By AMit Verma in India Uncut newsletter
Back in my blogging days, I used to run a section called ‘Where Your Taxes Go.’ Whenever I spotted a ridiculous use of our taxes, I would point it out.
Examples included moustache allowances, educating and rehabilitating monkeys, overpaying for condoms, policing parrots, paying fake municipal employees, golf buggies for the army, statues for Sardar Patel, Mayawati and a dead farmer, 62 sandstone elephants, and regulating skirt hemlines.
You will note that all parties have been culprits in my list.
Yesterday, I put out a tweet reacting to Arvind Kejriwal’s announcement that taxpayers’ money would be used to send “senior citizens to Ayodhya for Ram Lalla's darshan.” I argued:
If Kejriwal wants to pander to soft Hindutva, he should spend his own money doing so. Not the taxes of people like me.
And then I elaborated:
To be clear, what I am protesting here is the use of public funds.
Kejriwal can do whatever he wants for votes. But use party money or personal money for it. Not public funds.
This drew heated responses, among them the usual Whataboutery of whether I had protested against the use of state funds to send people on the Haj pilgrimage. As it happens, I had done so numerous times, including this post from 14 years ago.
(On issues like taxes and free speech, Whataboutery doesn’t work against me because I have been writing for long enough to have slammed all sides. Besides, as I pointed out here, all Whataboutery is an admission of guilt.)
Anyway, there is a larger point here, which is that we take our tax money for granted. When people advocate government spending, they assume that government spending does not have a cost, and there is an endless supply of money. This is not true. That money has a cost.
It is a moral cost.
The Moral Cost of Taxes
I can sum up my worldview thus: I respect consent and oppose coercion. This leads me to a fundamental truth about political philosophy, summed up in the headline of an old column of mine: Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence.
Taxes involve coercion. In that column, I had written:
No one pays taxes willingly. Without the threat of imprisonment—basically, abduction by the one entity that has a monopoly on violence—there would be no taxpayers. There are two words that mean the act of taking someone’s property without their consent: no wonder people say that Taxation is Theft.
Indeed, it is more than that. Assume that you pay 25% of your income in taxes. That amounts to one-fourth of your time and labour. It means that, for all practical purposes, from January to March every year, you are a slave to the state. Taxation is not just theft, it is part-time slavery.
Now, this does not mean that I am an anarchist who wants zero taxes and no state. For individual rights to have any meaning, someone has to safeguard them. That’s why we need the state. And the state needs taxes to exist. And so we have the liberal paradox:
In order for our rights to be safeguarded, we first need to allow them to be infringed.
The Central Question of Political Philosophy
The moral cost of taxes is undeniable. The central question of political philosophy then is this: when is this cost justified?
Some argue for a nightwatchman state. Others argue for a welfare state. Some want a state based on a religion or a personality cult. And there are all kinds of variations on all these themes. Every political philosophy lays out some ends, and then argues, implicitly, that these ends justify the means.
I don’t want to take an ideological position here. I just ask that all of us accept that government spending has a cost, and factor that in whenever we demand that our taxes be spent on something. Whether we speak about the police or building highways or a space program or grand statues or pilgrimages for the elderly or moustache allowances, consider the moral cost. None of those come free.
One Thing That All Citizens Can Agree on
While the ideologues fight it out, I know there is one thing that all citizens can agree on: our taxes should be spent on governance, not politics.
The function of taxes should be to make the people of a country better off, and not the political party in charge.
And yet, look around you. You will find that the party in power constantly uses government funds to buy votes and benefit cronies — and this has been normalised.
Every government in power, at the centre or in a state, will spend hundreds of crores of our money in placing government ads in newspapers. In fact, this has become one way of controlling the media. Toe the government line, and the ads flow in. Speak truth to power, and the tap is turned off. Many publications depend on such spending, and are thus being bribed by our money to be government propaganda machines.
In fact, I remember an interview when Kejriwal was asked about the crazy advertising spending by his Delhi government, and he responded with Whataboutery, saying that if Modi does it, why can’t he?
This recent example of Kejriwal courting the Hindutva vote by promising free pilgrimages is another example of chasing a votebank at our expense. (And yes, the Congress did it also with the Haj subsidy.) These days, all politicians promise freebies at the polls, from biryani to televisions, which they intend to pay for with our money.
I once wrote a limerick that summed this up:
POLITICS
A neta who loves currency notes
Told me what his line of work denotes.
‘It is kind of funny.
We steal people’s money
And use some of it to buy their votes.’
So now, at the end of this piece, I have three requests for you:
One, whenever you want the government to spend money on something, consider the moral cost of that spending. There is violence involved.
Two, scrutinise all government spending and ask if it is going towards governance or politics. Will it benefit the citizen or the party in power?
INDIA IPPON DESU
Thursday, July 29, 2021
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Study shows two thirds of Indian population already carry Covid Antibodies
India’s fourth “serosurvey” of the covid pandemic has found neutralising antibodies to the novel coronavirus in 67.6% of people aged over 6, suggesting that more than two in three people have already been exposed to the virus or a vaccine.
The survey, conducted in the last 10 days of June and the first week of July, indicates the scale of the punishing second wave that hit the country in May. The previous survey, done in December and January, found seropositivity in only 24.1% of people tested.
Some of the antibodies detected were due to vaccination rather than infection. India had administered about 300 million doses before the latest survey. The pace has since quickened, and 412 million doses have been given as of 21 July.
About 400 million people remain highly susceptible to the virus, warned Balram Bhargava, director of the Indian Council of Medical Research, which conducted the survey. The distribution of antibodies was geographically uneven, he said, leaving pockets of greater vulnerability around the country. Women and city dwellers had slightly more antibodies than average. The most seropositive age group was people aged 45-60, of whom 77.6% had antibodies. The least seropositive group was children aged 6-9, of whom 57.2% had antibodies.
Measuring deaths
The findings seem to broadly concur with those of a seropositivity survey conducted from March to June this year by the World Health Organization and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which found 55.7% seropositivity in children and 63.5% in adults.2
The results will also lend support to researchers who this week argued that India’s official figures understated its true pandemic death toll by an “order of magnitude.” Their analysis, published in the Indian Express, concluded that about four million people had died from covid-19 in India. The official figure stands at 418 511 deaths.3
The researchers looked at three measuring systems. The first was excess mortality in the civil death registration systems of Indian states, several of which had recently updated figures. This led to an estimate of two million excess deaths in the first wave (to March 2021) and 1.4 million in the second. But, the researchers warned, this system undercounts deaths even in normal years.
The second estimate was based on June’s WHO-AIIMS seropositivity survey (the latest survey by the Indian Council of Medical Research was not yet available) and calculated likely deaths by applying international infection fatality rates estimated by the US Centers for Disease Control, stratified by age. The resulting estimates were 1.5 million deaths in the first wave and 2.4 million in the second.
The third estimate was based on the Consumer Pyramid Household Survey conducted by the Center for the Monitoring of India’s Economy in June, near the end of the second wave. It asked whether anyone in the household had died in the past four months. The answers led the researchers to estimate 3.4 million excess deaths in the first wave and 1.5 million in the second.
Gentler wave
“These numbers are far from definitive,” the authors concede. But roughly four million deaths would correspond to a fatality rate of about 0.5% if the seropositivity survey is correct in estimating about 800 million infections. The official death count, by contrast, would suggest an implausibly low fatality rate of 0.05%.
The first wave was deadlier than most people think, the researchers argue, but the second wave was more acutely felt because it was compressed into a few weeks, overloading hospitals and oxygen supplies.
But the seropositivity survey offers hope of a gentler third wave throughout most of India as the country’s R number starts to tick upward again, reaching 0.95 on 20 July.
Of the people surveyed, 62.2% had no vaccination, 24.8% had had one dose, and 13% were fully vaccinated. Seropositivity was 81% among people who had received one vaccine dose and 89.8% among those who had had both. Among health workers, 10.5% were unvaccinated and seropositivity was 85.2%
The survey, conducted in the last 10 days of June and the first week of July, indicates the scale of the punishing second wave that hit the country in May. The previous survey, done in December and January, found seropositivity in only 24.1% of people tested.
Some of the antibodies detected were due to vaccination rather than infection. India had administered about 300 million doses before the latest survey. The pace has since quickened, and 412 million doses have been given as of 21 July.
About 400 million people remain highly susceptible to the virus, warned Balram Bhargava, director of the Indian Council of Medical Research, which conducted the survey. The distribution of antibodies was geographically uneven, he said, leaving pockets of greater vulnerability around the country. Women and city dwellers had slightly more antibodies than average. The most seropositive age group was people aged 45-60, of whom 77.6% had antibodies. The least seropositive group was children aged 6-9, of whom 57.2% had antibodies.
Measuring deaths
The findings seem to broadly concur with those of a seropositivity survey conducted from March to June this year by the World Health Organization and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, which found 55.7% seropositivity in children and 63.5% in adults.2
The results will also lend support to researchers who this week argued that India’s official figures understated its true pandemic death toll by an “order of magnitude.” Their analysis, published in the Indian Express, concluded that about four million people had died from covid-19 in India. The official figure stands at 418 511 deaths.3
The researchers looked at three measuring systems. The first was excess mortality in the civil death registration systems of Indian states, several of which had recently updated figures. This led to an estimate of two million excess deaths in the first wave (to March 2021) and 1.4 million in the second. But, the researchers warned, this system undercounts deaths even in normal years.
The second estimate was based on June’s WHO-AIIMS seropositivity survey (the latest survey by the Indian Council of Medical Research was not yet available) and calculated likely deaths by applying international infection fatality rates estimated by the US Centers for Disease Control, stratified by age. The resulting estimates were 1.5 million deaths in the first wave and 2.4 million in the second.
The third estimate was based on the Consumer Pyramid Household Survey conducted by the Center for the Monitoring of India’s Economy in June, near the end of the second wave. It asked whether anyone in the household had died in the past four months. The answers led the researchers to estimate 3.4 million excess deaths in the first wave and 1.5 million in the second.
Gentler wave
“These numbers are far from definitive,” the authors concede. But roughly four million deaths would correspond to a fatality rate of about 0.5% if the seropositivity survey is correct in estimating about 800 million infections. The official death count, by contrast, would suggest an implausibly low fatality rate of 0.05%.
The first wave was deadlier than most people think, the researchers argue, but the second wave was more acutely felt because it was compressed into a few weeks, overloading hospitals and oxygen supplies.
But the seropositivity survey offers hope of a gentler third wave throughout most of India as the country’s R number starts to tick upward again, reaching 0.95 on 20 July.
Of the people surveyed, 62.2% had no vaccination, 24.8% had had one dose, and 13% were fully vaccinated. Seropositivity was 81% among people who had received one vaccine dose and 89.8% among those who had had both. Among health workers, 10.5% were unvaccinated and seropositivity was 85.2%
A Consequence of flying during Covid
56 Air India crew, including 5 Vande Bharat pilots, died of Covid till July, govt says
The Indian Pilots’ Guild wrote to PM urging annuity at four times normal coverage, if any pilot becomes permanently or temporarily unfit due to Covid or post-Covid complications.
July 22, 2021 by Taran Deol
New Delhi: Despite various measures to safeguard employees affected by the pandemic, the national carrier, Air India, has lost 56 staff members, including five pilots, to coronavirus till 14 July. In a written response to a Lok Sabha question Thursday, Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation, V.K. Singh confirmed that a total of 3,523 Air India Limited employees have been affected by the virus.
“A number of representations have been received by Air India from employee associations for grant of due compensation and other benefits to the COVID-19 affected employees,” the statement read. Various measures have been undertaken to safeguard the needs of the employees and their families affected due to the pandemic, including a 17-day-long paid quarantine leave, compensation of Rs 10,00,000 for the death of a permanent employee and Rs 5,00,000 for the death of a fixed-term contractual employee. Families of casual/contract workers were paid compensation of Rs 90,000 or two months’ salary.
