As previously mentioned, I have been reading Frank Dikötter’s trilogy on the history of China during its years under the rule of Mao Zedong (1949-76). Of the three books, the one covering the middle years of 1958-62 is titled “Mao’s Great Famine.” The name given by Mao and his gang to these years was “The Great Leap Forward.”
The story told in this book is the sort of critically important and easily-available information about how the real world works that all our newly-minted elite college graduates have somehow missed. The short version is that a clique of political ideologues with zero knowledge of how things are actually produced takes control of making the major economic decisions. They have what they think are brilliant ideas about how to transform the economy and do everything better. In short order, output collapses and people are starving.
It is impossible not to notice the close analogy between the events that led to China’s catastrophe and the ongoing energy disaster being imposed on various U.S. states and other Western countries by an equally ignorant clique of political ideologues.
China’s “Great Leap Forward” operated mainly in three large areas of economic activity: irrigation projects, steel making, and agriculture. All three initiatives ended in total failure, and for essentially the same reasons. In the irrigation and steel making areas, vast resources were wasted, but when the schemes failed the country was basically just back where it started. The agricultural schemes were different in that when they failed tens of millions of people starved to death. So I will focus on those in this post.
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