It’s time for the annual books list. 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. And more!

I got thousands of rare Cultural Revolution-era photos from a historical archive here in China. I believe some of these have never been posted online, or only exist behind extremely expensive licenses. So here they are, for free. Open the thread for more.

Great thread from one of the best analysts of Chinese local government

Grachan Moncur III was born on this day June 3, 1937. The trombonist's two remarkable 1960s Blue Note albums move between post-bop & the avant-garde yet exist in a realm of their own. "Evolution" bluenote.lnk.to/GrachanMoncu… "Some Other Stuff" bluenote.lnk.to/GrachanMoncu…

Useful thread

China’s heavily test-based university admissions system has gotten a lot of criticism over the years but seems like it is a lot more resilient to AI than the US system. With possibly quite long lasting implications for human capital.

It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins. The Saxophone Colossus died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY at the age of 95. 1/2 conta.cc/4wFIDrM

Tyler and Kim did a great job of avoiding facile modern analogies with the Roman Empire in this episode, but I was still surprised that they did not even pause for a knowing chuckle after Kim said the empire declined because of inflation and falling population. I mean!

Another arrival day shoutout to #SunRa: one of his greatest baritone-riding fanfares riffing away below two of his most jaw-dropping space chants. From THE album to get if you or someone needs one well-recorded sampler covering most of his infinite bases: youtube.com/watch?v=-9jnkl5p…

My Chinese friends with young children these days report feeling increasingly out of sync with contemporary urban culture, a big change from the more pro-family vibes of past decades

In “the transparency and force with which it conveys, across centuries, the discombobulating intensity of adolescence itself,” writes Catherine Nicholson, Felix Platter’s 16th-century diary is without precedent. go.nybooks.com/4blYbaj

"The core of the U.S.-China technology competition is not chips or subsidies, but the cultural and structural conditions that produce leading technical talent. America’s advantage in this deeper competition is eroding." Sharp new piece by @yingyi_ma! brookings.edu/articles/why-c…

A post of mine on industrial policy from last July is having a second life, so let me rewrite it more clearly now that I have more experience with X. Can industrial policy work? Yes. The East Asian experience shows it can, at least partially. But its success rests on a key condition: labor control. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan industrialized rapidly under authoritarian (e.g., Park’s South Korea) or semi-authoritarian regimes (e.g., Japan). Wages and labor rights were systematically repressed to favor capital accumulation and export competitiveness. This was especially stark in South Korea during the 1980s and 1990s, when unions clashed with the state and big business. China’s recent experience basically follows the same pattern. Authoritarianism in East Asia was not incidental to the success of industrial policy. It was functional. No labor repression, no successful industrial policy. Let me be careful about what I am NOT claiming: 1) I am not claiming labor repression is sufficient for industrial policy to succeed. You need many other ingredients. Best counterexample? Brazil under import substitution: labor repression, but without the other key pieces, such as aggressive export orientation. Labor repression is a necessary condition. If you do not get the difference between necessary and sufficient, you have more important priorities than reading about industrial policy. 2) I am not claiming the only path to growth is industrial policy. Many countries have grown without it, or with pretty lousy and ineffectual versions of it. Best example? Spain. 3) I am not saying labor repression means wages do not grow. It means they grow less than they otherwise would have. Think counterfactuals. 4) I am not saying democracies cannot repress labor. They sometimes do. It just happens far less often, and often less effectively. Continental Western Europe after WWII was not an example of industrial policy. France and, to some degree, Italy used some, but the mainstream view is that postwar growth was not driven by it. What many of these countries used was a form of “coordinated capitalism,” in which unions accepted slower wage growth in exchange for higher investment and faster growth. That has a flavor similar to my argument. As far as I can tell, there is no clean example of large-scale industrial policy that has succeeded without labor repression. Why so many people on the left are in love with industrial policy is a mystery to me. More generally, why so many people on the left admire China, given that its economic policy is 100% contrary to what they support (low taxes, little industrial regulation, little concern for the environment, labor repression, as little economic and political power to women and minorities as possible) is even more of a mystery except for some infantile contrarian positioning (“since this is not what The Economist like, I support it”) Alexander Gerschenkron made this point better than anyone. But it was also Marx’s point about “primitive accumulation,” and Stalin’s logic in the five-year plans, which were all about repressing labor (mostly agricultural, but to a lesser degree in manufacturing too). I am not going to praise Stalin in public, but he understood economics better than the average poster on X. Read Gerschenkron. Seriously. The original post: x.com/JesusFerna7026/status/…