The national carrier also provided medical facilities such as hospitalisation to those affected, while Covid care centres were opened in several cities to cater specifically to its employees. Vaccination for employees and their families was also conducted free of cost.
Pilots hit hard, blame delay in vaccination
The national carrier lost five pilots — Harsh Tiwary, G.P.S. Gill, Prasad Karmakar, Sandeep Rana and Amitesh Prasad — all of whom operated Vande Bharat flights — India’s repatriation mission. Many blamed the airline management for a delayed vaccination drive.
The Indian Pilots’ Guild wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi early July, urging that “any pilot becoming permanently medically unfit or temporarily medically unfit due to Covid or post Covid complications, must be provided annuity at four times the normal coverage, due to impending increased risk undertaking Vande Bharat flights or air bubble pacts”.
Meanwhile, other airlines have also lost pilots to Covid — Vistara lost two and IndiGo was the worst hit with seven deaths in May during the second wave of the pandemic.
(Edited by Paramita Ghosh)
July 22, 2021 by Taran Deol
New Delhi: Despite various measures to safeguard employees affected by the pandemic, the national carrier, Air India, has lost 56 staff members, including five pilots, to coronavirus till 14 July. In a written response to a Lok Sabha question Thursday, Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation, V.K. Singh confirmed that a total of 3,523 Air India Limited employees have been affected by the virus.
“A number of representations have been received by Air India from employee associations for grant of due compensation and other benefits to the COVID-19 affected employees,” the statement read. Various measures have been undertaken to safeguard the needs of the employees and their families affected due to the pandemic, including a 17-day-long paid quarantine leave, compensation of Rs 10,00,000 for the death of a permanent employee and Rs 5,00,000 for the death of a fixed-term contractual employee. Families of casual/contract workers were paid compensation of Rs 90,000 or two months’ salary.
The national carrier also provided medical facilities such as hospitalisation to those affected, while Covid care centres were opened in several cities to cater specifically to its employees. Vaccination for employees and their families was also conducted free of cost.
Pilots hit hard, blame delay in vaccination
The national carrier lost five pilots — Harsh Tiwary, G.P.S. Gill, Prasad Karmakar, Sandeep Rana and Amitesh Prasad — all of whom operated Vande Bharat flights — India’s repatriation mission. Many blamed the airline management for a delayed vaccination drive.
The Indian Pilots’ Guild wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi early July, urging that “any pilot becoming permanently medically unfit or temporarily medically unfit due to Covid or post Covid complications, must be provided annuity at four times the normal coverage, due to impending increased risk undertaking Vande Bharat flights or air bubble pacts”.
Meanwhile, other airlines have also lost pilots to Covid — Vistara lost two and IndiGo was the worst hit with seven deaths in May during the second wave of the pandemic.
(Edited by Paramita Ghosh)
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Why LPG scheme worked
July 17, 2021 by Rama Bijapurkar
In 2014, to get a gas connection for my domestic worker, I needed to go all the way to the chairperson of a PSU oil company and ask for a special dispensation because the beneficiary was from a lower income group and lived in a chawl in Mumbai with no rent agreement or proof of residence. “It’s a subsidised commodity so we can’t change the rules,” was the reason the oil company gave us for being so hidebound on KYC documents for address proof. She needed LPG, not just for convenience, but for earning more. She needed it to make chapatis for her entire family’s lunch dabbas and then show up for work on time before her office-going women employers left for the day. They paid more than those who were okay with 11 am housework.
In 2019, another domestic worker of mine in Mumbai wanted a gas connection. In addition to working in my house, she ran a food service business for her neighbouring street vendors – she cooked and her husband delivered the food. This time, after five rounds to her gas agent and some coaching from me on asserting her rights, she got her connection and two cylinders.
In 2021, a farm labourer wanted a gas connection in a remote village. I downloaded the forms online and filled them for him; he made one trip to the agency with photographs, Aadhaar card and bank passbook as residence proof (almost all Indian households have bank accounts now). It took three days end-to-end for him to get the gas cylinder at home.
While we are commemorating and celebrating three decades of economic reforms in India, we should also be evaluating, remembering important reform moves that have taken place in the recent past, especially one that actually helped the poor almost immediately and didn’t wait for the trickle-down timeline.
Why LPG worked
All my extended family’s domestic workers across India’s big and small towns have LPG connections now, as do 90 per cent of urban and 59 per cent of rural households (ICE360 survey data). Today, I have great difficulty obtaining even a small bottle of kerosene in Mumbai.
An even more gratifying sign of progress is that money for the LPG subsidy is now coming directly into people’s bank accounts. In 2014, when my domestic worker found that the money had actually come into her account, I remember the excitement, both hers and mine! It was the first broad-based Direct Benefit Transfer scheme in India (and the world’s largest). We had never seen money flow directly into our bank account no questions asked, and no middlemen to be nice to.
Getting a gas refill was a big pain not too long ago. Call the gas agency, get endless ‘engaged’ ringtones, then promises of delivery, and finally, no delivery. The service you got was totally dependent on who you were. Today, my worker orders LPG gas on her cellphone using Marathi IVR. She is not literate, has a gas cylinder picture on her contact list, and gets her cylinder in the same wait time as me, even though I tip the delivery man more than she can afford to.
Then came the ‘Give It Up’ campaign in 2015, where one crore people responded to PM Narendra Modi’s call to give up their LPG subsidy.
I remember a meeting at an oil major many years ago where the topic of selective subsidies had come up for discussion. “Why should Shah Rukh Khan and my driver get the same subsidy,” one of the attendees asked. The answer was that it was too complicated administratively to let some get subsidies and some not. Call me a ‘bhakt’ if you will, but the PM’s idea to ‘Give It Up’ through giveitup.in was sheer genius. It appears that the number of people giving up subsidy has gone down now, but with sustained promotion and an easier user interface, it can grow again.
How Consumer India works
The idea of providing gas connections to low-income households was never considered in the past. “Too expensive to transport” was the refrain. LPG is one thing that cannot be sachet-ised because there is no way to economically make smaller cylinders.
Hindustan Petroleum started an initiative called ‘Rasoi Ghar’ around 2004 — community kitchens with LPG, which was a pay-for-what-you-use facility. But that received lukewarm consumer response because taking your food elsewhere to cook it with others was not everyone’s idea of a great idea. Then came various versions of smokeless chulhas, but none of them was obviously as good as the real thing — LPG. Now, as part of our welfare State, we have given 83 million women below the poverty line access to LPG through Ujjwala Yojana.
Critics say, “Oh, giving connections is easy, but they can’t afford to buy LPG regularly, so what’s the point?”
A report in Hindu Business Line in September 2019 said that the Modi government was “stumped” by the fact that connections had increased but consumption of LPG had not in proportion. Why anyone who knows Consumer India should be “stumped” by this is itself stumping.
We need to explain to the critics that having access to an amenity is itself a huge benefit — one that can be used when you need to. Consumer India has always had, even at middle-income levels, a portfolio of products that are consumed for any purpose, optimising overall benefit and cost. Good detergent powder for office clothes, low-quality detergent for bedsheets and home clothes; two-wheelers for neighbourhood errands and commute to office, and a car to take the family out for social occasions; the list is endless. That’s how Indian families optimise their happiness and balance their budgets. Shampoo sachets, that much-celebrated innovation, now work as regular ‘once-in-a-while’ usage. So, there’s no need to stress about infrequent LPG usage. It’s not like building toilets with no water connection— a kind of deal stopper.
The LPG story of India is remarkable. Let’s celebrate it and push harder for ‘giveitup.in’ so that more low-income households have equality of access. As their incomes grow, they will, by choice, become firewood-free.
Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India. Views are personal.
In 2014, to get a gas connection for my domestic worker, I needed to go all the way to the chairperson of a PSU oil company and ask for a special dispensation because the beneficiary was from a lower income group and lived in a chawl in Mumbai with no rent agreement or proof of residence. “It’s a subsidised commodity so we can’t change the rules,” was the reason the oil company gave us for being so hidebound on KYC documents for address proof. She needed LPG, not just for convenience, but for earning more. She needed it to make chapatis for her entire family’s lunch dabbas and then show up for work on time before her office-going women employers left for the day. They paid more than those who were okay with 11 am housework.
In 2019, another domestic worker of mine in Mumbai wanted a gas connection. In addition to working in my house, she ran a food service business for her neighbouring street vendors – she cooked and her husband delivered the food. This time, after five rounds to her gas agent and some coaching from me on asserting her rights, she got her connection and two cylinders.
In 2021, a farm labourer wanted a gas connection in a remote village. I downloaded the forms online and filled them for him; he made one trip to the agency with photographs, Aadhaar card and bank passbook as residence proof (almost all Indian households have bank accounts now). It took three days end-to-end for him to get the gas cylinder at home.
While we are commemorating and celebrating three decades of economic reforms in India, we should also be evaluating, remembering important reform moves that have taken place in the recent past, especially one that actually helped the poor almost immediately and didn’t wait for the trickle-down timeline.
Why LPG worked
All my extended family’s domestic workers across India’s big and small towns have LPG connections now, as do 90 per cent of urban and 59 per cent of rural households (ICE360 survey data). Today, I have great difficulty obtaining even a small bottle of kerosene in Mumbai.
An even more gratifying sign of progress is that money for the LPG subsidy is now coming directly into people’s bank accounts. In 2014, when my domestic worker found that the money had actually come into her account, I remember the excitement, both hers and mine! It was the first broad-based Direct Benefit Transfer scheme in India (and the world’s largest). We had never seen money flow directly into our bank account no questions asked, and no middlemen to be nice to.
Getting a gas refill was a big pain not too long ago. Call the gas agency, get endless ‘engaged’ ringtones, then promises of delivery, and finally, no delivery. The service you got was totally dependent on who you were. Today, my worker orders LPG gas on her cellphone using Marathi IVR. She is not literate, has a gas cylinder picture on her contact list, and gets her cylinder in the same wait time as me, even though I tip the delivery man more than she can afford to.
Then came the ‘Give It Up’ campaign in 2015, where one crore people responded to PM Narendra Modi’s call to give up their LPG subsidy.
I remember a meeting at an oil major many years ago where the topic of selective subsidies had come up for discussion. “Why should Shah Rukh Khan and my driver get the same subsidy,” one of the attendees asked. The answer was that it was too complicated administratively to let some get subsidies and some not. Call me a ‘bhakt’ if you will, but the PM’s idea to ‘Give It Up’ through giveitup.in was sheer genius. It appears that the number of people giving up subsidy has gone down now, but with sustained promotion and an easier user interface, it can grow again.
How Consumer India works
The idea of providing gas connections to low-income households was never considered in the past. “Too expensive to transport” was the refrain. LPG is one thing that cannot be sachet-ised because there is no way to economically make smaller cylinders.
Hindustan Petroleum started an initiative called ‘Rasoi Ghar’ around 2004 — community kitchens with LPG, which was a pay-for-what-you-use facility. But that received lukewarm consumer response because taking your food elsewhere to cook it with others was not everyone’s idea of a great idea. Then came various versions of smokeless chulhas, but none of them was obviously as good as the real thing — LPG. Now, as part of our welfare State, we have given 83 million women below the poverty line access to LPG through Ujjwala Yojana.
Critics say, “Oh, giving connections is easy, but they can’t afford to buy LPG regularly, so what’s the point?”
A report in Hindu Business Line in September 2019 said that the Modi government was “stumped” by the fact that connections had increased but consumption of LPG had not in proportion. Why anyone who knows Consumer India should be “stumped” by this is itself stumping.
We need to explain to the critics that having access to an amenity is itself a huge benefit — one that can be used when you need to. Consumer India has always had, even at middle-income levels, a portfolio of products that are consumed for any purpose, optimising overall benefit and cost. Good detergent powder for office clothes, low-quality detergent for bedsheets and home clothes; two-wheelers for neighbourhood errands and commute to office, and a car to take the family out for social occasions; the list is endless. That’s how Indian families optimise their happiness and balance their budgets. Shampoo sachets, that much-celebrated innovation, now work as regular ‘once-in-a-while’ usage. So, there’s no need to stress about infrequent LPG usage. It’s not like building toilets with no water connection— a kind of deal stopper.
