How an Economist Sees the Life We Live Now, and What's Wrong With It | Is This Society Too Good to Young People? Part 6

QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, media and publishing. What they share is a long habit of paying attention to public affairs, and the hope of passing on a "good society." The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is that the future world we want?

There's a small story about science:

Freud once wrote Einstein a letter. In it he said that perhaps twenty-odd people in the world understood relativity — the public didn't understand it at all, but they worshipped you, they knew you were great. Now anyone at all can hold forth on psychoanalysis. That is exactly my predicament.

Liu Qing, a professor in the Department of Political Science at East China Normal University, gave us this example in an interview. His point: like the natural sciences, the social sciences have a threshold of expertise too.

In 2016, Shanghai's population fell in absolute terms for the first time this century. Local Shanghai forums like Kuandaishan (KDS) were delighted: "The hard drives are finally shrinking." "Hard drive" is a catch-all sneer for people from outside Shanghai. It started on the Kuandaishan forum: because words like 外地人 (outsiders), "WDR" and "YDR" were filtered out, users borrowed the name of the hard-drive maker Western Digital (WD) and called outsiders "Western Digital people," which eventually became "hard drive," abbreviated YP.

Go by a local resident's fellow feeling, or by common sense, and a shrinking migrant population might mean less pressure on the city and a little more room to live — provided services don't get scarcer. But then what? The average age on KDS is not high. By the time those users are ready to draw on the city's welfare, would they rather live in a city that is thriving or one that is running down? In the country's most rapidly aging city, if there aren't enough working people in the future, who keeps it prosperous?

Economists usually point to the danger here: a conclusion drawn from common sense may not match what we actually want.

Economists are worth listening to because of how they think, not because they build disciplinary walls to assert authority and shut down conversation.

The real question underneath is this: which of today's variables decide the society of tomorrow? And which of them do we tend to miss?

It also has to do with our confidence and our resolve to keep modernizing. Gao Quanxi, chair professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University's KoGuan School of Law, told The Oriental Historical Review that "in form we are a modern state, but in substance we have not, in the past hundred years, completed the passage from the ancient to the modern." Part of that passage is becoming a country that is "economically free and still able to provide welfare." Economic freedom has several faces: protection of private property, prices set by market supply and demand, and the free movement of the factors of production, labor included.

Broadly, it opposes administrative interference and supports free movement and the individual's right to pursue his own interest.

Take a simple case: can we live in cities, and can those cities be livable? We pointed out earlier that most complaints about cities actually trace back to trouble created by existing policy. That trouble gets labeled "urban ills," an attempt to let feeling override thought and to shape how we understand cities.

One form this takes is unfriendly household-registration (hukou) policy. But the deeper question is where young people can live and how they can grow. Where the young people are is where tomorrow's core workforce will be. And as individuals, they like living in cities: more opportunities, more resources, and it's easier to keep learning. As the old line has it, city air makes you free.

In a free market these young people ought to have more room to look for a way up, rather than being hemmed in by unreasonable policy.

Policymakers may not see it that way. They care about local results in front of them, but they have neither clear thinking nor evidence to back their short-term claims. As models of citizenship they are not encouraging.

This is the sixth piece in the series, on how an economist sees the problems in our lives. Lu Ming, born in 1973, is a distinguished professor at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He works mainly on labor economics, urban-rural and regional development, and socioeconomics. In July 2016 he published Great Nation, Big City (《大国大城》).

As Henry Hazlitt put it: "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups." Whether the young will live in a just society is a question of how we think. Which is why, when economists imagine the society to come, they turn to law and policy.

58. Why can't we judge wisely from our own experience and common sense alone?

On scientific questions, ordinary people are still fairly willing to leave things to the experts. Take the straddling-bus project. We might sense something is wrong with it, but you wouldn't stand up in public and say, let's put it to a vote, build it or not. Same with the Han Chunyu affair — you'd say that's for the journals and the academy to settle, and ordinary people will say, "I don't understand this."

So where does the difficulty of the social sciences lie? On every question we discuss, everyone seems to have something to say. Take whether the population of big cities should be capped. A great deal of government policy is in fact a response to public attitudes. When many people believe a city's problems come from having too many people in it, policy tends to tilt that way. That's where the difference lies, I think.

