Introduction

Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) is often described as his magnum opus—a work that changed how the West thinks about its relationship to the East. Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935 and raised partly in Egypt. He studied at Princeton and Harvard before joining Columbia University’s faculty in 1963, where he would remain for the rest of his career. Written in the wake of decolonization and the turmoil following the Yom Kippur War, Orientalism offered a scathing critique of how the West (the Occident) has historically represented—and misrepresented—the “Orient,” especially the Arab and Islamic world. The book’s acclaim propelled Said into international prominence and helped launch the field of postcolonial studies.

After Said’s death in 2003, an endowed professorship in his name was established at Columbia by his son and other donors. The first holder was historian Rashid Khalidi, who co-founded Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies and chaired the History Department. Khalidi became a central figure in Middle Eastern scholarship and a prominent public voice for Palestinian causes. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that Columbia has found itself at the epicenter of the political storm that swept through America following Hamas’s massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s ruthless and prolonged retaliatory campaign in Gaza. In 2024, Khalidi retired in protest of what he regarded as Columbia’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

By then, it was clear that Columbia—as well as many other universities—had been caught between a rock and a hard place: chastised by left-leaning, pro-Palestinian voices such as Khalidi while also investigated for antisemitism, first by a Republican Congress and later by the second Trump Administration. Within less than two years, Columbia saw two presidents (Minouche Shafik and Katrina Armstrong) resign, and the university struggled to find someone willing to take what, in calmer times, would be considered a coveted job. Earlier this year, Columbia agreed to pay approximately $200 million over three years to the federal government as part of a settlement package. In response, Khalidi canceled his fall course on modern Middle East history, citing the university’s “capitulation” to political pressure. His departure marked not just the end of an era but also cast a long shadow over Said’s intellectual legacy at Columbia.

As a faculty member at one of the colleges caught up in these controversies, I had a front-row seat to the incendiary rhetoric and raw emotions that animated both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Yet I often felt like a confused and frustrated bystander, struggling to make sense of what I saw and to sort truth from distortion. My search for clarity led me to Jewish and Middle East History, and recently to Orientalism.

The book first caught my attention when Douglas Murray, in The War on the West, branded it a symbol of “anti-Western” thought. For the record, I found it hardly lived up to that scandalous label. Orientalism was not an attempt to retell the history of the Middle East from “the other side,” as I had assumed. Instead, it is a scholarly critique of how the field of Oriental studies—or Orientalism—emerged and evolved over centuries, and how it sustained and legitimized colonial power. Unlike Murray’s polemic, Orientalism was not written for mass consumption. In fact, it was a challenging read: Said’s pages were dense with references to Orientalist scholars and texts I scarcely knew, and much of the detail was difficult to absorb. Yet the book contains enough illuminating passages to make the effort a worthwhile one. Above all, his central insight stood out clearly: cultural representations are never neutral—they are bound up with visible and invisible struggles for power. That idea offered me a new vantage point from which to process the unsettling upheavals we all bear witness to today.

What Is “Orientalism”?

On the surface, Orientalism refers simply to the study of the East. Armed with the tools of modern scholarship, Orientalists believed they were “rescuing the Orient from obscurity, alienation, and strangeness.” By rediscovering and reconstructing the East’s lost languages, arts, and histories—such as Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Dunhuang Mogao Caves—they helped preserve and reassert the achievements of ancient civilizations. Over more than two centuries, this enterprise produced a vast body of knowledge that stands as one of humanity’s great intellectual accomplishments. Many who entered the field were motivated, at least ostensibly, by curiosity and a genuine passion for discovery.

Yet Orientalism was always more than an academic discipline. It was also a distinctive way of seeing—a mode of perception and representation shaped as Europeans confronted the Orient’s special place in their history: a source of fascination and desire, but also of fear and control. In Edward Said’s account, Orientalism did not merely rationalize colonial domination after the fact; it helped create the very conditions that made such domination not only acceptable but also preferable.

Said quotes Karl Marx to illustrate this mindset.  Reflecting on British rule in India, Marx asked:

“Can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England, she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.”

Although Marx was writing about India, hid rationale applies to much of what Europe called “the Orient.” However self-serving or brutal Western rule might have been, he saw it as a necessary evil in humanity’s progress—a step on the predetermined path toward revolution and enlightenment. That professed faith in historical inevitability, I think, was the common denominator among Orientalists, even if they differed on what glorious ends Western domination was meant to serve.

Critique of Orientalism

Essentialism

Said’s first and foremost critique of Orientalism is its assumption of an absolute and systematic difference between the West and the Orient. The West is rational while the Orient is aberrant; the West is humane while the Orient is aloof; the West is progressive while the Orient is backward; the West embraces liberty and self-government while the Orient passively endures serfdom and despotism—and so on.

Moreover, Orientalists regarded these differences as fixed and unchanging, rooted in the “inherent” traits of geography, race, and culture. In their view, there existed a causal link between a civilization’s behavior and these supposedly objective determinants—one that could be generalized, systematized, and even used for prediction. From this flawed foundation grew a vast body of texts, academic traditions, and cultural representations that, as Said observed, “create not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe.” In the end,

“objective structure (designation of the Orient) and subjective restructure (representation of the Orient by the Orientalist) become interchangeable.”

Said saw Henry Kissinger’s writing as an exemplar of such cultural essentialism.

Thanks to the Newtonian revolution, Kissinger wrote in his 1974 book American Foreign Policy, the West “is deeply committed to the notion that the real world is external to the observer, that knowledge consists of recording and classifying data—the more accurately the better.” The developing world, however, has a very different relationship with empirical reality because “they never went through the process of discovering it.”

Did Kissinger mean to suggest that a proper relationship with empirical reality could never be learned by those who did not “discover it?” That seems implausible, because few people alive today—even in the West—participated in that discovery themselves.  It would make sense only if he was referring to civilization or culture rather than individuals. Regardless, the clear implication is that this difference remains so fundamental that it continues to shape global affairs and must be taken into account in the making of American foreign policy.

 Prejudice

Said’s second objection is that Orientalism was never an innocent scholarly pursuit. Although most Orientalists saw themselves as impartial scholars, their work was inevitably shaped by the prejudices of their own societies.

For medieval Christendom, the Orient was the land of infidels, violent hordes, and slave traders. Since the rise of the Arab empire, Islam had symbolized terror and barbarism in the European imagination. Saladin’s victories over the Crusaders, the Khwarezmian sack of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople all left deep scars on the Christian psyche.

The Arab world also stood at the center of a vast medieval slave trade. Merchants in Prague, Verdun, and Venice profited handsomely by selling Slavic boys and girls—often as eunuchs—into servitude in the East. Arabs even believed, Said notes, that castration could “purify and improve the Slavic mind.” The horror of slavery endures in language itself: the English word slave shares its root with Slav, and in Arabic, the term for eunuch derives from the same ethnic label. Even today, the Italian greeting ciao originates from a Venetian phrase meaning “I am your slave.”

Having suffered centuries of defeat and humiliation at Muslim hands, it is hardly surprising that medieval European thinkers cast the Prophet of Islam as an impostor destined for Hell—as Dante fancied in the Inferno. Shaped by this inherited cultural bias, the Orientalists who came of age during Europe’s imperial ascendancy continued, almost reflexively, to portray Islam as a degenerate faith. Their distorted perception gradually broadened into a caricature of the entire Orient—something “either to be feared (the Yellow Peril, the Mongol hordes, the brown dominions) or to be controlled (by pacification, research and development, outright occupation whenever possible).”

Orientalist tropes still permeate modern politics and culture. Stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims as violent, irrational, or backward remain so pervasive that they are difficult to resist. I once took it for granted that suicide bombers were mostly Islamist jihadists—presumably lured by visions of martyrdom and paradise with seventy-two virgins.  Only after reading John Gray’s Black Mass recently did I learn that this horrific tactic, now symbolized by the terrifying explosive vest, was pioneered not by jihadists but by the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist-Leninist group in Sri Lanka. Until the early 2000s, it was the Tigers, not Islamic extremists, who carried out the majority of suicide attacks.

Entanglement

Finally, orientalists often conveniently concealed their interests behind a façade of scholarship. Whether as consultants, merchants, or citizens of imperial powers, they all benefited—directly or indirectly—from empires that relentlessly extracted resources from the Orient.  Many took it upon themselves to “dignify simple conquest with an idea,” transforming material ambition into moral or intellectual justification.  Others continued to insist that “there were subtle distinctions between Orientalism as an innocent scholarly endeavor and Orientalism as an accomplice to empire.” Yet, as Said concluded,

“Orientalism can never unilaterally be detached from the general imperial context that begins its modern global phase with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.”

Is Orientalism anti-west?

Douglas Murray devoted a lengthy critique to Orientalism in The War on the West, alleging that Said viewed “everything in the West through a lens that was not just interrogative and hostile but amazingly ungenerous,” and that he “held the West to standards expected of no other society and then castigated it” for failing to meet them. Murray was not alone in this view. In the 1994 “Afterword” to Orientalism, Said himself expressed dismay that the book had been “misleadingly” labeled anti-Western “by commentators both hostile and sympathetic.”

Yet there is some truth to the charge. Indeed, it is difficult to miss Said’s contempt for Western exceptionalism and his indignation at the destruction, misery, and death that ideology inflicted on the peoples of the Orient.  He famously wrote in the book, which he probably had come to regret,

It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.

Here, Murray is right to complain that Said slips into the very essentialism he condemned in Orientalist thought.

“My objection to Orientalism,” Said wrote elsewhere, “is that as a system of thought it approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint.” If Europe itself is such a human reality, then to claim that every European is racist is, without any doubt, “uncritically essentialist.”

Alas, the impulse to overgeneralize and stereotype is truly, deeply human!

