Can't wait to see the discourse among the Twitter Left over whether this vague statement is a defense of Maoism or Dengismhttps://twitter.com/DavidWright_7/status/1232140197271408646 …
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I know the real issue in the real world is the basic Republicans just being mad about this statement in general but I actually really want to know if Bernie means to praise China pre-1982 or post-1982
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Replying to @arthur_affect
In the context there, he might well be talking about Xi.
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Replying to @mssilverstein
Xi hasn't lifted record numbers of people out of poverty come on
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mssilverstein
Neither did Mao, so presumably Deng wins by default
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Replying to @crispy_bart @mssilverstein
Mao's whole tenure as leader of the CCP is an upward arc out of the extreme poverty following the devastation of WWII, which many true believers do give him credit for, even with the unfortunate downward blips along the way
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Replying to @arthur_affect @crispy_bart
Yeah, there's some correlation/causation problems for any economic growth analysis that takes as t=0 the immediate aftermath of World War II. You could talk about a Dutch economic miracle, which took it from widespread famine in 1944 to enormous prosperity by 1960.
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Replying to @mssilverstein @crispy_bart
This is highly controversial in econ IIRC but Keynes was big on the idea of a "production possibility frontier" (PPF) that's this quasi-objective graph of how productive your country *should* be based on population, natural resources, available technology, etc
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And an economy might be depressed below this level for extended periods of time due to false constraints (Keynes' big thing being how the money supply and deflation can do this) but when those are lifted we run back up to that frontier very quickly
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And this is very different from actually expanding the frontier itself, which requires actually inventing new things, discovering new resources, etc Like moving into unoccupied houses rather than building new ones
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Hence WWII "created" enormous prosperity for America after the Depression *because of the Depression*, it was just breaking a vicious feedback loop of deflation and stinginess ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" etc)
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The insane and monstrous idea some military-industrial complex guys had that if we just had regular massive world wars America's economy could grow by those leaps and bounds over and over again was completely wrong
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Replying to @arthur_affect @crispy_bart
Yeah - and if it works, it's because there's political will to spend money on bombs that doesn't exist to build bridges. But the logic would basically mean that we could do just as well with fake bombs.
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