Ben Mathew Economics
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Blog
  • Recommended
  • Mailing List
  • Contact

Reading Hayek in Beijing

5/26/2013

0 Comments

 
The Wall Street Journal has an article on Yang Jisheng, who experienced the tragedy of large-scale central planning:
In the spring of 1959, Yang Jisheng, then an 18-year-old scholarship student at a boarding school in China's Hubei Province, got an unexpected visit from a childhood friend. "Your father is starving to death!" the friend told him. "Hurry back, and take some rice if you can."

Granted leave from his school, Mr. Yang rushed to his family farm. "The elm tree in front of our house had been reduced to a barkless trunk," he recalled, "and even its roots had been dug up." Entering his home, he found his father "half-reclined on his bed, his eyes sunken and lifeless, his face gaunt, the skin creased and flaccid . . . I was shocked with the realization that the term skin and bones referred to something so horrible and cruel."

Mr. Yang's father would die within three days. Yet it would take years before Mr. Yang learned that what happened to his father was not an isolated incident. He was one of the 36 million Chinese who succumbed to famine between 1958 and 1962.
Jisheng went on to write a book on that man-made famine, Tombstone, which came out last year to critical acclaim:

“Tombstone easily supersedes all previous chronicles of the famine, and is one of the best insider accounts of the Party’s inner workings during this period, offering an unrivalled picture of socioeconomic engineering within a rigid ideological framework . . . meticulously researched.” —Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker

Jisheng was influenced by Hayek's Road to Serfdom. I haven't read that book. But I have read Hayek's article on the price system, The Use of Knowledge in Society, which is easily one of the most important works ever written in economics. Whenever we're in the mood for a little socioeconomic engineering, we should read and re-read that article and think hard about whether we really know enough to intervene and override the price system.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Ben Mathew

    Author of Economics: The Remarkable Story of How the Economy Works

    Archives

    October 2016
    September 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.