household responsibility system

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Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century by Christian Caryl

Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, export processing zone, financial deregulation, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mont Pelerin Society, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, price stability, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , single-payer health, special economic zone, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, Yom Kippur War

“Baochan daohu [“contracting by the household”] is like a chicken pest,” one peasant said. “When one family’s chicken catches the disease, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole country will be infected.”20 In 1979, by one estimate, 10 percent of Anhui Province was practicing the household-responsibility system. In June 1979, after paying a visit to Fengyang County to see the results for himself, Wan Li approved the expansion of the program to the entire province.21 In the countryside, at least, the party was beginning to release its grip. Zhao Ziyang, Wan’s counterpart in Sichuan Province, took note.

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In 1978 he had begun allowing the communes to subdivide their production teams into smaller groups. He justified what he was doing as a way of “bringing individual initiative into full play.” He may have actually regarded the measure as an intermediate step on the way toward full-scale revival of the household-responsibility system. In 1979 he then allowed some production teams in the province to break work groups down into individual families. The measures sparked political resistance from conservatives. (The Maoists had not vanished completely, after all.) “But Mr. Zhao is ready to risk it,” wrote a group of visiting British journalists.

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But amid the ruins of Mao’s utopian edifice, Mosher also discovered intriguing evidence of a powerful source of transformative energy: individual initiative. Though they were far from the places where the most important experiments were under way, the people in Mosher’s remote Guangdong village had already picked up on the spread of the household-responsibility system, and he succeeded in capturing a nice snapshot of the spirit that, once unleashed, would soon lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The old entrepreneurial mind-set of the Chinese “flared anew once opportunity presented itself,” Mosher noted. When one woman heard that the party might soon allow a return to household farming, she immediately began making plans to start cultivating her own mulberry patch, planting the bushes between the rows of trees on the farm.

China's Disruptors: How Alibaba, Xiaomi, Tencent, and Other Companies Are Changing the Rules of Business by Edward Tse

3D printing, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, bilateral investment treaty, business process, capital controls, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, experimental economics, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, industrial robot, Joseph Schumpeter, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, middle-income trap, money market fund, offshore financial centre, Pearl River Delta, reshoring, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, trade route, wealth creators, working-age population

He had been targeted and pushed aside during the Cultural Revolution, but with Mao’s death he and his ideas returned to ascendancy, and he became the de facto leader of the country. The first reforms under this new regime took place in the countryside. Under what became known as the “Household Responsibility System,” farmers, once they had met various contractual obligations to sell a share of their produce to the state, were free to sell everything else they grew or raised at whatever price they could find on the market. After years of repression, agricultural output soared, rising by as much as 10 percent annually through the 1980s.

