The Biases of Western Analysts Regarding the Chinese and Indian Economies: A Few Thoughts

For orthodox economists it has been bad enough that neoliberalism has had as its product not only social misery but developmental failure. Making things worse is that a nation should enjoy so much success for so long a time by way of rejecting neoliberal prescriptions, instead following a statist and mercantilist course of development that has stressed exactly the "hard" industries that finance-singing neoliberals are so prone to treat with disdain (along with those who stand up for them). That the government presiding over the progress has been run by a party still calling itself Communist (however little its actual policies may have to do with Communism), that international relations have become more hostile (indeed, even that China has become such a major producer of "green" technology of the kind the fossil fuel-worshipping right despises, such that one does not hear the right screaming against the recent tariffs on such goods in the name of their free-market pieties), has only lent a further edge to their hostility to China's gains. The result has been their endlessly predicting doom for China's growth, and even the outright collapse of the Chinese state--only to see China defying those predictions for decade after decade. Even the Great Recession, escalating trade war with the United States and its allies, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this remains the case, China's growth admittedly slowing, but still greatly superior to what the rest of the world has seen for the most part, with China's 4.7 percent a year average annual GDP growth rate in the crisis years of 2020-2023 enviable (certainly next to the U.S.' mere 2 percent, Europe's 1.1 percent, Japan's 0.3 percent over the same time frame)--and even the slowing seeming to bespeak not the failure but the maturity of an economy that by this point would seem to have surmounted any "middle income trap" to go by its high-technology exports (greater than those of the whole G-7 in the aggregate, and greater than those of the U.S. today in per capita terms).

Of course, none of this has given the doomsayers any pause, the predictions still forthcoming.

Such analysts' ceaseless doomsaying about China has had its complement in their comparative optimism about the prospects of India--which they view so much more positively because in contrast with the statist-mercantilist, manufacturing-minded Chinese model India presents a more thoroughly privatized-neoliberal, services-oriented, financialized economy of the sort they approve and champion, with India's undeniable explosion in inequality part of what they find a very welcome package. (If the term "billionaire Raj" is in many utterances a criticism of the combination of extreme wealth in a few hands with vast poverty, for such economic thinkers the country's generation of billion-dollar fortunes are India's glory.) That India is governed by a far right political party, and is seen as at least potentially a counterbalance to China (a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, but also a member of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue), only makes them more favorably disposed toward the country and the prospects of its economy.

Of course, none of this in itself means that China will not find its development stalling out, or that India will not eventually overtake China's progress (even if in the most bullish scenario this is apt to be later rather than sooner given China's very, very long lead with a GDP more than five times as big as India's, and a manufacturing value added more than ten times India's to go by the United Nations numbers). What it does mean is that anyone taking an interest in that conversation ignores those very powerful, enduring, prejudices at their peril and should look the more closely at the specifics that analysts offer in support of their claims, rather than relying on their supposed "authoritative judgment" as "experts" in the way that the mainstream media ceaselessly encourages us to do--and pay particular attention to those who refuse to conform to the prevailing "consensus." A good example of this is Michael Roberts, a longtime City of London economist who has not towed the line, least of all on China and India--and, right or wrong, given us a good deal more to think about than do the purveyors of "elitism mixed with banality" so beloved of those besotted with pompous phrases like "the adults in the room."

Emmanuel Todd's Writing About Natality

When Emmanuel Todd published his La Défaite de l'Occident (The Defeat of the West) rightist commentators in America were visibly delighted at the fact of a prominent French academic who had tended to be associated with the left presenting America as being in economic decline, and general decline as a leading power, due to the decline of the homogeneity of its elite, waning religiosity and a neglect of engineering-oriented education, and its championing of "non-traditional" ideas about family and gender internationally in a world for the most part little inclined to have anything to do with them. (Thus was it the case that, while it is far from the norm for major American newspapers to devote pieces to books not even available in English, figures like the Claremont Institute's Christopher Caldwell wrote about the book for the New York Times.) However, those writers seizing on Todd's authority in support of these positions were of course being very selective, overlooking much else that Todd had to say, not least about the subject of natality. In Todd's view fertility correlates inversely with neoliberalism--the prevailing version of capitalism depriving people with middle class standards with regard to "personal responsibility" in regard to marriage and family of the security that they would regard themselves as requiring before they have children, with neoliberal champion Korea's plunging fertility rate and neoliberalism-resistant France's relatively high rate both making the point in his view.

If any of those rightist commentators' approval of Todd's discussion of such matters as the decline of Protestantism translated over to an openness to his criticisms of neoliberalism, it has so far escaped me.

Just What is the Total Fertility Rate in the U.S. and What Does it Tell Us About American Life?

It seems that natality has become a fashionable topic in America--mostly because of the culture war-minded right, but then, the logic of centrism and the biases of the media being what they are, it is that right which sets the agenda in American discourse, its grievances the ones that get discussed.

Of course, as is usually the case with the dialogue about such matters we hear little of substance. Consider the reality of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR). As a quick check of the World Bank's data set regarding the matter shows, the U.S. TFR had its ups and downs in the past. After the post-World War II "baby boom" the TFR trended downward, and fell especially steeply after the early 1970s, striking 1.7 in 1976. There was a recovery, but it was only at the end of the 1980s that the rate returned to replacement level, where it stayed for the '90s and '00s before dropping again after 2008-2009.

The reader who knows anything of economic history has likely noticed a commonality between the slippage in the 1970s, and the slippage after 2008-2009, namely that in each case it correlates with a nasty and prolonged economic shock, the kind that makes responsible people put off having families and children precisely because they are not confident of being in a position to take care of them. Indeed, it is significant that America's TFR hit its low in 2020, dropping to 1.6 amid the addition of the post-pandemic disruption of American life to the stresses of the Great Recession that, contrary to the press' stupid propaganda, never really went away, and with it the added disinclination to make the commitments involved in having children (as, of course, an enormous amount of data demonstrates).

Still, if there have been ups and downs it does seem to me that there is more at issue than the merely cyclical character of economic life. The highly insecure neoliberal way of life that the economically orthodox think is so delightful is anything but for the vast majority of those actually living it, and it seems to me that Emmanuel Todd is entirely right when he argues for the inverse relationship between neoliberalism and natality. Alas, our media, which in its usual manner hastened to give platforms to the culture warriors as they selectively seized on Todd's work as affirmation of their ideas, has no interest in platforming anyone likely to take up those ideas of Todd's, or for that matter, any alertness to hard economic realities and what they actually mean for those we more mendaciously than ever call "middle class." Instead when it comes to topics like that, outfits like the Times give us Justin Wolfers telling us "Don't worry, be happy" in pieces that absolutely embody Thomas Frank's characterization of the American news media's "paramount problem" as its "annoying professional-class assumptions."