Alternative social systems and individual wellbeing

Communism ...

or Capitalism?

A joke from Poland in the 1970s: "In capitalism it is a question of man's exploitation by man. In communism it is the reverse."

A modern social system is an environment where millions of people find opportunities, develop their talents, express their beliefs, and earn their livings within the context of a set of economic and political institutions. Specific institutions of property, power, ideology, education, and healthcare create an environment within which citizens of all circumstances pursue their life interests. Individuals exercise their freedoms through the institutions within which they live, and those institutions also determine the quality and depth of social resources available to the individual that determine the degree to which he or she is able to develop talents and skills and gain access to opportunities. Institutions create constraints on freedom of choice that range from the nearly invisible to the intensely coercive. Institutions create inequalities of opportunity and outcome for different groups of citizens; rural people may have more limited access to higher education, immigrant and minority communities may experience discrimination in health and employment; and so on. Further, social systems differ in the balance they achieve between "soft" constraints (market, education, regional differences) and "hard" constraints (police, regulations governing behavior, extra-legal uses of violence).

To describe a set of institutions and a population of individual actors as a system has a number of implications, some of which are unjustified. The idea of "system" suggests a kind of functional interconnection across its components, with needs in one subsystem eliciting adjustments in the activities of other subsystems to satisfy those needs. This mental model is misleading, however. Better is the ontology of "assemblage" discussed frequently here (link, link, link). This is the idea that a complex social thing is the unintended and largely undesigned accumulation of multiple independent components. One set of processes leads to the development of the logistics infrastructure of a society; another set of processes leads to the development of the institutions of government; and yet other path-dependent and contingent processes contribute to the system of labor education, management, and discipline that exists in a society. These various institutional ensembles are overlaid with each other; sometimes there are painful inconsistencies among them that are resolved by entrepreneurs or officials; and the result is a heterogeneous and largely unplanned agglomeration of social arrangements and practices that add up to "the social system". 

A central premise of some classics of social theory, including Marx, is that the institutions through which social interactions take place form large and relatively stable configurations that fall into fairly distinct groups -- feudalism, capitalism, communism, socialism, social democracy, authoritarianism. And different configurations of institutions do better or worse in terms of the degree to which they allow their members to satisfy their needs and live satisfying lives. The ontology associated with the theory of assemblage, however, is anti-essentialist in a very important sense: it denies that there are "essentially similar configurations" of institutions that play crucial roles in history, or that there is a tendency towards convergence around "typical" ensembles of institutions. In particular, it suggests that we reject the idea that there are only a few historically possible configurations of institutions -- capitalism, socialism, authoritarianism, democracy -- and rather analyze each social order as a fairly unique configuration -- assemblage -- of specific institutional arrangements.

This perspective casts doubt on the value of singling out "capitalism," "liberal democracy," "religious autocracy," "apartheid society," "military dictatorship," or "one-party dictatorship" as schemes for understanding distinctive and sociologically important patterns of un-freedom. Rather than considering these different "ideal types" of social-political systems as structures with distinctive dynamics, perhaps it would be more satisfactory to consider the problem from the point of view of the citizens of various societies and the degree to which existing social, political, and economic institutions serve their development as full and free human beings.

Amartya Sen's framework for understanding human wellbeing in Development as Freedom is valuable in this context (link). Sen understands wellbeing in terms of the individual's ability to realize his or her capabilities fully and to live within an environment enabling as much freedom of action as freely as possible. Sen's framework gives a powerful basis for paying close attention to inequalities within society; a society in which one-third of the population have exceptional freedom and opportunities for development, one-third have indifferent attainments in these crucial dimensions, and one-third have extremely limited freedoms and opportunities is plainly a less just and desirable society than one in which everyone has the same freedoms and a relatively high level of opportunities for development -- even if the average attainment for the population is the same in the two scenarios.

This prism permits us to attempt to understand the structural characteristics of society -- political, cultural, religious, economic, or civic -- in terms of the effects that those institutional arrangements have on the freedoms and capacity for development of the population. This is the underlying rationale for the Human Development Index, but the HDI is primarily focused on development rather than freedom.

We might try to evaluate the workings of a given ensemble of social and political institutions by devising an index of human wellbeing and freedom that can be applied to each society. Examples of indexes along these lines include the Human Development Index, the Opportunity Index, and the Cato Institute Freedom Index. Every index is selective. It is interesting and important to observe, for example, that political freedom plays no role in the Human Development Index, while the Cato Institute index pays no attention to the prerequisites of freedom: access to education, access to health care, freedom from racial or ethnic discrimination.