The LPG story of India is remarkable. Let’s celebrate it and push harder for ‘giveitup.in’ so that more low-income households have equality of access. As their incomes grow, they will, by choice, become firewood-free.
Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India. Views are personal.
Thursday, July 15, 2021
Monday, July 12, 2021
Sunday, July 11, 2021
Animal Based Medicine in China
By Rachel Love Nuwer. Originally published at Undark
IZ P.Y. CHEE vividly remembers the first time she visited a bear farm. It was 2009, and Chee, who was working for a Singapore-based animal welfare group, flew to Laos to tour a Chinese-owned facility. The animals Chee saw “were hardly recognizable as bears,” she later wrote, “because they had rubbed most of their fur off against the bars of the cages and had grown very long toenails through disuse of their feet.”
As at countless other bear farms across China and Southeast Asia, the bears there were being held for their bile. Bear bile — which is either “milked” through a catheter permanently inserted into the animals’ gall bladders or extracted by stabbing large needles into the animals’ abdomens — is popularly prescribed across the region to treat a host of ailments, including, most recently, Covid-19. It is also marketed as an all-around health tonic. Although there is a growing animal welfare and anti-bear farming movement in China, the industry remains powerful.
Seeing the suffering bears made Chee wonder about the cultural and historical forces that brought the animals there — a question that propelled her to conduct exhaustive research on animal medicalization in China. In “Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China,” she details her findings, many of which are distilled from sources never before published in English. Chee, who is now a research fellow and lecturer at the National University of Singapore, also found that, until now, even scholars in China have dedicated scant attention to the history of animal-based medicine, despite the controversy associated with the topic today.
“If Chinese medicine retains an Achilles’ heel in the present century, it is the widespread perception that it is contributing to a holocaust among wild creatures,” Chee writes, “and in so doing supporting a global criminal enterprise” of animal poaching and trafficking. Moreover, she adds, such medicines are often condemned “as being as ineffective as they are unethical,” even by some Chinese physicians. Many of these products are medically useless at best, Chee writes, and in some cases, actually harmful.
Defenders of animal-based Chinese medicine often point to the practice’s 2,000-plus year history. In “Mao’s Bestiary,” however, Chee shows that the roots establishing the use of most animals as ingredients in medicine are not as deeply planted in China’s culture as many believe. Instead, the industry as it exists now was purposefully developed, expanded, and promoted over the last century. Today, it is more closely linked to politics and profit than to ancient culture and tradition. This revelation has important implications for both species conservation and for public health, Chee argues, because it leaves room for “possibilities of choice and change.”
Chee focuses on the evolution of animal-based medicine throughout the tumultuous period of modern China’s formation, from the 1950s through the 1980s. These decades encompassed the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and, finally, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
While animal-derived medicines do have a long history in China, Chee found that their use in the past was nowhere near the “startlingly abundant” level they are at today. Around 400 animals were cited in the 16th century “Compendium of Materia Medica,” for example, whereas more than 2,300 are listed today in pharmacopeias.
Many newly medicalized species exist only on distant continents, such as jaguars in South and Central America. Nor is China’s use of animals in traditional medicine solely based on Chinese innovation, Chee found; ideas, approaches, and technologies from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Japan, and the Western world all heavily influenced the industry’s development. So while animal-based products may still “hold the aura of tradition,” Chee writes, in fact, most are the products of a profit-driven expansion.
Efforts to abolish traditional medicine and replace it with a science-based approach, primarily inspired by Japan, began in the 1920s and continued through the early days of a Communist government that was racing to build an industrialized economy. While researchers acknowledged that some especially efficacious Chinese herbs were worth investigating to find their active ingredients, animal-based remedies were “initially undervalued and underdeveloped” by the new regime as it worked to build up its pharmaceutical sector, Chee writes.
Traditional doctors pushed back on the attempt to phase out their industry, however, and argued that the synergistic effects of the plant, animal, and mineral ingredients of their practice were too complex to be nailed down in a lab. To appease both groups, the state-owned drug-making sector decided that doctors trained in Chinese and Western medicine should learn from each other, “scientizing” Chinese medicine and seeking new innovations from tradition.
“To learn from the Soviet Union” was also a popular phrase in China at this time. Following the example set by the USSR, China was especially interested in creating its own pharmaceuticals from local ingredients to become self-sufficient. Soviet interest in animal-based folk medicine and the USSR’s own practice of farming deer for medicinal ingredients soon “provided modern and scientific sanction for the Chinese fascination with faunal drugs,” Chee writes.
During the Great Leap Forward’s period of rapid industrialization, “animals as well as plants were swept up in this nationwide project,” Chee continues. China expanded its export of high-end medicinal products like deer antler, rhino horn, and tiger bone, especially to Chinese expatriates. To meet steep quotas, authorities promoted the creation of “laboratory farms” for scaling up production. Entrepreneurs at these farms were also encouraged to find more uses for existing animal parts, and to engineer additional uses for new parts and species.
“Once a medicinal animal was farmed, there was pressure or incentive to justify the use of all of its parts, regardless of previous traditions that had often been quite selective as to which part should actually be taken as medicine, and for what purpose,” Chee writes. Medicine farms popped up for a host of additional species, including geckos, ground beetles, scorpions, snakes, and seahorses.
Wildlife farming also began being presented as something benefiting conservation because it allegedly spared wild animals from being hunted. In fact, it usually had the opposite effect by stimulating the market and relying on hunters to replenish farm stocks, Chee notes. While she does not delve deeply into the impact this has had on animal populations within and outside China, many sources today argue that demand for traditional medicine all but emptied the country’s forests of tigers, pangolins, and other highly sought after species.
During the purges and upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the export of luxury medicines such as rhino horn were scaled up to generate much-needed revenue. Back home, however, a stark lack of medical care and supplies inspired an emphasis on “miracle cures” derived from cheaper, more common animals.
Chicken blood therapy — “the direct injection of chicken blood (from live chickens) into human bodies” — was representative of this time, Chee writes. The doctor who founded the treatment claimed chicken blood therapy could cure more than 100 conditions, and it was heavily promoted throughout the country, becoming “emblematic of economical grassroots innovations” and “the very expression of ‘red medicine,’” Chee writes.
This practice started to be phased out in 1968 when news surfaced of people dying after being injected with chicken blood. But similar remedies soon took its place, including ones that used goose or duck blood, lizard eggs, or toad heads. These new remedies were marketed as magic-like cures for serious and otherwise untreatable conditions, including cancer — “an attribute that has become standard in the marketing of many animal-based drugs today,” Chee writes.
After Deng came to power in 1978, wildlife farming and animal-based medicine “became even more popular as part of the official policy to enrich farmers,” Chee continues. The government-supported bear bile industry — which was originally inspired by facilities in North Korea and continues to flourish today — was one major result of this period, as was the proliferation of tiger farms.
Policy shifts also had significant ramifications for the regulation of Chinese medicine, and its impact on consumers and the environment. The forestry ministry was “given decision-making power over wild medicinal animals,” Chee writes, “and would essentially manage China’s forests as extraction sites.” Meanwhile, the health ministry only had full regulatory control of patented drugs, so companies selling animal-based medicines could bypass health or efficacy regulations and make extravagant, unchallenged claims about their products’ curative value.
Chinese medicine has become globalized over the last three decades, and animal-based products have “continued to play a central, if increasingly problematic, role,” Chee writes. The industry is assailed in the international media for its role in driving species declines, and clashes regularly occur within China between proponents of animal-based medicines and those who value wildlife and conservation. “Many middle-class Chinese, both on the mainland and in the diaspora, and within Chinese medicine itself, have been on the front lines in the battle to save endangered species from poaching and consumption,” Chee points out.
“Mao’s Bestiary” went to press in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Chee writes in the introduction that the likely link between Covid-19’s emergence and wild animals fundamentally changes the debate by making wildlife use a global public health issue.
Yet despite the undeniable threats posed by zoonotic diseases, animal-based traditional medicine remains an “immensely profitable, and thus politically influential” force in China, she continues. As evidence, Chinese authorities not only did not ban animal-based medicine during the pandemic, but actually promoted remedies containing bear bile for treating Covid-19.
As for shaping the industry’s future to mitigate the dangers for both wildlife and humans, Chee looks not to officials but to Chinese consumers, who can choose to boycott animal-based medicines. There is a large and growing animal welfare movement in China, so this could be more than just a pipe dream. “Whether they will reinvent the pharmacology of Chinese medicine as a practice less reliant on animals, endangered or otherwise,” she concludes, “remains a vital question.”
IZ P.Y. CHEE vividly remembers the first time she visited a bear farm. It was 2009, and Chee, who was working for a Singapore-based animal welfare group, flew to Laos to tour a Chinese-owned facility. The animals Chee saw “were hardly recognizable as bears,” she later wrote, “because they had rubbed most of their fur off against the bars of the cages and had grown very long toenails through disuse of their feet.”
As at countless other bear farms across China and Southeast Asia, the bears there were being held for their bile. Bear bile — which is either “milked” through a catheter permanently inserted into the animals’ gall bladders or extracted by stabbing large needles into the animals’ abdomens — is popularly prescribed across the region to treat a host of ailments, including, most recently, Covid-19. It is also marketed as an all-around health tonic. Although there is a growing animal welfare and anti-bear farming movement in China, the industry remains powerful.
Seeing the suffering bears made Chee wonder about the cultural and historical forces that brought the animals there — a question that propelled her to conduct exhaustive research on animal medicalization in China. In “Mao’s Bestiary: Medicinal Animals and Modern China,” she details her findings, many of which are distilled from sources never before published in English. Chee, who is now a research fellow and lecturer at the National University of Singapore, also found that, until now, even scholars in China have dedicated scant attention to the history of animal-based medicine, despite the controversy associated with the topic today.
“If Chinese medicine retains an Achilles’ heel in the present century, it is the widespread perception that it is contributing to a holocaust among wild creatures,” Chee writes, “and in so doing supporting a global criminal enterprise” of animal poaching and trafficking. Moreover, she adds, such medicines are often condemned “as being as ineffective as they are unethical,” even by some Chinese physicians. Many of these products are medically useless at best, Chee writes, and in some cases, actually harmful.
Defenders of animal-based Chinese medicine often point to the practice’s 2,000-plus year history. In “Mao’s Bestiary,” however, Chee shows that the roots establishing the use of most animals as ingredients in medicine are not as deeply planted in China’s culture as many believe. Instead, the industry as it exists now was purposefully developed, expanded, and promoted over the last century. Today, it is more closely linked to politics and profit than to ancient culture and tradition. This revelation has important implications for both species conservation and for public health, Chee argues, because it leaves room for “possibilities of choice and change.”
Chee focuses on the evolution of animal-based medicine throughout the tumultuous period of modern China’s formation, from the 1950s through the 1980s. These decades encompassed the early years of the People’s Republic of China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and, finally, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.
While animal-derived medicines do have a long history in China, Chee found that their use in the past was nowhere near the “startlingly abundant” level they are at today. Around 400 animals were cited in the 16th century “Compendium of Materia Medica,” for example, whereas more than 2,300 are listed today in pharmacopeias.
Many newly medicalized species exist only on distant continents, such as jaguars in South and Central America. Nor is China’s use of animals in traditional medicine solely based on Chinese innovation, Chee found; ideas, approaches, and technologies from the Soviet Union, North Korea, Japan, and the Western world all heavily influenced the industry’s development. So while animal-based products may still “hold the aura of tradition,” Chee writes, in fact, most are the products of a profit-driven expansion.
Efforts to abolish traditional medicine and replace it with a science-based approach, primarily inspired by Japan, began in the 1920s and continued through the early days of a Communist government that was racing to build an industrialized economy. While researchers acknowledged that some especially efficacious Chinese herbs were worth investigating to find their active ingredients, animal-based remedies were “initially undervalued and underdeveloped” by the new regime as it worked to build up its pharmaceutical sector, Chee writes.
