Comment of the Day: Kaleberg: Noah Smith: China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy: "Maybe communism just needed better central planners. Chinese policy has been heavily influenced by the teachings of Qian Xuesen...
...a onetime professor at JPL before he was kicked out of the county during the 1950s red scare. While much of his work was on nuclear weapons and the surveillance state, his systems engineering approach is widely used in China. It isn't a magic bullet, and it has its dark side, but it avoids a lot of ideological traps that both capitalists and more traditional communists fall into. Whenever I think about running China, I am always glad that I am not the one riding that tiger. I don't expect the Chinese miracle to run forever, but everyone running the place knows what is likely to happen if the tiger ever stops...
#shouldread