So each of these indices is limited as a scheme for evaluating the overall success a particular institutional configuration has in creating a free and enabling environment for its citizens. But suppose we had a composite index that reflected both freedom (broadly construed) and wellbeing? Such an index might look something like this:

• Rule of law 
• Security and safety 
• Movement 
• Religion 
• Association, assembly, and civil society 
• Expression and information
• Identity and relationships 
• access to quality education
• access to quality healthcare
• freedom from racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination in employment, education, housing, and other social goods
• equality of opportunity

(It is interesting to observe that these characteristics align fairly well with the contents of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

Using an index like this, we could then ask important comparative questions: How do ordinary citizens fare under the institutions of contemporary Finland, Spain, China, Russia, Nigeria, Brazil, Romania, France, and the United States? An assessment along these lines would put us in a position to give a normative evaluation of the various social systems mentioned above: what social, political, and economic arrangements do the best job of securing each of these freedoms and opportunities for all citizens? Under what kinds of institutions -- economic, political, social, and cultural -- are citizens most free and most enabled to fully develop their capacities as human beings?

It seems evident that the answer to this question is not very esoteric or difficult. Freedom requires the rule of law, respect for equal rights, and democratic institutions. Real freedom requires access to the social resources that permit an individual to fully develop his or her talents. A decent life requires a secure and adequate material standard of living. These obvious truths point towards a social system that embodies the protections of a constitutional liberal democracy; extensive public support for the social resources necessary for full human development (education, healthcare, nutrition, housing); and an extensive social welfare net that ensures that all members of society can thrive. There is a name for this set of institutions; it is called social democracy. (Here are several earlier posts that reach a similar conclusion from different starting points; link, link.)

And where are the social democracies in the world today? They are largely the Nordic countries: Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. Significantly, these five countries consistently rank in the top ten countries in the World Happiness Report (link), a rigorous and well-funded attempt to measure citizen satisfaction with the same care as we measure GDP or national health statistics. The editors of the 2020 report describe the particular success of Nordic societies in supporting citizen satisfaction in these terms:

From 2013 until today, every time the World Happiness Report (WHR) has published its annual ranking of countries, the five Nordic countries – Finland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland – have all been in the top ten, with Nordic countries occupying the top three spots in 2017, 2018, and 2019. Clearly, when it comes to the level of average life evaluations, the Nordic states are doing something right, but Nordic exceptionalism isn’t confined to citizen’s happiness. No matter whether we look at the state of democracy and political rights, lack of corruption, trust between citizens, felt safety, social cohesion, gender equality, equal distribution of incomes, Human Development Index, or many other global comparisons, one tends to find the Nordic countries in the global top spots.

And here is their considered judgment about the circumstances that have led to this high level of satisfaction in the Nordic countries:

We find that the most prominent explanations include factors related to the quality of institutions, such as reliable and extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, and well-functioning democracy and state institutions. Furthermore, Nordic citizens experience a high sense of autonomy and freedom, as well as high levels of social trust towards each other, which play an important role in determining life satisfaction. (131)

The key factors mentioned here are worth calling out for the light they shed on the current dysfunctions of politics in the United States: effective institutions, extensive welfare benefits, low corruption, well-functioning democracy, a limited range of economic inequalities, a strong sense of autonomy and freedom, and high levels of social trust and social cohesion. It is evident that American society is being tested in each of these areas by the current administration, and none more so than the areas of trust and social cohesion. The current administration actively strives to undermine both trust and social cohesion, and goes out of its way to undermine confidence in government. These are very disturbing signs about what the future may bring. Severe inequalities of income, wealth, and social resources (including especially healthcare) have become painfully evident through the effects of the Covid-19 epidemic. And the weakness of the social safety net in the United States has left millions of adults and children in dire circumstances of unemployment and hunger. The United States today is not a happy place for many of its citizens.

New structural economics

Does economic theory provide anything like a concrete set of reliable policies for creating sustained economic growth in a middle-income country? Some contemporary economists believe that it is possible to answer this question in the affirmative. However, I don't find this confidence justified.

