the secondary problems which creates resistance. Take property tax in China which I did a long thread on earlier. Ask the Galaxy Brains have been pointing out a property tax is better 4/n

Which as I said was true but we're entirely puzzled why it wasn't done and never considered the second order risks which of course every policy maker and home owner in China understands but it's totally lost in book readers who only visit the Four Seasons Beijing 5/n

Consequently when they attempt to make proposals about how to solve a problem their "solutions" are generally tossed in the circular file as completely unworkable for a reason obvious to anyone actually working on the problem or in the field. Professors and tankies have 6/n

Close to zero understanding of how things actually get done and what policy will work out get done. If you'll notice, 99 times out of a hundred they will make Hare Krishna sounding recommendations like "cooperate more" which is totally worthless. Try pinning them down 7/n

In SPECIFIC TANGIBLE recommendations and they'll either stumble over their words or have no answer. They don't understand what tools the government has as its disposal or whether it is an executive or legislative issue. So yes, I sympathize a lot with the guys professors thoughts