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For people interests in this topic, I really recommend the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell. It focuses mostly on a subset of Asia that has great economic su

For people interests in this topic, I really recommend the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell. It focuses mostly on a subset of Asia that has great economic success in the 20th century, and only looks at a few contrasting countries to show perhaps why they didn't work as well. The book's theory is that success starts by first focusing on productivity of agricultural land, to maximize output, not profit. To accomplish that, you need lots of farmers who are motivated to maximize output, which means land distribution so that farmers are working for themselves, rather than as laborers where the landowner takes all. Once there is a broad base of farmers, and the country has food sovereignty, limited import funds can't be drained away just to make sure everyone is fed. And once there's a broad farming base, that is accumulating savings, that means that 1) banks can start making loans for the beginning of industry, and 2) there's a strong farmer consumer base that can be customers of this early industry. Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that practiced land reform to wrench land away from idle landlords and distribute it widely, have had this success. And countries that feigned it, like the Philippines, have struggled in comparison. Land really is different from capital, there's a finite amount of it, whereas more capital can always be made. Redistributing hoarded land should be a primary function of government, or at least a government that wants to grow the economy, rather than grow wealth inequality.

3a2d29 4y ago
Really interesting perspective here, wanted to add. I am an engineer now, but studied developmental economics very briefly and there are lot of really interesting theories out there. This “land distribution” point reminds me of a paper they claimed Spain fell behind other colonial powers like England and France because the resource they exploited was precious metals that allowed a few to get rich, but didn’t allow a middle class to grow. Make me think of whether big tech does the same thing (if they can find a way to automate enough they can hire few people and few engineers)
- dasil003 4y ago
  I’ve thought a lot about this as big tech has grown over the past twenty years. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as precious metals because tech does have utility. But the low marginal costs and rapid global distribution trend towards winner-take-all results.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    But it's also creating a large population of upper middle class/upper class individuals who will then invest their capital. So I still don't see it being as bad as a gold rush.
- chrischen 4y ago
  But the inverse of that is a bit ridiculous: don’t automate the things so you can create busy work for more people. It sounds even more ridiculous if you phrase it as make and keep people alive just to do busy (fake) work.
  - tnzk 4y ago
    The point was, at such a developmental stage, large portion of population wouldn't be capable of automating stuff, so keeping people busy and alive would be better than starve them with nothing to do.
    - chrischen 4y ago
      That's exactly how and why progress is halted. People yell "think of the jobs" and prevent new advances in automation or technology that would actually save lives or better lives, just for the sake of protecting the incumbent industries.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Right, p -> q does not imply q -> p, and does not imply !p -> !q,yet too often when it comes to economics, that sort of fallacy underlies key arguments on selling policy to the populace.
quacked 4y ago
I couldn't agree with you more. I don't think this principle ceases to be true once a country gets rich, either--the more fundamental goods the people produce themselves with a focus on maximizing output (food, weapons, textiles, fuel, medicines) the better off the country will be, especially if the people own the land they work on. In many western countries each of these industries has undergone massive monopolization, which in my opinion has driven not only wealth inequality but knowledge inequality--there are now many millions of people who couldn't actually set "the system" up if the oversight vanished because they don't have any real ownership of its components.
zenon 4y ago
A in-depth review/summary of the book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w...
Apocryphon 4y ago
Here’s a good account of how land reform was undertaken in Taiwan: Taiwan and the "Land to the Tiller" Program by John C. Médaille https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-and-the-land-to-the-tiller-program-2005.htm https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-a...
slothtrop 4y ago
I also recommend this book review - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w... Brings up the point that some countries with similar land reforms (e.g. Mexico) didn't achieve the same result, but generally casts a favorable view of the book.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lern_too_spel 4y ago
The biggest impediment to growth is idle wealth. Wealth tied up in art is not doing anything and should be taxed arbitrarily high at inheritance. The same with slumlords' properties. Taxes on productive income can then be reduced by the same amount to encourage growth.
- wronglyprepaid 4y ago
  Can you cite anything to back your claim here? Why is idle wealth more of an impediment than policies that discourage investment? What does idle wealth even mean, how do you measure it? Why would anyone with wealth want it to sit idle?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    An no matter how many times you sell the Mona Lisa to pay the Mona Lisa tax, it still wouldn’t drop in value. So all art would have to be owned by the government or non-profits, which can easily be abused by the rich to hold “their” art tax-free.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- zozbot234 4y ago
