Wednesday 29 September 2021

Niall Ferguson does not think China will overtake America in the next twenty years

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When I was in Peking I bought and read Niall Ferguson's interesting 2011 book, Civilisation: The West and the Rest and had dinner with the historian James Palmer, who lives in the city. 

He told me that everything that Niall Ferguson said in the book about China (a lot) was wrong.

I realise now that James Palmer is ardently anti-colonial and left-wing and so disposed not to like a historian who has achieved my childhood ambition and presented imperialism in a fair light. Also, like me, Niall Ferguson loves AJP Taylor.

Still, I assume Mr Palmer knew what he was talking about. 

There is something slightly too feather-footed about Niall Ferguson, a conservative who apologised for saying that there might be a link between Keynes' homosexuality and his economic theories (a remark I remember someone making in the Spectator fifteen or twenty years earlier) and who, unlike Andrew Roberts, opposed Brexit before coming round to it after the referendum. 

Dr Fergusson also opposed Donald Trump. Perhaps it would have ruined his career had he not. 

This is from Dr Fergusson's latest and very inconclusive thoughts on China. He is honest in hedging his bets. Nobody, least of all historians, know the future. 

A major mistake of the Cold War was the tendency of Western observers to overestimate the Soviet Union. I have often wondered if the same mistake is being repeated with the People’s Republic of China. Then again, for every article over the last 10 years that predicted China’s economy would overtake that of the U.S., there were at least two prophesying a “China crisis.”

.....Let’s begin by recalling how many experts believed the Soviets would overtake America. In successive editions, the economist Paul Samuelson’s hugely influential economics textbook carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the U.S. at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the time frame had been moved forward to 2002-2012. The graph was quietly dropped after that.

Samuelson was by no means the only American scholar to make this mistake. A late as 1984, Harvard’s liberal guru John Kenneth Galbraith could still insist that “the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”

It is good to be reminded how wrong the experts were about Bolshevik Russia, including the drily funny J.K. Galbraith, whom I respected in my teens and twenties very much more than I do now. He had a sense of humour, something not nearly so common on the left of centre as on the right. 

As you get older, you see who are political ideologues and he was one.

I remember how shocked I was when in 1981 I read him saying that if he were British he would certainly certainly vote Labour. 

I read his account of his visit to the USSR and remember him expecting Brezhnev's Russia to deliver the goods yet he appeared on the BBC and his books sold well in Penguin. Galbraith would have been an ardent admirer of Joe Biden now. Yet he is still considered very clever and Donald Trump a fool.

36 comments:

  1. You're making a lot of homophobic posts and comments these days. How ugly...typical hater catholic.

    As for Niall Ferguson...I never understood why historians like to think of themselves as political and economic experts. They're 'merely' experts on researching and recording the past. Nor is it really possible to predict how things will develop in the long term not least because 'history' never repeats itself exactly.

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    1. I missed out the important words re Keybes by mistake. "There is something slightly too feather-footed about Niall Ferguson, a conservative who apologised for saying that there might be a link between Keynes' homosexuality (a remark someone had made in the Spectator fifteen or twenty years earlier) and his economic theories and who, unlike Andrew Roberts, opposed Brexit before coming round to it after the referendum." There is nothing homophobic about NF's saying Keynes's childlessness influenced his theories. I don't buy it myself. Good Catholics don't hate people but want everyone to be saved.

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    2. I agree with you 2nd para. "Historians, even the finest, rarely have any insight into the politics of their own time. We see this with Tony Judt, Norman Davies and a hundred others who trot out Guardian-reader platitudes. We see it too with historians on the right, like Andrew Roberts admiring George W. Bush. This is true of AJP Taylor too, with his fear of German unification and his campaigning for unilateral nuclear disarmament." http://pvewood.blogspot.com/2013/04/

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    3. Since I wrote that my old supervisor Robert Tombs has proven to be a good political analyst.

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    4. What other remarks of mine do you consider infra dig?

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    5. What's worse: to be called a 'catholic hater' or 'typical'?

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    6. His remark sounds a bit prejudiced against the Church. Someone said the only genuinely religious emotion the English ever experience is hatred of Catholicism. It might apply to other races too.

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    7. Infra dig? I presume you mean homophobic? Well, your post bemoaning the US embassy in Afghanistan flying the gay flag. It put you off so much than in the next post you even started praising the Pashtuns and finding good things about.

      Toma: you haven't actually made a counterargument.

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    8. And very much to object to in current American political fashions which they seek to impose around the world. Muslims and Christians have more in common than they have with atheist social liberals and I hoped thirty years ago that they would be allies.

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    9. Don,

      'You're making a lot of homophobic posts' is a flat out lie.
      To call Paul a 'typical hater catholic' is an insult.

      You berate our host here, bitch, and you want me to make small talk with you?..

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    10. The Catholic Catechism in use in England in the 1980s said the sin of Sodom is one of the four sins crying out to heaven for vengeance. He might think that typical Catholic hatred but it is the reverse of hatred.

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    11. I didn't bemoan the rainbow flag.

      No-one bemoans the Rainbow Flag. No-one would dare to do so. The only safe response when you see a Rainbow Flag is to bow down and worship it.