That said, Murray’s critique also oversimplifies, if not distorts, Said’s argument by quoting him out of context. Said never suggested that Europeans were uniquely capable of domination or cruelty. On the contrary, he insisted—immediately following that infamous line—that when confronted with “other” cultures, human societies have almost invariably relied on imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism. As a descendant of a once-proud empire that believed itself to be the center of the world, I can easily relate to this observation. Orientalism dominates the discourse of our time only because, for the past five centuries, the West has been more powerful than the East. Would humanity have fared better had the hegemonic culture of the modern era arisen from the East instead? I doubt it, and I suspect Said would have agreed.

The paradox of our differences

Ultimately, Orientalism is a book about coming to terms with our differences. At first glance, these differences seem to arise from identities such as race, culture, history, and nation. Yet identity, whether of the self or of the “other,” is neither static nor objective. Rather, as Said wrote, “identity is a much worked-over historical, social, intellectual, and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and institutions in all societies.”

Nation-building, for instance, is an act of identity creation. Many nation-states emerged from wars and treaties, sustained by collective imagination and perpetuated through indoctrination (aka public education). Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Israel–Palestine conflict. It was not two preexisting states suddenly plunging into decades of war; rather, it was the conflict itself—whose origins reach back at least to the Crusades—that ultimately gave rise to the two national identities now locked in struggle. Identities and differences, therefore, are neither fixed nor independent; they evolve together, continuously shaping and reinforcing one another.

As the foundation of social life, identity offers belonging and security. Preserving it can feel as vital as self-defense, for to lose one’s identity can seem akin to losing life itself. When people believe their identities are under attack, this instinct can trigger fierce, almost autoimmune responses. You can feel its force in Charlie Kirk’s proclamation that “our form and structure of government was built for people who believed in Christ,” or in J.K. Rowling’s impassioned defense of womanhood against what she sees as the overreach of the trans-movement. The profound crisis of American politics today is, at its core, a crisis of identity—a nation divided over what it means to be American. In particular, is America still a melting pot, or has it become a scrambled salad?

Said urged us to look beyond such rigid identities. We must not, he wrote, continue to “divide human reality into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races.” Identities that present themselves as “radical and ineradicable” end up “setting the real boundaries between human beings” and turning our vision away from shared human realities—joy and suffering, love and fear, justice and oppression—that unite us far more than they divide us.

Said’s passionate plea to focus on our common humanity rather than our petty differences is as inspiring as it is utopian.

In the decades since the publication of Orientalism, progressives have embarked on a mission to demonstrate that many—perhaps most—human identities once thought immutable are, in fact, social constructs. Not only are nation and race social inventions, we are now told, but so too are woman and man. In this view, no artificial boundaries—biological or otherwise—should separate humanity. Yet it has become clear that not all of these claims have been equally well received by the public. Ironically, the effort to dissolve the very boundaries underlying identity has inadvertently reinforced politics of identity that now dominate American life.

Another legacy of Orientalism is the tendency to view social and political relationships primarily through the lens of power. In this framework, power corrupts and oppresses: the stronger party (for instance, the West) is presumed to be the oppressor, while the weaker (the Orient) is the oppressed. Applied to the Israel–Palestine conflict, this logic leads naturally to the conclusion that Israel, being the stronger side, must necessarily be at fault. I suspect many of the young people protesting on campuses for the Palestinian cause have been persuaded by this line of reasoning. The irony is that such a reductionist view is even more essentialist than Orientalism itself, for it flattens complex and evolving human realities into a single variable—power—which, like identity, is also a social construct that shifts with context and interpretation.

As much as I want to agree with Said that we should rise above our petty differences, I do not believe we can simply wish those differences away when grappling with complex social, political, and geopolitical realities. Nor do I think that power dynamics alone hold the key to understanding them. Power structures arise from historical contingencies and, in turn, interact with human identities—both real and imagined. To ignore the latter is to risk reducing the former to a hollow academic abstraction. Ultimately, for each person living in a particular historical moment, their own identity—and the identity of those they perceive as “others”—is real and consequential. We disregard that reality at our own peril.

That, ultimately, is the lesson I took away from Orientalism.

 

Marco Nie

October 11, 2025

Black Mass is a satanic parody of the Catholic Mass, a central act of worship in the Roman Catholic Church that commemorates the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Using this deliberate and profane inversion of a holy rite, John Gray delivers a scathing critique of Western thought in broad strokes. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the book dismisses nearly all Western political ideologies—from utopianism and Marxism to liberalism—as mere heresies of Christianity.

Gray is well known for his skepticism about human progress. He has been on my radar for quite some time, but only after watching a recent debate between him and Francis Fukuyama was I finally convinced that his books were probably worth reading. My hunch was right. I thoroughly enjoyed Black Mass, the pessimistic—sometimes disheartening—message notwithstanding.

According to Gray, the ideological foundation of the West is the pursuit of the salvation of humanity, which gives rise to historical teleology—the belief that history has a purpose. This idea entered Western thought with Christianity. As Gray put it,

Christians believed history had an end in both senses: it has a pre-determined purpose, and when that was achieved it would come to a close.

In the broadest terms, historical teleology views human history as a struggle between good and evil that is destined to end with the triumph of good and the transformation of humanity. This idea, Gray notes, originated in Zoroastrianism, a proto-monotheistic religion of ancient Persia.

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What is Gray against?

In short, almost everything, and it all began with millenarianism.

The Book of Revelation teaches that Christ will return to defeat Satan and establish a thousand-year kingdom of peace. Christian millenarianism, which Gray traces back to Joachim of Fiore (1132–1202), builds on this belief. Its novelty lies in the insistence that the return of Christ will usher in a transformation that is:

(i) imminent, because the present world is seen as irredeemably corrupt;
(ii) collective, in that it affects not just individuals but humanity as a whole;
(iii) terrestrial, meaning the kingdom is to be realized on earth, not in heaven or the afterlife; and
(iv) miraculous, since it depends on divine intervention.

In contrast, traditional Christian doctrine since St. Augustine has emphasized an unbridgeable gulf between the City of Man and the City of God, rooted in the belief that human life is hopelessly marred by original sin. Accordingly, it rejects the notion that evil can be defeated in this world. It is in this sense, Gray argues, that millenarianism represents a “heretical reversion to Christian origins”—hence the analogy to a Black Mass.

The central thesis of the book is that millenarianism is a highly contagious ideological virus that has deeply and repeatedly penetrated Western thought. As we shall see next, Gray argues that many of humanity’s self-inflicted disasters can ultimately be traced to this infection.

Utopianism

Humans have never stopped dreaming of a harmonious and prosperous society in which everyone lives happily ever after. However, such visions were initially located in a distant past, severed from the present by myth or rupture. Plato’s ideal republic, for instance, existed in a Golden Age before history; so too did Confucius’s legendary era of the “three generations” (三代).

Millenarianism is unique in its belief that a utopian society is achievable in the foreseeable future. Many Enlightenment thinkers inherited this belief but secularized it. Rejecting the possibility of divine intervention, they designated humans as the agents of transformation. Yet, humanistic as their ideology may appear, it “cannot do without demonology.” Utopia requires a struggle against evil forces—those said to have corrupted society or obstructed the path to perfection.

According to Gray, it was the French Revolution that first embraced violence as a legitimate tool for transforming society. Until then, he writes, “no one believed violence could perfect humanity”—not even in Medieval Europe. For the Jacobins, violence became not only a means of self-defense against internal and external enemies but also an instrument of civic education and social engineering. True revolutionaries, they believed, must show no mercy toward the enemies of human progress.

As Maximilien Robespierre put it eligantly, “pity is treason.”  Chairman Mao understood this well, though his rhetoric was intentionally crude to resonate with his peasant base. “Revolution is not about wining and dining people,” he proclaimed.  “It is the violence of one class against another.”(革命不是请客吃饭。革命是暴动，是一个阶级针对另一个阶级的暴力行动。)

Gray’s point is clear: there is a direct line between this secularized form of millenarianism and the most horrific political ideologies of the modern time.

Communism

Marxism holds that history will culminate in a classless society so prosperous that every person will be free—not just politically, but liberated from the tyranny of material necessity. However, the path to this ultimate freedom runs through the dictatorship of the proletariat and the abolition of private property.

Russia and China shed a tremendous amount of blood trying to turn this enticing blueprint into reality—only to arrive at demonstrably tragic outcomes. Gray argues that the failures of these regimes did not stem from the supposedly backward cultures or traditions of the host countries—so-called “oriental despotism.” Instead, he writes, Russia’s misfortune was due to her exposure to “the Enlightenment in one of its most virulent forms.”

In the same vein, Mao’s China was driven by “an Enlightenment ideal of universal emancipation” in its relentless effort to remake an Oriental tyranny in the image of Western ideals.  Liberals often interpret post-Mao China as an experiment in re-westernization. Gray disagrees. Ideologically, he argues, post-Mao China has been moving toward de-westernization—and the belief that globalization and modernization would bring China closer to the West has always been, in his view, a pipe dream.

Judging by recent geopolitical developments, he may well have been right.

Nazism

Like communism, Nazism was also a brainchild of the modern West. The Nazis shared with secular millenarians a vision of a corrupt world spiraling toward catastrophe. Where Nazism differed was in its overwhelming negativity—a fixation not on the content of a future paradise but on the obstacles to it.

The Nazis were most notorious for their racism and superstitious hatred of Jews. Neither was new in the West. While racial prejudice may be rooted in human nature, Gray writes that “racism is a product of the Enlightenment.” He goes so far as to argue that liberal racism—unlike its tribal counterpart—left open “the possibility of the forcible destruction of other cultures, and even—if all else failed—genocide.”

Antisemitism, meanwhile, was a defining feature of medieval millenarianism, which often portrayed Jews as “devils with the horns of a goat… whose goal was the destruction of Christendom, even of the world.” When Hitler implemented his infamous Final Solution, it is conceivable that he believed he was doing the world a favor—ridding it of a mystical evil force, whose elimination was a necessary precondition for the ascension of the German Volk to a state of harmony.