  There's a fallacy here. The bottom-line economic effect of having a lot of "wealth tied up in art" is incenting the preservation and/or creation of highly valued art. You can't even meaningfully take that wealth away in the aggregate, because it's pure paper wealth; it's a side effect of how much we happen to value some objects. Slumlord properties have the same theoretical problem as land, in that concentrated ownership can act as an incentive towards bad management; there's not much economy of scale when it comes to managing rental properties, so policy should incent dispersed ownership instead.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Not when the price of art never reaches it's creator, and only goes stratospheric through speculation and back-and-forth trades long after his death. You can't be incentivised to create art when you will never realize that incentive. And unlike music record labels, it's not like you are giving someone else your earnings in exchange for editing and technical help and marketing. Art was a bad example, though, since it's mostly just used as a tax dodge. The real problem is rent seeking.
zozbot234 4y ago
How Asia Works was reviewed on SSC as part of an ongoing review contest: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w...
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
This is a really interesting take. Although more capital, in theory, can just easily be made - if the incentives are not in place - it appears to have the same problems as getting past the agricultural stage. So it seems like a parallel to me why advanced economies might stagnate.
- epistasis 4y ago
  This is addressed in later parts of the book, and I really only focused on the first part in my comment. How to keep capital 1) maximally productive, rather than rent seeking, and 2) keep capital from fleeing, are all about what incentive structures the government sets up. And for every single industrial country, government policy has been key to growing infant industries into functional, independent, adult economies. At every stage of economic development, the rules seem to change for of which policies enable or maximize economic growth. (I fear the US is starting to flub it now, but they may still save themselves!!)
car_analogy 4y ago
> Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that practiced land reform to wrench land away from idle landlords and distribute it widely, have had this success. Land reform was one element. The other, despite the article's unqualified praise of "open up your economy to foreign investment and trade", is trade restrictions and various forms of state meddling to support local industries. I don't need to point out how difficult China makes it for foreign firms to operate in their local market. Per James Galbraith: " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The well-known problem with "state meddling to support local industries" is that, as a rule, that kind of policy tends to support the most parasitic and least socially beneficial industry sectors (because they don't have much of an alternative to lobbying for more government meddling), not those with the best potential for success.
  - epistasis 4y ago
    Exactly, the successful Asian nations had very clever techniques for this. One, was to provide subsidy/tax breaks/trade protections only to those firms that could compete on the global market. This means that firms have to find success through actual productivity and output, rather than through rent seeking. So it isn't so much "as a rule" as "as a rule when the government has been refulatorily captured." In fact I think you will find that most industries that are built only happen through lots of government "interference." Silicon Valley is an excellent example of this, as the early customers were all defense industry largesse. And without those extremely rich customers with very extreme technological needs, development of Silicon Valley would have stalled, or perhaps not happened at all.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      The government is always "captured" by some interests. The meaningful question is what could incent governments to pick the most widely beneficial policies. Trade policy is one of those sectors where it seems especially easy to make socially bad choices, so being extra careful can make sense.
tynpeddler 4y ago
Really excellent point. Transitioning to a capitalist system is extremely difficult because other economic and political systems almost always have much more extreme imbalances in the distribution of money and power (especially if the situation is bad enough to warrant a large change) and introducing a capitalist system lets those folks simply perpetuate uneven wealth/power distributions and in many cases make things worse. The US got around this problem by having huge amounts of land to give away in the west (after conquering it from the Indians of course), and I think Britain kind of got around this problem by creating a system that let their productive merchant class amass large amounts of wealth and partially displace the inefficient aristocracy. France had a rough go of it and had to have multiple revolutions to clear out their nobles and Germany had to lose a few world wars to level things out a bit.
- tsss 4y ago
  The wealth inequality in the US is now higher than at the time of the French revolution, so I find this assertion to be highly questionable.
  - tynpeddler 4y ago
    Only by some measures and only with the caveat that the methods used to approximate wealth distribution in pre-revolutionary France are not directly analogous to the methods used to measure it today which makes direct comparisons messy. For example, other measures built around the gini coefficient would suggest that now is more equal than pre-revoluitonary France (with the caveat that those methods are also imprecise and built on calculated assumptions). Secondly, my comment is about wealth+power. Despite his wealth and connections, Bezos doesn't have nearly the political power that the second richest man in pre-revolutionary France wielded.
SenHeng 4y ago
