This week's links: Keynes Twisted, Japanese decluttering, the China Challenge

 

How Economics Manufactured the Household State Part II — They Kept Keynes’s Name and Removed His Threat

The point is not that every heterodox proposition is correct or that mainstream economics contains no useful tools. The point is that a science becomes intellectually fraudulent when it calls one school “economics” and treats rival premises as optional politics. No serious discipline would remove competing explanations from the curriculum, then announce that the surviving explanation has won. 

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The household state is therefore not a natural fact waiting to be discovered by economists. It is the political product of a discipline that narrowed its own vision, then handed the resulting fiction to governments as scientific necessity. 

11 Japanese Decluttering Lessons

Global Imbalances and the China Challenge

China has a distinct model of growth and integration into the global economy. When China joined the WTO in 2001, Western governments assumed that economic integration would gradually produce convergence. China would embrace the liberal understanding that underpinned the global trading system; market forces would play a larger role, and its priorities would come to resemble those of other major trading nations.

China has indeed become much richer – a major achievement. But convergence has not followed. On the contrary, since 2015, its approach to international economic relations has increasingly diverged from that of the rest of the world. Western countries trade because they want their consumers to access cheaper goods. China trades to put its producers and technology in a dominant position. Its objective is first to achieve greater self-sufficiency and then to establish lasting industrial and technological superiority in as many sectors as possible. This was already clear in 2015 with the adoption of the “Made in China 2025” objectives, and it has since been confirmed and expanded in the recent 15th plan. Industrial capacity is not simply there to meet demand. It is an asset in its own right: a source of technological capability, national resilience, and geopolitical influence.