Traditional doctors pushed back on the attempt to phase out their industry, however, and argued that the synergistic effects of the plant, animal, and mineral ingredients of their practice were too complex to be nailed down in a lab. To appease both groups, the state-owned drug-making sector decided that doctors trained in Chinese and Western medicine should learn from each other, “scientizing” Chinese medicine and seeking new innovations from tradition.
“To learn from the Soviet Union” was also a popular phrase in China at this time. Following the example set by the USSR, China was especially interested in creating its own pharmaceuticals from local ingredients to become self-sufficient. Soviet interest in animal-based folk medicine and the USSR’s own practice of farming deer for medicinal ingredients soon “provided modern and scientific sanction for the Chinese fascination with faunal drugs,” Chee writes.
During the Great Leap Forward’s period of rapid industrialization, “animals as well as plants were swept up in this nationwide project,” Chee continues. China expanded its export of high-end medicinal products like deer antler, rhino horn, and tiger bone, especially to Chinese expatriates. To meet steep quotas, authorities promoted the creation of “laboratory farms” for scaling up production. Entrepreneurs at these farms were also encouraged to find more uses for existing animal parts, and to engineer additional uses for new parts and species.
“Once a medicinal animal was farmed, there was pressure or incentive to justify the use of all of its parts, regardless of previous traditions that had often been quite selective as to which part should actually be taken as medicine, and for what purpose,” Chee writes. Medicine farms popped up for a host of additional species, including geckos, ground beetles, scorpions, snakes, and seahorses.
Wildlife farming also began being presented as something benefiting conservation because it allegedly spared wild animals from being hunted. In fact, it usually had the opposite effect by stimulating the market and relying on hunters to replenish farm stocks, Chee notes. While she does not delve deeply into the impact this has had on animal populations within and outside China, many sources today argue that demand for traditional medicine all but emptied the country’s forests of tigers, pangolins, and other highly sought after species.
During the purges and upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, the export of luxury medicines such as rhino horn were scaled up to generate much-needed revenue. Back home, however, a stark lack of medical care and supplies inspired an emphasis on “miracle cures” derived from cheaper, more common animals.
Chicken blood therapy — “the direct injection of chicken blood (from live chickens) into human bodies” — was representative of this time, Chee writes. The doctor who founded the treatment claimed chicken blood therapy could cure more than 100 conditions, and it was heavily promoted throughout the country, becoming “emblematic of economical grassroots innovations” and “the very expression of ‘red medicine,’” Chee writes.
This practice started to be phased out in 1968 when news surfaced of people dying after being injected with chicken blood. But similar remedies soon took its place, including ones that used goose or duck blood, lizard eggs, or toad heads. These new remedies were marketed as magic-like cures for serious and otherwise untreatable conditions, including cancer — “an attribute that has become standard in the marketing of many animal-based drugs today,” Chee writes.
After Deng came to power in 1978, wildlife farming and animal-based medicine “became even more popular as part of the official policy to enrich farmers,” Chee continues. The government-supported bear bile industry — which was originally inspired by facilities in North Korea and continues to flourish today — was one major result of this period, as was the proliferation of tiger farms.
Policy shifts also had significant ramifications for the regulation of Chinese medicine, and its impact on consumers and the environment. The forestry ministry was “given decision-making power over wild medicinal animals,” Chee writes, “and would essentially manage China’s forests as extraction sites.” Meanwhile, the health ministry only had full regulatory control of patented drugs, so companies selling animal-based medicines could bypass health or efficacy regulations and make extravagant, unchallenged claims about their products’ curative value.
Chinese medicine has become globalized over the last three decades, and animal-based products have “continued to play a central, if increasingly problematic, role,” Chee writes. The industry is assailed in the international media for its role in driving species declines, and clashes regularly occur within China between proponents of animal-based medicines and those who value wildlife and conservation. “Many middle-class Chinese, both on the mainland and in the diaspora, and within Chinese medicine itself, have been on the front lines in the battle to save endangered species from poaching and consumption,” Chee points out.
“Mao’s Bestiary” went to press in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, and Chee writes in the introduction that the likely link between Covid-19’s emergence and wild animals fundamentally changes the debate by making wildlife use a global public health issue.
Yet despite the undeniable threats posed by zoonotic diseases, animal-based traditional medicine remains an “immensely profitable, and thus politically influential” force in China, she continues. As evidence, Chinese authorities not only did not ban animal-based medicine during the pandemic, but actually promoted remedies containing bear bile for treating Covid-19.
As for shaping the industry’s future to mitigate the dangers for both wildlife and humans, Chee looks not to officials but to Chinese consumers, who can choose to boycott animal-based medicines. There is a large and growing animal welfare movement in China, so this could be more than just a pipe dream. “Whether they will reinvent the pharmacology of Chinese medicine as a practice less reliant on animals, endangered or otherwise,” she concludes, “remains a vital question.”
Tuesday, July 06, 2021
Vivek Kaul : Of Government taxes, Bitcoin and the Future of money
Anything can be money if individuals on both sides of the economic transaction are ready to accept it as money. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens – A Brief History of Humankind: “Money is anything that people are willing to use in order to represent systematically the value of other things for the purpose of exchanging goods and services.” Of course, for something to emerge as a form of money at a societal level, it needs to be widely accepted.
This is the hope that the believers in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been peddling for a while to make them look like attractive investments. That one day when enough number of people across the world are tired with the government backed fiat money or paper money as it more popularly known, cryptos will take over.
Of course, you can’t wait for that to happen, and you need to buy bitcoin now. This is one of the ways in which the fear of missing out or FOMO, is created.
So how logical is this argument? How much should we trust it? These are questions well worth asking.If you look at the history of money, different things have been money at different points of time. In the prisoner-of-war camps of the Second World War, cigarettes emerged as a form of money. They are a great example of the fact that anything can be money if both the sides of the economic transaction are willing to accept so. Also, any system where conventional money is not around, like in a prison, does not continue to stay in a vacuum, and newer forms of money emerge.
Different agriculture commodities including tobacco have been money at different points of time. So have been different metals, everything from iron and bronze to silver and gold.
Hence, different things have been money at different points of time, during the course of human history. What this tells us is that as long as enough people accept something as a form of money, it can continue functioning as money, until it doesn’t.
This means that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies can also become a form of money, over a period of time. Nevertheless, if we leave it at just this, it will be lazy reasoning at best. Also, this is where things get a tad complicated.
Allow me to explain.
Pure paper money or fiat money or money not backed by any commodity (gold, silver, tobacco, iron, copper etc.) has been around for many centuries, nevertheless, it has flourished and been widely accepted only in the last hundred years.
Why is that the case? Why do people happily and readily accept money not backed by any commodity as a form of payment, on most days?
As L Randall Wray writes in Modern Money Theory:
“The typical answer provided in textbooks is that you will accept your national currency because you know others will accept it. In other words, it is accepted because it is accepted. The typical explanation thus relies on an “infinite regress”: John accepts it because he thinks Mary will accept it, and she accepts it because she thinks Walmart will probably take it.”
To put it a tad simplistically, paper money is accepted because paper money is accepted. Are we saying there is a mass delusion at work? Is fiat money fiction?
As Jacob Goldstein writes in Money – The True Story of a Made-Up Thing:
“Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money is fundamentally, unalterably unalterably social. The social part of money—the “shared” in “shared fiction”—is exactly what makes it money. Otherwise, it’s just a chunk of metal, or a piece of paper, or, in the case of most money today, just a number stored on a bank’s computers.”
Now that maybe true, but that’s not important. What is important is to understand what keeps this shared fiction, this mass delusion, this myth, or whatever else you might want to call it, going. And this is where the government, which issues fiat money and controls the fiat money system, comes in.
For the government, it is important that its citizens continue to believe in the shared fiction of fiat money and continue accepting it as a form of payment. What keeps it going? Before answering this question, it is important to understand that there are three things that make a government a government: a) The right to tax. b) The right to legal violence. c) The right to create money out of thin air.
Two out of three rights are important to the context of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The right to tax and the right to create money out of thin air. In the past, I have talked extensively about the fact that any government letting bitcoin and cryptocurrencies operate smoothly is essentially giving away its right to create money out of thin air. And they aren’t exactly waiting to do it. (You can read about this here, here and here).
So, what about the right to tax that any government has?
As Wray writes:
“One of the most important powers claimed by sovereign government is the authority to levy and collect taxes (and other payments made to government, including fees and fines). Tax obligations are levied in the national money of account: Dollars in the United States, Canada, and Australia; Yen in Japan; Yuan in China; and Pesos in Mexico. Further, the sovereign government also determines what can be delivered to satisfy the tax obligation. In most developed nations, it is the government’s own currency that is accepted in payment of taxes.”
And not just in developed nations, even in lesser developed ones, the governments accept tax payments in the fiat money of the country. This is what keeps the fiat money system going. As Wray writes: “It is because anyone with tax obligations can use currency to eliminate these liabilities that government currency is in demand, and thus can be used in purchases or in payment of private obligations. The government cannot easily force others to use its currency in private payments, or to hoard it in piggybanks, but government can force use of currency to meet the tax obligations that it imposes.”
In simple terms, government taxes can only be paid in fiat money and that creates demand for fiat money or paper money not backed by anything, and keeps the system going.
A counter argument to this might be that while this might be true in countries where taxes form a significant part of the economy, but how does it work in countries where taxes are not a significant part of the economy. Why does the paper money system still hold?
The answer lies in the overall structure. Companies which operate in a country need to pay taxes to the government in fiat money. So, they carry out their business in fiat money; accept and make payments in it. This means their employees, suppliers (their employees), contractors (their employees), distributors (their employees) and so on, everyone gets paid in or must pay in paper money as well.
When people who are a part of the overall business system, which needs to pay different kinds of taxes, get paid in paper money, they go out and spend that paper money. Hence, individuals and institutions who sell to these people, must then accept paper money. So, the cycle keeps going. And there is demand for paper money or fiat money.
Also, it is worth mentioning here that taxes form a significant part of the economy in any developed country in the world. For any monetary revolution to happen, the governments in these countries need to buy the idea of bitcoin and other cryptos, and also actively promote them. El Salvador classifying bitcoin in a legal tender isn’t going to help that cause. Or the fact that Nigerians have taken on to bitcoin like no one else. These are exceptions to the rule.
The larger point here is that the structure of fiat money being needed to pay government taxes, keeps the paper money system going and will continue to keep it going in the time to come. The demand for fiat money will remain. As long as that is the case, bitcoin and other cryptos will be a sideshow at best, keeping the believers interested, at least for a while.
Also, governments are not going to give up on their right to create money out of thin air. This explains why money central banks are now in the process of planning and/or launching their respective central bank digital currencies.
Of course, people who do not like to pay their fair share of taxes also do not like the idea of being a part of the formal financial system (which is what fiat money system on its whole is at the end of the day). Therefore, people who are a part of the black economy like to convert their profits on which they haven’t paid cash, into other assets like real estate (held benami), gold (easy to store), precious stones (easy to move around) etc. It also explains why people operating in the black illegal economy love bitcoin and other new forms of crypto.
On the flip side, those who run the fiat money system have been abusing it post 2008, when the financial crisis broke out, and post late 2019, when the world was hit by the Covid pandemic.
A lot of fiat money has been created out of thin air, to get economic activity and economic growth going again. This is offered as a major reason by crypto believers, as to why the world should be shunning paper money and buying bitcoin and other cryptos. There is a lot of paper money being created out of thin air, but only 21 million bitcoin are only ever going to be mined.
Hence, the cryptosystem is built around the concept of scarcity whereas with more and more paper money being created, high inflation can become the order of the day and wealth stored in fiat money can lose value at a very fast pace.