Another reason for China, Japan and Korea has got to be the intense focus on education, and the belief that education has (financial) value. Singapore showcases this very well. The ethnic Chinese and the Indians are very much focused on pursuing education for their children, even back in the early colonial days and that has led to great success for that portion of the population. The Malays however, have a more idyllic bent in their cultural preferences and that has led to a more impoverished life overall in their population. Maybe it’s because the early Chinese and Indians were imported by the British and brought with them the stereotypical immigrant work ethic while the Malays were indigenous and didn’t have the same kind of drive.
- curiousgal 4y ago
  Well Tunisia has been focused on education as well and that hasn't led them anywhere. Without a solid economy you just end up with like 30% unemployment rate where a large percentage of those unemployed hold higher degrees (masters and PhDs).
  - throwaway2056 4y ago
    Language, network effects and political affiliations allow for slightly easier visa access beneficial for Asians to work across Middle East, EU, USA.
    - csomar 4y ago
      Language: Tunisians speak fluent French. Network effects: Tunisia is quite close to Europe. Visa Access: It's limited but still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_diaspora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_diaspora vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese. Relative to population size, Tunisians moved more overseas.
      - throwaway2056 4y ago
        AS you know even in Western Europe, talented devs/students lose out - sadly -as English is paramount. Geographically close to Europe but I bet Europeans/Americans do not feel that way. Again due to various factors. VISA: For Asians there is one advantage - they have some established characteristics - like hardworking, reputation in IT etc. Again not to say others do not have it but when people talk about IT guy/girl they refer to Indians or Asians - NOT Tunisians.
missedthecue 4y ago
India has a lot of farmers running their own plot of land, but they aren't very high on the list of agriculturally efficient farming. The average farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares where in the USA the average farm size is hundreds of times greater and far more efficient. I think it would be economically better, though politically impossible, if India experienced a great deal of farmland consolidation. How is a guy that only farms 1.2 hectares supposed to increase his income? Buy a farm truck or tractor? Increase efficiency? He's stuck doing everything by hand and making $1000 a year.
- epistasis 4y ago
  High farm output from land distribution is only the start, and only works for the first decade or so of development. The books later parts describe what works for industrial development, and to some degree what does not. I think India fits in very well with the ideas portrayed in How Asia Works.
- fractalb 4y ago
  > The average farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares where in the USA the average farm size is hundreds of times greater and far more efficient. Sure, there might be some truth to the statement that an average US farmer is more efficient than an Indian farmer. But, the reason that an average India farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares compared to the US farmers is not that Indian farmers are inefficient at farming, it's just that there are at least two orders of magnitude more farmers in India (and that's their livelihood) compared to the US. edit:formatting
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    There used to be a lot more american farmers too before farmland consolidation.
    - sudosysgen 4y ago
      Sure, but that only happened because the US had enough capital to put to work all the farmers gainfully.
mgh2 4y ago
[1] Japan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881381 [2] Korea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881497
ismail 4y ago
> Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that practiced land reform to wrench land away from idle landlords and distribute it widely, have had this success. This is an interesting view. how did they avoid being punished for this? Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. Would be interested In understanding how Zimbabwe attempt was different to these countries. Here in South Africa land reforms is a politically charged issue. Due to apartheid we have a deeply unequal society, where productive farm land is concentrated in primarily in a few hands. Split along racial lines. I recall meeting some labourers on a farm here in the western cape. They worked on a farm that had been “claimed” by colonisers who arrived in the 1800’s, and then handed down in families. Where as this labourer ancestors has been in that area for generations before the colonisers got there.
- imtringued 4y ago
  >Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. It actually didn't. It tries to buy out land but then noticed that it ran out of money. After that they hired thugs to get white farmers off their farms. They didn't give the new black farmers any method of financing their business which led to failed farms. Finally they gave the land to political allies who don't farm at all. A simple land value tax would have prevented this nonsense.
  - laxmin 4y ago
    The Land without accompanying appendages: machinery, know-how, processing, storage, transportation, fertilizers and other inputs including seeds AND RELIABLE WATER .... is actually useless. Zimbabwe redistributed the land without the necessary infrastucture or know-how to till the land and produce output. Therein was the whole failure.
- TMWNN 4y ago
  >Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. Recent history of Zimbabwe: <http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>
- csomar 4y ago
Animats 4y ago
I really recommend the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell. Yes. That's a good book. It's not "land reform", though. It's agricultural modernization. Farming needed to be mechanized to free up labor for manufacturing. The "Asian tigers" had far too many people tied up inefficiently growing rice. Then they could start exporting. Most poor countries are past that point now, though. Today's poor countries have too many people in cities. And everybody can't be a net exporter.