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    12. Gerald Warner said something about organising 21 gun salutes for homosexuals, but that is in the UK. In Romania people are very religious - it's the most religious country in Europe - and are conscious of sin and also that we are all sinners. Edward Norman said 40 years ago that modern man does not consider himself a sinner but Romanians were not modern then nor are they really now - and they know about original sin.

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  2. China is not the Soviet Union.

    Both the IMF and the World Bank now rate China as the world’s largest economy based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), a measure that adjusts countries’ GDPs for differences in prices. In simple terms, this means that because your money stretches further in China than it would in the US, China’s GDP is adjusted upwards.

    And it won’t be too long before China’s economy surpasses the US’s by other measures, too. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) predicts it will happen in 2029.

    https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/the-world-s-top-economy-the-us-vs-china-in-five-charts/

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    1. Fergusson in the article to which I link disagrees.

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    2. Fergusson is a waste of time.

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    3. Why China Evergrande Group Stock Soared 40% Today

      Rich Smith

      SEP 29, 2021 1:58PM EDT

      https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/why-china-evergrande-group-stock-soared-40-today-2021-09-29

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    4. China is not the Soviet Union.

      But there are a lot of right-wingers engaged in desperate exercises in wishful thinking who need to believe that China will fail the way the Soviet Union failed.

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    5. Right and left are not relevant to this except perhaps in Australia. I don't think the last cold war was necessary and don't want a repeat but like Covid lockdowns the cold war created a precedent that people expect to be followed.

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    6. @dfordoom

      Even under Mao this Communist Party was not quite orthodox: in place of the Soviets’ tepid internationalism, the Chinese communists are, and always have been, unrepentant nationalists. The Trotskys and Bukharins of the Russian Revolution saw the ‘blind forces’ of capitalist exchange as the greatest threat to the liberty, dignity, and development of mankind; for Asian revolutionaries, imperialism was the greater threat, and that threat was far less ‘blind.’ I suspect it was this nationalist kernel at the core of Chinese communism that allowed Beijing to introduce reforms in the 1980s fatal to communist parties across the internationalist Warsaw bloc.

      https://scholars-stage.org/xi-jinpings-war-on-spontaneous-order/

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    7. Can you provide any examples of a right winger claiming China is weak and will suffer the fate of the Soviet Union in the near future? I certainly haven't heard anyone hold such a stance, on the right, left, or middle. Quite the opposite, the right seems to be more alarmist regarding China's ascendancy than the left (in some cases).

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    8. Toma: you have huge issues.

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    9. Toma thank you - very much to the point - and I agree, for what my view is worth. How do you find time to read so deeply and widely?

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    10. I think he's saying you're mad. I have no idea why.

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    11. Don,

      You have a yuge rainbow flag pole up your ass.

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    12. I really should delete that, Toma. I shall let it go this time but please be nice from now on. I feel I stirred you up.

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    13. Well said. Nor can I. That is one of the main reasons I can't stand the left. (I don't mean I can't stand left-wing people. They are often lovely. I hate the sin and try to love the sinner.)

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    14. Even as its best the essence of the left is bullying people into doing things against their will, and while using emotional blackmail at the same time, which is not far removed from bullying.

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    15. Interesting figures from the World Economic Forum, which I see is the body that runs the Davos conference.

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    16. Even as its best the essence of the left is bullying people into doing things against their will

      To be brutally honest politics in a democracy is all about bullying people into doing things against their will. That's the essence of democracy. The most powerful group imposes its will on everyone else.

      It's not even the tyranny of the majority since in countries like Britain a government can be elected with 36% of the vote and then effectively that 36% of the electorate has the right to impose its will on the other 64%. In practice it's the tyranny of the best organised most highly motivated minority.

      It has nothing to do with left or right. The Economic Right (which is in reality neo-fascist) has been ruthlessly efficient in crushing dissent on economic issues. The Cultural Left (which is neither left nor liberal but is also best described as neo-fascist) is equally ruth in crushing dissent on social/cultural issues.

      But the tyranny is inherent in democracy. You can have freedom or you can have democracy. You cannot have both.

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  3. From: Paul Marks:

    The best historian of modern China that I know of is Frank Dikotter. He has spent his life studying a subject I find baffling. With Soviet, and modern Russian, propaganda there is (at least to me) a bit-of-a-wink, a sort of "I am lying, you know I am lying, and I know that you know that I am lying - but this is a game we play". But representatives of the People's Republic of Chian deliver the most absurd lies with total conviction. If ordered to do so, all representatives of China (from high to low) would declare that Kettering, Northamptonshire was-and-had-always-been part of China - and they might even pass a lie detector test on the matter. Morally this is terrible - but it is an incredible skill.

    Soviet and modern Russian propaganda also mixes lies with the truth - in a complex web. Whereas PRC propaganda can be just straight lying ("lies out of whole cloth" - no mixing with truth at all), but delivered with total conviction.

    By the way, I hold no candle for the modern West - the West I supported is dead (I am certainly not claiming it was perfect - but I was loyal to it). So, I can look on modern conflicts with some objectivity. Although, perhaps because I am one of Tolkien's Dwarves, I am filled with rage, not just despair.

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