Andrew Batson's blog. Musings on China, books, economics, jazz, history, and other stuff of interest.
(This post reproduces a thread I wrote on Twitter/X on July 29.) A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China s real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency. After all, it s called the exchange rate ! But it s actually not. Mostly, it s about prices. A rant: China s real [ ]
Another good year for music. Thanks to some lucky coincidences I saw the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by Knoell Scott, three times this year. Every show was different, and each a fun and life-affirming musical experience—see them if you can! Their most recent studio album is very charming, even if it lacks the wild avant-garde [ ]
Here are the most memorable of the books I read this year, listed in roughly the order I read them. It seems like reading 19th century authors was a theme in the culture this year, and I ended up participating in this trend without really planning to: Twain, Stevenson, Whitman were some of my highlights. [ ]
Reading China s five-year plans, one of the most immediately striking things is just how many things they attempt to plan. These are not just documents about where to build airports or highways (although such proposals do go into the plan). Recent iterations also cover many things that are not obviously amenable to top-down direction, such [ ]
The first people you meet in life are your parents. That simple fact makes the family the foundational institution of society: learning how to be a person, and what other people are like, happens first in the family. After that, the next social institution most people encounter, in modern societies anyway, is usually schooling and [ ]
Two things happened this year to convince me to do some more intentional listening to Indian classical music, which I had long been aware of but had never really got. The first was the untimely death of Zakir Hussain, the beloved tabla virtuoso; he had been scheduled to play a concert near where I live [ ]
After doing a round of India-China comparisons that focused on commonly cited macro indicators like manufacturing, investment and literacy (see last month s post India and the invidious comparison with China ), I wanted to highlight a lower-profile but perhaps even more interesting contrast: the structure of government and the nature of decentralization in large countries. One [ ]
I recently wrote a piece at my job, and somewhat unusually for us, it s come out from behind the paywall so that everyone can read it. Here s the opening: There are two statements about China’s economy that receive broad agreement today. One is that China faces a long-term structural slowdown in its growth rate, due [ ]
Around my trip to India I did some not-very-systematic reading, and had pretty good luck. All of these books were worth reading and helpful in different ways:
In June I went to India for the first time. It was a quick trip, just a week, but I still got a pretty intense introduction to current debates on the Indian economy at the India Policy Forum in Delhi. As a China specialist with only a newspaper-reading level of familiarity with India, I was [ ]