The trouble with this argument is that while more bitcoin cannot be created, anyone and everyone, who understands these things, can create a new cryptocurrency. Which is why there are thousands of cryptos going around. As renowned investor Ray Dalio put it in a note on bitcoin: “Competition will, play a role in determining bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices. In fact, I assume that better ones will come along and displace this one because that is the way the evolution of everything works.” Given this, in the years to come, gold will still be around, about bitcoin, we really don’t know.
So, the point is you don’t know which crypto is going to be around in the days to come. And given that, how do can you ensure that the value of your wealth remains the same, by investing in crypto. Plus, at the risk of sounding cliched, the price volatility of cryptos continues to remain a huge risk.
Something which falls by 50% in a matter of months, cannot even aim to be an asset class, forget being a form of money. The crypto believers now offer the example of stablecoins, which are basically cryptos pegged to paper or fiat money. They have price stability. But their stability comes from being linked to fiat money in the first place.
As Mark Carney writes in Value(s) — Building a Better World For All: “The highest-profile examples of stablecoins… are best thought of as payments systems rather than money per se since they derive their moneyness from the underlying sovereign currencies.”
To conclude, a small story. Before the crypto crash happened, a gentleman on Twitter very confidently told me that he would rather buy dogecoin, which was launched as a joke on bitcoin, than the US dollar. This is because the dogecoin wasn’t being created out of thin air (which is not true, given that the amount of dogecoin goes up every year, but we will ignore that here) and the dollar was.
His point was that the US dollar was not backed by anything. The US dollar is not backed by anything in the physical sense of the term, but it is backed by the US sovereign, the biggest economy in the world, perhaps the most innovative economy in the world and the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Also, the dollar has an exorbitant privilege. While other countries need to earn it, the US can simply print it. Which explains why the demand of for the dollar continues to remain solid, despite its abuse.
Yes, to that extent, it is not backed by anything and bitcoin and other cryptos are backed by everything.
What I can’t get my head around is that if you can’t trust the government (and there are reasons not to), how can you trust a few random guys launching their own crypto in their own backyard. Something which can be moved up and down by a few tweets. How is this fiction better than the government’s fiction? I really don’t have an answer for that.
This is the hope that the believers in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have been peddling for a while to make them look like attractive investments. That one day when enough number of people across the world are tired with the government backed fiat money or paper money as it more popularly known, cryptos will take over.
Of course, you can’t wait for that to happen, and you need to buy bitcoin now. This is one of the ways in which the fear of missing out or FOMO, is created.
So how logical is this argument? How much should we trust it? These are questions well worth asking.If you look at the history of money, different things have been money at different points of time. In the prisoner-of-war camps of the Second World War, cigarettes emerged as a form of money. They are a great example of the fact that anything can be money if both the sides of the economic transaction are willing to accept so. Also, any system where conventional money is not around, like in a prison, does not continue to stay in a vacuum, and newer forms of money emerge.
Different agriculture commodities including tobacco have been money at different points of time. So have been different metals, everything from iron and bronze to silver and gold.
Hence, different things have been money at different points of time, during the course of human history. What this tells us is that as long as enough people accept something as a form of money, it can continue functioning as money, until it doesn’t.
This means that bitcoin and cryptocurrencies can also become a form of money, over a period of time. Nevertheless, if we leave it at just this, it will be lazy reasoning at best. Also, this is where things get a tad complicated.
Allow me to explain.
Pure paper money or fiat money or money not backed by any commodity (gold, silver, tobacco, iron, copper etc.) has been around for many centuries, nevertheless, it has flourished and been widely accepted only in the last hundred years.
Why is that the case? Why do people happily and readily accept money not backed by any commodity as a form of payment, on most days?
As L Randall Wray writes in Modern Money Theory:
“The typical answer provided in textbooks is that you will accept your national currency because you know others will accept it. In other words, it is accepted because it is accepted. The typical explanation thus relies on an “infinite regress”: John accepts it because he thinks Mary will accept it, and she accepts it because she thinks Walmart will probably take it.”
To put it a tad simplistically, paper money is accepted because paper money is accepted. Are we saying there is a mass delusion at work? Is fiat money fiction?
As Jacob Goldstein writes in Money – The True Story of a Made-Up Thing:
“Money is a made-up thing, a shared fiction. Money is fundamentally, unalterably unalterably social. The social part of money—the “shared” in “shared fiction”—is exactly what makes it money. Otherwise, it’s just a chunk of metal, or a piece of paper, or, in the case of most money today, just a number stored on a bank’s computers.”
Now that maybe true, but that’s not important. What is important is to understand what keeps this shared fiction, this mass delusion, this myth, or whatever else you might want to call it, going. And this is where the government, which issues fiat money and controls the fiat money system, comes in.
For the government, it is important that its citizens continue to believe in the shared fiction of fiat money and continue accepting it as a form of payment. What keeps it going? Before answering this question, it is important to understand that there are three things that make a government a government: a) The right to tax. b) The right to legal violence. c) The right to create money out of thin air.
Two out of three rights are important to the context of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The right to tax and the right to create money out of thin air. In the past, I have talked extensively about the fact that any government letting bitcoin and cryptocurrencies operate smoothly is essentially giving away its right to create money out of thin air. And they aren’t exactly waiting to do it. (You can read about this here, here and here).
So, what about the right to tax that any government has?
As Wray writes:
“One of the most important powers claimed by sovereign government is the authority to levy and collect taxes (and other payments made to government, including fees and fines). Tax obligations are levied in the national money of account: Dollars in the United States, Canada, and Australia; Yen in Japan; Yuan in China; and Pesos in Mexico. Further, the sovereign government also determines what can be delivered to satisfy the tax obligation. In most developed nations, it is the government’s own currency that is accepted in payment of taxes.”
And not just in developed nations, even in lesser developed ones, the governments accept tax payments in the fiat money of the country. This is what keeps the fiat money system going. As Wray writes: “It is because anyone with tax obligations can use currency to eliminate these liabilities that government currency is in demand, and thus can be used in purchases or in payment of private obligations. The government cannot easily force others to use its currency in private payments, or to hoard it in piggybanks, but government can force use of currency to meet the tax obligations that it imposes.”
In simple terms, government taxes can only be paid in fiat money and that creates demand for fiat money or paper money not backed by anything, and keeps the system going.
A counter argument to this might be that while this might be true in countries where taxes form a significant part of the economy, but how does it work in countries where taxes are not a significant part of the economy. Why does the paper money system still hold?
The answer lies in the overall structure. Companies which operate in a country need to pay taxes to the government in fiat money. So, they carry out their business in fiat money; accept and make payments in it. This means their employees, suppliers (their employees), contractors (their employees), distributors (their employees) and so on, everyone gets paid in or must pay in paper money as well.
When people who are a part of the overall business system, which needs to pay different kinds of taxes, get paid in paper money, they go out and spend that paper money. Hence, individuals and institutions who sell to these people, must then accept paper money. So, the cycle keeps going. And there is demand for paper money or fiat money.
Also, it is worth mentioning here that taxes form a significant part of the economy in any developed country in the world. For any monetary revolution to happen, the governments in these countries need to buy the idea of bitcoin and other cryptos, and also actively promote them. El Salvador classifying bitcoin in a legal tender isn’t going to help that cause. Or the fact that Nigerians have taken on to bitcoin like no one else. These are exceptions to the rule.
The larger point here is that the structure of fiat money being needed to pay government taxes, keeps the paper money system going and will continue to keep it going in the time to come. The demand for fiat money will remain. As long as that is the case, bitcoin and other cryptos will be a sideshow at best, keeping the believers interested, at least for a while.
Also, governments are not going to give up on their right to create money out of thin air. This explains why money central banks are now in the process of planning and/or launching their respective central bank digital currencies.
Of course, people who do not like to pay their fair share of taxes also do not like the idea of being a part of the formal financial system (which is what fiat money system on its whole is at the end of the day). Therefore, people who are a part of the black economy like to convert their profits on which they haven’t paid cash, into other assets like real estate (held benami), gold (easy to store), precious stones (easy to move around) etc. It also explains why people operating in the black illegal economy love bitcoin and other new forms of crypto.
On the flip side, those who run the fiat money system have been abusing it post 2008, when the financial crisis broke out, and post late 2019, when the world was hit by the Covid pandemic.
A lot of fiat money has been created out of thin air, to get economic activity and economic growth going again. This is offered as a major reason by crypto believers, as to why the world should be shunning paper money and buying bitcoin and other cryptos. There is a lot of paper money being created out of thin air, but only 21 million bitcoin are only ever going to be mined.
Hence, the cryptosystem is built around the concept of scarcity whereas with more and more paper money being created, high inflation can become the order of the day and wealth stored in fiat money can lose value at a very fast pace.
The trouble with this argument is that while more bitcoin cannot be created, anyone and everyone, who understands these things, can create a new cryptocurrency. Which is why there are thousands of cryptos going around. As renowned investor Ray Dalio put it in a note on bitcoin: “Competition will, play a role in determining bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices. In fact, I assume that better ones will come along and displace this one because that is the way the evolution of everything works.” Given this, in the years to come, gold will still be around, about bitcoin, we really don’t know.
So, the point is you don’t know which crypto is going to be around in the days to come. And given that, how do can you ensure that the value of your wealth remains the same, by investing in crypto. Plus, at the risk of sounding cliched, the price volatility of cryptos continues to remain a huge risk.
Something which falls by 50% in a matter of months, cannot even aim to be an asset class, forget being a form of money. The crypto believers now offer the example of stablecoins, which are basically cryptos pegged to paper or fiat money. They have price stability. But their stability comes from being linked to fiat money in the first place.
As Mark Carney writes in Value(s) — Building a Better World For All: “The highest-profile examples of stablecoins… are best thought of as payments systems rather than money per se since they derive their moneyness from the underlying sovereign currencies.”
To conclude, a small story. Before the crypto crash happened, a gentleman on Twitter very confidently told me that he would rather buy dogecoin, which was launched as a joke on bitcoin, than the US dollar. This is because the dogecoin wasn’t being created out of thin air (which is not true, given that the amount of dogecoin goes up every year, but we will ignore that here) and the dollar was.
His point was that the US dollar was not backed by anything. The US dollar is not backed by anything in the physical sense of the term, but it is backed by the US sovereign, the biggest economy in the world, perhaps the most innovative economy in the world and the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Also, the dollar has an exorbitant privilege. While other countries need to earn it, the US can simply print it. Which explains why the demand of for the dollar continues to remain solid, despite its abuse.
Yes, to that extent, it is not backed by anything and bitcoin and other cryptos are backed by everything.
What I can’t get my head around is that if you can’t trust the government (and there are reasons not to), how can you trust a few random guys launching their own crypto in their own backyard. Something which can be moved up and down by a few tweets. How is this fiction better than the government’s fiction? I really don’t have an answer for that.
Sunday, July 04, 2021
Meritocracy: John H Cochrane Blog
Adrian Woolridge wrote a thought-provoking essay titled "Meritocracy, Not Democracy, Is the Golden Ticket to Growth," advertising a forthcoming book.
Meritocracy, the secret sauce of growth?
To Woolridge, meritocracy is the secret sauce of prosperity:
The surest sign that a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy, as some liberals like to think, or the leanness of its government, as some free-marketers imagine, but its commitment to meritocracy. Singapore is a soft authoritarian power. But it has transformed itself in a few decades from a poverty-stricken swamp into one of the world’s most prosperous countries, with a higher standard of living and a longer life expectancy than its old colonial master, because it is perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of meritocracy. The Scandinavian countries have some of the world’s largest governments and most generous welfare states. But they retain their positions at the top of international league tables of prosperity and productivity in large part because they are committed to high-quality education, good government and, beneath their communitarian veneer, competition; in other words — meritocracy.
By contrast, countries that have resisted meritocracy have either stagnated or hit their growth limits. Greece, a byword for nepotism and “clientelism” (using public-sector jobs to reward partisan cronies), has struggled for decades. Italy, the homeland of nepotismo, enjoyed a postwar boom like France and Germany but has been stagnating since the mid-1990s....