Radical Islamism

I had always assumed that Islam must bear some—if not most—responsibility for the rise of “radical Islamism,” which has waged an asymmetric war against the West for decades. However, Gray has a different take. According to him, the intellectual founder of radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb, was deeply influenced by European thinkers, particularly Nietzsche.

Qutb’s conception of a revolutionary vanguard dedicated to the overthrow of corrupt Islamic regimes and the establishment of a society without formal power structures owes nothing to Islamic theology and a great deal to Lenin.

In this light, jihadists, in their pursuit of a world of faithful, have much in common with the Jacobins, who were inspired by Rousseau’s ideas of popular sovereignty and the general will. Like the Jacobins, they see revolutionary violence as a purifying force. Like the Jacobins, they blame the sorry state of their world on conspiracies—only the Jacobins targeted counterrevolutionaries, while the jihadists’ enemy is “the West.”

Perhaps the only major innovation of radical Islam is its theological justification for suicide attacks as acts of personal purity that guarantee one’s place in heaven.

What surprised me most was Gray’s reprimand of neoliberalism and neoconservatism.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism emerged as a reaction against communism and socialism. It was founded on the belief that the free market could do everything: organize the economy, foster trade, and promote peace—if only governments would leave it alone. Thanks to this immense power, the free market was seen as destined to win over the world, thus representing a logical and desirable end of economic history.

These beliefs, Gray contends, are closer to religious faith than to the results of scientific inquiry. According to him, Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” reflects a kind of faith-based political economy—but Smith himself never tried, as some of his 20th-century followers did, to “deduce free markets from dubious axioms of rational choice.” On the contrary, Smith understood the flaws of market societies and never entertained the illusion of an omnipotent market that naturally regulates, stabilizes, and corrects itself.

Therefore, it was not the religious Smith but his secular disciples—the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—who turned the free market into a religion. In his famous Road to Serfdom, Hayek argued that “a successfully planned economy is a Utopia.” And yet, Gray observes, “he failed to notice that the same is true of the self-regulating market.” Hence the irony:  “the free market became a religion only when its basis in religion was denied.”

Like all fundamentalists, Gray quips, neoliberals ended up worshiping tenets that was “a caricature of the tradition they seek to revive.”

Neoconservatism

Like neoliberals, neoconservatives embraced a radicalized version of progressive thinking—the idea that humanity is gradually progressing toward a just, equal, and inclusive society in which everyone is entitled to, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Like neoliberals, neoconservatives claimed access to a universal truth. What sets them apart was their emphasis on aggressively proselytizing their truth around the world. This mission was often justified by the dubious claim that liberty could not be secure anywhere unless it was secured everywhere. As George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address:

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

Neoconservatives interpreted the West’s triumph in the Cold War as a vindication of their historical teleology. As Fukuyama famously wrote in The End of History:

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Intoxicated by such utopian thinking, neoconservatives eagerly took up the project of preaching—and, in some cases, forcefully installing—this “final form of human government” across the globe. That their deeds bear the religious imprint of medieval millenarianism is evidenced by two convictions.

First, even preemptive wars are justifiable if they further “human progress,” echoing the Jacobin belief in violence as a purifying force.

Second, “truth is whatever serves the cause.”

On this second point, Gray’s tart commentary on the bogus casus belli for the Iraq War—fabricated and sold to the world under the watch of Tony Blair and George W. Bush—deserves full quotation:

It is not so much that he [Blair] is economical with the truth as that he lacks the normal understanding of it… When he engages in what is commonly judged to be deception he is only anticipating the new world that he is helping to bring about… When Bush and Cheney rejected intelligence that conflicted with the case for war they were not suppressing the truth… For these seers, victory was the same as truth—not truth of the ordinary kind, to be sure, but the esoteric truth that is concealed in the deceiving mirror of fact.

Of course, this notion of a “higher truth”—a truth not based on facts but on its utility to “the cause”—was a hallmark of modern totalitarian regimes. The Soviet Union’s infamous propaganda outlet was aptly named Pravda, the Russian word for “truth.”

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 What is Gray for?

As the long list above suggests, Gray’s cynicism can be overwhelming. While what he detests is laid bare in the book for all to see, it is harder to pinpoint what he supports. This is understandable, since Black Mass is written primarily as a critique of Western thought.

At his core, I believe Gray is a pacifist who sees human institutions as instruments for managing conflict. He condemns all violence, regardless of the moral justifications made in its name. This conviction leads him to embrace what can only be described as a morally relativist position. In the book, he quotes the Bulgarian-French historian Tzvetan Todorov to argue that there is little moral difference between America burning Japanese civilians alive with atomic bombs and Nazi Germany murdering millions of Jews in gas chambers. It is a revealing argument worth quoting in full:

 Atomic bombs killed fewer people than the famine in the Ukraine, fewer than the Nazis slaughtered in the Ukraine and Poland. But what the bombs and the slaughters have in common is that their perpetrators all thought they were but a means to achieve a good. However, the bombs have another feature: they are a source of pride to those who made and dropped them … whereas totalitarian crimes, even if they were considered by their perpetrators to be useful and even praiseworthy political acts, were kept secret … Both the Soviet and the Nazi leadership knew that the world would damn them if it knew exactly what they had done. They were not wrong, because as soon as their crimes were revealed they were treated as the emblems of absolute evil. Things are quite different in the case of the atomic bombs, and for that very reason, even if the crime is less grave, the moral mistake of the people who killed in the name of democracy is greater.

It is this desire to preserve peace and minimize violence that compels Gray to reject the idea of progress itself. As the term has come to be understood in the postwar world, progress implies that human beings can improve society through reason, collective action, and moral development.

Case against progress

Progressives assume that ethics and politics follow discoverable laws, much like those in science, and that society improves cumulatively: each step forward enables further advances, and the elimination of one evil paves the way for eradicating others.

They believe that human beings are born with natural rights and that governments exist to protect them. Freedom, in this view, is a natural condition that emerges once tyranny is removed. These principles are treated as axiomatic in modern legal documents such as the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights.

Unlike Marxists, progressives don’t always promise a full-fledged utopia. Yet the logic of historical teleology is all the same: an infinite process of improvement implies a convergence to a world far better than the present, and human progress will continue until liberty and universal rights are secured for all.

Gray builds his case against progressivism on three core arguments.

First, universal human rights derived from Faith rather than Reason. 

Thomas Aquinas laid the groundwork for natural law theory, which was later used to justify universal rights and moral standards. But Aquinas’s law was part of the “eternal law of God,” revealed to humans through Reason. Similarly, Locke’s notion of a state of nature is inextricable from his belief in divine creation: we are all equally free because we are all made by God, and harming oneself or others is wrong because it violates God’s property. Gray rejects this conception of freedom as a natural condition. To him, freedom is a product of the modern nation-state, whose formation often involved the violent integration or exclusion of “alien” groups.

Second, imperfection is a permanent feature of the human condition. 

Humans are, as Gray puts it, “an extremely violent species,” for whom a conflict-free existence is impossible. We want incompatible things—excitement and tranquility, freedom and security, truth and vanity—and cannot agree on what morality or the ideal society should look like. There is no single moral truth, only visions of perfection inherited from religious tradition.

Liberal thinkers since Hobbes have placed their faith in rationality to resolve conflict. Because humans “dread violent death more than anything,” they would supposedly choose peace through mechanisms like the Leviathan (Hobbes), the social contract (Locke), or democratic institutions. But Gray argues this rationalization leaves out the most intractable human drive: the need for meaning. “Nothing is more human than the readiness to kill and die in order to secure a meaning in life.”

Third, there is no guarantee that the “better angels of our nature” will prevail.   

This view starkly contrasts with optimistic humanists like Steven Pinker, who argue that society has become progressively more peaceful. Gray disagrees. Knowledge may accumulate, but “humans do not become any more civilized as a result.” On the contrary, they remain prone to barbarism—especially “when it comes clothed in virtue.” Material prosperity has grown alongside technological and scientific progress, but so has the capacity for destruction.

Gray’s model of history

Gray concludes that the idea of ever-continuing progress is an illusion, as it presupposes a fundamental transformation in human behavior. Instead, he offers a model of history as a cyclical movement between order and anarchy:

Anarchy could be overcome as evolving patterns of social cooperation crystallized into civil institutions; but the order in society that resulted would regularly break down, and when this happened no social contract could restore order. States are at the mercy of events as much as any other human institution, and over the longer course of history all of them fail.

Gray’s model strikes me as a rather precise depiction of Chinese history between the founding of the first unified empire—the Qin Dynasty in 221 BCE—and the abdication of the last Qing emperor in 1911 CE. During those two millennia, China witnessed the rise and fall of twelve major dynasties and around 400 emperors. Each episode, regardless of its origin, followed a remarkably consistent script: a brief period of order and prosperity, followed by inevitable descent into corruption, rebellion, and collapse.

This historical regularity became so deeply embedded in Chinese consciousness that it gave rise to idioms like “Thirty years on the east bank, thirty years on the west bank” (三十年河东，三十年河西) and “That which is long divided will unite; that which is long united will divide” (分久必合，合久必分)—as well as poetry such as “When the state rises, the people suffer; when it falls, the people suffer” (兴，百姓苦；亡，百姓苦).

My history education in China was entirely shaped by Marxist historical materialism, which depicts history as a linear progression from primitive communal societies to utopian communism. The inherent contradiction between this teleological framework and the cyclical pattern of Chinese dynastic history was never acknowledged, let alone explained. According to my teachers, Chinese history was simply another data point confirming the greatness of Marxist theory.

After moving to the U.S., I began to view Chinese history from Qin to Qing as a profound anomaly in the supposed universal arc of progress. For whatever reason, China appeared locked by historical contingencies in a perpetual cycle of dynastic rise and fall. This trap stymied institutional innovation and long-term economic growth, subjecting generations of Chinese to recurring, man-made catastrophes.

The traumatic historical experience etched into the collective psyche a deep-seated urge to trade stability for anything, at any price. As a result, the ability to provide stability remains the most compelling justification for the rule of any Chinese regime—repressive or otherwise. It also explains why today’s Chinese state prioritizes “maintaining internal stability” (维稳) over nearly all other governmental functions.

