"Funny how that hasn't happened under Mao who, presumably, was running a "better" system. And really, is India that resource-poor compared to China? Enough to explain the difference in growth rates?"
No; Mao was essentially running the same system as the USSR: state ownership of the MoP, operated for socialist ends, according to central planning doctrine--the same incentive-less structure for both government and workers. The only thing that's changed was a kind of democratization of the ends--they now had to be somewhat responsive to the demands of the global market for China to achieve its export-oriented growth. However, China's domestic market remains essentially constrained by planning.
On the other hand, India is, per the definition we seemed to have agreed on in the other comment thread, no more than nominally democratic (government unaccountable to public demands in a practical sense). However, because it is nominally a democracy, it can't just go around doing whatever it wants, meaning it has the inefficiency of meeting public demands, the same kind of handicaps to growth as much richer countries, and the inefficiency of a government which is unresponsive to the public. At the same time, this façade means that the average Indian citizen can't just be abjectly angry with the Indian government: he can and has to vote the current people out for a new group, if it's so bad.
China doesn't have to worry about that. Really, the Chinese system is just so incredibly messed up that it seems to be working, for now, in spite of itself. And it's not the future slow itself down that's a problem; if having to maintain a growth rate of 8% or better forever is problematic, which we seem to agree is the case, and China's governmental system will collapse without that, then it's unclear in how, in the long-term, it's really a better system. I'll put it to you this way: which system of governance would be easiest to drop into a wealthy, democratic, Western society which isn't experiencing rapid economic growth: India's or China's?
"Did they? I am not at all sure about that. Granted, trustworthy statistics are hard to come by, but it does seem to me that the living standards of the Chinese people rose much faster and further than those of Russians under Stalin. The Russians were building heavy industry plants -- just like Mao did -- and while certainly useful (as WW2 demonstrated), they didn't do much for ordinary people."
We're not here arguing about the speed or duration of improvement of living standards; we're arguing about end-states. In both China and the USSR, living standards did increase dramatically for most people. And the difference is, again, partially attributable to the difference in the technological convergence space between China and the USSR. Imperial Russia was already a minor industrial power before the revolution; China was barely industrialized to any extent before Deng's reforms in the 80's, meaning it had nearly a century of growth to catch up on. In consideration of the facts that in neither case do we have democratization of ownership or responsiveness to a market, and in both cases convergence will end, and you see why they did/will stall and fall.
"Initial ones? Or all the time -- meaning claims to ownership can be granted or taken away by the polity at will? If the latter, I would object to calling this "ownership", it's much more akin to a mere license."
Initial ones; they'd be dealt out at birth to be utilized at the appropriate time, 14, or 15, or 18, or whatever age a particular vision of the Public Good decides it should be. Think of them like citizenship cards: no matter what country (or vision of the Public Good) you're born into, you get one, and you can't legally sell it. These differ primarily in that no one could take it away from you, either, as it's a claim to your own labor as much as anything else, and you're free to go to whatever vision of the Public Good appeals to you at that pre-designated age; in that way, they're more like passports.
"That's how the ownership of the former Soviet factories, etc. was distributed in the early 1990s.. Basically everyone who worked at a particular factory got a "share" of ownership of that factory in the form of the so-called "voucher". You can google up how well that worked. On the other hand, if you mean non-transferable ownership then it's not really ownership and I don't see much use in it."
Well, the problem is, once again, that those were ownership stakes in state-owned factories--once again, state-owned in a non-democratic system is owned by the class of people who were members of the state government, i.e. members of a private class.
When you say "non-transferable", do you mean "non-exchangeable"? Because it seems to me as though one thing that ownership ought to be is non-transferable. I can offer to "transfer" my ownership of a particular piece of property to you in exchange for something you own, or, just as easily for you, you can try to kick me out without having to exchange anything. Short of killing me, you can't take away my labor, or, in the scenario we've been working out, my claim to ownership of the MoP, and if you kill me, then neither you nor anyone else gets it, either.
This is where we can bring in both Kant and Rawls; if I devise a moral law (e.g. people ought to try to take others' ownership claims from them by force) which I would not apply to myself, I can hardly call it a law. On the other hand, if I don't know whether I'll be put in the position of the person who has an ownership claim, or a person who tries to take that ownership claim, and we all agree that one of these is a bad thing, then we simply won't let this scenario arise. This is, again, essentially the market acting on morals: not enough people want for this thing to happen, so it won't.
Really, the Chinese system is just so incredibly messed up that it seems to be working, for now, in spite of itself.
Heh. I think your theory finds itself in contradiction with empirical reality. Sorry, the reality always wins.
a growth rate of 8% or better forever ... and China's governmental system will collapse without that
It is not obvious to me at all that the Chinese political system will collapse without that.
...Initial ones; they'd be dealt out at birth to be utilized at the appropriate time, 14, or 15, or 18, or whatever age a particular visio
Note: Originally posted in Discussion, edited to take comments there into account.
Yes, politics, boo hiss. In my defense, the topic of this post cuts across usual tribal affiliations (I write it as a liberal criticizing other liberals), and has a couple strong tie-ins with main LessWrong topics:
The issue is this: recently, I've seen a meme going around to the effect that companies like Walmart that have a large number of employees on government benefits are the "real welfare queens" or somesuch, and with the implied message that all companies have a moral obligation to pay their employees enough that they don't need government benefits. (I say mention Walmart because it's the most frequently mentioned villain in this meme, but others, like McDonalds, get mentioned.)
My initial awareness of this meme came from it being all over my Facebook feed, but when I went to Google to track down examples, I found it coming out of the mouths of some fairly prominent congresscritters. For example Alan Grayson:
Or Bernie Sanders:
Now here's why this is weird: consider Grayson's claim that each Walmart employee costs the taxpayers on average $1,000. In what sense is that true? If Walmart fired those employees, it wouldn't save the taxpayers money: if anything, it would increase the strain on public services. Conversely, it's unlikely that cutting benefits would force Walmart to pay higher wages: if anything, it would make people more desperate and willing to work for low wages. (Cf. this this excellent critique of the anti-Walmart meme).
Or consider Sanders' claim that it would be better to raise the minimum wage and spend less on government benefits. He emphasizes that Walmart could take a hit in profits to pay its employees more. It's unclear to what degree that's true (see again previous link), and unclear if there's a practical way for the government to force Walmart to do that, but ignore those issues, it's worth pointing out that you could also just raise taxes on rich people generally to increase benefits for low-wage workers. The idea seems to be that morally, Walmart employees should be primarily Walmart's moral responsibility, and not so much the moral responsibility of the (the more well-off segment of) the population in general.
But the idea that employing someone gives you a general responsibility for their welfare (beyond, say, not tricking them into working for less pay or under worse conditions than you initially promised) is also very odd. It suggests that if you want to be virtuous, you should avoid hiring people, so as to keep your hands clean and avoid the moral contagion that comes with employing low wage workers. Yet such a policy doesn't actually help the people who might want jobs from you. This is not to deny that, plausibly, wealthy onwers of Walmart stock have a moral responsibility to the poor. What's implausible is that non-Walmart stock owners have significantly less responsibility to the poor.
This meme also worries me because I lean towards thinking that the minimum wage isn't a terrible policy but we'd be better off replacing it with guaranteed basic income (or an otherwise more lavish welfare state). And guaranteed basic income could be a really important policy to have as more and more jobs are replaced by automation (again see gwern if that seems crazy to you). I worry that this anti-Walmart meme could lead to an odd left-wing resistance to GBI/more lavish welfare state, since the policy would be branded as a subsidy to Walmart.