One such economist is Justin Yifu Lin. Lin is a leading Chinese economist who served as chief economist to the World Bank in 2008-2012. So Lin has a deep level of knowledge of the experience of developing countries and their efforts to achieve sustained growth. He believes that the answer to the question posed above is "yes", and he lays out the central components of such a policy in a framework that he describes as the "new structural economics". His analysis is presented in New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy. (The book is also available in PDF format from the World Bank directly; link.)

Lin's analysis is intended to be relevant for all low- and middle-income countries (e.g. Brazil, Nigeria, or Indonesia); but the primary application is China. So his question comes down to this: what steps does the Chinese state need to take to burst out of the "middle income trap" and bring per capita incomes in the country up to the level of high-income countries in the OECD?

So what are the core premises of Lin's analysis of sustainable economic growth? Two are most basic: the market should govern prices, and the state should make intelligent policies and investments that encourage the "right kind" of innovation in economic activity in the country. Here is an extended description of the core claims of the book:

Long-term sustainable and inclusive growth is the driving force for poverty reduction in developing countries, and for convergence with developed economies. The current global crisis, the most serious one since the Great Depression, calls for a rethinking of economic theories. It is therefore a good time for economists to reexamine development theories as well. This paper discusses the evolution of development thinking since the end of World War II and suggests a framework to enable developing countries to achieve sustainable growth, eliminate poverty, and narrow the income gap with the developed countries. The proposed framework, called a neoclassical approach to structure and change in the process of economic development, or new structural economics, is based on the following ideas:

First, an economy’s structure of factor endowments evolves from one level of development to another. Therefore, the industrial structure of a given economy will be different at different levels of development. Each industrial structure requires corresponding infrastructure (both tangible and intangible) to facilitate its operations and transactions.

Second, each level of economic development is a point along the continuum from a low-income agrarian economy to a high-income post-industrialized economy, not a dichotomy of two economic development levels (“poor” versus “rich” or “developing” versus “industrialized”). Industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvement targets in developing countries should not necessarily draw from those that exist in high-income countries.

Third, at each given level of development, the market is the basic mechanism for effective resource allocation. However, economic development as a dynamic process entails structural changes, involving industrial upgrading and corresponding improvements in “hard” (tangible) and “soft” (intangible) infrastructure at each level. Such upgrading and improvements require an inherent coordination, with large externalities to firms’ transaction costs and returns to capital investment. Thus, in addition to an effective market mechanism, the government should play an active role in facilitating structural changes. (14-15)

So a state needs to secure the conditions for well-functioning markets; and it needs to establish an industrial strategy that is guided by a careful empirical analysis of the country's comparative advantage in the global economic environment. In practice this seems to amount to the idea that the middle-income economy should identify the leading economies' declining industries and compete with those on the basis of labor costs and mid-level technology. Lin also emphasizes the important role of the state in making appropriate infrastructure investments to support the chosen industrial strategy. This is a "structural economic theory" because it is guided by the idea that a developing economy needs to incrementally achieve structural transformation from a given mix of agriculture, industry, and service to a successor mix, based on the resources held by the economy that give it advantage in a particular set of technologies and production techniques. Here is a representative statement:

Countries at different levels of development tend to have different economic structures due to differences in their endowments. Factor endowments for countries at the early levels of development are typically characterized by a relative scarcity of capital and relative abundance of labor or resources. Their production activities tend to be labor intensive or resource intensive (mostly in subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, fishery, and the mining sector) and usually rely on conventional, mature technologies and produce “mature,” well-established products. Except for mining and plantations, their production has limited economies of scale. Their firm sizes are usually relatively small, with market transactions often informal, limited to local markets with familiar people. The hard and soft infrastructure required for facilitating that type of production and market transactions is limited and relatively simple and rudimentary. (22)

Some common development strategies fail to conform to these ideas. So, for example, import substitution is a bad basis for economic development, because it subverts the market and it distorts the investment strategies of the state and the private sector; it fails to guide the given economy on a path pursuing incremental comparative advantage (18).