I think Gray would understand this impulse. His rejection of progressivism reflects a similar longing for peace and security—not through utopian schemes, but through humility, restraint, and a sober understanding of human nature.

Final remarks

I don’t disagree with Gray’s analysis of the very real danger posed by progressive fervor. Progress and fanaticism may well have a symbiotic relationship, and violence may be the price humanity must pay to move forward. However, the hopelessness offered by Gray feels darker and more despondent than the evils he so dreadfully warns us about. If Chinese history is any guide, there is no reason to believe that subscribing to his worldview offers a greater prospect for peace and stability.

Of course, a good philosopher like Gray surely knows that some readers will find his view of human affairs “dispiriting.” He does offer a solution: God. Put bluntly, Gray suggests that if humans need to find meaning in life, they’d better get it from God than from any other nonsenses.

Gray regards religion as an indispensable human institution. He mocks modern atheists armed with Reason and Science—Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens come to mind— for trying to make religion disappear by simply “showing it is an illusion.”  To Gray, religion persists because it serves genuine human needs, the most important of which are to “live with what cannot be known” and to “find meaning in the chances of life.” That’s why heavy-handed suppression of religious belief has never succeeded. Instead,

like repressed sexual desire, faith returns, often in grotesque forms, to govern the lives of those who deny it.

Gray’s solution is all the more remarkable considering that he himself is an atheist. But he does not see this as a contradiction. In Gray’s mind, he is simply prescribing medicine to soothe and pacify his fellow Homo sapiens who cannot help themselves. In doing so, he tells yet another version of Plato’s noble lie: that “while philosophers may know the truth, they also know that truth is deadly to the mass of humankind.”

Marco Nie, July 27 2025

I don’t recall exactly when I first heard Professor Mahmassani’s name, but it was likely in the fall of 1999, shortly after I began graduate school at the National University of Singapore. My advisor, Professor Der-Horng Lee, had also just arrived in Singapore, and—perhaps because I was his first and, for a while, only student—we spent a great deal of time talking that fall. Having earned his PhD in transportation and worked in the U.S. for several years, he seemed to know the field exceedingly well. He was also a gifted storyteller, and one of his specialties was to share anecdotes about academics. A quarter century later, I no longer remember the details of those conversations, despite my fond memory of them. What I do remember clearly is that Hani’s name came up often—as a leading authority in dynamic network analysis, the creator of DYNASMART, and a charismatic scholar known for his sharp wit and formidable intellect.

Those stories and names—especially Hani’s—left an indelible impression on me and ultimately played a role in my decision to pursue an academic career myself.

I must have seen Hani from afar at various conferences many times in the early 2000s, when I was a PhD student at UC Davis.  Yet, I have never worked up the courage to introduce myself.  For a young student, having a word with him at those events was no easy feat—it was a fierce competition that required social skills and persistence to win.

The first time I actually spoke with him was at the INFORMS annual meeting in Pittsburgh in the fall of 2006, right after I joined Northwestern University as an assistant professor.  I caught up with him after a session we both attended.  Upon learning that I was new to the profession, he immediately offered advice on how to navigate the tenure process.

By now I’ve forgotten most of what he said except the part about the importance of getting the NSF CAREER award, likely because I never got it (sorry, Hani). What has stayed with me to this day, however, was how gently and candidly he spoke to me.  I remember thinking afterward: Wow— this isn’t the imposing figure that I had admired in awe from a distance, but a humble and empathetic mentor, someone you could trust and turn to for guidance.

As fate would have it, just a few months after we first met, Hani came to interview for the William Patterson Chair Professorship.  On the day of his seminar, I ran into the Dean of Engineering, Julio Ottino, in the hallway.  He casually asked for my opinion about Hani’s candidacy and said something to the effect of, “I heard he’s like a god in your field.” I nodded without the slightest hesitation.

Hani arrived in Northwestern to join my department in the summer of 2007.  Soon after, he also assumed the role of the director for the university’s renowned Transportation Center.  His leadership at that critical juncture transformed the center—from an endangered entity into a thriving institution that truly lived up to its promise: a world-class think tank and laboratory for cross-disciplinary transportation research and education that matter.

It took me months to accept the seemingly surreal fact that Hani—someone everybody in the field knows and talks about, whose name I had mostly encountered in books and papers—was now a colleague who sometimes sat next to me at faculty meetings. It will take much longer to come to terms with the gigantic void he has left behind.

There is no need for me to tout Hani’s legacy in transportation research, industry, government agencies, and the broader scientific community. A short piece of personal reflection cannot do it justice anyway. As a colleague who had the fortune to observe him up close, it’s not hard to see why Hani accomplished all that he did.

Hani has one of the most brilliant and inquisitive minds that I’ve ever known. He was always open to new ideas and able to grasp their essence as quickly as anyone in the field. That’s why his expansive research portfolio—now including autonomous vehicles, tele-work, urban air mobility, machine learning and AI—remains cutting-edge, often ahead of his much younger colleagues, myself included.

At PhD prospectuses and defenses—where our intellectual interactions most often took place—he always asks the most penetrating questions, the kind that could only come from someone with a profound understanding of the topic at hand.  It was hard to walk away from those encounters without feeling that he knew almost everything.

What amazed me the most was that, even in his 60s, Hani could still be animated by new ideas like a graduate student.  It was not uncommon for our discussions during PhD defenses to be carried away by one of Hani’s bursts of human ingenuity, leaving the thesis defender standing by in relief and amusement.  As far as I could tell, his passion for developing DYNASMART—the software he began almost 40 years ago—never wavered in the slightest.

Hani is also one of the most hard-working academics that I’ve ever known.  He maintained an excruciatingly busy schedule that includes a tremendous amount of travel.  When I was an assistant professor, I once complained to Hani that I could not concentrate on writing proposals because I had to teach at the same time. Hani reply with a smile, “Marco, you have to multi-task.“  Since then I’ve taken that advice to heart—but I know I could never be as good a mulit-tasker as he was.

Hani was famous for sleeping only four hours a day, typically going to bed in the early morning hours. I once read that there is a genetic mutation that allows a person to function well on much less sleep than normal—about six to seven hours a night. Roughly one percent of people have that mutation. I have no doubt that Hani was a one-percenter. Still, a four-hour-a-day sleep schedule, sustained over decades, must have taken a toll on the body.

In any case, because of Hani’s unusual hours, many of his associates learned to get his attention by writing to him after midnight—because that’s when he replied to emails. When I was younger, I occasionally took advantage of this trick. It worked nearly every time, though in recent years, I could no longer keep up with him.

The busy life Hani led meant that he could sometimes be hard to reach by email. A non-trivial proportion of the messages I sent him never received a response. For a while, I found this spontaneity to be an annoying inconvenience. But eventually, I came to realize that—like every human being—Hani also had only 24 hours in a day. Yes, he slept three hours less than most people, but even that wasn’t enough to share with everyone who wanted a piece of his attention.

The truth is, all my important requests were answered in a timely manner. More importantly, whenever he did respond, he made the time count: he would sit me down and ensure I was treated with warmth, respect, and care. In those moments, he made me feel as if I were the center of his attention.

In retrospect, every milestone I achieved at Northwestern owes something to Hani.

• He was a co-PI on my first NSF grant, a critical component of my tenure package.
• He guided me through the tenure process. We had lunch together at one of his favorite Evanston restaurants—whose owner Hani knew personally (he had great taste in food and restaurants, by the way)—to discuss who should write letters for me (and who should not). As always, he insisted on paying.
• After my daughter was born in 2010, he surprised me with a nicely wrapped gift one day when I showed up at the Transportation Center for a meeting.
• In 2016, when I was debating whether to go up early for promotion to full professor, it was Hani who reassured me that I was ready and promised his full support, without reservation.
• Most recently, when I was tapped to be the next department chair, Hani was among the first who congratulated me and expressed his confidence. He met with me for an hour to offer a wide range of advice in late May, about a month before his passing. That was the last time I saw him.

As I write down this long and woefully incomplete list of things Hani did for me, I can’t help but ask myself what I ever did for him. The answer is: almost nothing. I didn’t even buy him a single meal—and I can’t count how many times we dined together. I had never given it much thought, but I realize now that I had quietly assumed there would be time to return the favor. After all, we were colleagues; there would always be another opportunity, right?

Now that he’s gone, the thought that I will never have the chance to buy him a meal—even just as a small token of gratitude—makes me feel incredibly sad and powerless.

Yesterday, the Transportation Center organized an informal gathering in Hani’s memorial. I sat at a table with my colleagues Joe Schofer and Pablo Durango-Cohen.  We chatted about how the sudden death of someone close to you sheds light on the fleeting fragility of life and the importance of living in the moment, not in the future.

Living in the moment means to do what feels important to you now, whether that’s writing an essay that speaks your truth, visiting a faraway place that occupies a special place in your heart, saying “I love you” to your family, or making a trip just to tell an old friend “I miss you.”

The conversation reminded me of something I once read about the Japanese eschatology captured in the word sayonara. Commonly translated as “goodbye,” it literally means “so be it.” To the Japanese, life moves along an unpredictable path. Every moment holds the potential for abrupt change—even death. So they say sayonara not just to mark parting, but to appreciate the moment and its mortality. As John Toland wrote in The Rising Sun, this eschatology gave the Japanese “the strength to face disaster stoically and a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint.”

In every sense, Hani was a living embodiment of the ideal behind sayonara. He was always on the move—full of curiosity, conviction, and fortitude—chasing his dreams while savoring every step along the way.

The fact that Hani lived the fullest version of his life is the small comfort I take as I mourn the premature passing of a giant in our field.

Sayonara, Hani. May you rest in peace.

