Notes

Albums

next week, the blog shall return to its regularly scheduled technical programming

Items Lost

  • Copper brooch with tardigrade & tesseract engravings. Gifted to me by an eco-technologist acting as an avant-garde musician at an Edge Esmeralda closing event. 500 extant copies: if you own one, I would love to meet you.
  • Studies in Hegelian Cosmology by J. M. E. McTaggart. 1903 edition, greenbacked & hardcover & originally archived at Trinity College, Cambridge. "On loan" from the Rhodes Library; saddened by the likely indefinite postponement of return.
  • U.S. Passport. Visas to Turkiye, India. Entry and exit stamps from U.K., Czechia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan, India, Turkiye, Poland, Finland, Ireland, Georgia, Ukraine.
  • Turkish Antarctic expedition pin, with decorated wooden bird. 17th birthday present from a dear friend of mine.
  • Framework laptop, 13". Ran NixOS. Was approaching a faithful representation of my own brain; I lost an extension of myself.
  • Black Leuchtterm notebook. Maths & rambles & private keys.
  • Silver necklace with misshapen star. Acquired in a jewelry store in the Mission, originally intended for my partner. Ultimately not for me.
  • Clothes: checkered flannel shirt, also acquired in the Mission. Partner's beanie. Foresight hoodie, MATS jacket. Beloved boots.
  • Bike. Estimated ~$15k new, a kind mechanic gave it to me for free. Was the way I got to school for a while; suspension perfect for mountain biking. Stolen in Healdsburg.
  • Letters. From S to me, written and drawn in Prague on self-Narrativism; from me to S, written in Taiwan as poetry; from R to me, written in print English in the Queen's College; from G to me, first on a pink sticky-note and next on a four-inch thumbpad; so, so many between L and I. ESPR/WARP/Atlas/ASPR/Rise notes.
  • My phone, twice: firstly in Warsaw airport, and secondly in a San Francisco Airbnb. The second was a replacement for the first, however, and I found the first when I went through Warsaw again. Ended up back where I started.
  • My glasses.

Review | Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

Notable:

  • TVEs (township and village enterprises), while often nominally state-owned, were de facto private enterprises, and as such outcompeted SOEs (state-owned enterprises). Rural TVEs were often non-agricultural, typically in the industries of commerce and manufacturing, and survived in large part because of policies allowing for the resurgence of RCCs (rural credit cooperatives) as private lending institutions.
  • In 1985, RCCs accounted for 76.8 percent of all agricultural loans and 47.8 percent of all loans extended to TVEs. Post Tiananmen Square, RCCs were restricted to solely providing credit for agricultural purposes, curtailing entrepreneurship for the manifest reason that *most entrepreneurs started their business to get out of agriculture.
  • TVEs (in English) refer to xiangzhen qiye (rural and township enterprise) rather than xiangcun qiye (township and village enterprise). TVEs refer to the entire xiangzhen qiye phenomenon, which includes collective TVEs and straightforward rural private enterprises, while xiangcun qiye just refers to collective TVEs.
  • Wenzhou Province served as a pioneer and bellwether for the reformist orientation to the "private sector" broadly, and specifically with regards to informal finance. In Guizhou Province (the poorest), fully 68.9% of households had taken informal credit, and 81% of private credit loans were used for production.
  • Unlike other East Asian economies, the Chinese investment to GDP ratio increased as Chinese GDP increased, such that investment accounted for fully 50% of Chinese GDP in 2005. It can be argued that such obscene investment levels serve as a substitute for entrepreneurship, and would have been unnecessary only if China continued its pseudo-liberal policies of the 1980s.
  • In fact, such large investments in infrastructure came at the cost of investment in rural education and public health, directly leading to increased illiteracy rates and a marked decrease in improving infant mortality rates. Additionally, productivity growth stagnated.
  • Considering Shanghai an innovation hub is misleading. Zhejiang and Guangdong surpassed Shanghai in patent grants in the early 1990s, from 0.3x in the mid 1980s, due to their more entrepreneur-favoring policies. (This is especially striking when you note that Shanghai had between 3-6x more research scientists and R&D spending).
  • Urban entrepreneurs in Yunnan and Shanghai earned similar amounts, when the GDP per capita in Yunnan is one tenth that of Shanghai.
  • Personal income per capita and GDP per capita were negatively correlated in Shanghai in the 1990s.
  • India creates (where the present tense refers to ~2008) more value per laborer than China and is better at retaining wealth.