What this analysis leaves out completely is the goal of economic development -- improving human wellbeing. Indeed, the word "wellbeing" does not even appear in the book. And certainly the perspective on development offered by Amartya Sen in his theory of capabilities and realizations is completely absent. This is unfortunate, because it means that the book fails to address the most important issue in development economics: what the fundamental good of economic development is, and how we can best approach that good. Sen's answer is that the fundamental good is to increase the wellbeing of the globe's total population; and he interprets that goal in terms of his idea of human flourishing. (Sen's theory of economic development is provided in many places, including Development as Freedom. Here is a recent statement by Sen, Stiglitz, and Fitoussi on why GDP and growth in GDP are inadequate ultimate measures of development success; Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up.) Sen's fundamental view is this: the most important goal that a state can have is to create policies that enhance the development of the human capabilities of its population. In particular, social resources should be deployed to enhance education, health, domicile, and personal security. In such an environment individuals can have the fullest satisfaction of their life goals; and they can be the most productive contributors to innovation and growth in their societies. Well-educated and healthy people are an essential component of economic success for a country. But significantly, Lin does not address these "quality of life" factors at all (another phrase that does not occur once in the book).

Even less does Lin's theory address the kinds of issues raised by "post-development" thinkers like Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Escobar challenges some of the most basic assumptions of classical economic development theory, beginning with the idea that industry-lead structural transformation is the unique pathway to human flourishing in the less-developed world. Escobar's critique involves several ideas. First is the observation that economic development theory since 1945 has been Eurocentric and implicitly colonial, in that it depends upon exoticized representations of the industrialized North and the traditional agricultural South. Against this colonial representation of global development Escobar emphasizes the need for a more ethnographic and cultural understanding of development. Second, this Eurocentric view brings along with it some crucial distributive implications -- essentially, that the resources and labor of the developing world should continue to provide part of the surplus that supports the affluence of the North. Third, Escobar casts doubt on the value of development "experts" in the design of development strategies for poor countries in the South (46). Local knowledge is a crucial part of sound economic progress for countries like Nigeria, Brazil, or Indonesia; but the development profession seeks to replace local knowledge with expert opinion. So Escobar highlights local knowledge, the importance of culture, and the importance of self-determination in theory and policy as key ingredients of a sustainable plan for economic development in the countries of the post-colonial South.

Why do these alternative approaches to development theory matter? Why is the absence of a discussion of wellbeing, flourishing, or culture an important lacuna in New Structural Economics? Because it results in a view of economic development that lacks a compass. If we haven't given rigorous thought to what the goal of development is -- and Sen demonstrates that it is entirely possible to do that -- then we are guided only by a rote set of recommendations: increase productivity, increase efficiency, increase market penetration, increase per capita income. But the fact of substantial rise in economic inequalities through a growth process means that it is very possible that only a minority of citizens will be affected. And the fact that a typical family's income has risen by 50% may be less important than the availability of a nearby health clinic for their overall wellbeing. And both of these kinds of considerations seem to be relevant in the case of China. It is well documented that there has been a substantial increase in China's income (and wealth) inequalities in the past thirty years (link, link). And it is also reasonably clear that China's commitment to social security provisioning is far lower than that of OECD countries. So it is far from clear that China's recent history of growth has been proportionally successful in enhancing the quality of life and human flourishing of the mass of its population (link).

The unstated assumption is that countries that pursue these prescriptions -- "maintain efficient markets, adopt an industrial strategy that accurately tracks shifts in comparative advantage, support investment in appropriate infrastructure to reduce transaction costs" -- will have superior long-term growth in per capita income and will be better able to ensure enhancements in the quality of life of their citizens. But this is nothing more than naive confidence in "trickle-down" economics. It ignores completely the problem of the likelihood of rising economic inequalities, and it doesn't provide any detailed analysis of how quality of life and human flourishing are supposed to rise. Development economics without capabilities and wellbeing is inherently incomplete; worse, it is a bad guide to policy choices.

Life quality across structural change

Periods of rapid structural change are particularly likely to lead to decline in the quality of life of some sections of the affected population. Change creates winners and losers; and it is common that the gains and losses are channeled into very distinct groups of people.  This is true during periods of large-scale migration, technology change, and structural change within an economy. Important components of life quality include health, nutrition, education, economic wellbeing, economic security, and security from violence and coercion. Each of these properties is affected by several important dimensions of social life:

• legal and political institutions
• institutions of economic production and distribution
• economic opportunities and income
• public provision of income supplements
• public provision of food subsidies
• public provision of health care resources
• household support provided by family and community

When a society's governmental and economic institutions are enmeshed in a period of rapid change, many of the components of life quality are likely to be affected -- positively or negatively. The basic institutions of a society determine the value of the private and public assets individuals and households control on the basis of which to support their pursuit of a decent life; this is what Amartya Sen refers to as "entitlement bundles". (Sen applies his entitlement theory to the study of famine in Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation; link.) And shifts in the composition of the entitlement bundle are likely to lead to abrupt worsening of the conditions of the least-well-off.

