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Yuen Yuen Ang Profile picture
Yuen Yuen Ang
@yuenyuenang
Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy @JohnsHopkins
6 subscribers
Nov 4 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
We should thank AJR & 2024 Nobel committee for sparking debates. They haven't solved the material inequality puzzle, but few have done more to raise awareness about *ideational* inequality & decolonizing. If you're reading AJR, pair it with a rich list in this 🧵 Image "The Nobel committee is supporting NIE’s legitimisation of property/wealth inequality and unequal development. Rewarding AJR also seeks to re-legitimise the neoliberal project at a time when it is being rejected more widely than ever before." ~ Jomo Kwame Sundaram (co-editor of "Is Good Governance Good for Development?", a thought-provoking book)

🖇️ networkideas.org/news-analysis/…Image
Oct 28 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Two 📚 on indigenous knowledge & institutions you should read in contrast with AJR "Why Nations Fail."

Conventional notions of "good ins" are all premised on modern societies, defined by an industrial-colonial logic that scorns indigenous as "backward."

Push back. Ask where ideas come from. 🧐Image
Image A reminder from “Braiding Sweetgrass”

Private property rights is the Holy Grail of conventional political economy

Where did they come from? After white settlers force natives off their communal land and made them accept “private property” (infertile land that kept them poor) Image
Oct 26 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
AJR's Nobel helps spark 🎇 conversations about development thinking. There is a big gap in our knowledge of ADAPTIVE political economy: how societies learn, adapt & use what they have. This involves decolonizing: giving agency back to the Global Majority 🌐

Refreshing & thanking @TheEconomist for including my work in this list of 5⃣ 📚

economist.com/the-economist-…Image
Image
Image Much of world assumes anything about China is exceptional & exotic, while anything about the West is universal

Thus in "Adaptive Political Economy" (open access at @World_Pol) I took China out of the cover and rearticulated the same ideas on adaptive & experimental development in my book

muse.jhu.edu/article/927487…Image
Image
Oct 21 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
How did the West rise?

1) Economic & political freedoms (AJR) 🌟
2) Colonial-imperial extraction
3) State capacity, industrial policy, trade protectionism
4) Access money among elites while curbing predation

Only 1 wins Nobel & the rest do not. Learn about them all. Image
Image
Image
Image The term "rise" must be qualified

Both the rise of the West & China are Gilded, not Golden; their growth comes with costs

But mainstream economists do not qualify "rise"

Oct 15 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Convention:
"European form of good institutions" is the "root cause" of growth

In fact:
Market-building ≠ market-sustaining

Further:
Market-building institutions look wrong if you insist on "European form" as normative standard 📏

. muse.jhu.edu/article/927487…Image Convention 👑
Replicate "European form of good institutions"

In fact 🌄
All countries must start with what you have - indigenous innovation

Blinder 🕶️
Believing in one standard of good institutions (idealized liberal form) will blind you from seeing that potential Image
Oct 14 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Refreshing my critique of A&R's take on China 🇨🇳

While emphasizing this ➡️ AJR isn't just wrong about Chinese development, they don't account for fraught Western experiences either. Image A&R do not define "inclusive" or "non-extractive" institutions

Liked countries: inclusive & non-extractive

China: non-inclusive & extractive

False puzzle: If China doesn't have the right (idealized Western) institutions, why did it prosper? Image
Oct 14 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Please know this: "Chinese exceptionalism" is a myth created to distract you from seeing partial myths in stock narratives about Western development

AJR isn't just wrong about Chinese development, they don't account for fraught Western experiences either. The logic goes like this ➡️

Norm based on Western experience: non-extractive (non-corrupt) institutions is answer

China: Not a democracy, therefore must be extractive

In fact: China and US were both Gilded Ages, both were dominated by a particular type of corruption Image
Oct 14 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Congrats to AJR! 🌟 They are brilliant.

But I don't agree with their idealized portrayal of institutions in Western development

It is historically inaccurate, if not ideologized

Thus, not only do they struggle to explain China, they also can't explain why Western economies like the US prospered despite being as corrupt as China is today When America was a developing country, did it prosper - primarily or only - because colonists imported "the European form of good institutions"? Image
Sep 4 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
China's 🇨🇳 Economic Paradox: Tech Boom, Growth Slump 🤖 + 📉

Extreme takes - either China is taking over the world or collapsing - amplify one side of its paradoxical trajectory. "Peak China" meme fails to capture that.