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., 123 Forbes, 10 Ford Motor Company, 123, 131, 133 Forever 21, 195 Fosun, 123, 138, 148, 155, 156, 194 Foursquare, 129 Foxconn, 112 Gang of ’92, 45–46, 54, 148, 168–69 Gao Feng Advisory Company, 25 Gavekal Dragonomics, 73 Geely Auto, 12, 44, 76, 123, 131–34, 138, 175, 185, 212 General Mills, 196 General Motors, 133, 137, 179 Gerke, Roland, 196 Germany, 121, 216 doctorates in, 108 global financial crisis, 73, 78 Global Solar Energy, 123 Golden Monkey, 194 Goldman Sachs, 37, 136 Gome Electrical Appliances, 13 Google, 83, 87, 112, 127, 128, 197 Great Firewall of China, 82 Great Leap Forward, 3–4 Great Wall Technology, 76, 126 Guo Guangchang, 148 Guo Wei, 148 Haier, 3, 5–8, 10, 47, 49, 58–60, 76, 84, 94, 98, 100, 101, 175, 185, 187, 200, 208, 224 Hainan, 46 Hangzhou Wahaha Group, 52, 76 Harvard Business Review, 93–94 health-care system, 12, 153–57, 162, 163, 212 Hengan International, 12, 53, 175–78, 199, 200 Hershey, 194 Hertz Global Rental, 194–95 Hewlett-Packard, 125, 128 Hoffman-La Roche, 155 Home Depot, 180 Honda, 133 Honeywell, 190, 192, 196 Hong Kong, 68, 214, 223–24 Hong Kong Stock Exchange, 68, 86, 177 hospitals, 154–56, 212 Household Responsibility System, 43 Huang Guangyu, 13 Huang Nubo, 45, 63, 168 Huawei Technologies, 11, 20, 43–44, 47, 54, 60, 67, 75, 84, 89, 122, 128, 136, 138, 139, 140, 175, 200, 222 innovation by, 94, 101–5 Hui Ka Yan, 48 Hu Jintao, 147 Hutchison Telecom, 103 Hyundai, 133 IBM, 125, 127–28, 129, 178 ICBC, 149 ICQ, 85 IDG, 85–86 India, 68 infrastructure, 71, 78, 79, 82, 83, 85, 99, 105, 111, 114, 137–38, 153, 163, 164, 166, 188, 191, 192, 210, 223, 224 Innovation Works, 111–12 Intel Capital, 113 interest-rate liberalization, 40, 152–53 Internet, 27, 81–90, 82, 135–36, 161, 186, 197, 209–10, 218–19, 221–22 iPhone, 68, 69, 94 iQiyi.com, 162 Japan, 94, 121, 141, 216 R&D spending in, 107 JD.com, 84, 87 revenue of, 89 Jialing, 76 Jiang Jianqing, 149 Johnson & Johnson, 175 Joyo.com, 12, 57, 68 Jumei.com, 206 “just-in-time” production system, 94 Kan, Michael, 69 Kandi Technologies Group, 133 Kao, 175 KFC, 180 Kimberly-Clark, 12, 175 Kingsoft, 68 Kirby, William C., 93–94 Konka, 76 Koo, Victor, 158–59, 160, 218 Krugman, Paul, 9 Kutcher, Ashton, 129 Lardy, Nicholas, 17 Lau, Martin, 136 Lau, Ricky, 225 Lee, Hudson, 196 Lee, Kai-fu, 111–12 legal infrastructure, 114 Legend, 44 Legend Holdings, 112, 126 Lei Jun, 11, 12, 57, 67, 81, 112, 162, 197, 226 Lenovo, 11, 20, 44, 54, 67, 75, 89, 112, 139, 140, 148, 171 expansion by, 124–29, 130 revenue of, 125–26, 127, 128 Leung, Antony, 224 Levi’s, 195 Li, Richard, 85–86 Li, Robin, 11, 49, 50, 64, 81, 88, 139 liberalization, 44, 55, 71, 72, 75, 78–79, 152, 154, 166–67, 178, 181, 210, 211, 223 of interest rates, 40, 152–53 Li Dongsheng, 148 Liebherr, 5–6 Lifan, 76 Li Ka-shing, 85 Li Keqiang, 210, 215 Lin Bin, 68 Li Shufu, 12, 44, 47, 131–34, 138, 175, 185 Little Emperors, 51–53 Liu Chuanzhi, 54, 171 Liu Junling, 96 Liu Mingkang, 149 Loncin, 76 L’Oréal, 205 Lu Guanqiu, 130 Lyft, 135 Ma, Jack, 10, 33–40, 41, 47, 50, 54–55, 60–61, 62–63, 64, 86, 136, 148, 197, 201, 221 background of, 36–37 environmental work of, 60, 168, 169–70 and U.S.

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Never before have so many people moved in such a short time from the countryside to cities. By 2030 one in five city dwellers in the world will be Chinese. The economic modernization of China began in earnest at the close of the 1970s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. First for reform was agriculture, where land was decollectivized and the ‘Household Responsibility System’ was introduced, shifting responsibility for profits and losses back to farmers. This set the foundations for a rapid acceleration in improvements in cereal yields, as farmers became incentivized to adopt more efficient practices. Next was industry. Rather than opening the economy to foreign influence all at once, the Chinese leadership established ‘Special Economic Zones’ in four coastal cities – Shenzhen, Shantou, Zhuhai and Xiamen – in which foreign multinationals were offered tax incentives and a more business-friendly operating environment in exchange for establishing export manufacturing facilities.