Summary of main points given by author:

- Explicitly private entrepreneurship in the non-farm sectors developed vigorously and rapidly in rural China during the 1980s. - Financial reforms, again in the rural areas, were substantial in the 1980s, and the Chinese banking system channeled a surprisingly high level of credits to the private sector in the 1980s. - Conventional property rights security was — and still is — problematic, but the security of the proprietor — the person holding the property — increased substantially at the very onset of the economic reforms. The Chinese policy makers in the early 1980s strongly, directly, and self-consciously projected policy credibility and predictability. - The political system, although absent of the normal institutional constraints associated with good governance, became directionally liberal early during the reform era.

On reforms:

- The Chinese definition of TVEs refers to their locations of establishments and registration (i.e., businesses located in the rural areas), not their ownership; Western researchers, on the other hand, have come to understand TVEs in terms of their ownership status. - The cognitive gap is huge: As early as 1985, of the 12 million businesses classified as TVEs, 10 million were completely and manifestly private. Almost every single net entrant in the TVE sector between the mid- 1980s and the mid-1990s was a private TVE; thus both the static and dynamic TVE phenomena were substantially private. - Private TVEs were most vibrant in the poorest and the most agricultural provinces of China (and this feature of private TVEs also explains the understatement of their size in the conventional reporting as well as the connections between rural private entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation). - There are reports of privatization of collective TVEs in the early 1980s and large-scale privatizations in the poor provinces. - Rural financial reforms — credit provisions to the private sector and allowing a degree of private entry into financial services — in the 1980s were endorsed by the governor of the central bank and the presidents of the major commercial banks. - Chinese reforms were heavily experimental in nature rather than relying on a blueprint approach, but the outcome of the experimentation was private ownership and financial liberalization. - By the measure of private-sector fixed-asset investments, the most liberal policy epoch, by far, was in the 1980s; in the 1990s, the policy was reversed, and many of the productive rural financial experiments were discontinued. - Rural administrative management was substantially centralized in the 1990s. - Credit constraints on rural entrepreneurship, including private TVEs, rose substantially in the 1990s. - Growth of rural household income in the 1990s was less than half of its growth in the 1980s, and the declining growth in the rural business income was especially pronounced. - The size of government — measured in terms of headcounts of officials and the value of fixed assets it controls — expanded enormously in the 1990s. - The directionally liberal political reforms of the 1980s were discontinued and reversed.

On Shanghai:

- Although they are located in the richest market in China, indigenous private-sector businesses in Shanghai are among the smallest in the country, and self-employment business income per capita is about the same in Shanghai as it is in provinces such as Yunnan, where GDP per capita is about 10 to 15 percent of that in Shanghai. (As an illustration of how unusual the above pattern is, imagine finding that self-employment business income per capita in the United States was about the same as that in Turkey.) - The political, regulatory, and financial restrictions on indigenous private entrepreneurship in Shanghai were extreme, as evidenced by the fact that the fixed asset investments by the indigenous private-sector firms peaked in 1985. - The share of labor income — inclusive of proprietor income — to GDP is very low in Shanghai. - Shanghai’s GDP increased massively relative to the national mean, but the household income level relative to the national mean experienced almost no growth. - Although wage income is high in Shanghai, asset income is among the lowest in the country. - Since 2000, the poorest segment of Shanghai’s population has lost income absolutely during a period of double-digit economic growth. Although aspiring to be a high-tech hub of China, the number of annual patent grants in Shanghai decreased substantially relative to that in the more entrepreneurial provinces, such as Zhejiang and Guangdong, in the 1990s. - Shanghai was also corrupt.