3a2d29 4y ago

Really interesting perspective here, wanted to add. I am an engineer now, but studied developmental economics very briefly and there are lot of really interesting theories out there. This “land distribution” point reminds me of a paper they claimed Spain fell behind other colonial powers like England and France because the resource they exploited was precious metals that allowed a few to get rich, but didn’t allow a middle class to grow. Make me think of whether big tech does the same thing (if they can find a way to automate enough they can hire few people and few engineers)

dasil003 4y ago
I’ve thought a lot about this as big tech has grown over the past twenty years. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as precious metals because tech does have utility. But the low marginal costs and rapid global distribution trend towards winner-take-all results.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  But it's also creating a large population of upper middle class/upper class individuals who will then invest their capital. So I still don't see it being as bad as a gold rush.
chrischen 4y ago
But the inverse of that is a bit ridiculous: don’t automate the things so you can create busy work for more people. It sounds even more ridiculous if you phrase it as make and keep people alive just to do busy (fake) work.
- tnzk 4y ago
  The point was, at such a developmental stage, large portion of population wouldn't be capable of automating stuff, so keeping people busy and alive would be better than starve them with nothing to do.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    That's exactly how and why progress is halted. People yell "think of the jobs" and prevent new advances in automation or technology that would actually save lives or better lives, just for the sake of protecting the incumbent industries.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Right, p -> q does not imply q -> p, and does not imply !p -> !q,yet too often when it comes to economics, that sort of fallacy underlies key arguments on selling policy to the populace.

quacked 4y ago

I couldn't agree with you more. I don't think this principle ceases to be true once a country gets rich, either--the more fundamental goods the people produce themselves with a focus on maximizing output (food, weapons, textiles, fuel, medicines) the better off the country will be, especially if the people own the land they work on. In many western countries each of these industries has undergone massive monopolization, which in my opinion has driven not only wealth inequality but knowledge inequality--there are now many millions of people who couldn't actually set "the system" up if the oversight vanished because they don't have any real ownership of its components.

zenon 4y ago

A in-depth review/summary of the book: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w...

Apocryphon 4y ago

Here’s a good account of how land reform was undertaken in Taiwan: Taiwan and the "Land to the Tiller" Program by John C. Médaille https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-and-the-land-to-the-tiller-program-2005.htm https://cooperative-individualism.org/medaille-john_taiwan-a...

slothtrop 4y ago

I also recommend this book review - https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w... Brings up the point that some countries with similar land reforms (e.g. Mexico) didn't achieve the same result, but generally casts a favorable view of the book.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lern_too_spel 4y ago

The biggest impediment to growth is idle wealth. Wealth tied up in art is not doing anything and should be taxed arbitrarily high at inheritance. The same with slumlords' properties. Taxes on productive income can then be reduced by the same amount to encourage growth.

wronglyprepaid 4y ago
Can you cite anything to back your claim here? Why is idle wealth more of an impediment than policies that discourage investment? What does idle wealth even mean, how do you measure it? Why would anyone with wealth want it to sit idle?
- bombcar 4y ago
  An no matter how many times you sell the Mona Lisa to pay the Mona Lisa tax, it still wouldn’t drop in value. So all art would have to be owned by the government or non-profits, which can easily be abused by the rich to hold “their” art tax-free.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
zozbot234 4y ago
There's a fallacy here. The bottom-line economic effect of having a lot of "wealth tied up in art" is incenting the preservation and/or creation of highly valued art. You can't even meaningfully take that wealth away in the aggregate, because it's pure paper wealth; it's a side effect of how much we happen to value some objects. Slumlord properties have the same theoretical problem as land, in that concentrated ownership can act as an incentive towards bad management; there's not much economy of scale when it comes to managing rental properties, so policy should incent dispersed ownership instead.
- vkou 4y ago
  Not when the price of art never reaches it's creator, and only goes stratospheric through speculation and back-and-forth trades long after his death. You can't be incentivised to create art when you will never realize that incentive. And unlike music record labels, it's not like you are giving someone else your earnings in exchange for editing and technical help and marketing. Art was a bad example, though, since it's mostly just used as a tax dodge. The real problem is rent seeking.

zozbot234 4y ago

How Asia Works was reviewed on SSC as part of an ongoing review contest: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-how-asia-w...

