Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
13 transcript-backed records
01 / commitment
“I will say that all these factors combined together restricted what could have been an earlier literacy revolution that failed to occur in China.”
02 / uncertainty
“I don’t know the number, but if you go to the economic historians’ work on Qing Dynasty [1644–1911] — their rough estimate is that China had a much smaller state in terms of the physical capacity as compared with Europe during that comparable period of time.”
03 / commitment
“I am collaborating with a number of professors — and some of them are based in China — on a book project looking at the history of Chinese technology, using the dataset that I already used for this forthcoming book. But we are going to devote the entire book to this topic.”
04 / belief
“Therefore, they can relate with each other much, much more than in the previous situation, when you think about your own treatment mostly as an isolated, individual situation rather than something that you can generalize. That, I believe, is the main reason why you see this level of demonstrations and protests.”
05 / evaluation
“It undermines the credibility of the policy management of the government. I think that the bigger worry is foreign capital, ahead of foreign migrants.”
06 / prediction
“I have the prediction that Xi’an is going to give, and I think the economic side is going to win rather than the political side.”
07 / evaluation
“It is an overwhelmingly investment-driven economy. I think that’s one of the biggest misunderstandings of Chinese economy.”
08 / recommendation
“I would argue that you go to Xi’an first to understand their political mentality, and then you go to Shenzhen.”
09 / evaluation
“Part of it is the socialization of the norm, because of the one-child policy that they instituted in the late 1970s, and they only lifted that policy in 2015.”
10 / evaluation
“The reason for that is, I think — although it’s a little bit difficult to generalize because we don’t really have many data points — one reason is the charisma power of individual leaders, Mao and Xiaoping.”
11 / evaluation
“The nature of the Chinese economy and Japanese economy is very land intensive, so the urban costs of living are very high because of the very high housing costs.”
12 / evaluation
“The bigger issue, I believe, is the fact that the household income share of the GDP is very low.”
13 / evaluation
“I think there’s some recent research that challenges that view, using better data, more fine-grained data that shows that per capita GDP by the 17th century in China was much lower than per capita GDP in Europe, even among the most developed regions of China.”