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Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

In November and December 1978, the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Party Committee produced a breakthrough. Over Hua’s objections, it was decided that, from then on, the focus of the party would be not class struggle but economic modernization. The plenum announced some tentative experiments with a “household responsibility system” in some provinces, which was an attempt to roll back collective agriculture and introduce economic incentives into farming. By the next year, the Central Committee was acknowledging the centrality of the notion of “truth from facts” and declaring the Cultural Revolution to have been a great calamity for the Chinese people.

…

If one compares 1980 to 1985, then by the latter date, twenty-one of the twenty-six members of the Politburo, eight of the eleven members of the Communist Party secretariat, and ten of the eighteen vice-premiers had been changed. Now that Deng and the reformers had consummated their political revolution and were in control of the state, they launched a series of further changes in economic institutions. They began in agriculture: By 1983, following the ideas of Hu Qiaomu, the household responsibility system, which would provide economic incentives to farmers, was universally adopted. In 1985 the mandatory state purchasing of grain was abandoned and replaced by a system of more voluntary contracts. Administrative control of agricultural prices was greatly relaxed in 1985. In the urban economy, state enterprises were given more autonomy, and fourteen “open cities” were identified and given the ability to attract foreign investment.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, Doha Development Round, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, household responsibility system, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, race to the bottom, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Deng’s increasingly ambitious plans, which came to be called “reform and opening up,” began with the establishment in several cities along China’s east coast of “special economic zones” (SEZs), isolated laboratories of carefully managed capitalism, where foreign firms were invited to invest on highly attractive terms. Success in these zones led to the creation of many more. The state abandoned hopelessly inefficient collective farming and created a “household responsibility” system that allowed farmers who had fulfilled their production quotas to sell any extra produce at market prices. Agricultural yields exploded. Deng and Zhao developed other policies that encouraged the growth of private commerce. In the countryside, township and village enterprises bloomed.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets by Peter Oppenheimer

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collective bargaining, computer age, credit crunch, data science, debt deflation, decarbonisation, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, equity risk premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, gentrification, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, household responsibility system, housing crisis, index fund, invention of the printing press, inverted yield curve, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Japanese asset price bubble, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Live Aid, low interest rates, market bubble, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, negative equity, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, open economy, Phillips curve, price stability, private sector deleveraging, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, railway mania, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen special economic zone , Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, stocks for the long run, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, tulip mania, yield curve

In the summer of 1989, just a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, as the pressures on the Eastern European communist states intensified, Francis Fukuyama, a US State Department official, wrote a paper titled ‘The End of History’ where he argued, ‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’4 The paper seemed to capture the zeitgeist. In parallel, about this time China was also beginning to open up its economy and embark on reforms. Following the landmark 1978 Chinese reforms that started the ‘household responsibility system’ in the countryside, giving some farmers ownership of their products for the first time, the first ‘special economic zone’ was formed in Shenzhen in 1980. This concept allowed for the introduction and experimentation of more flexible market policies. Although the reforms were slow and not without controversy, by 1984 it became permissible to form individual enterprises with fewer than eight people and, by 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first stock markets were opened in Shenzhen and Shanghai.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

Instead of clamping down, the government allowed the innovation to see whether it would work, just as a market economy allows small-scale experiments. Households who were renting land from collectives had every incentive to work hard and think of smarter ways of doing things because they were rewarded directly for their successes. Crop yields immediately increased. The experiment spread: just 1 percent of collectives had used the “household responsibility system” in 1979; by 1983 98 percent had switched to the system. These reforms were linked with a number of other pieces of liberalization: the retail price of grain was allowed to rise, further increasing the incentive to produce what was needed. Restrictions on trade between regions were eased, so that each region could enjoy its comparative advantage.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic

affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, assortative mating, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, Black Swan, Branko Milanovic, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, colonial rule, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, means of production, new economy, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, post-materialism, purchasing power parity, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, special economic zone, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working-age population, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