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

This is a really interesting take. Although more capital, in theory, can just easily be made - if the incentives are not in place - it appears to have the same problems as getting past the agricultural stage. So it seems like a parallel to me why advanced economies might stagnate.

epistasis 4y ago
This is addressed in later parts of the book, and I really only focused on the first part in my comment. How to keep capital 1) maximally productive, rather than rent seeking, and 2) keep capital from fleeing, are all about what incentive structures the government sets up. And for every single industrial country, government policy has been key to growing infant industries into functional, independent, adult economies. At every stage of economic development, the rules seem to change for of which policies enable or maximize economic growth. (I fear the US is starting to flub it now, but they may still save themselves!!)

car_analogy 4y ago

> Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that practiced land reform to wrench land away from idle landlords and distribute it widely, have had this success. Land reform was one element. The other, despite the article's unqualified praise of "open up your economy to foreign investment and trade", is trade restrictions and various forms of state meddling to support local industries. I don't need to point out how difficult China makes it for foreign firms to operate in their local market. Per James Galbraith: " ... none of the world's most successful trading regions, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and now mainland China, reached their current status by adopting neoliberal trading rules." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage#Criticis...

zozbot234 4y ago
The well-known problem with "state meddling to support local industries" is that, as a rule, that kind of policy tends to support the most parasitic and least socially beneficial industry sectors (because they don't have much of an alternative to lobbying for more government meddling), not those with the best potential for success.
- epistasis 4y ago
  Exactly, the successful Asian nations had very clever techniques for this. One, was to provide subsidy/tax breaks/trade protections only to those firms that could compete on the global market. This means that firms have to find success through actual productivity and output, rather than through rent seeking. So it isn't so much "as a rule" as "as a rule when the government has been refulatorily captured." In fact I think you will find that most industries that are built only happen through lots of government "interference." Silicon Valley is an excellent example of this, as the early customers were all defense industry largesse. And without those extremely rich customers with very extreme technological needs, development of Silicon Valley would have stalled, or perhaps not happened at all.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    The government is always "captured" by some interests. The meaningful question is what could incent governments to pick the most widely beneficial policies. Trade policy is one of those sectors where it seems especially easy to make socially bad choices, so being extra careful can make sense.

tynpeddler 4y ago

Really excellent point. Transitioning to a capitalist system is extremely difficult because other economic and political systems almost always have much more extreme imbalances in the distribution of money and power (especially if the situation is bad enough to warrant a large change) and introducing a capitalist system lets those folks simply perpetuate uneven wealth/power distributions and in many cases make things worse. The US got around this problem by having huge amounts of land to give away in the west (after conquering it from the Indians of course), and I think Britain kind of got around this problem by creating a system that let their productive merchant class amass large amounts of wealth and partially displace the inefficient aristocracy. France had a rough go of it and had to have multiple revolutions to clear out their nobles and Germany had to lose a few world wars to level things out a bit.

tsss 4y ago
The wealth inequality in the US is now higher than at the time of the French revolution, so I find this assertion to be highly questionable.
- tynpeddler 4y ago
  Only by some measures and only with the caveat that the methods used to approximate wealth distribution in pre-revolutionary France are not directly analogous to the methods used to measure it today which makes direct comparisons messy. For example, other measures built around the gini coefficient would suggest that now is more equal than pre-revoluitonary France (with the caveat that those methods are also imprecise and built on calculated assumptions). Secondly, my comment is about wealth+power. Despite his wealth and connections, Bezos doesn't have nearly the political power that the second richest man in pre-revolutionary France wielded.

