China and relationships of trust

Ridiculous. This guy obviously have no idea how Chinese villages and families work.

 

I've found a long time ago that anything Friedman writes needs to be taken with the same skepticism as someone on Fox News...

 

He expresses a common POV what is necessary for an economy to work, degrees of trust and free cooperation that requires trust as one ingredient. The analyses on the reason for Chinese trust fall very short, but I still remember the emphasis my Chinese teacher put on family size and support when explaining Chinese. In an urban environment, you are more anonymous and self reliant than in a rural environment and have usually less family around you. If I understand demographics correct there has been a massive inflow from rural regions to metropolitan regions and these people must adjust to this new and changing environment of rapidly expanding cities. Such a process takes more than a generation before things have settled down.

 

The fact is, the Communists did not destroy any forms of trust based on village and family social structure. It seems like Western journalists can throw up empty claims without any need for backing up those claims, so long as the claims cast the CCP in a negative light.

 

I'm a NYT picks! That's funny. I didn't know that until now. I had to do a summary since there was a limit on how much one could write so I didn't even think I got my points across.

 

Richmond?

 

Bingo! Surprising since the New York Times is highly hostile towards China of late and many of those picks were not.

 

Yesterday I read in my newspaper a review of a book by a Belgian psychiatrist Paul Verhaeghe against neoliberalism. It said among other things that traditionally man is seen as a social being, that Locke and Hume started to point in the direction of individualism ( understandable in their society ) which soon let to the notion of "social contract", that liberalism still accepted that humans were social beings, but that neoliberalism lost that notion ( "Society doesn't exist. There are just men and women" ). The result has been that while deregulation is said to be the purpose, when society doesn't exist we need rules and contracts. And because people seek the limits of those rules and contracts we need ever more of them.

So now we have replaced trust and rules with ever more rules and contracts in a "society" made for lawyers. Is this also true in China?

 

That's right, attributing these problems to acts by the ruling party is a hobbyhorse without much fact checking.

Even in Europe there's still lots of trust based economic tradition, but legally binding are the constructs approved by lawyers that exhibit much lacking trust. Who reads the standard form contract? That's one of the reasons why you are not allowed to make anything with a substatial influence deviating from common contract usage part of this large unreadable mess in Germany. Perhaps we should sacrifice something to Jupiter and make some kind of oath that as always some clever interpreter tries to circumvent.