Highlights below 👇

project-syndicate.org/commentary/xi-… These contradictory takes amplify only one side of China’s economic trajectory: tech boom + growth slump

🤖 ➕ 📉 Image
Jun 30 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Today, free market economies are taken for granted as the norm. Polanyi argues they are unprecedented and new in human history, appearing only in 19th century. Profit motive is not “natural” to humans… Image Instead, premodern societies were more “communistic” than capitalist
(What good is private gain if you were ostracized by a closed group?)
Organizing principle was not gain
But reciprocity + redistribution + household subsistence
May 10 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The consensus is that Western economies achieved prosperity by eliminating corruption.

Why, then, did the Chinese 🇨🇳 economy grow rapidly despite corruption? And why is it only now slowing down, after four decades of a sustained boom? 💥

@ProSyn

project-syndicate.org/onpoint/china-… Answering these questions requires reframing the debate – in particular, reexamining popular narratives of Western history...

In fact, looking a little further back in time reveals that China is not so unique.
Apr 7 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Attitudes have become so extreme that anyone who even *attempts* to tackle hard, important questions are scorned as unscientific, while scorners dedicate their lives to precisely proving points everyone already knows. Anything less than definite & airtight is not publishable… Image So naturally incentives gear toward trivial questions that can be (a) precisely & perfectly answered, (b) accepts conventional wisdom and wins approval.
Feb 17 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
A preview of my talk at IMF in 5⃣ slides

(Spoiler: China is only as exceptional as the West) Image Image
Feb 8 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
As construction projects came to a screeching halt, a downward spiral of falling land prices & more defaults followed. The depression lasted 4 years, local governments fell into deep financial holes.

Describing China 🇨🇳 today? Peak China?

No, America 🇺🇸 in the Panic of 1837
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Image Classical economists: America's development began with "the European form of good institutions"

Really?

Nope 🙅‍♂️ Image
Jan 30 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Jack Katzenstein's review of CHINA'S GILDED AGE is so articulate and accurate that it helps me understand my own book better. Seriously. 😇 Image Image
Dec 2, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
This week, sharing 7⃣ ideas 💡-

4⃣: Institutions that build markets ≠ good/strong institutions needed to preserve markets

Think start-up vs. Fortune 500 company

What's right ✅ for one isn't right ❎ for the other Image Contrary to conventional wisdom, the good/strong institutional forms found in rich democracies are NOT universal preconditions for development

So, why have we believed that?

Because victors 👑 not only write history; they write political economy Image
Nov 27, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
This week, sharing 7⃣ ideas 💡-

1⃣: We cannot study complex social systems using concepts and tools designed for complicated objects

We conflate "complicated" & "complex," but in fact they describe two completely different worlds.

Complicated = toaster 📠

Complex = tree 🌴
Image
Image Complicated objects are made up of many separate parts that do not interact and change with one another (e.g., toasters).

Complex systems interacts, evolves; produce unpredictable outcomes while displaying distinct patterns of organization and change, (e.g., trees, societies).
Nov 17, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
America 🇺🇸 is now also experiencing a partial repeat of the 19th-century 🪙 Gilded Age, except the former titans of capitalism in steel and railroads have been replaced by behemoths in high finance and technology.

noemamag.com/the-clash-of-t…
Both the U.S. and China confront sharp inequality, corruption or capture of state power by economic elites, and persistent financial risks to common people who have no way to indemnify themselves.

noemamag.com/the-clash-of-t…
Image
Apr 14, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"Endogeneity" is a big, ugly social science jargon

Here's a simpler way to understand it ♻️ Image Endogeneity (mutual causation), like ambiguity 👇, is a fact of life

As social scientists, we should not aim to "treat endogeneity" and eliminate it like it's a dreadful disease

We should study and explain it. That's all.

Apr 14, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Extremely useful resource following dominant linear logic ▶️ in political economy: state capacity is either cause (independent variable) or outcome (dependent variable)

But what if it's BOTH cause and outcome? ▶️◀️

It wouldn't fit in a linear, 2D template Image A template, like any infrastructure, is a powerful thing, constraining what you look for

The binary - cause (IV) and outcome (DV) - forces social scientists to look for linear stories

This runs into limits with outcomes like
DEVELOPMENT
That are inherently bi-causal ▶️◀️ Image
Apr 3, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Bk rec 🧵To understand China's modernization 🏙️🏭& China-Taiwan's fraught relationship, essential to read about Sun Yat-Sen's revolutionary mission.

No coincidence that former TW president Ma Ying-Jeou began tour of China with a visit to the mausoleum where Sun is entombed. Sun's defining thesis, "The International Development of China" (1919), reads like a boring blueprint of what China has been doing since the 1980s. But in those days, Sun was seen as a utopian, even a crackpot, for his vision of modernizing China's infrastructure. 🚆