Marco Nie, July 19, 2025

Introduction

In a recent public lecture given at Peking University (https://youtu.be/03i_Ojbx5do?si=iZzTfL-s_DQQrXfE), Prof. Michal Sandel of Harvard University made a passionate plea to end “the tyranny of meritocracy.”  The event lasted two hours, but thanks to Sandel’s pedagogical skills and oratorical prowess, it felt much shorter. Throughout the lecture, Sandel deftly engaged his audiences and implored them to wrestle with a provocative question:

Does the winner truly deserve their success in a meritocracy?

The Thesis

Sandel’s thesis centers on what he calls “the rule of luck in life,” which covers two key aspects. First, abilities and talents are largely shaped by natural endowments and social circumstances. For example, it is well known that educational achievement is highly correlated with genes. Second, whether a particular talent is valued by society is also a matter of chance. A math prodigy who earns millions as a Wall Street trader today might have lived in destitution in a self-sufficient agrarian society. In the words of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, “merit is a bit of an accident not only in its origin, but also in its being treated as merit.”

Beyond the role of luck, Sandel also argues that no winners are truly self-made or self-sufficient, as they inevitably owe much of their success to others. You may recall that Barack Obama tried to make a similar point during his 2012 presidential campaign; however, his unfortunate phrasing—“if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”—animated his political opponents and may have cost him a considerable amount of conservative votes.

Thus, although merit in Latin connotes “to earn” or “to deserve,” Sandel maintained that successful individuals in a meritocracy do not truly earn their success—certainly not all of it. Stripping away the notion of “deservedness” allows Sandel to build his case against the tyranny of meritocracy.

If those who succeed must deserve their success, so must those who struggle deserve their failures. Meritocracy not only flatters the winners and humiliates the losers but also legitimizes and perpetuates inequality. By pitting winners against losers, meritocracy undermines the idea of the “common good” and makes the pursuit of solidarity and community an impossible project.

When Sandel spoke of those who lose out and felt looked down by the winners, he was likely referring to the working class, especially those from America’s rural areas and Rust Belt. He firmly rejected the unsolicited advice often directed at these “losers”—to go get a college degree, if not for themselves, then certainly for their children.   While acknowledging the intrinsic value of education, Sandel does not believe it is an adequate answer to inequality.  He noted that only about 35% of American adults hold a college degree.  If about two thirds of our fellow citizens do not have a college degree, Sandel reasoned, “it is a mistake to create an economy that makes a university degree a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life.”

On this point I am with Sandel. No amount of education could eliminate losers in a meritocracy. The Austrian Economist Fred Hirsch, in Social Limits on Growth, characterized education as a positional good, where rewards depend on one’s relative standing on a slope.  There is no such thing as leveling up—that is, closing the gap between winners and losers—because the slope itself ensures inequality. As Hirsch put it, the value of education to a man depends on how much education the person ahead of him in the job line has.

The Antithesis

At its core, Sandel’s case against meritocracy is a moral one.  The hubris of winners is immoral; so too is the denigration of losers for their lack of credentials. Yet, what is truly immoral, Sandel argues, is prioritizing merit over virtue, pride and honor over dignity and decency, and inequality over the common good. He opposes meritocracy because he sees it as a principal driver of this moral failure.

As noble and inspiring as Sandel’s critique sounds, I found it ultimately unconvincing. The main problem is that he does not offer a viable alternative to meritocracy—at least not in the lecture (perhaps he does so in his book of the same title, which I have yet to read). The ideal society he describes seemed to verge on an egalitarian utopia. He never clearly defines what the “common good” entails, as if the concept were self-evident. To me, it closely resembles Rousseau’s notion of the “general will,” which has, for better or worse, inspired generations of revolutionaries around the world. Notably, Sandel’s vision is more vague than that of John Rawls, who at least quantified the goal of a just society as maximizing the welfare of its least advantaged members.

Sandel also does not explain how, in the absence of meritocracy, society can achieve the common good and ensure dignified work and a decent life for all. I imagine the programs he envisions would involve centralized, government-led interventions—either actively allocating “dignified work” from the top down, massively redistributing income and wealth on a regular basis, or some combination of both.  Yet, we have seen such programs implemented at scale before, and their track record is far from encouraging.

A case in point is the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives that have swept through the American institutions over the past five years. A popular piece of anti-DEI rhetoric rebrands the acronym as standing for “Didn’t Earn It.” This seemingly crude distortion is not merely an internet troll to “own the libs,” but rather a pointed critique of DEI’s underlying anti-meritocratic spirit (after all, merit originally means “to earn”).  If Sandel is right, anti-meritocracy is indeed not a bug, but a feature.   However, DEI has not unified the country around the common good, as Sandel might have hoped. On the contrary, it has provoked strong backlash from right-wing politicians, pundits, and activists—indeed, DEI became a rallying cry for the MAGA movement during the last presidential campaign.

Ironically, many—perhaps even the majority—of those opposing DEI are precisely the “losers” Sandel seeks to liberate from the tyranny of meritocracy. Liberals might once again conclude that these fatheads were acting against their own self-interests.  Yet presuming to know a group’s self-interest better than they themselves do is arguably the ultimate manifestation of the winner’s hubris the very arrogance Sandel scorns and scolds with indignation.

The Audience

I was curious how the students at Peking University would react to Sandel’s dismantling of meritocracy. After all, they are the undisputed winners in an education system that has worshipped meritocratic ideals for thousands of years.   I suspect many would feel their hard-earned success worth defending. Yet, I was somewhat disappointed that no one—neither students nor faulty—was willing to dissent from an opinion that must have struck many of them as baffling.

To be fair, it is an intimidating task to engage a world-renowned Harvard professor of Philosophy in a public debate about metaphysics. It probably did not help that these students were raised in a culture that encourages deference to authority, fosters group conformity, and penalizes contrarians. Moreover, the notion of “the common good” may not have sounded foreign to them at all, as they have been accustomed to similar slogans such as the “China Dream” (中国梦) and “Common Prosperity” (共同富裕).

While the students did not challenge Sandel directly, they did raise a few thoughtful points. The most interesting concerned the phenomenon of involution (内卷) hyper-competition that renders life miserable for everyone, especially for the so-called winners. This discussion prompted Sandel to share a remarkable anecdote.

He recalled that when he was in high school (which I estimate was in the late 1960s), his math class would reseat students every few weeks according to their cumulative GPA—in other words, a student’s academic ranking was publicly broadcast by where they sat in the classroom. I doubt this revelation startled many in the audience, most of whom were likely survivors of similarly excruciating mental experiences. But it was genuinely shocking to me, because in the America that I know, such practices have long been considered beyond the pale.

Needless to say, Sandel shared the story to highlight how much progress American education has made over the past five decades. Yet, one cannot help but wonder if the MAGA America would view that earlier era with nostalgia—seeing its passing as evidence of decadence rather than progress and a deafening call to “make American education great again.”

The End

I will close by conceding that meritocracy has its own problems. Yet I find it hard to swallow wholesale Sandel’s idealistic and simplistic approach to addressing them.  For those seeking a more nuanced analysis, The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor, may be worth reading.

 

Marco Nie

Wilmette, April 27, 2025

 

During his second presidential campaign, Donald Trump frequently referred to “tariff” as the most beautiful word in the dictionary.  He later demoted it to a mere fourth place, following God, Love, and Religion.  People often like to think Trump as a habitual bluffer, yet his tariff talk was not a bluff. Within a week of taking office, Trump threatened both Canada and Mexico with a 25% tariff—a move that was temporarily delayed after the two countries made concessions, at least in posture if not in substance. Chinese were not so lucky; the 10% tariff on their imports has since taken effect (note 1).  More recently, Trump also imposed a 25% tariff on all steel and aluminum products (note 2).

The media and economists have responded to Trump’s “trade war” with their typical skepticism and contempt.   They have impatiently explained that tariffs are ultimately paid by importers of goods and services, who almost always pass the cost on to consumers. Consequently, tariffs not only reduce trade volume and make everyone poorer, but also tend to exert inflationary pressure on the very economies they are meant to protect.   Although I have never taken a macroeconomics course, I am convinced that this is the lesson I would have learned.   In ordinary times, choosing between the established wisdom of the economic profession and Trump’s reckless ideas would be a no-brainer.   But we no longer live in ordinary times.  Today, the reputation of economists is at an all-time low; their credibility has been called into question even by the New York Times, arguably the staunchest defender of expertise and scientific consensus (see note 3 for a recent article).

As I felt the need to conduct my own research on the issue, someone in a WeChat group recommended Trade Wars are Class Wars by Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis. The provocative title was tantalizing. Yet, I noticed that neither author is a career economist—in fact, neither appears to have earned a Ph.D. According to Wikipedia, Klein is a novelist and software entrepreneur, while Pettis has taught finance at both Tsinghua University (my alma mater) and Peking University. Although Pettis may still hold a position at Peking University, I could not find any official confirmation.

Do these people really know what they are doing? I was hesitant at first, but I decided to give the book a try, largely because the New York Times article reminded me how often professional economists make mistakes.

The book is an engaging and accessible read—the historical insights into money and finance alone might be worth the time. Crucially, it provides readers with a valuable framework for understanding contemporary economic phenomena. The central argument is that trade wars, although ostensibly fought between nations, are rooted in the conflict between the working class and the elites, regardless of their national origin. In the authors’ own words:

Rising inequality within countries heightens trade conflicts between them. This is ultimately an optimistic argument: we do not believe that the world is destined to endure a zero-sum conflict between nations or economic blocs. Chinese and Germans are not evil, nor do we live in a world where countries can only prosper at others’ expense. The problems of the past few decades do not have their roots in geopolitical conflict or incompatible national characters. Rather, they have been caused by massive transfers of income to the rich and the companies they control.

To a layman like me, the authors’ thesis is compelling, although I feel that, with the benefit of hindsight, their optimism may have been misplaced. In what follows, I shall unpack their argument, focusing on the dynamic between China and the U.S.—the primary contenders in what might be the most consequential trade war of our time.