For example: It is likely that the austerity policies of the Spanish or Greek governments will have a negative effect on the health and nutritional status of the bottom half of those societies. Working people will have lower incomes and they will have reduced access to the social safety net; health status is likely to decline. As another example: Life expectancy in the former Soviet Union declined measurably following the collapse of the Soviet system (link). One part of that decline was the disappearance of the social security net created by state-owned industry -- the smashing of the "iron rice bowl".

This concern is particularly relevant in the context of the rural-urban transformation currently underway in China. Since 1980 China's rural sector has been subject to at least two major kinds of structural change. One has to do with the economic and political institutions that governed daily life for rural households, from communes to market institutions. And the other has to do with the rapid structural transformation of China's economy from agriculture to export-led manufacturing. The first set of changes led to a withdrawal of forms of "social insurance" that had been associated with the commune system, including healthcare and old-age care. The second has led to mass migration of younger workers from villages and towns to factories in cities. This migration leaves the remaining population in the countryside older, poorer, and less economically secure.

These observations have several important implications. Foremost among these is the crucial importance of maintaining effective systems for monitoring and measuring life quality across the society. It is important to have good measures of health status, nutritional status, educational status, and old age life quality across regions and sub-populations. So national governments need to create and fund the social research activities necessary to measure health and other quality of life properties across the population. (Here is a recent post on a spatial study of quality of life in China based on 1982 data; link.) Sen argues that it was the availability or lack of availability of information about famine conditions that explained the difference in outcomes between China during the Great Leap Forward and post-independence India; Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation.

Second, when it turns out that there are large numbers of "losers" in a large social process of change, it is important for the state and non-governmental actors to find institutions and resources that will help to improve their outcomes. "Winners" need to help to fund the amelioration of harms created by the processes that led to their gains. If NAFTA led to the increase of overall national income for Canada, Mexico, and the United States, but also led to the displacement of workers in a significant set of industries -- then it makes sense to tax part of those gains to compensate the losers. And in fact, the NAFTA agreements were premised on such compensation, though this has not occurred reliably (link). This means redistribution across sectors and regions; and it is justified by the fact that the overall gains created by the transformation would not have been possible without imposing these losses on the disadvantaged sector or region.

What might this kind of redistributive policy look like in the context of China's rural-to-urban transformation? It would seem that public moneys will be needed for several types of problems:

• Maintenance of income and quality of life and health for the elderly
• Investments that increase the productivity of labor and the level of employment in rural areas
• Investments that work to ameliorate the negative environmental effects of rapid change
• Investments in the institutions of public health -- clinics, hospitals, and medical personnel

It might be asked, "Why should developing nations concern themselves with this issue?" There are several answers. Basic justice and fairness entails that the wealth of a society should be distributed in ways that allow all segments of society to improve their quality of life and wellbeing. A society's wealth and income is a joint product of its entire population; so fairness dictates that everyone should benefit from improvements in productivity. But prudence lines up with this answer as well. A society that ignores the widening of the gaps between rich and poor, and does not concern itself about improving the wellbeing of the poor, is likely to suffer a rising level of social strife as well. It can either go the route of creating gated communities for the rich, or it can use its resources to create fair life outcomes and fair access to opportunity for all its people. Everyone is better off in the long run with the second choice.

In The Paradox Of Wealth And Poverty: Mapping The Ethical Dilemmas Of Global Development I argued that a developing nation should choose an economic development strategy that spreads the benefits of growth over a broader population, over a strategy with a higher growth rate but with substantially greater inequality. I still think this is the right answer to the question. And this approach has the best likelihood of improving the quality of life of the poorest segment of society. The graphs below make the case based on three stylized strategies:

1. NL neo-liberal growth: choose those policies and institutional reforms that lead to the most rapid growth: unfettered markets, profit-maximizing firms, minimal redistribution of in­come and wealth 
2. PF poverty-first growth: choose those policies and institutional reforms that lead to economic growth favorable to the most rapid growth in the incomes flowing to the poorest 2 quintiles 
3. WF immediate welfare improvement: direct as much social wealth as possible into programs that immediately improve the welfare of the poor (education, health, food subsidies, housing subsidies)  

 

The neo-liberal strategy consistently maximizes GDP; but the poverty-first strategy, which is more redistributive from the start, leads to consistently better improvement for the income for the bottom 40% of the economy.  It embodies the idea that Hollis Chenery advocated forty years ago in Redistribution with Growth: Policies to Improve Income Distribution in Developing Countries in the Context of Economic Growth.

