Years of Poems and Spirits

Recently have heard couple of people implying current Chinese leadership don’t know how the country was run prior to 1949. R. Bin Wong and couple of professors mentioned that during a talk and just read similiar sentiment in Perry and Goldman’s Grassroots Political Reform … book.

Does that mean there is lack of serious study on past state-society relationship? Even lack of knowledge of governance style/tradition? It is hard to believe but somehow I felt there is more to it …

Just a reminder.

Hypothesis:

1. If, in the long run, an economy features a liquid financial market, it is likely the economy is efficient.
(Liquidity: index of expected profitability by market participants; Efficiency: rate of utilization of resources and factors)
2. This is so because in general people tend to trust other participants (even at arms length) so there is not lack of credit. Or trust and credit is a necessary condition of an efficient economy.
3. How to prove? The expressway test: sampling all cars’s speed readings on an expressway, the higher the standard deviation (higher variation of speed), the slower the average speed. People don’t know what to expect from other drivers, so drive defensively and cautiously.

Extension:
If the above were true, can the same be said about state and society?
But what is the equivalent of liquidity? Or what is the best index to measure the expected return on participating and submitting by polity participants? Level of participantion?
And what is the best index to measure political harmony? An Utilitarian statement of number of policies that benefit most people?

Reason is the same: trust=participation and participation leads to best outcome. Not quite sure.

What triggered:
In developing countries, many people are skeptical of their governments or people from other domains/communities. This leads to incredibly inefficient political life.

Pakistan said Bhutto was assassinated by al Qaida but speculations abound and no one is happy with the government’s explanation. How is national reconciliation or progress possible?

China’s paper-in-bans newstory: which one is true, who to believe? How can the problem be fixed?

Lippman (via S Huntington) said that the developing countries problem is, “they need to be governed”. Can we say “they need to learn to trust?”

Also links Putnam’s social capital and Foucault’s disciplinary effect: higher social capital=higher self-discipline or submission.

NYT used the title “The Show of Emotion Heard ’Round the Presidential Campaign World” to describe Hillary’s near-breakdown a couple of days ago. Now that Hillary just won N.H., even her campaign manager acknowledges that a little “humanization” helped a lot.

Thoughts:
1. The reason many people don’t like Hillary is because she made herself non-connectable. People are not able to look at her and say, I know how she feels. For anyone who has suffered as much public humiliation and attacks as she has should feel angry and insecure. But not Hillary. All we are looking for is a little “princess-ness” in her, but she just singlemindedly worked herself up as the widowed-career-woman-turned-mother-in-law of America.

2. For the above-stated reason, I hope Hillary fails. Because she may win but she may never have a mandate. If people cannot connect to her, they won’t lend her goodwill or benefit of doubts. That just leaves door to endless partisan gridlock: what if the Republicans in the Congress don’t hand her any victory in her first 100 days–without knowing any details, who would most people likely to blame? But what if it is someone who is more personally appealing?

3. Doesn’t this argument work in a boarder context, say state and society? Can we say that if people get what they expected, they are more likely to obey the rules? That goes back to one of the first questions Migdal asked in our class, “why people are waiting at traffic light in the middle of the night?” Doesn’t expectation come from “connection”? I know it is a little fuzzy here … need to work on the logic more … heyhey

4. What does Obama’s “Change” mean? I suspect it is a masquerade for the resentment toward the war and the Bush administration. Is it likely that many of those who voted for Obama (the young and the first-timers) also agitated against the war? And they realized that the anger cannot cash out in Congress so they took it out on Hillary (aka the establishment)? I certainly hope so.