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I bet Hong Kong was also an influence.
by pg 17y ago
I bet Hong Kong was also an influence.
- tc 17y agoHong Kong is perhaps the best modern case study of relatively free capitalism in action. In just a quarter of a century, a poor country with few natural resources raised its standard of living above that of the UK, its colonial parent. There's an old story that once, in a meeting, Milton Friedman was chastising Sir John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong's Financial Secretary, for not collecting the economic statistics that Milton and other economists wanted. Cowperthwaite replied that the omission was intentional; he knew that if he collected the data, the bureaucrats back in the UK would see the numbers and expect him to do something about them.
- jacquesm 17y agoI think the opium trade may have had something to do with that (and with the wealth of Macao as well).
- uygbuyb 17y agoSlight statistical effect though - it was a small place that had concentrated banking/shipping etc. The average income of the city of London (the financial centre) is higher than the average for the UK - that doesn't mean the solution is for the rest of the country to build banks on all the farmland.
- jimmybot 17y agoRight. What works for Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, the Isle of Man, and other low tax city states just does not work for the rest of the world--it doesn't scale.
- pchristensen 17y agoExactly. Regulatory arbitrage doesn't work if everyone shares the same regs.
- sketerpot 17y agoTaiwan and Hong Kong (and the other two "Asian Tigers", South Korea and Singapore) were favored trading partners with the US during their economic rise, in the hopes that China would notice their booming economies and abandon strict communism. The US helped Taiwan out with billions of dollars of loans and financial aid for exactly this reason.