On consequences:

- Although GDP growth was rapid during both the 1980s and 1990s, household income growth was much faster in the 1980s. - The share of labor income to GDP was rising in the 1980s but declining in the 1990s. - Several studies on total factor productivity (TFP) converged on the finding that TFP growth since the late 1990s has either slowed down from the earlier period or has completely collapsed. - The majority of the much-touted poverty reduction occurred during the short 8 years of the entrepreneurial era (1980-1988) rather than during the long 13 years of the state-led era (1989-2002). - Income disparities worsened substantially in the 1990s, while they initially improved in the 1980s. - Governance problems, such as land grabs and corruption, intensified greatly in the 1990s. - The heavy taxation on the rural areas led to the withdrawal and rising costs of basic government services. - Between 2000 and 2005 the number of illiterate Chinese adults increased by 30 million, reversing decades of trend developments; this development has garnered almost no attention in the West. - The way the Chinese measure adult illiteracy implies that all of this increase was a product of the rural basic education in the 1990s, and this adverse development coincided closely in timing with the intensification of urban bias in the policy model.

misc:

  • urbanization -> centralization of power? Jane Jacobs might have something to say here?
  • much FDI just allowed for capital to be more efficiently used in China by routing through Hong Kong. See Lenovo
  • Stiglitz's perspective on TVEs was just plain wrong?

Review | Anglo-Saxon Magic

Possibly the most comprehensive extant anthology of rituals, especially Anglo-Saxon rituals. It opens with some historical notes, a discussion on the germane characteristics of magic, and applications / motivations of common ritualistic ingredients.

Storms notes that it is incoherent to consider magic as descending from animism, just as it is incoherent to consider religion as descending from animism. Given that magical practices were considered to have effects independent of the effects wrought on the world by spirits or phantoms, the two traditions obviously coexisted rather than being dependent on each other. Additionally:

Another argument against animism as the explanation of all magic is that the spirits themselves are subject to the power of magic, which would be hard to account for if they were the originators of that power. . . . A form of magic that is spread all over the world is that in which a man is killed by means of an effigy. . . . There is nothing animistic in this form of magic and it is based on the principle that like influences like, and that a thing that has once had contact with another thing remains irrevocably connected with it. Its effect is probably due to suggestion and autosuggestion.

What is magic?

In defining magic we have to bear in mind the practical side of magic, that is, the way in which it operates, and the theoretical side, that is, the notions, conceptions and beliefs that are the basis and origin of magical practices. We define magic as the art of employing a personal power that operates in such a way as cannot be perceived by physical sense and that is carred into effect by means of a traditional ritual.

The underlying idea of magic is that of power, force, or strength. Primitive man does not distinguish between ordinary, normal, natural power and extraordinary, abnormal, supernatural or preternatural, magical, spiritual, or even divine power. As Graebener says: "The Australian aborigines do not regard the natural as supernatural, but the supernatural as natural." A medicine man has not two functions but one function; he does not apply two methods but one method. Curing a patient by magic or by natural means is one and the same thing in the mind of a witch-doctor; he cures a sick man ans there is the end of it.

It follows, then, that there was no inherent difference between the rules by which normal procedures or magical procedures were meant to work. In fact, Storms claims that originally "all magical practices were simple and straightforward", and that their opacity was added later purely to enhance mystery amongst onlookers.

Anglo-Saxon magic primarily draws upon Christian and pagan influence (Icelandic, Germanic, Celtic, classical). Woden is one of the only gods frequently mentioned by name in suriving rituals, and distinguishing e.g. Germanic from classical influence is infintely harder than distinguishing Christian and pagan.

Rules for rituals would encompass an entire volume in and of themselves, but it is notable that the more pungent the ingredient the stronger its perceived effect was. From this, you get goat dung as a wound salve.