China

After the major reforms led by Deng Xiaoping, “raising the living standards of the people” through rapid economic growth became the ruling party’s mantra in China. Widely viewed as a cornerstone of the party’s legitimacy, that goal—embodied in the GDP growth rate—has been pursued with relentless rigor and blind enthusiasm ever since.

The current Chinese developmental model took shape in the early 1990s, when millions of peasants migrated to cities to take newly created, better-paid industrial jobs. However, these workers were “systematically underpaid relative to the value of what they produce, which generates a substantial surplus that has been used to fund investments in physical capital.”

Ruthless exploitation of peasants, to be sure, is not new in China. Since 1949, peasants have disproportionately borne the immense human costs of the country’s industrialization, through thick and thin. The difference is that exploitation has become far more effective in the post-reform era. On one hand, modern technology, expertise, foreign capital, and global markets—all made available by rampant globalization—have dramatically boosted productivity. On the other hand, China’s “comparative advantage of lower human rights”—a poignant term coined by Professor Hui Qin—has kept labor costs low by outlawing adversarial labor unions and selectively enforcing the infamous Hukou system, among other policies.

As a result, “workers at nonfinancial corporations in China are paid only 40 percent of the value of what they produce.” To put this figure in perspective, Thomas Pickette (note 4) estimates that labor’s share in national income averages around two-thirds in developed countries—while Klein and Pettis place it at close to 70%, which is not far off.

This high-savings growth model with “Chinese characteristics” worked like magic. It has sustained a growth rate above 7% for several decades, lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and created an economic miracle that is the envy of the world. The Chinese people have benefited greatly; any one of my friends and relatives in China will tell you that their lives have improved markedly compared to even the 1990s, when virtually no ordinary family could afford an automobile. It is a classic story of capitalism’s rising tide lifting all boats.

However, not all boats were lifted equally.

As Klein and Pettis noted, “the share of Chinese GDP consumed by Chinese households fell by 15 percentage points between the late 1980s and the bottom in 2010.” In 2023, Chinese households consumed 38% of their nation’s GDP, compared to 69% in the US, 55% in Japan, and 51% in Europe (note 5). In other words, despite the newfound prosperity, underconsumption remains severe in China to sustain growth at a breakneck pace. Underconsumption directly results from underpaying workers and is further compounded by China’s regressive tax policies and concentrated income distribution.

Suppressing consumption channels an excessively large share of national income into savings, of which China’s financial policies are eager to take advantage.

Chinese investors have relatively few options to invest their hard-earned savings. For one thing, stringent foreign currency controls make it very difficult for most people to buy overseas assets. Moreover, for reasons few can understand, the stock market in China has been notoriously stagnant and erratic—at the time of writing, the Shanghai Composite Index (SCI) is roughly half of its peak value achieved in 2007, even though China’s GDP has grown fivefold in nominal terms during the same period. For those who entrust their money to government-run banks, deposits tend to lose value quickly because interest rates are set well below the growth rate, ensuring that Chinese manufacturers and real estate developers have access to cheap capital.

Not surprisingly, the real estate sector went viral early on, as it was virtually the only game in the town for those who did not want to be ripped off. This approach worked for a while, sustained by the expectation that real estate prices in China would continue to rise because the party willed it so. When that myth was debunked a few years ago, the last safe haven for Chinese savings was effectively burned to the ground.

In a nutshell, the China miracle has been a mixed bag for its own people. While it has raised the average living standard, it has also created staggering inequalities—and friction between social classes—through years of regressive wealth redistribution. That said, had China kept these problems contained within its borders, the world would happily let it do what it will to its own people. However, as China’s growth model was kept alive on borrowed time, the rest of the world began to feel the pinch.

As an economy grows larger, its growth naturally slows. Simply put, maintaining the same growth rate for a larger economy requires more capital and labor in absolute terms. Moreover, marginal returns on investments diminish as available opportunities become less attractive—after all, a country’s institutions set limits on its ability to absorb investment effectively.

Ideally, the market is best at discovering these limits: when a project cannot yield enough return to break even, it should not be funded. However, in China, growth is determined by the party rather than by the market. Once the overall GDP target is set for the country at the beginning of each year, it is passed down to local governments, where party officials enforce it as if their careers and lives depend on it—and in many cases, they do. This top-down approach creates powerful incentives that distort resource allocations.

As the authors noted, “China’s provincial and municipal governments control most of the credit creation within the banking system, and Chinese banks rarely have to write down loans for projects that cannot service the debt”. Therefore,

the easiest way for officials to hit their targets is to tell the state-run banks to lend to favored companies to invest in as much infrastructure, manufacturing, and real estate as necessary. Whether the investments are worthwhile is irrelevant. All that matters is that the quantity of spending generates enough reported GDP to meet the central government’s objectives.

This might explain, at least partially, the creation and subsequent implosion of the real estate bubble.

Elsewhere, China’s overinvestment has created a huge glut of manufactured goods that cannot be absorbed by its citizens, whose purchasing power was intentionally curtailed. When a country saves more than it consumes and channels those extra savings into domestic manufacturing, it runs a current account surplus from trade in goods (note 6). According to the authors, China accumulated a current account surplus of nearly $1.4 trillion between 1998 and 2008. Yet in 2024 alone, China’s surplus from trade in goods reached nearly $770 billion—about 4% of its GDP or more than 2% of global trade in goods (note 7).

Under ideal conditions, a country cannot maintain a trade surplus indefinitely because the influx of foreign exchange gradually increases the value of its currency, which in turn weakens exports (note 8). However, China circumvented this law by pegging its currency to the dollar, which requires, among other maneuvers, buying incoming foreign currencies with RMB and converting them into dollar reserves. Keeping the RMB artificially below its market value hurts Chinese consumers’ ability to purchase goods, services, and assets from abroad. Consequently, this amounts to yet another wealth “transfer from China’s consumers that subsidized the profits of manufacturing operations in China—including the joint ventures established by American, European, and Japanese companies.”

In theory, manipulating the currency alone would not be sufficient. An artificially weak RMB increases demand for Chinese goods—yet in a nearly fully employed economy, this heightened demand bids up labor costs and causes general price levels to rise. Ultimately, inflation will offset the effort to hold down the RMB’s fundamental value. Fortunately (or unfortunately for Chinese workers), China was able to control inflation by keeping wages well below market value, thereby suppressing consumption.

In summary, China sustained its growth model by underpaying its workers, suppressing consumption, manipulating its currency, and controlling its financial market. This strategy created a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary Chinese people to kleptocrats and oligarchs. At the same time, it generated a huge trade surplus that must be offset by deficits in other countries. Such an imbalance can only be remedied through some combination of (A) increased consumption and (B) declining production outside China.  Outcome A seems benevolent at first glance.  Isn’t helping others consume more at the expense of Chinese people a good—even altruistic—deed? However, if other nations must borrow to import Chinese goods, their national debt levels will rise. The second outcome is almost always detrimental: at least in the short term, it can lead to factory closures, layoffs, and higher unemployment rates, all of which may trigger political upheavals.

Unsurprisingly, China’s trade surplus is often cited as a culprit behind worsening indebtedness and rising unemployment in other countries. Moreover, there is concern that China’s diminishing returns on domestic investment might now be dragging down global productivity. It is not too far-fetched to assume that the capital forcefully injected into the Chinese economy might be more effectively deployed elsewhere.

For reasons I will now explore, no country harbors this resentment more than the United States.

The United States

The US is deeply in the red. At of now, its national debt stands at over 120% of its GDP—a historical high. The cost of debt service has recently exceeded the defense budget, raising alarms among many elites in light of Ferguson’s law, which states,

Any great power that spends more on debt service than on defense will not stay great for very long.

Additionally, the US has become thoroughly deindustrialized, with much of its once-mighty manufacturing sector decimated by the onslaught of globalization. The result is the desolation of the Rust Belt, a disheartened working class, and, many would argue, the rise of MAGA and Trumpism.

Why did this happen? According to the authors, the US did not really have a choice. Americans had to give up manufacturing jobs and spend money they didn’t have because the rest of the world wanted them to.

For one thing, class wars—as explained earlier—tend to depress domestic spending by concentrating national savings into the hands of the rich and the state. Even in countries that simply wish to increase their foreign reserves for financial resilience, domestic spending decreases as an unintended consequence. Together, these forces have led to a chronic shortfall in global spending and, paradoxically, have made demand for goods and services “the world’s scarcest and most valuable resource.” The excessive savings, taken from consumers who would otherwise put them to good use, are then turned into manufactured goods that must be exported, or into sovereign funds seeking safe assets abroad.

For several reasons, everyone wants American sovereign debt (treasury bonds). First, the US has been the world’s sole superpower for decades. Second, the US dollar is the de facto global reserve currency. Third, the US financial system is large, flexible, open, and, above all, shows genuine respect for investors’ rights. Therefore, foreign savings pour into the US, effectively forcing Americans to absorb the glut of manufacturing capacity at the expense of domestic jobs and incomes. This dynamic has compelled foreign savers to mitigate the impact of job losses on American spending by purchasing dollar-denominated assets, which in turn pushed down interest rates, expanded credit, and facilitated a surge in household borrowing.

Seen from this perspective, what the world has been practicing since the fall of the Berlin Wall is not free trade, but mercantilism in the guise of free trade. Instead of employing tariffs or quotas to discourage imports—as traditional mercantilists would do—modern countries simply hold down the value of their currencies, suppress interest rates, and subsidize exporters, thereby gaining export market share while keeping foreign goods at bay.

In other words, when Trump claims that everyone is taking advantage of America—I cannot believe I am saying this—he might have a point. However, what he may have failed to appreciate is that this arrangement is a direct result of the US-led world order, which was ostensibly designed to serve US interests.

Solutions?

Is there a solution to trade wars—which appear to be a feature, not a bug, of the current world order? Klein and Pettis believe there is.

