You can plausibly write this off as some incoherent pseudo-communist drivel but it is a position I've seen aped by very smart progressive people, who also talk about how it would be great if deflation, overcapacity and depressed profit margins persist because that's good for everyone because 'cheap stuff!' and that any dissent is just a sign of resentment and hypocrisy and that if you can't compete it's on you, without realising how this is a a deeply parochial Western viewpoint, but above all a view of the global economy that is zero-sum to the point of nihilism and that profoundly anti-progressive.
It also happens to be inconsistent with what Chinese officials themselves think, given what they are trying to do.
All of this is part third worldist kitsch and part the kind of motivated reasoning that comes with negative partisanship effects (one is giving ammunition to the hawks and the imperialists and the racists etc).
And I will insist that Piketty et al.'s critics are trying to fight on the wrong ground. We shouldn't be trying to estimate the top 1% share at all. The Gini coefficient is still the more important metric.
I have looked at this and there seem to be no good answers to a lot of the questions asked by Piketty et al.'s critiques. It's not really possible to solve many of the methodological issues, so both sides end up justifying their choices based on vibes.
Perhaps my Israeli followers can help me out here: why does it feel like studying at TAU / HUJ is basically a free ticket into an elite PhD program? It genuinely feels like any Israeli who wants to go to ivies can just do it after studying at these schools
The two best statistics in the WSJ’s genuinely great article on North Korea’s economic boom:
Pyongyang built more housing last year than LA. (Says something about CA housing dysfunction).
North Korea assembled more cellphones than the USA.
(Assuming the #s are true!)
High modernism was good actually and “the state having a plan” is the foundation of industrial society, that doesn’t change no matter how much you cherry pick. Someone should write an updated, withering review entitled “Reading James Scott in Beijing” or sth.