Democracy alone does not lead to growth, and likewise growth does not swiftly lead to democracy. Look at China vs. India, and many democratic, at least in the sense of leaders chosen by fairly free elections, but poor countries around the world.
For a generation, political economists have been looking more deeply at institutions -- rule of law, property rights, etc. -- as a secret sauce. "Meritocracy" is a good buzzword for a different idea of what is centrally important.
...countries that favor recruiting professional managers through open competition have higher growth rates than those that favor recruiting amateur managers through personal connections. America has the highest overall management score, followed by Germany and Japan. Rich-world laggards such as Portugal and Greece, and big emerging-market countries such as India, have a long tail of un-meritocratic and therefore badly managed firms.
The essay goes on, condensing much more evidence.
It is plausible that meritocracy is especially important now, as businesses globalize and incorporate IT. The rising skill premium and larger reach of global corporations means that it is ever more important to match skilled people with the positions that require skill.
His bottom line
... The idea that there is a necessary relationship between democracy and growth rests on a false positive. The really robust relationship is between meritocracy and growth. ..
the evidence of economics is overwhelming: Meritocracy promotes prosperity, and dismantling meritocracy will reduce it. Those who support the current campaign against merit need to admit that they are opting for lower growth. I am not an expert on the huge political/economic literature on the correlates of growth. This sounds reasonable, but the Acemoglus, Barros, etc. of the world may have important things to say on the evidence. Still, it's a novel idea and let's follow it.
We should distinguish "leading country" growth that must come from innovation, and "catchup growth" that simply uses current ideas most efficiently. Woolridge, and the rest of this essay, is, I think, mostly about the latter. For almost all of the world's population, that's what matters. And in my view, the US is a good deal below the efficient frontier as well.
Non-meritocracy
Some evidence on the other side:
Another way to measure the prosperity-producing power of meritocracy is to look at what happens if you remove it. The City College of New York had a well-deserved reputation as the “Harvard of the proletariat,” taking thousands of poor adolescents, many of them the offspring of immigrants, and turning them into the successful citizens of a knowledge society — doctors, lawyers, academics and, in the case of 10 alumni, Nobel Prize winners. Then in 1970 the university introduced an open-access regime, admitting anyone who had graduated from the city’s high schools. The result was a simultaneous boom in student numbers and a collapse in academic standards. By 1978, 2 out of 3 students admitted to the college required remedial teaching in reading, writing and arithmetic. Dropout rates surged. Talented scholars left. A college that had once specialized in producing the rocket fuel of a successful society — talent — became synonymous with protests and sit-ins. In 1999, a task force led by former Yale president Benno Schmidt pronounced the larger City University system to be “in a spiral of decline.” The college only began to recover after it abandoned open admissions as a failed experiment.
This is nice as it illustrates where modern universities are going. It is however not obviously germane to the larger point. Maybe City College moved to an equally important role of providing remedial education to people ill-served by the city's disastrous public high schools. Maybe City College fed meritocratic middle managers, and left to Chicago the business of producing Nobel Prize winners. Really, that City College failed in this new role is the more trenchant criticism. But the decline of meritocracy in favor of other goals is indeed the post 1968 trend of modern universities.
Woolridge offers the story of Venice
...Venice is one of Italy’s least favored cities when it comes to natural resources. Yet in the early Middle Ages it was the richest city in Europe. Venetian sailors — there were some 36,000 of them in the 14th century — popped up as far away as China. Venetian merchants invented the prototype of today’s joint-stock companies, the commenda. The same merchants used the proceeds of ingenuity and dynamism to build some of the world’s most spectacular buildings and patronize some of its most glorious arts.
This Manhattan of the Middle Ages owed its success in large part to its unusual openness to talent: Rather than a hereditary ruler, the standard at the time, Venice had a doge who was selected by the ruling families; rather than a royal court, it had a council of wise men whose job it was to advise — and constrain — the doge. Social mobility was commonplace. Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of the University of Chicago Pearson Institute calculate that in government documents in the years 960, 971 and 982, new names made up 69%, 81% and 65%, respectively, of those recorded. Institutions became more inclusive: From the late 12th century onward, a hundred new members were added every year to the Ducal Council, which kept the doge under tight control.
Yet from the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the most powerful families took to rigging the system in favor of their children. In 1315 they succeeded in locking their position at the top of society for good by publishing the “Book of Gold” (Libro D’Oro) — an official list of Venetian noble families that was intended to keep the social order exactly as it was. Venetians called this La Serrata: the closure.
La Serrata spelled the end of Venice as the world’s most successful city-state. A self-satisfied oligarchy used its power to hoard opportunities and strangle innovation...
It's a nice story, but I don't think we need to go back to the Middle Ages to see the pattern over and over. Societies in which people who make important decisions are chosen by skill, not connections, prosper. I hope the book will have a longer list of more recent examples. Military examples seem to me particularly useful. The tension between giving command decisions by political connections vs. meritocracy is always present, and both military disasters and successes often traced to the results.
China
On to the dragon in the room:
The West — and particularly the United States — is turning against the meritocratic idea precisely when the greatest geopolitical rival it has ever faced, China, is embracing meritocracy more tightly.
Though China's government is run by "the insider dealing of this rather grubby elite,"
The Chinese educational system is determinedly meritocratic: Children compete to get into the best nursery schools so that they can get into the best secondary schools and then into the best universities. Examinations — most important, the university entrance examination or gaokao that students take at 18 — regulate the race to get ahead. This examination system, which draws on the tradition of civil service examinations that were administered for more than a thousand years, is now more geared to produce scientists and engineers rather than Confucian officials.
The Chinese Communist Party claims that it is trying to create a system based on “political meritocracy,” ...routinely recruiting the brightest young students into its ranks. The party’s Organization Department acts as a giant human resources department keeping records on high-fliers across the country. Provincial governors and university presidents are evaluated on the basis of their success in hitting a number of targets.... the West should at least prepare itself for the possibility that, albeit messily, China is turning itself into a giant Singapore, determined to use meritocracy as a tool of growth and social progress.
Equity and opportunity
Here is the paradox. The US paternalistic/aristocratic elite is running away from meritocracy under the banner of "social justice" and "racial equity." Yet meritocracy throughout history has been a great equalizer, a great leveler, the main way that excluded out-groups could get ahead. US universities originally adopted standardized tests and dropped racial quotas e.g. against Jews, and discovered a wealth of talent that did not come from "holistic assessment" at the time, i.e. did you go to Andover and Exeter and come from "the right" families. Standardized tests, and the meritocracy they represent was and is one of the great equalizers of opportunity and gates of social and economic mobility, allowing people to prove themselves.
I would argue that the idea of merit is one of humanity’s most successful privilege-busting inventions.
And I would agree.
The abandonment of meritocracy
Woolridge is naturally worried about trends in the US and the West:
Meritocracy is under assault from all directions. For progressives, it is a tool of White male privilege...
... San Francisco’s Lowell School is one of the most successful schools in the country and has given thousands of poor immigrant children (among others) a chance of an elite education. The San Francisco Board of Education has now banned it from using admission tests and introduced a lottery system instead, with the school commissioner, Alison Collins, pronouncing that meritocracy is “racist” and “the antithesis of fair.” Elite schools in New York and Boston are also under threat. Programs for the gifted and talented are being dismantled across the country. Universities have been reducing the importance of standardized admissions tests, with some going so far as to make testing optional, and putting more emphasis on “holistic assessment” instead.
...Companies are introducing formal or informal quotas in the name of “equity” (which is increasingly taking the place of equality of opportunity as a measure of justice).
...Meritocracy is one of the great building blocks of modernity, along with democracy, capitalism and liberalism. ... Is it really the case that meritocracy is a tool of White male privilege? W.E.B. Du Bois and Ruth Bader Ginsburg might have something different to say. Are lotteries or holistic assessments really better ways of distributing educational opportunities than standardized tests? Most of us would hesitate before flying with a pilot who had been chosen by lottery. Do we really want a society in which group identities trump individual abilities? A glance at the history of India or the former Yugoslavia suggests that we should at least pause before taking this leap.
This is a deeper point. Many political systems, both democratic and autocratic, carve up power and benefits based on group markers -- class, ethnicity, religion, race, parentage, caste. Not many who do so are meritocratic, prosperous, or peaceful.
Politics
Woolridge moves on to the political implications. This is interesting, but here I disagree a bit.
As we now know, "Capitalism and Freedom" was not entirely right, that economic growth would quickly lead to political freedom.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Western intellectuals convinced themselves that they had discovered a firm link between economic growth and democracy. ...policy makers welcoming China and Russia into the global order on the grounds that they would inevitably evolve into liberal democracies, and a group of neoconservatives even arguing in favor of “regime change” in the Middle East on the theory that democracy and prosperity would naturally replace the toppled regimes.
Woolridge thinks that meritocratic autocracies (an oxymoron!) pose a threat, given our self-inflicted wounds.
A cohort of rising powers are trying a different approach: linking meritocracy with autocracy of various degrees of hardness. Lee Kuan Yew recognized that the best way to enjoy Western levels of prosperity was not to introduce one-person-one vote but to borrow Western mechanisms such as an elite civil service, recruited through open competition and dedicated to corruption-free government, and graft it onto older Mandarin traditions of the rule of the scholar-bureaucrat. Since then a growing number of countries, led by mighty China, have tried to imitate his model....Countries as diverse as Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates have chosen authoritarian modernization over democracy.
Here I disagree. Yes, meritocratic autocracies can prosper for a while, but not for long. The autocracy part always eventually takes over. The group in power wants to keep power, and wants to keep their children in power (even communism turns to hereditary monarchy, see North Korea). Yes, Singapore. But it's hard to think of a prosperous meritocratic autocracy that has lasted as such for several transitions of power.
And if democracy is not automatically meritocratic, using political power to reward interest groups, autocracy is definitely not automatically meritocratic! Overall, it's hard to make a case that autocracy is more likely to be meritocratic than democracy. Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Russia... So Woolridge must have in mind some other secret sauce that produces a stable, long-term meritocratic autocracy, that survives changes of power over generations. I have no idea what that might be.
Democracy is not great at producing technocratic efficiency. Democracy is not great at stemming the army of rent-seekers. Indeed, democracy's greater responsiveness to desires of organized groups often means responsiveness to the desires of rent-seeking groups demanding protection. But democracy is good at the main thing it is designed for: stopping tyranny; Kicking the bums out when they get too entrenched.
Autocracy is not automatically meritocracy! It is usually the opposite. Democracy here in the US was invented to resist an exclusionary, anti-meritocratic autocracy, King George's UK. At a minimum, when you get a bad King all you can do is wait 30 years for them to die.
We also forget that autocrats are often a good deal weaker than democracies. A democratic government at least has a measure of legitimacy. Autocrats worry about waking up the next morning, and have to please the interest groups that keep them in power. It is not obvious that autocracy is better at quieting rent-seekers than democracy. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. Quieting rent seekers, avoiding tyranny, and avoiding a bloodbath when power must eventually change hands are three main problems of government. It is not obvious that autocracy does better on any of the three, despite democracy's tumult. And despite the occasional benevolent autocrat who produces some meritocracy and prosperity, for as long as one lifetime.
Though our woke elite aristocracy is moving headlong away from meritocracy, it's not obvious the voters are going along with it. The last election was very close, and a surprisingly large number of the supposed beneficiaries of noblesse oblige voted Republican. The meritocratic ideal, equality of opportunity not statistical equity of various groups, runs deep in America and surfaces every four years.
Here also I think Woolridge confuses the argument somewhat. The "-cracy" part of the word means rule, as in aristocracy, bureaucracy, autocracy and so forth. Meritocracy, strictly speaking, is about merit and skill as the selector for positions of power in government. But much of what Woolridge talks about is the looser sense of meritocracy -- whether decision-making positions in private companies are awarded on merit or on family contacts, ethic group, or other trust mechanisms. Meritocracy in universities is not about who controls the government. One can have meritocratic institutions in an autocratic and un-meritocratic government and vice versa.