Because trade wars are driven by class conflicts, one approach might be to persuade elites worldwide—especially in surplus nations like China and Germany—that allowing workers a greater share of national income is in their best interest. By reversing the transfers of wealth from the working class to the rich, there is a hope to resolve this challenge before trade wars escalate out of control.   Although this solution sounds inspiring, it is unlikely to succeed. For one, it is far from clear that the ruling party in China could withstand a redistribution of wealth that might require profound political reforms. Moreover, even if China were to transition into a democracy overnight, the inherent flaws of the current world order would remain unresolved. We simply can no longer pretend that the present form of globalization is inherently beneficial or a gold standard for promoting free trade.

This brings me to the second and much darker solution. Fundamentally, America’s commitment to open markets and globalization has turned the country into the dumping ground for the world’s excessive savings. Yet, in a democracy, Americans have every right to put an end to this situation. The re-election of Trump suggests that many Americans have finally made up their mind. Of course, Trump’s tariffs are unlikely to revive the manufacturing sector overnight—if ever. Instead, they signal the forthcoming dissolution of the US-led world order, making an informal declaration that the era of pretense of free trade is over, and that America’s markets and economy will henceforth be selectively open to allies and friends on favorable terms.

Will the second solution lead us to an apocalypse akin to the calamities of the last century? It is still too early to tell.  We live in interesting times—may we outlive them.

 

Marco Nie, Wilmette, IL

February 22, 2025

Notes:

1. https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-canada-mexico-colombia-a5ee8bc89b7fbb459ee574c002c90df1.
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c360dz384n5o
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/10/business/economy/economists-politics-trump.html
4. See Economics of Inequality by Thomas Pickette.
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_consumer_markets
6. In an open economy, the basic macroeconomic relationship dictates that

Y = I + C + G + X – M,    (Eq. 1)

where Y is the total economic output (GDP), I is the investment in capital goods (research and development, equipment etc.), C is household consumption, G is government spending, X is export, and M is imports.  Moreover, the saving

S = Y – C – G = (Y-C-T) + (T-G)， (Eq. 2)

where S is national saving, T is taxes, Y-C-T is private saving and T-G is public saving.

If we replace Y-C-G in (1) with S, we obtain

S = I + (X-M). (Eq. 3)

Eq. 3 states that national saving equals investment less net exports.

7. https://english.www.gov.cn/archive/statistics/202502/14/content_WS67af350fc6d0868f4e8efa3b.html.
8. A few words on a nation’s current account and financial account: The current account tracks the net flow of goods and services; positive net exports result in a current account surplus, whereas negative net exports lead to a current account deficit. The financial account measures the net changes in ownership of financial assets and liabilities. If a country is running a current account deficit, it needs to fund that deficit—often by borrowing from abroad (resulting in an inflow in the financial account) or by drawing down foreign reserves. Conversely, a current account surplus indicates that the country is earning more from abroad than it spends, and this excess is either invested overseas or added to official reserves. Under ideal conditions, a country running a current account deficit would face pressure to depreciate its currency or draw on its reserves, because (i) the need to finance the deficit with foreign exchange weakens the demand for the local currency, and (ii) a depreciated currency boosts exports, providing a natural correction to the trade imbalance. On the other hand, a country running a current account surplus experiences the reverse pressure. The surplus generates an inflow of foreign exchange, which increases the demand for the local currency and tends to drive its appreciation. This appreciation in turn makes the country’s exports relatively more expensive and less competitive, thereby exerting a natural corrective force that reduces the surplus. In theory, therefore, no country can sustain a trade imbalance indefinitely. Yet this is precisely the situation in which China and the United States find themselves.

 

The Democrats are still reeling from their crushing defeat––a shellacking, as Obama might have put it––in this year’s presidential election. Eight years ago, when they first lost to the MAGA movement, I received the news with shock, anger, and sorrow.  This time around, I was shocked not by the election result, but by the fact that so many Democrats were seemingly caught off guard again, by what appeared to be a rather predictable outcome.

I don’t claim to have any above-average understanding of American politics.  All that I did was read Wall Street Journal, pay attention to Poly Market, and listen to podcasts like Honestly with Barry Weiss, All In, Megyn Kelly Show and Joe Rogan.  That was enough for me to conclude, several weeks ahead of the election, that Trump was going to win easily despite all polls said otherwise.

What is even more surprising is that the Democrats still cannot agree on why they lost so badly. According to Nancy Pelosi and Rachel Maddow, their party did nothing wrong.  They lost simply because they were up against a global anti-incumbent wave set in motion by pandemic-induced inflation.

Bernie Sanders begs to differ. In a scathing post-election statement, he scolded the Democratic Party for abandoning working class people and attributed its humiliating loss to their mass defection.

Biden’s age and ego were frequently cited as another culprit: had he not attempted to run again and allowed a proper primary to run its natural course, the liberals might have rallied around a stronger candidate than the hastily anointed Kamala Harris.

Others grudgingly conceded that the Biden administration has misread and mishandled the immigration crisis at the border.  While Trump’s lie about “dog-eating-aliens” was debunked and ridiculed, the truth is he succeeded in keeping the spotlight on an issue that progressives struggled to defend.   In the end, even the sanctuary cities in blue states had lost their appetite for more migrants arriving on the buses sent by the governors of the border states.

What else?

Interestingly, many Democrats become defensive on culture issues, especially when “wokeism” or “DEI” was cited to explain their defeat.     In a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart got into a testy argument with his guest about the role DEI may or may not have played in the election.  John Oliver, a Stewart disciple, similarly pushed back against this theory on his well-regarded Last Week Tonight Show.  For full disclosure, I am a big fan of both men. However, I find their dismissive attitude unconvincing and unhelpful.

Like it or not, many conservatives regularly discuss culture issues in apocalyptic terms. Should the liberals at least try to sympathize with their concerns and emotions, if not meet them halfway?

When I watched Elon Musk’s stump speeches at Trump rallies––I know, I am not supposed to––I immediately noticed the man’s fixation on culture issues. This election, he often told the audience in an uncharacteristically solemn voice, is our last chance to save Western Civilization.  Many people would find this proclamation preposterous.  Isn’t Trump supposed to be the greatest threat to our democracy, the crown jewel of the Western Civilization? Has Musk really gone crazy, as alleged in a popular pre-election sticker liberals rushed to put on their Teslas?  If he has, then madness must have infected many others.  Liz Truss, a former British Prime Minister, used very similar language in a recent Wall Street Journal Opinion piece.  “Mr. Trump,” she wrote, “can do more than end wokeism and kickstart the American economy: he can save the West.”

If you have read Douglas Murray’s The War on the West, you would better understand where this sentiment comes from.  Murray describes a civilization under attack from within and without, yet few in the West see the eminent and grave danger.   The book is meant to be a rallying cry, a logical prelude to fighting back, now signified by Trump’s resounding electoral victory––I suppose that’s how most Trump supporters, Musk and Truss included, read it.

The War On the West is first and foremost a culture war.

On one side of the battleground stands the Western canon, which prides itself on its profound contributions to philosophy, science, literature, and the arts. Through the Enlightenment movement and the Industrial Revolutions, the canon has brought sustained economic growth, extraordinary prosperity, and human flourishing. Thanks to these accomplishments, Western civilization has dominated the world for centuries—politically, militarily, economically, and culturally. Seen from the vantage point of the West, humanity has ascended to an unprecedented height under its hegemony, and the ascent still shows no sign of abating.

This conventional wisdom, however, has been relentlessly challenged by an anti-Western intelligentsia since the end of World War II—led by authors like Jean-Paul Satre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said.  Murray conceded that the rise of anti-Westernism was an inevitable correction to a prolonged and repressive colonial order.  However, that correction quickly turned into an overcorrection and, in recent years, has deteriorated  to a full-blown assault—not on the misdeeds and atrocities of the imperialist Western empires of the past, but on Western civilization as a whole.  In the mind of these anti-Western warriors, the hegemonic culture of the West is fundamentally racist, greedy, power-hungry, hypocritical and sometimes genocidal.  It would never voluntarily abdicate power and control on other peoples and civilizations.  This might sound like hyperbole.  But how else could one make sense of the famous chant led by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, an American civil rights icon, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has to go?”

In fact, Edward Said, who was educated at Princeton and taught at Columbia, described Europeans almost exactly this way.   “Every European,” he wrote in his masterpiece Orientalism, “in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric.”   Regarding the work of Michel Foucault, another towering intellectual of post-colonial studies, Murray has this to say:

Taken in its totality, his work is one of the most sustained attempts to undermine the system of institutions that had made up part of the Western system of order. His obsessive analysis of everything through a quasi-Marxist lens of power relations diminished almost everything in society into a transactional, punitive and meaningless dystopia.

Thus, to Foucault, Said, and their enthusiastic followers, there is almost nothing good to be said about the West.  Murray rejected this absolutist anti-West sentiment, though much of his defense is built around some form of whataboutism.

Murray points out that racism, often considered an original sin of the West, existed in non-Western societies as well.   For example, many Chinese dialects refer to foreigners as “gui” (Ghost), instead of “ren” (human).  As a Chinese person, I can confirm he was not far off. I would add that the Chinese once used derogative terms for different foreigners: “yangguizi” (foreign ghost) for the Westerns, “xiaoguizi” (little ghost) for Japanese, “bangzi” (stick) for Koreans, A’san (little wretch) for Indians and so on.

Another anecdote mentioned by Murray surprised me. According to him, Kang Youwei, a prominent scholar and reformer during the late Qing Dynasty, argued that white people or “yellow” people should be rewarded if they were willing to marry black people,  because their sacrifice could help “purify humankind.”

Murray acknowledges the enormous pains and sufferings that the transatlantic slave trade inflicted on Africans but insists that the West was not alone in the guilt of perpetuating this ancient and horrific institution. Slave trade was rampant in the Arab World—we know so little about it today only because, according to Murray, the Arabs systematically castrated their slaves.  Brazil and Ottoman Empire continued the slave trade decades after the costly Civil War ended slavery in North America in the early 1860s.  By that time, the British Empire has long outlawed the practice and spent a fortune to police the oceans and to compensate the companies for their lost “assets”—in fact, so much debt was taken on to foot the bill that the British taxpayers did not pay it off until 2015.