Generally speaking, government officials and ordinary people judge an issue by what they feel around them — it's crowded, it's congested. That's what they see.

But some things only come clear when you put them inside national and global trends, and researchers put more weight on that. Otherwise, what becomes of our public policy? We look at the local and the short-term, and when we look only at the local and the short-term we lose the overall, long-run interest. As I keep saying in my book, we have to pursue the public interest and the long-term interest. If those get ignored, the whole social pie is made smaller, and that is bad for the country's development and for each person's.

59. What limits our judgment on social questions?

China has both kinds of problem. The first kind is a matter of knowledge — you say "I don't follow," I explain, you may then follow, and the problem is solved.

Other times it isn't really a failure to follow. There is a genuine conflict between local and public interest, between the short term and the long term. From the standpoint of making public policy, scholars tend to look at the long run and the whole picture, but come down to one particular place and problems appear. Under our present fiscal system, for instance, the places migrants move to feel they have no obligation to pay for the schooling of migrants' children. How could they have no obligation? Of course they do. There is a great deal to unpack here.

60. People oppose corruption, yet they like having privileges of their own. Where's the flaw in that logic?

Corruption is produced by privilege. When we see corruption, when we see someone else with a privilege, we object, we dislike it — but when we hold a privilege ourselves, we all like it. Aren't a lot of our institutions and policies protecting our own privileges? Mine included: I'm a city person, I'm from Shanghai. Our system protects our privileges as city people, and we all welcome that. What kind of logic is that? If we welcome a system that protects our own privilege while opposing corruption, then what we are fighting is the symptom, not the cause.

61. Take the hukou system — why is a solution that satisfies everyone always out of reach?

In my research I have not found that income or education has any significant effect on a person's attitude toward public policy or on public participation. What I have found is that the strongest influence is where you were born. On the hukou system — locals versus newcomers — the people who really oppose reform are those born locally. I recently did a study of public attitudes toward outsiders, and the people who hold the most negative views of them, and who most support restrictive population policies, are mainly locals, and within that group the "natives" who were born there.

62. Why is empathy so scarce on this question?

How do you reach a compromise between the public interest and narrow private interest? What is the mechanism? The "veil of ignorance." John Rawls is where that comes from, but it may not be easy to grasp inside China's education system. So in my book I used a different principle: "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you."

I wrote at length about left-behind children. Think it through. We are city people now, and we don't want outsiders' children coming here for school. But consider: our ancestors were all farmers. Our grandfathers moved to the city. Apply the way we treat migrant children in big cities today to that generation, and our fathers would have been left-behind children. Would you want your father to have been a left-behind child? It's a simple point, and of course you wouldn't. "Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you" — that is Confucius's wisdom. Chinese civilization has this wisdom in it already.

My book takes it one step further. If you don't learn to compromise, you're forgetting something. If you can't use the "do not do unto others" way of thinking today, then tomorrow, when we debate a policy like heavy taxes on the rich, it will be your turn to lose out. Fortunes do turn. Apply "do not do unto others" to one public policy today, and someone else applies it to another public policy tomorrow. That way everyone can give ground to everyone else. It is a very important mechanism in a modern society.

63. Why should we think about problems whole? How would we gain by it?

Everything I've talked about today involves the relationship between the public interest and the long-term interest, and between short-term and local interest. Sometimes, if that isn't spelled out, we don't notice that an opinion we hold today, or our attitude to one thing, can affect the country's development.

I gave a public lecture recently and called it, flatly, "Why Our Views on Cities Affect National Development." Some things work like this: reasonable from where I stand, unreasonable at the national level. It all depends on how you look at it. I think we Chinese may be short on civic consciousness. What is a citizen? A citizen considers the public interest, and will even give up some private interest for it. We don't have that.

Plenty of people will ask me, why should I give anything up? Because that is exactly how a nation, or a civil society, is formed: you give ground today, I give ground tomorrow. Today I might sacrifice a bit of my own interest on one issue in pursuit of the social interest. Next time I might be the one the status quo hurts, and to protect my interest someone else gives ground. That is how a society moves forward. Many of China's problems today come from the fact that since ancient times Chinese people have thought: I look after myself and my family, and whatever lies beyond the family boundary is none of my business. That is what the small-peasant society left us.