His real complaint is that institutions -- corporations, universities, etc. -- in the West are moving away from meritocracy. As an economist, that always smells to me of lack of competition. A society can only afford non-meritocratic institutions if those institutions do not have to compete. That is in part political -- politics offers protection from competition, often precisely to allow non-meritocratic private structures. But the surest solution is not to try for a cultural revival of meritocracy in government-protected uncompetitive industries and institutions (universities). The surest solution is more competition, so institutions have no choice but to be meritocratic.
Thus I also disagree with Woolridge's political musings,
The West has thrived materially over the past century or so in large part because it managed to fuse democracy with meritocracy. America’s Founders understood that the reason for embracing democracy was not that it made us rich, but that it gave ordinary people a say in how their country was governed. They also understood that democracy could actually destroy prosperity if it wasn’t diluted with a degree of meritocracy. They built meritocratic restraints into the Constitution by giving senators six-year terms and giving Supreme Court justices jobs for life. They also put limits on the power of the state to interfere in the wider economy. One reason meritocracy flourished was that the U.S. made it easy for companies to claim limited liability without declaring an explicit public purpose. Another was that the U.S.’s lax immigration laws and vast territories attracted tens of millions of ambitious and energetic people from more crowded and tradition-bound societies.
Other Western countries pursued a similar policy of fusing meritocracy with democracy: France and Britain competed to produce the world’s most elite civil services, and the European Union imposed even more restraints on democratic overreach than the United States did. During the golden years of the 1980s and 1990s this formula worked because the democratic part of the formula generated political legitimacy and the meritocratic part generated good government and economic growth.
In part, this depends on what one means by "democracy." I analyze the same facts by noting the US is not a "democracy," in the sense that each issue is decided by 50% + 1 votes. We are a representative democracy, with strong protections for electoral minorities. Or at least we were -- we are trending to much more 50% + 1 and much less protections in the form of limited government and personal rights. But to say these structures are a "fusing of democracy with meritocracy" seems to me profoundly to miss the point of property and other rights, limited government, and structures that requires more than a transient 50%+1 majority to make huge changes, including transferring money and who gets what job responsibility around.
The current attack on meritocracy is not just a threat to the prosperity of particular countries. It is a threat to the prosperity of the whole democratic world. Prosperity will increasingly be identified with top-down authoritarian regimes that make up for their failure to give their people a voice by giving them jobs and improving their welfare.
Here I disagree again. Authoritarian regimes that buy support by "giving" jobs and handing out money -- most of them -- are neither meritocratic nor prosperous. A few countries, South Korea before it became democratic, Singapore, China for a while, combined meritocratic economics institutions and lower-level government, and generated prosperity. For a while. South Korea became democratic, and China is facing the conundrum that meritocracy at the top means loss of power. In any case, these countries allowed their citizens to make themselves jobs and wealth, with a quid pro quo of stay quiet politically. For a while. While the West may be trying to shoot itself in the foot, it is not clear that autocracies will provide a durable attractive alternative -- to anyone but the autocrats!
Democratic countries in turn will be associated with economic stagnation, populist revolts and racial disharmony, as people try to get ahead in a low-growth environment by emphasizing their membership in defined groups rather than their individual merits.
This is indeed our danger. But those pesky peasants with pitchforks are darn meritocratic at bottom.
All in all though, it's a very provocative idea that meritocracy has been a building block of prosperity, one that many countries struggle to achieve, and that we are now deliberately throwing away.
Updates
In response to thoughtful comments below. Yes, meritocracy is about whether people are selected for positions of decision making or power based on skill, talent, and preparation. This is not about redistribution. One can have a very meritocratic society with lots of redistribution. The question is whether a society (and government) redistributes by handing out checks, by giving people high paying jobs of little consequence, or by allocating actual decision making powers based on considerations other than skill. Those who pursue the latter have a point. Social status and power in society are about more than money, and tokenism is pretty repugnant. A meritocratic redistributionist society must face the dilemma of keeping enough incentives for the talented to put in the hard work to acquire skills, and to match their talents with opportunities; and for the talented and skilled to put in the incredible hard work it takes to start, innovate and manage companies. But all that is for another day. This post and essay are not about redistribution.
Meritocracy, the secret sauce of growth?
To Woolridge, meritocracy is the secret sauce of prosperity:
The surest sign that a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy, as some liberals like to think, or the leanness of its government, as some free-marketers imagine, but its commitment to meritocracy. Singapore is a soft authoritarian power. But it has transformed itself in a few decades from a poverty-stricken swamp into one of the world’s most prosperous countries, with a higher standard of living and a longer life expectancy than its old colonial master, because it is perhaps the world’s leading practitioner of meritocracy. The Scandinavian countries have some of the world’s largest governments and most generous welfare states. But they retain their positions at the top of international league tables of prosperity and productivity in large part because they are committed to high-quality education, good government and, beneath their communitarian veneer, competition; in other words — meritocracy.
By contrast, countries that have resisted meritocracy have either stagnated or hit their growth limits. Greece, a byword for nepotism and “clientelism” (using public-sector jobs to reward partisan cronies), has struggled for decades. Italy, the homeland of nepotismo, enjoyed a postwar boom like France and Germany but has been stagnating since the mid-1990s....
Democracy alone does not lead to growth, and likewise growth does not swiftly lead to democracy. Look at China vs. India, and many democratic, at least in the sense of leaders chosen by fairly free elections, but poor countries around the world.
For a generation, political economists have been looking more deeply at institutions -- rule of law, property rights, etc. -- as a secret sauce. "Meritocracy" is a good buzzword for a different idea of what is centrally important.
...countries that favor recruiting professional managers through open competition have higher growth rates than those that favor recruiting amateur managers through personal connections. America has the highest overall management score, followed by Germany and Japan. Rich-world laggards such as Portugal and Greece, and big emerging-market countries such as India, have a long tail of un-meritocratic and therefore badly managed firms.
The essay goes on, condensing much more evidence.
It is plausible that meritocracy is especially important now, as businesses globalize and incorporate IT. The rising skill premium and larger reach of global corporations means that it is ever more important to match skilled people with the positions that require skill.
His bottom line
... The idea that there is a necessary relationship between democracy and growth rests on a false positive. The really robust relationship is between meritocracy and growth. ..
the evidence of economics is overwhelming: Meritocracy promotes prosperity, and dismantling meritocracy will reduce it. Those who support the current campaign against merit need to admit that they are opting for lower growth. I am not an expert on the huge political/economic literature on the correlates of growth. This sounds reasonable, but the Acemoglus, Barros, etc. of the world may have important things to say on the evidence. Still, it's a novel idea and let's follow it.
We should distinguish "leading country" growth that must come from innovation, and "catchup growth" that simply uses current ideas most efficiently. Woolridge, and the rest of this essay, is, I think, mostly about the latter. For almost all of the world's population, that's what matters. And in my view, the US is a good deal below the efficient frontier as well.
Non-meritocracy
Some evidence on the other side:
Another way to measure the prosperity-producing power of meritocracy is to look at what happens if you remove it. The City College of New York had a well-deserved reputation as the “Harvard of the proletariat,” taking thousands of poor adolescents, many of them the offspring of immigrants, and turning them into the successful citizens of a knowledge society — doctors, lawyers, academics and, in the case of 10 alumni, Nobel Prize winners. Then in 1970 the university introduced an open-access regime, admitting anyone who had graduated from the city’s high schools. The result was a simultaneous boom in student numbers and a collapse in academic standards. By 1978, 2 out of 3 students admitted to the college required remedial teaching in reading, writing and arithmetic. Dropout rates surged. Talented scholars left. A college that had once specialized in producing the rocket fuel of a successful society — talent — became synonymous with protests and sit-ins. In 1999, a task force led by former Yale president Benno Schmidt pronounced the larger City University system to be “in a spiral of decline.” The college only began to recover after it abandoned open admissions as a failed experiment.
This is nice as it illustrates where modern universities are going. It is however not obviously germane to the larger point. Maybe City College moved to an equally important role of providing remedial education to people ill-served by the city's disastrous public high schools. Maybe City College fed meritocratic middle managers, and left to Chicago the business of producing Nobel Prize winners. Really, that City College failed in this new role is the more trenchant criticism. But the decline of meritocracy in favor of other goals is indeed the post 1968 trend of modern universities.
Woolridge offers the story of Venice
...Venice is one of Italy’s least favored cities when it comes to natural resources. Yet in the early Middle Ages it was the richest city in Europe. Venetian sailors — there were some 36,000 of them in the 14th century — popped up as far away as China. Venetian merchants invented the prototype of today’s joint-stock companies, the commenda. The same merchants used the proceeds of ingenuity and dynamism to build some of the world’s most spectacular buildings and patronize some of its most glorious arts.
This Manhattan of the Middle Ages owed its success in large part to its unusual openness to talent: Rather than a hereditary ruler, the standard at the time, Venice had a doge who was selected by the ruling families; rather than a royal court, it had a council of wise men whose job it was to advise — and constrain — the doge. Social mobility was commonplace. Daron Acemoglu of MIT and James Robinson of the University of Chicago Pearson Institute calculate that in government documents in the years 960, 971 and 982, new names made up 69%, 81% and 65%, respectively, of those recorded. Institutions became more inclusive: From the late 12th century onward, a hundred new members were added every year to the Ducal Council, which kept the doge under tight control.
Yet from the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the most powerful families took to rigging the system in favor of their children. In 1315 they succeeded in locking their position at the top of society for good by publishing the “Book of Gold” (Libro D’Oro) — an official list of Venetian noble families that was intended to keep the social order exactly as it was. Venetians called this La Serrata: the closure.
La Serrata spelled the end of Venice as the world’s most successful city-state. A self-satisfied oligarchy used its power to hoard opportunities and strangle innovation...
It's a nice story, but I don't think we need to go back to the Middle Ages to see the pattern over and over. Societies in which people who make important decisions are chosen by skill, not connections, prosper. I hope the book will have a longer list of more recent examples. Military examples seem to me particularly useful. The tension between giving command decisions by political connections vs. meritocracy is always present, and both military disasters and successes often traced to the results.
China
On to the dragon in the room:
The West — and particularly the United States — is turning against the meritocratic idea precisely when the greatest geopolitical rival it has ever faced, China, is embracing meritocracy more tightly.
Though China's government is run by "the insider dealing of this rather grubby elite,"
The Chinese educational system is determinedly meritocratic: Children compete to get into the best nursery schools so that they can get into the best secondary schools and then into the best universities. Examinations — most important, the university entrance examination or gaokao that students take at 18 — regulate the race to get ahead. This examination system, which draws on the tradition of civil service examinations that were administered for more than a thousand years, is now more geared to produce scientists and engineers rather than Confucian officials.
The Chinese Communist Party claims that it is trying to create a system based on “political meritocracy,” ...routinely recruiting the brightest young students into its ranks. The party’s Organization Department acts as a giant human resources department keeping records on high-fliers across the country. Provincial governors and university presidents are evaluated on the basis of their success in hitting a number of targets.... the West should at least prepare itself for the possibility that, albeit messily, China is turning itself into a giant Singapore, determined to use meritocracy as a tool of growth and social progress.
Equity and opportunity
Here is the paradox. The US paternalistic/aristocratic elite is running away from meritocracy under the banner of "social justice" and "racial equity." Yet meritocracy throughout history has been a great equalizer, a great leveler, the main way that excluded out-groups could get ahead. US universities originally adopted standardized tests and dropped racial quotas e.g. against Jews, and discovered a wealth of talent that did not come from "holistic assessment" at the time, i.e. did you go to Andover and Exeter and come from "the right" families. Standardized tests, and the meritocracy they represent was and is one of the great equalizers of opportunity and gates of social and economic mobility, allowing people to prove themselves.
I would argue that the idea of merit is one of humanity’s most successful privilege-busting inventions.
And I would agree.
