Among scholars of comparative economics, there is a widespread view that the S… · @YashengHuang · TwKit

@YashengHuang

Among scholars of comparative economics, there is a widespread view that the Soviet – and later Russian – economy failed to take off because its leadership opted for shock therapy rather than for the gradualist reforms, Chinese style. Like many perspectives offered at 30,000 feet from the ground, this view is ahistorical. Mikhail Gorbachev tried the gradualist approach and launched land-leasing reforms closely modeled after the Chinese rural reforms, but unlike the Chinese farmers, who jumped on the offer, the Soviet farmers refused to sign up for a leasing deal with the state. In the documentary Inside Gorbachev’s USSR, an official recalled a Soviet farmer explaining why he did not want to lease the land, “You are paying me a salary, right? If I lease from you and there is no rain, I still have to work, but who will pay me? I have a loss, and I have nothing to eat.”12 In the hyperindustrialized economy, this Soviet farmer rested on the safety net of a basic salary in a way that completely eluded the Chinese farmers. The upside of the residual value is much larger to someone who faces risks than someone who does not, a notion that every venture capitalist knows well, and this is why venture capitalists structure compensations to the entrepreneurs they backed loaded with stock options rather than with high salary. The baseline effect is again at work. The knowledge of residual claims depended on the existence of capitalistic residues and, in the late 1970s, rural China still retained a few rudimentary capitalistic traits, a fundamentally different situation from urban China and the industrialized Soviet Union at the time of perestroika. In these two latter settings, there were no longer any residues of residual values and residues of risks. The fruits were hanging low only because the trees were not tall in the first place. The “modesty” judgment of the dual-track reform ignores the crucial rural context of China’s experiment.

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