But here's the thing. China has already modernized. Ninety percent of our economy is industry and services. More than half the population now lives in cities. What does a modern society like this need? Cooperation over a much larger area. We lack the awareness for it, so a lot of public policy just jams.

Is there a country anywhere in the world that counts as modernized with urbanization at just over 50%? The more developed a country is, the more urbanized it is. If everyone accepts that as a universal law, then as long as China wants to keep developing, farmers moving into cities is the trend. So let me ask: how do we solve the schooling of rural children? Isn't the answer obvious? That's why I once wrote that bringing left-behind children into the cities is the only way out. People ask me why it's the only way. Because of the logic I just laid out. As long as you want the country to develop, with urbanization climbing, you cannot have parents moving to the city forever while the children stay behind in the countryside. It won't work. It's that simple. And as those children grow up, along with urbanization, they become the city's future workforce. The better their quality, the more they matter to the city. You will be relying on them in your old age.

64. What does "the public interest" mean? Why is it still an argument for freedom, with no risk of sliding into an authoritarian society?

Take left-behind children again. From the standpoint of the public interest, we now have more than 60 million of them (the state recently revised the definition and the number suddenly dropped to 9 million — set that aside, let's use the old definition), plus more than 30 million children who moved to the cities with their parents. Together, 100 million children. That 100 million is roughly a third of all school-age children. Now a simple question: China is going to upgrade its industry and grow its economy while the total labor force shrinks — so isn't this 100 million a precious resource? From the standpoint of the public interest, shouldn't you do everything you can to educate them well? And doesn't it follow that the better the place where they are educated, the faster this 100 million worth of human capital improves? That is the public interest.

If these children are educated in big cities, push the question one step further: who gains? The big cities gain. Because when these children grow up they are the ones providing services in that city. So if you don't let them go to school in these cities now, who loses?

You can see in this example how much of our thinking runs into the conflict between local, short-term interest and overall, long-term interest. What we're doing now is foolish. These people do end up staying in the big cities, and because of what we're doing today their human capital won't be good enough by the time they grow up.

And once these children have been treated unjustly by the city while they're young — people who do the kind of research I do often say, "if you don't build schools now, you'll have to build prisons later." Perhaps that isn't rigorous, but I think the point behind it is right.

65. Young people carry fewer fixed opinions and are easier to talk to, so why do they struggle to change society?

If you want my first instinct, two things are fairly urgent. The first is at a high level, the level of policymaking. In much of our policymaking, and especially on the issues I've discussed today, there isn't enough exchange across disciplines.

Many of the issues we've discussed today are closely tied to the planning departments inside our administrative system. But when plans are drawn up, I don't think economics and sociology are heard enough. Economics and sociology focus more on the long-run questions in socioeconomic development that we've just been discussing, efficiency and fairness among them. Traditional planning, by comparison, hasn't given enough thought to the economic consequences — the same goes for regional economic development — and hasn't drawn out the underlying patterns well enough. On the parts that touch ordinary citizens more directly, I think a little more tolerance and openness in how we discuss these questions would make things go better.

Young people, for instance, don't carry as many fixed opinions, so talking with them may be a bit easier. But when someone's views are deeply set, when he feels much of what's happening today is hurting him, the conversation can be hard.

66. Before a policy or a law is passed, why should we ask more often whether other countries have done the same thing?

What John Rawls describes does offer a route to an ideal state of society, or to some optimal state of public policy, but I don't think it is the only route. Put it another way: we can't wait until all the conditions are... You can say China certainly has no mature modern system yet, but that doesn't mean our system has no agenda at all for public policy. Nor can you say that the goal of our government's policymaking isn't to reach the best state for society.

If, in public hearings, in the government's decision-making, in the National People's Congress making laws, in the government's deliberations over how to carry out a policy — if we could get all kinds of voices and interests to sit down and talk it through, I think that would work. The problem is that right now the process doesn't exist at all. And even where it does, many ordinary people lack the willingness to compromise between public and private interest, long-term and short-term interest, that we just talked about. If our citizens had the civic consciousness we discussed, on top of the awareness that already exists, I think things could improve a great deal, and we could move gradually toward a more ideal, more stable system.