The earliest instance of an individual using a word with the function of "magic" to describe certain practices was Herodotus describing a class of Persian astronomer-priests. When you consider magic as primarily the domain of primitive peoples, it makes sense that from a civilized perspective one would want to reify it (and subsequently kill it in the process). So, the best way to study rituals is to treat them as a practice rather than the outcome of some established metaphysics.

His primary sources are the Leechbook and the Lacnunga.

Review | Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

Concepts featured: natural tendency towards monopolization, power-law distribution of production, virtues of vertical integration, value accretion to speculators, capital oligpolies, capital export.

The basic argument:

Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

Lenin is surprisingly perceptive. Or, perhaps, his ideology tended to notice inconvenient truths about the "market" economies of the Gilded Age (most of which are downstream of markets having power-law distributions in outcomes) such as the centralization of not just raw material production, but commodity production and capital itself.

Repeatedly, I have seen the biggest flaw of pre-WW2 Marxist analysis to be its inability to predict or even notice the effects of technological innovation on the common man.

It goes without saying that if capitalism could develop agriculture, which today is everywhere lagging terribly behind industry, if it could raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken, there could be no question of a surplus of capital. This “argument” is very often advanced by the petty-bourgeois critics of capitalism. But if capitalism did these things it would not be capitalism; for both uneven development and a semi-starvation level of existence of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and constitute premises of this mode of production. As long as capitalism remains what it is, surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries.

Sure, the Haber process was incubated and developed on the government's dime. But BASF then matured and implemented it, massively multiplying crop yields because there was money in it. Only capital-rich organizations can afford to invest in 0-1 jumps, and nations happen to be capital-rich organizations which work for the public benefit. Yet the exact ills of monopolies are also boons: vertical integration and large scale production allows the 1-many innovations to be implemented.

Regardless, companies will take the low-hanging fruit, and the low-hanging fruit in the early 20th century was investing in colonies. Railways, oil, coal, metals, cash crops, etc.. Marx and Engels claim that this results in the "bourgeoisification" of the British working class, as the profits from such foreign investment accrue in Britain rather than South Africa, and that British labor unions were pro-imperialist. This seems to be broadly correct.

Capital as export is a powerful force:

In 1904, Great Britain had 50 colonial banks with 2,279 branches (in 1910 there were 72 banks with 5,449 branches), France had 20 with 136 branches; Holland, 16 with 68 branches; and Germany had “only” 13 with 70 branches.68 The American capitalists, in their turn, are jealous of the English and German: “In South America,” they complained in 1915, “five German banks have forty branches and five British banks have seventy branches.... Britain and Germany have invested in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the last twenty-five years approximately four thousand million dollars, and as a result together enjoy 46 per cent of the total trade of these three countries.”

He also makes the argument that the cause of net immigration to the colonial powers rather than net emigration from them is that such profit accruement decreases the incentives to leave:

One of the special features of imperialism connected with the facts I am describing, is the decline in emigration from imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower wages are paid. As Hobson observes, emigration from Great Britain has been declining since 1884. In that year the number of emigrants was 242,000, while in 1900, the number was 169,000. Emigration from Germany reached the highest point between 1881 and 1890, with a total of 1,453,000 emigrants. In the course of the following two decades, it fell to 544,000 and to 341,000. On the other hand, there was an increase in the number of workers entering Germany from Austria, Italy, Russia and other countries. According to the 1907 census, there were 1,342,294 foreigners in Germany, of whom 440,800 were industrial workers and 257,329 agricultural workers. In France, the workers employed in the mining industry are, “in great part”, foreigners: Poles, Italians and Spaniards. In the United States, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe are engaged in the most poorly paid jobs, while American workers provide the highest percentage of overseers or of the better-paid workers. Imperialism has the tendency to create privileged sections also among the workers, and to detach them from the broad masses of the proletariat.

Centering the monopoly as simultaneously alien to the free market and yet the inevitable result of a free market is particularly poignant, I feel. His other analyses are interesting from a historical perspective, but without intimate knowledge of the context they should not be wholly trusted.My translation was particularly good. Quite happy with it.