Regional decentralization, which in recent times Xu dates to the Great Leap Forward, allowed provincial and municipal governments to implement various economic policies and thus to discover what was best for them—as long as it was not in flagrant violation of the central rules and Communist Party ideology. (Although the disregard of the ideology was in reality accepted as long as it was well camouflaged and the policies were successful.) Xu shows that all crucial developments, from the introduction of the household responsibility system (land reform) to the privatization of state-owned enterprises, started at the lower levels of government. They were not, as is sometimes believed, part of some grandiose plan of experimentation thought up at the top, but came about entirely through lower level–based initiatives.53 If reforms were successful, their local promoters were able to get higher positions within the government and the party, to accede to central policy-making bodies (that’s where the centralization part kicks in), and to try to apply the same recipe elsewhere.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World by Joshua B. Freeman

anti-communist, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate raider, cotton gin, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, mass immigration, means of production, mittelstand, Naomi Klein, new economy, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Soviet and Eastern European factories recruited peasants displaced by the collectivization of agriculture. In China, it was the decollectivization of agriculture that freed up a workforce no longer ensconced in the benefits and obligations of the collective farm. After Mao’s death, communal farms were broken up, with small parcels of land leased to individual farmers under the “household responsibility system,” which allowed them to sell produce exceeding quotas on the open market. Initially, the new system brought a rapid boost to the rural standard of living. But further changes, including opening the country to food imports and rising costs for health care, education, and other social benefits, left the countryside far poorer than the cities.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Fortunately the British animal-hygiene neurosis hasn’t yet spread to the rest of the world. Over half the world’s pork is now raised in China, much of it in peasant households and small farms. A 1998 US study of Chinese agriculture noted: ‘With the dissolution of many collective farms and the institution of the Household Responsibility System in the early 1980s, backyard [pork] production increased to 92.9 per cent by 1982.’24 The advantage of decentralizing pig production is that it is easy to find waste food locally, easy to dispose of waste, and easy to ensure that nutrients cascade back to the land in the form of manure.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

THE PATH NOT TAKEN The early reforms were often implicit—for example, the authorities turned a blind eye to private commercial activity even though it was technically illegal under the Communist regime. Growth picked up in rural areas, far from the reach of the central bureaucracy, for it was in the rural areas that the party had not entirely snuffed out the notion of private property. Under the Household Responsibility System, rural households contracted land and machinery from farmer collectives and kept any surplus they generated beyond a required payment. It was an important step toward greater agricultural productivity. A number of private firms also started, cloaked in the permissible garb of collectives known as Town and Village enterprises.2 Marxist ideologues had determined that these enterprises would become exploitative if they exceeded seven members, yet the rule was rarely enforced.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, Atahualpa, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, British Empire, centre right, classic study, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, crony capitalism, Day of the Dead, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, household responsibility system, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of the printing press, iterative process, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labour management system, land reform, land tenure, life extension, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, means of production, Menlo Park, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, new economy, open economy, out of africa, Peace of Westphalia, Port of Oakland, post-industrial society, post-materialism, price discrimination, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, stem cell, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vilfredo Pareto, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey, zero-sum game

This is evident in the first instance in the large delegations of authority to China’s provinces and municipalities to implement policies in a manner that suits local conditions. This authority often clashes with, and frequently trumps, the interests of the line ministries headquartered in Beijing. Most Western observers focus on the reform’s creation of market incentives through the household responsibility system, which decollectivized agriculture and allowed peasants to keep a much larger proportion of their output. They also point to the creation of four special economic zones open to foreign investment. These were indeed critical: agricultural output doubled in the first four years following the reform as private incentives kicked in, and export industries were seeded in southern cities like Shenzhen.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

“We permit some people and some regions to become prosperous first, for the purpose of achieving common prosperity faster,” he told CBS’s Mike Wallace in 1986.2 Deng’s first steps, beyond allowing small-scale private enterprise in trade and services, was to decollectivize agriculture. He dissolved the People’s Communes and introduced a household responsibility system. This meant that families were allocated a plot of land from which they had to deliver a set output to the state, but were free to trade any surplus privately. Agricultural production shot up. Farmers started to save money. Sometimes they pooled their money to start small enterprises in their villages or the nearest town.