If there were smoother channels for scholars' voices to get through, I think some of these problems could be solved. There's an unfortunate side to this too: the disagreements inside academia are severe. China's social sciences as a whole are advancing, but we are cut off from academia abroad — we exchange far too little with it.

Progress has been quick, but my overall sense is that when we make policy, and when our academic community states its views, our grasp of certain theoretical foundations, of what is happening internationally, of the roads other countries have already traveled, still isn't good enough. I've been saying lately that when we make a statement, or when a policy proposal comes up, we should ask more often: is this proposal, this policy of ours, something other countries are doing? Has it been done historically? Or, put more simply, how would we translate it into English? If we can answer all that, then eight times out of ten there is some universal pattern behind what we're doing. But if what we're doing today is something no other country has done historically, no country is doing now, and is hard even to put into English, then I think we need to be careful.

And I'm afraid a great deal of what we're doing right now is exactly that.

67. Why is other countries' experience worth learning from? Isn't caring about what happens elsewhere just idle worry?

Right now we don't make enough international comparisons; when we do make them we get a lot of them wrong; and then we blindly believe we are different from everyone else. Plenty of people argue this way: we're different from other countries. If one issue out of ten is genuinely different from other countries, maybe I can accept that. If nine out of ten are "different from other countries," then I think we're in trouble.

Let me give you a concrete example of international comparison. In the recent discussion of Shanghai's future there was a specific policy: cutting the future supply of land zoned for construction. People feel Shanghai is too big now, and "too big" comes down to two things, people and land. The question is how much land Shanghai should turn into construction land for its future development.

Somebody did the arithmetic: construction land is 45% of Shanghai's total area. So he made an international comparison — look, in other countries' metropolitan areas the share is about 20% or 30%. Tokyo is a little over 30%, so Shanghai's share is too high. Leave aside for now whether the figure is right. At the very least, when you make this comparison, the area Shanghai currently administers is smaller than those metropolitan areas, so the denominator we're using is small. Take Tokyo: the Tokyo metropolitan area is twice the size of Shanghai, and Shanghai is only half that. Calculating 45% on a smaller denominator — what should you really be comparing? You should compare how far the city sprawls across the whole Tokyo area. Look at it that way and Tokyo's sprawl reaches about 50 kilometers in the short direction and 70 or even 80 kilometers in the long one. And why does it stop at 50 kilometers in some directions? Because to the west there are mountains. Building costs rise, and it stops. To Tokyo's east is the sea. Natural geography hems it in. Shanghai has no such constraints; everything to the west of us is plain. So in a comparison like that, the comparison itself was wrong.

68. Why, as more and more information becomes shareable, do we grow narrower?

Simplistic logic is everywhere, and it does real damage. Let me give a few examples from the topics we've covered today. Two popular views alone have caused a great deal of trouble: first, that cities are too big; second, that China's regional imbalance comes from resources being too concentrated in the coastal areas and the big cities. Those are the two main claims, and in fact both are wrong. This kind of simple thinking runs very deep and touches a very wide range of things.

This is happening worldwide too, of course — anti-intellectualism, populism, both on the rise. But let's not wander too far; let's talk about China. First, I think our information still doesn't flow freely enough. Second, where there is information, it comes mixed — the scientific and the unscientific all jumbled together. And faced with it, people don't do their own rational analysis. We aren't much good at cool thinking, at doubting what we hear; we take in whatever is easiest to take in.

When people see congestion, they say there are too many people. That's easy to accept, isn't it? Let's use it as an example. But we forget to ask one question: in big cities elsewhere in the world, the population keeps growing. Urban ills were at their worst in the 1950s; now there are more and more people, and the urban ills have been brought under control. So what does having more people really have to do with urban ills? I can't say there's no relationship at all, but it shows that the number of people is not an important factor in producing urban ills.

Then there's the line you hear now, that outsiders coming here for school will take our resources. Resources are a matter of supply and demand. When demand grows, why suppress demand? You can raise supply — build more schools. We're inclined to accept views that are direct and popular, and views that fit what we already believe, and we rarely reason out why these problems arose in the first place or how other countries handle them. We hardly discuss any of that.