SenHeng 4y ago

Another reason for China, Japan and Korea has got to be the intense focus on education, and the belief that education has (financial) value. Singapore showcases this very well. The ethnic Chinese and the Indians are very much focused on pursuing education for their children, even back in the early colonial days and that has led to great success for that portion of the population. The Malays however, have a more idyllic bent in their cultural preferences and that has led to a more impoverished life overall in their population. Maybe it’s because the early Chinese and Indians were imported by the British and brought with them the stereotypical immigrant work ethic while the Malays were indigenous and didn’t have the same kind of drive.

curiousgal 4y ago
Well Tunisia has been focused on education as well and that hasn't led them anywhere. Without a solid economy you just end up with like 30% unemployment rate where a large percentage of those unemployed hold higher degrees (masters and PhDs).
- throwaway2056 4y ago
  Language, network effects and political affiliations allow for slightly easier visa access beneficial for Asians to work across Middle East, EU, USA.
  - csomar 4y ago
    Language: Tunisians speak fluent French. Network effects: Tunisia is quite close to Europe. Visa Access: It's limited but still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_diaspora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunisian_diaspora vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese. Relative to population size, Tunisians moved more overseas.
    - throwaway2056 4y ago
      AS you know even in Western Europe, talented devs/students lose out - sadly -as English is paramount. Geographically close to Europe but I bet Europeans/Americans do not feel that way. Again due to various factors. VISA: For Asians there is one advantage - they have some established characteristics - like hardworking, reputation in IT etc. Again not to say others do not have it but when people talk about IT guy/girl they refer to Indians or Asians - NOT Tunisians.

missedthecue 4y ago

India has a lot of farmers running their own plot of land, but they aren't very high on the list of agriculturally efficient farming. The average farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares where in the USA the average farm size is hundreds of times greater and far more efficient. I think it would be economically better, though politically impossible, if India experienced a great deal of farmland consolidation. How is a guy that only farms 1.2 hectares supposed to increase his income? Buy a farm truck or tractor? Increase efficiency? He's stuck doing everything by hand and making $1000 a year.

epistasis 4y ago
High farm output from land distribution is only the start, and only works for the first decade or so of development. The books later parts describe what works for industrial development, and to some degree what does not. I think India fits in very well with the ideas portrayed in How Asia Works.
fractalb 4y ago
> The average farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares where in the USA the average farm size is hundreds of times greater and far more efficient. Sure, there might be some truth to the statement that an average US farmer is more efficient than an Indian farmer. But, the reason that an average India farmer is only doing 1.2 hectares compared to the US farmers is not that Indian farmers are inefficient at farming, it's just that there are at least two orders of magnitude more farmers in India (and that's their livelihood) compared to the US. edit:formatting
- missedthecue 4y ago
  There used to be a lot more american farmers too before farmland consolidation.
  - sudosysgen 4y ago
    Sure, but that only happened because the US had enough capital to put to work all the farmers gainfully.

mgh2 4y ago

[1] Japan https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881381 [2] Korea https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881497

ismail 4y ago

> Countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea that practiced land reform to wrench land away from idle landlords and distribute it widely, have had this success. This is an interesting view. how did they avoid being punished for this? Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. Would be interested In understanding how Zimbabwe attempt was different to these countries. Here in South Africa land reforms is a politically charged issue. Due to apartheid we have a deeply unequal society, where productive farm land is concentrated in primarily in a few hands. Split along racial lines. I recall meeting some labourers on a farm here in the western cape. They worked on a farm that had been “claimed” by colonisers who arrived in the 1800’s, and then handed down in families. Where as this labourer ancestors has been in that area for generations before the colonisers got there.

imtringued 4y ago
>Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. It actually didn't. It tries to buy out land but then noticed that it ran out of money. After that they hired thugs to get white farmers off their farms. They didn't give the new black farmers any method of financing their business which led to failed farms. Finally they gave the land to political allies who don't farm at all. A simple land value tax would have prevented this nonsense.
- laxmin 4y ago
  The Land without accompanying appendages: machinery, know-how, processing, storage, transportation, fertilizers and other inputs including seeds AND RELIABLE WATER .... is actually useless. Zimbabwe redistributed the land without the necessary infrastucture or know-how to till the land and produce output. Therein was the whole failure.
TMWNN 4y ago
>Zimbabwe tried redistributing farms but it turned out horribly for them. Recent history of Zimbabwe: <http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD http://imgur.com/a/VdQdD>
csomar 4y ago

Animats 4y ago

I really recommend the book How Asia Works by Joe Studwell. Yes. That's a good book. It's not "land reform", though. It's agricultural modernization. Farming needed to be mechanized to free up labor for manufacturing. The "Asian tigers" had far too many people tied up inefficiently growing rice. Then they could start exporting. Most poor countries are past that point now, though. Today's poor countries have too many people in cities. And everybody can't be a net exporter.