🚨New WP Alert🚨

@JenKuanWang and I analyze Taiwan's 1950s land reform, long seen as central to its economic takeoff—and to the East Asian Miracle.

By digitizing archival data, we bring new causal evidence to the table. What we find is surprising!

oliverwkim.com/papers/KimWang…
After the 1950s reform, rice yields in 🇹🇼 rose by 40%. The longstanding view—seen in Joe Studwell's excellent How Asia Works—is that land reform boosted productivity, launching 🇹🇼's extraordinary takeoff.

We test this theory by digitizing township-level data for the first time.

Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 109 today.

Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.

🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work. Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1915 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets.

🧵: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences.

More, and a link to my new newsletter post below: In 1967, 🇺🇸 was mired in the Vietnam War. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime was doing little for its people: in 1966, 42% of farmers were landless peasants.

To help the war effort, 🇺🇸 policymakers considered land reform—redistributing land from landlords to peasants.

🚀JMP alert🚀

My paper w @FergJoel applies machine learning to 1970s-80s satellite imagery to revisit one of the 🇨🇳 Chinese Miracle's first major reforms, the Household Responsibility System—the end of collective socialist agriculture.

What we found was quite surprising. 🧵 Starting in Anhui Province in 1978, the Household Responsibility System (often incorrectly attributed to Deng Xiaoping) broke up Mao's collective farms and brought back household farming—loosely, the end of communism in rural China.

The common view is that it boosted yields.

THREAD: On the role of bad social science in the Vietnam War—and how not understanding local conditions, and thinking through endogeneity (yes, endogeneity) can lead to policy conclusions with tragic, deadly consequences. In 1967, 🇺🇸 was mired in the Vietnam War. The corrupt South Vietnamese regime was doing little for its people: in 1966, 42% of farmers were landless peasants.

To help the war effort, 🇺🇸 policymakers considered land reform—redistributing land from landlords to peasants. 2/

Happy birthday to Albert Hirschman, who would be 106 today.

Hirschman—anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession.

🧵 and blog post on his remarkable life and work. 1/

oliverwkim.com/Hirschman-Stra… Hirschman was born in Berlin in 1916 to a Jewish family. He was just a teenager when he became involved as an activist in the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which was confronting Hitler’s rising Nazi Party in the streets.

2/

A thoughtful piece on "the End of Development" -- the rising threat of premature deindustrialization in poor countries, closing the path of manufacturing-led growth that East Asia took to escape poverty in the 20th century.

A few of my thoughts: 1/N

dissentmagazine.org/article/the-en… I agree with almost all the obstacles to manufacturing growth raised in the piece.

But in my view, it remains better for gov’ts to try with all the tools at their disposal — industrial policy, export incentives, capital controls— than not at all.

2/N