69. Why is public trust so easy to lose?

As for the media itself, I think it's neutral, traditional or new. But new media travels faster and reaches further. Anyone can see that.

The more important question is why this problem appears now. I tend to look inward, at academia. In a mature society, American society for example, and right through Trump's campaign, you could watch plenty of things the elite considered wrong spread very fast, quite possibly becoming part of the case that put him in office. But I think it's fairly normal for a society to hold some mistaken beliefs, or some anti-intellectual currents. Not everyone has had a higher education, and not everyone knows the truth.

But the government would do best to keep society open and information transparent. If information is skewed, then once you hit the "Tacitus trap" over the government's credibility — that is, once an organization has lost the public's trust, whatever it says, true or false, and whatever it does, good or bad, will be taken as a lie or a wrong — the government's credibility falls.

70. Is the government discriminating against outsiders? Does it know it's breaking the law?

Speaking as a social scientist, take the legal level first: where the law has not defined something, we talk about morality. But a lot of China's problems today lie in matters the law defines clearly, and I'm afraid we haven't handled even those well. Migrant children who move with their parents receiving schooling in the city, for instance — that is what the Compulsory Education Law provides. If the local government doesn't give them compulsory education, that breaks the Compulsory Education Law. It's that simple. China says it wants a society ruled by law, that it will govern the country according to law — so which is bigger right now, administrative power or the law?

Come back to ordinary people. A lot of public opinion still backs the view that outsiders shouldn't go to school here. Is that speech itself unlawful? Put the question in the American setting: American policy certainly cannot discriminate against Black people. Correspondingly, an ordinary citizen cannot make discriminatory statements about Black people in public either. The logic is the same. If the law says the government's practice is wrong, then when ordinary people make discriminatory statements about outsiders, that speech is itself supporting an unlawful act.

71. Why do doctor-patient conflicts keep happening?

Let me give you an example; it may clear things up, and it's true. A friend of mine runs a railway bureau. In a meeting once he told us about a case. A Japanese professor came to China and took his wife to Tibet on a trip. She got altitude sickness, fell ill, was hospitalized, and the doctors couldn't save her. She died. Our railway bureau chief was very nervous, said compensation would be needed, and we set aside a sum of money. Time passed, nobody came; more time passed, and the Japanese man arrived. We assumed it was about the compensation. Instead he said: before we went into Tibet this time, we didn't properly assess our own physical condition. Please forgive us.

A lot of problems are like this. Look at them inside China alone and they seem impossible to explain, but the very thing I just described can happen in China too, and how are we to face it? In a society built on contracts, what matters most is that every person's responsibilities, rights and interests are perfectly clear, and are bound and protected by law. When I take a patient to a hospital, there is a contract in that: I have agreed to bear certain risks of medical treatment.

I'm trying to draw out of these examples some angles people don't usually pay attention to. Those angles have something in common. Society itself is a contract, and everyone is inside it. In the doctor-patient relationship, as in many of the issues we've discussed today, the rights and obligations of both parties to the contract are clearly defined. But do we respect the rules of that contract?

On the surface it looks like a doctor-patient issue, but a lot of our problems come down to insufficient respect for the social contract. People sign a contract to buy a home and then break it. Our government can lead the way in breaking contracts too — announcing today that purchase restrictions take effect tomorrow, so that many people who had already signed can no longer register the purchase. Do we have any sense of contract left? Or take wealth-management products: you sign when you buy one, and it says right there that the principal is not guaranteed. Then, if the principal isn't returned, off we go to petition the government. I think that's the real problem underneath.

Why have Western developed societies come as far as they have? I think it began with social contract theory, which formed a shared awareness. The Japanese example I gave is the same thing. By the same logic, in matters like the doctor-patient relationship, the responsibilities, rights and interests of everyone involved can be set out clearly in law.

72. Why is the right to be informed the precondition for ordinary people feeling protected?

This topic has no direct link to the national, urban and regional development we've been discussing today. So why am I willing to talk about it? Because on the whole, in a great many matters, the underlying question — whether it's the transparency of information or how a whole process unfolds — is how we get ordinary people to believe they are protected.

