Most people in China live in rural areas. Although more and more people are moving to the cities, only 40% live in urban areas. As the countryside goes, so goes the nation. And the countryside is trailing. While both have grown, the growth in wealth over the last 30 years has been faster in the cities than in the countryside. Country folk now earn less than a third of their urban counterparts. At the outset of his presentation, Prosterman gives a thumbnail sketch of land reform in China. Few people remember that from 1949 to 1956, before collectivization and the Great Leap Famine, the Party made good on their promise to recognize and enforce the full private ownership of peasant farmers. Perhaps it is time for the Party to return to its roots. 
In China, land legislation is Georgist. The State claims to own the land. Framers lease the land from the State under 30 year contracts. Since these leases can be sold, they are worth something, and can, in theory, be used to secure a loan. But there is a problem. Farmers are reluctant to make investments in their land when the land can be seized by the local cadre and redistributed in the interest of equality, a process called “readjustment“. Prosterman estimates that there is about $3 trillion worth of “dead capital” in rural China -- land that is not benefiting from the use of capital improvements such as electric pumps and greenhouses, which could make the land more productive and farmers wealthier.
Land Reform in China
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Europe’s Best Kept Secret: Portuguese Drug Decriminalization.
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In late 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs; not just cannabis, but also other street drugs such as heroin, cocaine, LSD and so on and so forth. That was then, this is now. What has happened since? The important point to take away from Glen Greenwald’s recent talk at CATO is what didn’t happen. Predictions of dire consequence did not play out. Opposition to the decriminalization among the various major political factions in Portugal is now virtually non-existent. In fact, the results have been so boring that few outside the country even know of Portugal’s experiment.
An other issue raised (yet not fully developed) in the talk is the extent to which international law (treaty obligations, in this case) obstructs efforts at more localized drug law reform.
Portugal is the dog that didn’t bark. Perhaps our keepers in Washington should take note.
Who Has Contributed More?
|UNESCO keeps a list of World Heritage Sites. The list provides us with a way to determine which populations have contributed more to Civilization while side stepping the accusation of Euro-centric bias. (If the UN is not a sorce for World Opinion™, nothing is.)
Why More Girls Than Boys Are Entering College.
|More girls than boys are going to college. Conservatives commentators claim this is due to the feminization of education. Guys either opt out because schools are hostile to them, and/or girls are at an advantage because schools speak their language. But which is cause and which is effect? Are there fewer males because schools are more feminized, or are schools more feminized because there are fewer males? More likely, it’s largely a combination of two other factors: the greater variation of intelligence among males than among females, and falling entry requirements. Assume two normal distributions, two bell shaped curves: blue and green. They both have the same average. One has more variation than the other. At the tails, there are more blues than greens. In the middle, there are more greens than blues. If you bisect the overlapping bell shaped curves at some point above the averages there will be more blues than greens. If you bisect the curves at some point below the averages, there will be more greens than blues. Think of the different methods of bisecting the distributions as falling entry requirements. Think of the wide-and-low blue distribution as boys, and the narrow-and-tall green distribution as girls. More and more people are entering college. Entry requirements are falling. We have moved from an era when more boys were qualified to an era when more girls are qualified. 
Go East, Young Man.
|Enrollment levels in American since 1980 Source: Nationmaster
There are 1.3 billion people in China, 0.3 billion in America. Somehow this led me to assume there are more students of higher education in China than America. Not so. America has more. (At least they did as of 2002.) This is not likely to remain. Enrollment levels have been rising rapidly in China, slowly in America. (Levels actually fell slightly in the late 90s). China will overtake America in number of students at institutions of higher learning, if they haven’t already.
