Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…I think that is likely. I think that the case for Chinese expansionism is more limited. I don’t think that they will be extremely expansionist. Then the question for the experts is, to what extent should the US defend a country like Singapore and Malaysia from Chinese influence rather than American influence? If I think about the spectacular record of Chinese economic growth, and this is not only in the nation of China, but around the world, my unconfirmed hypothesis is that a lot of it is due to the fact that Chinese ex ante, before they were rich, already had high IQs, whether that’s this tradition of education, the exam system, earlier urbanization in mainland China, whatever. The Chinese started off quite smart relative to their per capita income. When other better developments came, they could just keep on growing without obstacles in a way that, say, India has not managed to do. Agree or disagree? Maybe. I will say that Chinese, to me, seem extremely responsive to incentives. You put an incentive in front of them, and they will maximize everything out of it. Chinese, to me, are a super pragmatic people. It’s funny, I was working with the health care system. My wife and I were navigating some of the health care system at the University of Michigan. By the time that we spoke to a nurse with a, obviously, Chinese accent, we could tell that she was Chinese. Then it was clear that she was the truth-teller among all of the nurses in the system that was able to help us navigate, “Oh, this process is good. That other process is not so good. Maybe you should consider doing things with this doctor.” I feel like what I enjoy about a lot of Chinese is that they’re totally pragmatic that if you throw up an obstacle in their way, they will simply, rather than be aggrieved about the obstacle, they will think about, “Okay, how do I navigate around this obstacle?” Some of the Chinese I know have not even been all that upset with President Trump’s jerking around at the visa statuses around H1-B. They simply understand, “Oh, the rules have changed, and now I need to pivot.” This is also something that I think speaks to some of these Chinese attitudes where Xi Jinping and the rest of the Communist Party is able to generate a lot of economic growth simply because it has been pretty easy to be a Chinese official in the last 20 years, mostly before Xi’s era, in which the bureaucratic incentives were simply to maximize GDP growth and minimize the mass incidents, which is the Chinese euphemism for protests. You got a lot of GDP growth because that was what the bureaucratic incentives were. Even right now, there are plenty of people who realize that Xi is blocking their path to wealth, but they are able to repivot and are simply able to be pragmatic about doing all sorts of things. I would say that education is certainly part of it. China has valued education for a very long time. I would simply add the variable that they are very incentive-sensitive and are able to pivot and do things that make sense to themselves.…

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