How exactly do a market economy, democratic politics and a society ruled by law show up in this country? I think that deserves asking again. Whoever is right or wrong in a given matter, either way you have to let me know. Surely I'm entitled to be informed.

Then again, how did our society end up like this? If everyone in it believed privilege was wrong, if everyone held a value system built on justice, many of the problems we face today might not exist. We all like it when the privilege is ours, and so, when a problem involving privilege comes up, we don't feel anything is wrong with it. Our worship of privilege is deeply rooted, and in the end it's the ordinary person's rights that go unprotected.

73. Why does speaking in public carry responsibility?

I believe that once you enter the public sphere, what anyone says takes on a public meaning. As in the American setting: plenty of people may hold racist views privately, but American society can guarantee that if you express them in public you are in the wrong, and may even bear legal responsibility.

I think it's the same for us. Each of us has views on all sorts of things, but we need to be aware that once a view enters the public sphere it carries what we often call a "negative externality" — it affects other people, it affects the outcome of public policymaking, and that outcome affects social welfare. We need to be conscious of that. Some of this goes beyond law: racial discrimination can be defined legally, but if I make an irresponsible, unthinking remark about a policy, that may not be illegal. Still, I think we should be more rational and fair-minded, and avoid doing serious harm.

74. Why is it said that our problems come from too much regulation?

What strikes me as especially urgent right now? In this era of enormous social change in China, with the whole society and economy advancing so fast, on top of the transitional character of China's economy and society. And what problem does that transitional character create? Much of the social-science knowledge we have — economics, sociology, political science — studies fairly mature theory, the kind we were taught at university. It is aimed at a fairly mature society: it studies market economies, democratic politics, rule of law. It doesn't study much how a society that is not yet a market economy, a democratic polity or a rule-of-law society makes the passage to that state. And a great many of China's problems today are problems of transition. Explaining them probably calls for a different logic than explaining a mature market economy, and so do the solutions.

Take the United States. Many of its problems come from too little regulation, because its market economy is relatively free, so plenty of regulation there will have to be strengthened. China's problems come from too much regulation. The two are nothing alike.

We really do need to reflect on the problems in intellectual and academic circles. Let me list one or two. First, a lot of people, when they speak, are using ideas developed under fairly mature market-economy systems, and those ideas don't explain contemporary China well. You have to put China's own structure into the theory — how the Chinese government behaves, what Chinese policy looks like — to explain China's situation. Second, there is another type: someone describes a great many real phenomena. Are the phenomena real? Yes. But he gets the causes wrong, because he doesn't know the whole body of modern social-science knowledge well enough, and doesn't know the findings of empirical research or what is happening in international experience either. Both tendencies, I think, make many issues and many public policies very hard to discuss.

75. Why shouldn't an economist say, "I'm already tired of modernization"?

Consensus is hard because we already lack the willingness to listen to a different voice. If we really could listen, I don't think it would be hard at all. Before my book came out and after it, I had many chances to talk with different parts of society, including at the launch, where I spoke directly to ordinary citizens. I think they all understood what I was saying. I never ran into anything like a direct criticism of my views from them.

The criticism I did hear came not from the public but from inside academia — distorting some of the book's arguments, quoting out of context, or attacking points that don't actually matter. Those unimportant points aren't necessarily wrong, and they don't touch the book's overall argument; it's more that people understand and define things a bit differently.

But we probably have too many fixed opinions, held too firmly, with too little theory behind them and too little familiarity with international experience, and we lack the awareness we just discussed.

Much of the time we say things without realizing that nobody abroad would understand them. When I talk about urban population, for example, I ask a very simple question: if we translated the targets in our planning documents into English and presented them abroad, do you think anyone would follow? We say we want to "keep the population down to such-and-such a figure" — how would you translate that? What other city in the world sets a target like that? And when someone asks you how you'll do it, how do you explain? A lot of the time, when we say these things — and scholars are the ones proposing some of them — we scholars forget to ask: is anyone in another country proposing this?

As a scholar, I don't think I should be hard on ordinary people. But there are scholars living in Beijing who say, "I'm already tired of modernization." A philosopher may say that. An economist living in Beijing saying "I'm already tired of modernization" — that, I think, should not be said.