Quality of life in China

One of the important developments in efforts to measure economic progress has been the creation of various measures of quality of life.  Average income by itself is not a good indicator of wellbeing; instead we need to have a way of assessing the health, nutrition, and education status of a population over time.  The Human Development Index is one such measure, developed by the United Nations Development Programme. (Here is the 2011 report -- Human Development Report 2011: Sustainability and Equity: Towards a Better Future for All, and here is a resource describing the methodology associated with the index.) A defect in many such efforts is the fact that they are assessed at the country level, so internal regional variations in quality of life are not observable.

Walter H. Aschmoneit provided a truly fascinating effort in 1990 to provide a disaggregated study of quality of life in China circa 1982. The research is contained in Delman, Ostergaard, and Christansen, Remaking Peasant China: Problems of Rural Development and Institutions at the Start of the 1990's and the map that he constructs is represented above.

Aschmoneit incorporates eight factors into his index of life quality (205):

• gross value of industrial and agricultural output per capita
• employment rate
• rate of industrial workers by total employed population
• rate of illiteracy and half-illiteracy
• rate of middle school graduates
• rate of university graduates
• infant mortality rate
• death rate 

The data Aschmoneit uses to populate this index for the local administrative units (xian and shi) into which the Chinese population was divided derive from the 1987 Population Atlas of China (collected in 1982).  There were 2,378 administrative units represented in the study.  This means the data reflects the period shortly after the beginning of the reform of agriculture which led to China's extended period of rapid economic growth.

The map displays a number of important patterns.  Low quality of life is heavily concentrated in the western half of China, with the absolutely lowest areas being the extreme southeast and western parts of the country. Sichuan is almost wholly red and brown on the map, with the exception of the hinterlands of Chengdu, indicating below-average quality of life throughout the province. Yunnan and Tibet are almost uniformly substantially below average (purple and blue) in quality of life.  Areas of high quality of life are generally coastal in 1982, with the lower Yangzi Delta, Shandong, and the coastal northeast doing the best. The city of Wuhan in Hubei shows up as an above average district for quality of life, reflecting its advantaged position on the Yangzi River.  The environs of Beijing also show up as a high quality of life district. And in fact many of the isolated green districts appear to correspond to cities of various sizes; extreme poverty was primarily a rural phenomenon in China. (I haven't been able to identify all of the isolated green districts on the map in eastern China, but a number of them are significant cities like Wuhan, Changsha, Hangzhou, and Nanjing.  It would be interesting to determine whether there are exceptions: rural districts with high quality of life.)

There is a fairly close correspondence between this quality of life map and William Skinner's representation of the macroregions of China:

The regions of Lingnan, Southeast Coast, Lower Yangzi, and North China have the highest quality of life, while Upper Yangzi, Northwest China, and Yungui have the lowest.

Today it would be possible to present this data in the form of an interactive map, so the reader would be able to click on a specific place and view its data. This would be of interest because the index combines income data with longevity and education data. So the poverty of a region already gives it low quality of life, irrespective of the performance of the human development characteristics.  It would be interesting to see whether the most extreme districts with low quality of life are uniformly disadvantaged, or perhaps have a mix of better and worse health or education outcomes.

It would be genuinely interesting and important to reproduce this study today to see whether the basic pattern has changed through these decades of intensive economic growth and the acceleration of inequalities in China. If the 2011 Census includes the same data categories this would be a reasonably straightforward effort.  One would expect that the quality of life has gone up in the eastern and southern coastal areas. And it is very possible that quality of life has gone down in rural areas in the interior and the west of China as inequalities have increased and state subsidies have decreased for poor rural areas.

Remaking Peasant China is a book worth owning, not least for the Life-Quality Index map that it provides. The articles are well designed to address some of the key issues that China faced in rural development in the 1980s and 1990s. The book also includes as front paper a map of rural poverty areas at the xian level receiving national support 1986-1990, which gives a visual impression of the distribution of high-poverty areas in the late 1980s. Extreme poverty is defined as regions with more than 40% of rural households with annual per capita income below 150 yuan in 1985. (The map also represents xian with extremely low annual rainfall.) This map was also based on Aschmoneit's research.