The abandonment of meritocracy
Woolridge is naturally worried about trends in the US and the West:
Meritocracy is under assault from all directions. For progressives, it is a tool of White male privilege...
... San Francisco’s Lowell School is one of the most successful schools in the country and has given thousands of poor immigrant children (among others) a chance of an elite education. The San Francisco Board of Education has now banned it from using admission tests and introduced a lottery system instead, with the school commissioner, Alison Collins, pronouncing that meritocracy is “racist” and “the antithesis of fair.” Elite schools in New York and Boston are also under threat. Programs for the gifted and talented are being dismantled across the country. Universities have been reducing the importance of standardized admissions tests, with some going so far as to make testing optional, and putting more emphasis on “holistic assessment” instead.
...Companies are introducing formal or informal quotas in the name of “equity” (which is increasingly taking the place of equality of opportunity as a measure of justice).
...Meritocracy is one of the great building blocks of modernity, along with democracy, capitalism and liberalism. ... Is it really the case that meritocracy is a tool of White male privilege? W.E.B. Du Bois and Ruth Bader Ginsburg might have something different to say. Are lotteries or holistic assessments really better ways of distributing educational opportunities than standardized tests? Most of us would hesitate before flying with a pilot who had been chosen by lottery. Do we really want a society in which group identities trump individual abilities? A glance at the history of India or the former Yugoslavia suggests that we should at least pause before taking this leap.
This is a deeper point. Many political systems, both democratic and autocratic, carve up power and benefits based on group markers -- class, ethnicity, religion, race, parentage, caste. Not many who do so are meritocratic, prosperous, or peaceful.
Politics
Woolridge moves on to the political implications. This is interesting, but here I disagree a bit.
As we now know, "Capitalism and Freedom" was not entirely right, that economic growth would quickly lead to political freedom.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Western intellectuals convinced themselves that they had discovered a firm link between economic growth and democracy. ...policy makers welcoming China and Russia into the global order on the grounds that they would inevitably evolve into liberal democracies, and a group of neoconservatives even arguing in favor of “regime change” in the Middle East on the theory that democracy and prosperity would naturally replace the toppled regimes.
Woolridge thinks that meritocratic autocracies (an oxymoron!) pose a threat, given our self-inflicted wounds.
A cohort of rising powers are trying a different approach: linking meritocracy with autocracy of various degrees of hardness. Lee Kuan Yew recognized that the best way to enjoy Western levels of prosperity was not to introduce one-person-one vote but to borrow Western mechanisms such as an elite civil service, recruited through open competition and dedicated to corruption-free government, and graft it onto older Mandarin traditions of the rule of the scholar-bureaucrat. Since then a growing number of countries, led by mighty China, have tried to imitate his model....Countries as diverse as Rwanda and the United Arab Emirates have chosen authoritarian modernization over democracy.
Here I disagree. Yes, meritocratic autocracies can prosper for a while, but not for long. The autocracy part always eventually takes over. The group in power wants to keep power, and wants to keep their children in power (even communism turns to hereditary monarchy, see North Korea). Yes, Singapore. But it's hard to think of a prosperous meritocratic autocracy that has lasted as such for several transitions of power.
And if democracy is not automatically meritocratic, using political power to reward interest groups, autocracy is definitely not automatically meritocratic! Overall, it's hard to make a case that autocracy is more likely to be meritocratic than democracy. Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Russia... So Woolridge must have in mind some other secret sauce that produces a stable, long-term meritocratic autocracy, that survives changes of power over generations. I have no idea what that might be.
Democracy is not great at producing technocratic efficiency. Democracy is not great at stemming the army of rent-seekers. Indeed, democracy's greater responsiveness to desires of organized groups often means responsiveness to the desires of rent-seeking groups demanding protection. But democracy is good at the main thing it is designed for: stopping tyranny; Kicking the bums out when they get too entrenched.
Autocracy is not automatically meritocracy! It is usually the opposite. Democracy here in the US was invented to resist an exclusionary, anti-meritocratic autocracy, King George's UK. At a minimum, when you get a bad King all you can do is wait 30 years for them to die.
We also forget that autocrats are often a good deal weaker than democracies. A democratic government at least has a measure of legitimacy. Autocrats worry about waking up the next morning, and have to please the interest groups that keep them in power. It is not obvious that autocracy is better at quieting rent-seekers than democracy. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the case. Quieting rent seekers, avoiding tyranny, and avoiding a bloodbath when power must eventually change hands are three main problems of government. It is not obvious that autocracy does better on any of the three, despite democracy's tumult. And despite the occasional benevolent autocrat who produces some meritocracy and prosperity, for as long as one lifetime.
Though our woke elite aristocracy is moving headlong away from meritocracy, it's not obvious the voters are going along with it. The last election was very close, and a surprisingly large number of the supposed beneficiaries of noblesse oblige voted Republican. The meritocratic ideal, equality of opportunity not statistical equity of various groups, runs deep in America and surfaces every four years.
Here also I think Woolridge confuses the argument somewhat. The "-cracy" part of the word means rule, as in aristocracy, bureaucracy, autocracy and so forth. Meritocracy, strictly speaking, is about merit and skill as the selector for positions of power in government. But much of what Woolridge talks about is the looser sense of meritocracy -- whether decision-making positions in private companies are awarded on merit or on family contacts, ethic group, or other trust mechanisms. Meritocracy in universities is not about who controls the government. One can have meritocratic institutions in an autocratic and un-meritocratic government and vice versa.
His real complaint is that institutions -- corporations, universities, etc. -- in the West are moving away from meritocracy. As an economist, that always smells to me of lack of competition. A society can only afford non-meritocratic institutions if those institutions do not have to compete. That is in part political -- politics offers protection from competition, often precisely to allow non-meritocratic private structures. But the surest solution is not to try for a cultural revival of meritocracy in government-protected uncompetitive industries and institutions (universities). The surest solution is more competition, so institutions have no choice but to be meritocratic.
Thus I also disagree with Woolridge's political musings,
The West has thrived materially over the past century or so in large part because it managed to fuse democracy with meritocracy. America’s Founders understood that the reason for embracing democracy was not that it made us rich, but that it gave ordinary people a say in how their country was governed. They also understood that democracy could actually destroy prosperity if it wasn’t diluted with a degree of meritocracy. They built meritocratic restraints into the Constitution by giving senators six-year terms and giving Supreme Court justices jobs for life. They also put limits on the power of the state to interfere in the wider economy. One reason meritocracy flourished was that the U.S. made it easy for companies to claim limited liability without declaring an explicit public purpose. Another was that the U.S.’s lax immigration laws and vast territories attracted tens of millions of ambitious and energetic people from more crowded and tradition-bound societies.
Other Western countries pursued a similar policy of fusing meritocracy with democracy: France and Britain competed to produce the world’s most elite civil services, and the European Union imposed even more restraints on democratic overreach than the United States did. During the golden years of the 1980s and 1990s this formula worked because the democratic part of the formula generated political legitimacy and the meritocratic part generated good government and economic growth.
In part, this depends on what one means by "democracy." I analyze the same facts by noting the US is not a "democracy," in the sense that each issue is decided by 50% + 1 votes. We are a representative democracy, with strong protections for electoral minorities. Or at least we were -- we are trending to much more 50% + 1 and much less protections in the form of limited government and personal rights. But to say these structures are a "fusing of democracy with meritocracy" seems to me profoundly to miss the point of property and other rights, limited government, and structures that requires more than a transient 50%+1 majority to make huge changes, including transferring money and who gets what job responsibility around.
The current attack on meritocracy is not just a threat to the prosperity of particular countries. It is a threat to the prosperity of the whole democratic world. Prosperity will increasingly be identified with top-down authoritarian regimes that make up for their failure to give their people a voice by giving them jobs and improving their welfare.
Here I disagree again. Authoritarian regimes that buy support by "giving" jobs and handing out money -- most of them -- are neither meritocratic nor prosperous. A few countries, South Korea before it became democratic, Singapore, China for a while, combined meritocratic economics institutions and lower-level government, and generated prosperity. For a while. South Korea became democratic, and China is facing the conundrum that meritocracy at the top means loss of power. In any case, these countries allowed their citizens to make themselves jobs and wealth, with a quid pro quo of stay quiet politically. For a while. While the West may be trying to shoot itself in the foot, it is not clear that autocracies will provide a durable attractive alternative -- to anyone but the autocrats!
Democratic countries in turn will be associated with economic stagnation, populist revolts and racial disharmony, as people try to get ahead in a low-growth environment by emphasizing their membership in defined groups rather than their individual merits.
This is indeed our danger. But those pesky peasants with pitchforks are darn meritocratic at bottom.
All in all though, it's a very provocative idea that meritocracy has been a building block of prosperity, one that many countries struggle to achieve, and that we are now deliberately throwing away.
Updates
In response to thoughtful comments below. Yes, meritocracy is about whether people are selected for positions of decision making or power based on skill, talent, and preparation. This is not about redistribution. One can have a very meritocratic society with lots of redistribution. The question is whether a society (and government) redistributes by handing out checks, by giving people high paying jobs of little consequence, or by allocating actual decision making powers based on considerations other than skill. Those who pursue the latter have a point. Social status and power in society are about more than money, and tokenism is pretty repugnant. A meritocratic redistributionist society must face the dilemma of keeping enough incentives for the talented to put in the hard work to acquire skills, and to match their talents with opportunities; and for the talented and skilled to put in the incredible hard work it takes to start, innovate and manage companies. But all that is for another day. This post and essay are not about redistribution.
Saturday, July 03, 2021
What does "Dragon Man" Fossil tell us about Evolution
A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or "Dragon Man." Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing June 25 in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives -- and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.
"The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world," says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. "This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens."
The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City of the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could hold a brain comparable in size to modern humans' but had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. "While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species," says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.
Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. "Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish," remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.
Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.
"We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don't know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well," says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.
Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. "It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens," says Ni.
Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. "The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years," says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.
The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. "Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations," says Ni. "We found our long-lost sister lineage."
"The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world," says author Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University. "This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens."
The cranium was reportedly discovered in the 1930s in Harbin City of the Heilongjiang province of China. The massive skull could hold a brain comparable in size to modern humans' but had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth. "While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species," says Ji, leading to its new species designation of Homo longi.
Scientists believe the cranium came from a male individual, approximately 50 years old, living in a forested, floodplain environment as part of a small community. "Like Homo sapiens, they hunted mammals and birds, and gathered fruits and vegetables, and perhaps even caught fish," remarks author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University. Given that the Harbin individual was likely very large in size as well as the location where the skull was found, researchers suggest H. longi may have been adapted for harsh environments, allowing them to disperse throughout Asia.
Using a series of geochemical analyses, Ji, Ni, and their team dated the Harbin fossil to at least 146,000 years, placing it in the Middle Pleistocene, a dynamic era of human species migration. They hypothesize that H. longi and H. sapiens could have encountered each other during this era.
"We see multiple evolutionary lineages of Homo species and populations co-existing in Asia, Africa, and Europe during that time. So, if Homo sapiens indeed got to East Asia that early, they could have a chance to interact with H. longi, and since we don't know when the Harbin group disappeared, there could have been later encounters as well," says author Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Nature History Museum in London.
Looking farther back in time, the researchers also find that Homo longi is one of our closest hominin relatives, even more closely related to us than Neanderthals. "It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens," says Ni.
Their reconstruction of the human tree of life also suggests that the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals existed even further back in time. "The divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may be even deeper in evolutionary history than generally believed, over one million years," says Ni. If true, we likely diverged from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years earlier than scientists had thought.
The researchers say that findings gathered from the Harbin cranium have the potential to rewrite major elements of human evolution. Their analysis into the life history of Homo longi suggest they were strong, robust humans whose potential interactions with Homo sapiens may have shaped our history in turn. "Altogether, the Harbin cranium provides more evidence for us to understand Homo diversity and evolutionary relationships among these diverse Homo species and populations," says Ni. "We found our long-lost sister lineage."
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