76. What else do we have no consensus on? The things we have no consensus on may be precisely the universal values.

That's an interesting question; let's work through it. First: do you think we have a consensus on the market economy? The three principles of a market economy are, one, prices are mainly set by supply and demand; two, the factors of production move freely — note, that includes labor; three, private property is protected. Do you think there's consensus on those three? There isn't.

Second: do you think we have a consensus on justice? Including what we just discussed, "do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you." No consensus there either.

Third: do we have a consensus on civilization? How do we understand civilization?

77. What does a civilized society look like? Why is it worth wanting?

The most important mark of modern civilization is care and provision for the weak. That is what underpins the idea that public policy and public services should tilt toward the disadvantaged. Do we have a consensus on that? It doesn't look like it.

Our idea of a "civilized city," if you ask me, amounts to clean, pretty, and no spitting in the street.

Let's ask another question: what are Shanghai's values? Take these past few days. After Trump took office, the mayor of New York put out an open letter: New York stands for inclusion and equality, those are our values. So if you are discriminated against anywhere in this country, New York State will always be open to you.

They have values. That's what makes a great city and a great country. Why didn't New York stop to think, oh dear, if I say this all 300 million Americans will come running to New York and there won't be enough housing? How is it that never occurs to them? So the gap isn't small, it's enormous. We have no consensus even on very basic questions.

When a city thinks about its own long-term development, once you have some basic values and some consensus, you can start the discussion. Whether I actually get there is another matter — I can say it will take 30 years, 50 years, as long as the direction is right. For instance: low-rent housing should gradually be extended to cover the resident population, or at the very least extend coverage step by step to residents without a local hukou. Or take the hukou system: I can't open it up all at once, so I set a target — I won't let the share of non-hukou residents keep rising. When I lecture government officials they tell me hukou reform is very hard. I say the bar isn't high: can we at least set a target of not letting the share of non-hukou residents rise? That's not hard. Or bring it down by one percentage point a year. That's fine, not hard at all.

78. In building consensus, what can an economist do, and what can an individual do?

As an individual, all I can do is my best. Do good research, communicate it well — that is where my effort goes. As for how this society will change, frankly, I don't know either.

The optimistic outcome, as I see it now, is that through research and communication a little more consensus forms and policymaking gets somewhat healthier. The pessimistic version is what I said before: the more pessimistic in the short run, the more optimistic in the long run. Maybe we really do need these problems to blow up before reform gets pushed through.

But it's a pity. Why does it have to be this way? In the afterword to my book I write about Black Americans' access to schooling. What China faces today is not worse than what the United States faced in the 1960s, when Black Americans were fighting for equal rights with whites. Back then Kennedy sent in troops to protect Black students going into schools. They did it. So how hard is what we face today? It hasn't come close to that, has it? And yet today it's our own local governments tearing down schools on their own initiative. A great deal of this is absurd.

79. What does a just society look like?

A great deal of our public policy — not just the making of it but the carrying out — violates a very basic principle. That principle is fairness.

Fairness has a second layer of meaning too: reverse discrimination. Reverse discrimination means protecting the weak — in American education, for instance, setting aside places in higher education for minority groups. Or giving relief payments and scholarships to the poor. That is fairness.

Fairness means, first, everyone is equal. Second, on top of that, you practice reverse discrimination, giving some benefits and preferences to the poor and the weak. That is fairness. But many of our policies today are neither fair nor reverse-discriminating.

Take the hukou system. Our hukou system is in effect protecting the rich, because it is tied to public services. Among the migrant population there are rich people too, but on average they are more likely to be low earners; politically they have few rights; socially they face all kinds of discrimination. They are the weak. They are also long-term residents, so by rights public policy ought to be discriminating in their favor. In reality this group — disadvantaged overall, and relatively low-income — is the one policy discriminates against. So there's not much fairness to speak of here.

(More reporting to come, updated as it appears.)

People in this report:

Lu Ming: Distinguished professor at the Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Author of Great Nation, Big City (《大国大城》) and The Power of Space (《空间的力量》), among other books.

He says: "The longer the stretch of history I look at, the more I believe that what decides the path of human development is universal laws. Each country's particular character can only flower within them."

Cover image from: Pixabay