Murray also questions “the notion that colonialism is always and everywhere a bad thing.” In fact, many nations that emerged in the postcolonial world failed spectacularly, sometimes subjecting their people to far greater misery than under colonial rule.  Murray even thinks it is unfair to blame the Europeans for “stealing” the Americas from the native peoples, because “the whole history of our species was one of occupation and conquering” until the modern era.  Also, do we really believe American Indians and Aztecs would have fared better if their land were “discovered” by someone else?  These arguments are far from airtight, but they are not complete nonsense either.

Murray is also exasperated by the defamation and purging campaign against the historical figures revered in the West.   In recent years, these efforts have escalated from critiques in books and magazines to violent protests and acts of vandalism.

It has become fashionable on the left to desecrate or destroy the statues of people who have done or said anything judged as incompatible with the latest edition of the progressive code of conduct.

Voltaire was canceled because he had invested in the French East India Company and made a racist comment about Africans in a book.

John Lock was canceled because he owned stock in companies involved in the slave trade.

Thomas Jefferson was cancelled because he not only owed slaves but also impregnated one—that second offense had to be a sexual assault because, evidently, a slave could not give a valid consent.

Even the reputation of Abraham Lincoln, once described by Tolstoy as a man “bigger than his country,” was in serious trouble, partly due to his alleged mistreatment of American Indians.  He also made racist comments, and once advocated for deporting Black people from the United States altogether.

The cancellation that truly sent Murray into a frenzy—given that he is British—was that of Churchill, whose racist worldview was no secret to any student of history.  Churchill must be canceled, Murry writes indignantly,

because as long as his reputation stands, the West still has a hero; (he must be canceled because) they want to kick the “white men,” they want to kick at the great man view of history; and they want to kick at the holiest beings and places of the West.

This culture war has spilled out from the realm of intellectual quarrels into many aspects of social life in the West.

DEI initiatives feature prominently in Murray’s narrative. While few would disagree with their noble objectives, in practice, these programs often conflict with the other values long cherished in the West, such as meritocracy and equal opportunity (rather than equal outcomes). This has led to great confusion about the trade-offs between pursuing equity and rewarding merit.

In certain quarters on the left, the word “merit” itself has acquired a racist connotation. So have any quantitative tools, such as the SAT or GRE, designed to assess merit or produce a ranking in a population.  Suffice it to cite one quote from Ibram X. Kendi, whose radical antiracist writing Murray repudiated repeatedly in his book:

Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black minds and legally exclude their bodies.

Regardless of their professed goals, many DEI programs have been downgraded to a campaign to make all institutions in the nation—political offices, universities, big corporations— “look like its population.”   DEI is considered such an inherent, unequivocal good that its arrival must be hastened.    It is not enough if everyone agrees and strives to achieve it; a great leap forward is needed to make it a reality now, at least in appearance first.  An article published in The New York Times during July 2020—which I read about in Murray’s book—captures this burning ideology perfectly. Its tagline reads: “To Make Orchestras More Diverse, End Blind Auditions.”

The war on the West has become disturbingly close to a direct assault on “whiteness”, including  white people.  In its extreme form, Murray contends, the rhetoric not only bear all the hallmarks of racism, but sounds “protogenocidal.”  If you think he suffers from paranoia, consider the following anecdotes from the book:

• A New York Times contributing editor claims that whiteness is “a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect.”
• Arizona Department of Education declared white babies can begin to express racial prejudice when they are only three months old, and at the age of five they “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness.”
• Author Robin DiAngelo wrote in White Fragility that “white people were all racist,” and that white people who refute this truism “were simply providing further evidence of their racism.”
• A mandatory DEI course for Coca-Cola employees suggest they need to be “less white, less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant and more humble.”

These words remind me of how the bourgeoisie and landlords were denounced and vilified during the politically engineered mass frenzies in China between 1949 and 1979. The difference is that, at least in theory, the bourgeoisie and landlords could redeem themselves by relinquishing their social status and properties. How can white people convincingly relinquish their whiteness?

Perhaps the worst development of all is the intolerance of different opinions.  In many cases, this intolerance turns to bullying, intimidation, even threats of persecution against anyone who dares to voice support for dissenting voice.  As Murray laments,

It is so often made clear that whether you’re a math teacher or a partner in a vast multinational firm, the cost of raising your head above the parapet can lead to your whole career crashing down around you. And it can happen from asking the simplest of questions, asserting a provable truth, or simply acknowledging a belief that everybody held until the day before yesterday.

For the record, I’m not sure how much Murray has overstated his case here.  However, it does not take that many precedents—and I have heard of many—for most people to learn the lesson and voluntarily shut their mouths. Even if only a fraction of the population finds their freedom of speech infringed with impunity, democracy can suffer a terrible setback, possibly irreversible damage.

If Elon Musk is to be believed, it is this grave concern that compelled him to turn Twitter into X at a considerable financial cost to him personally.  Musk might well be wrong and have even made Twitter much worse, but I find no particularly good reason to doubt his sincerity and motives.

I read The War on the West long before this election, having heard of it on a podcast (either Sam Harris or Bari Weiss). I remember it as a thriller: intense, controversial, but highly informative—an eye-opening experience in some ways. I suspect most Democrats won’t receive the book well—that is, if they can muster the patience to finish it at all. However, it would be a mistake for them to reject such a book out of hand. They ought to read it, if only to crack the mystery that is still haunting them after eight long years: why so many voters cast their presidential ballots for a demagogue who, in their minds, talks so much, knows so little, has so many character flaws and so few moral virtues.

Some Democrats may dismiss The War on the West as yet another conspiracy theory from the right. Many more may conclude, with the usual self-righteousness and condescension, that they are fighting it for the right side of history. But I am convinced if they do not change course and tactics, they will continue to lose this war—and more elections in the years to come.

Marco Nie, Wilmette

November 30th, 2024

If J.D. Vance were not a candidate for the US vice presidency in this election cycle, I would never have read his famed memoir by now.  Memoirs are not among my favorite genres, and reading one written by a 30-year-old Yale Law alumnus turned venture capitalist seemed like a waste of time.   Don’t get me wrong—I have no doubt that someone with Vance’s résumé is smart, ambitious, and hard-working, and their life may even be interesting.  However, stories of such prodigies are abundant in this country, thanks to popular culture’s obsession with them. While these successes are well-deserved and respectable, they hardly inspire any curiosity or excitement in me.

Now that Vance is on the ticket for the highest office in the land, paired with the most controversial and divisive politician in generations, his memoir suddenly becomes a window into his inner world—his beliefs, values, and preferences that could profoundly shape the future of this country.    My interest was also piqued because Vance was known for his anti-Trump stances—he famously compared his current running mate to Hitler. Would his book reveal any clues about his 180-degree turn on Trump? Was his change of heart simply political expediency or the result of some sort of epiphany? In any case, I felt this was a book I needed to read, even if I did not want to.

Given my relatively low expectations, Vance’s book was a surprisingly smooth and thought-provoking read.  As a competent writer, he knows how to command the attention of the reader through storytelling.  I was never bored, partly because the lives of hillbillies—white working-class people from rural, mountainous regions of the United States—feel so alien to me. Of course, I’ve heard about the “white working-class,” but never before had I been brought so close to the vivid details of their day-to-day lives.

Vance’s maternal grandparents were from Appalachian Kentucky, which they left for the Midwest at a young age. Vance speculates that his grandmother’s unexpected teenage pregnancy may have hastened their departure. However, they were largely part of a broader wave of Appalachian people migrating to America’s industrial heartland in search of better opportunities.   The young couple settled in Middletown, Ohio, where Vance’s grandfather secured a blue-collar job in the steel industry, which, in those good old days, paid well enough to support a middle-class family.

Vance’s mom was a good student in high school—even the salutatorian, according to the book. However, her life was derailed after she became a single teenage mother.  Following her first unsuccessful marriage, she married a few other men and dated many more, but gave birth to only one more child, the lucky J.D.  The central plot of the book revolves around how young Vance grew up with a mother who led a tragically chaotic life and was rarely able to provide him with anything resembling a normal home.   He never had a stable father figure—the introduction of a new father to the home always brought an escalating series of dramas that ended with the disintegration of the family.  Mostly, the destructive force seemed to come from Mom—at least that’s the impression one gets from reading the book. Here is how Vance described one of the episodes unfolding after Mom moved in with Matt, one of her boyfriends (or husbands, it’s not entirely clear).

Living with Mom and Matt was like having a front-row seat to the end of the world. The fighting was relatively normal by my standards (and Mom’s), but I’m sure poor Matt kept asking himself how and when he’d hopped the express train to crazy town. It was just the three of us in that house, and it was clear to all that it wouldn’t work out. It was only a matter of time.

Vance was deeply troubled by his mother’s “revolving door of father figures”—it must have felt like a disgrace that tainted the honor of the extended family.  He recalled being set off by a Facebook post from a 13-year-old girl pleading with her mother to stop changing boyfriends. Sympathizing with the young girl, Vance lamented,

for seven long years, I just wanted it to stop. I didn’t care so much about the fighting, the screaming, or even the drugs. I just wanted a home, and I wanted to stay there, and I wanted these goddamned strangers to stay the fuck out.

It wasn’t just boyfriends and drugs. Mom once threatened to kill him by crashing the car they were riding in, forcing Vance to flee while she pursued him in a rage. The ordeal ended only when the police came to take her into custody. I paused for a long time after reading about this horrifying event, trying to imagine how I would have coped as an 11-year-old boy in that situation—I’m not sure I would ever fully recover from such trauma.

After the incident, Vance struck a deal with Mom: he lied to the judge to keep her out of jail, and she agreed to let him decide where he wanted to live. In the ensuing years, Vance would live briefly with his biological father, then with his half-sister Lindsay on and off (while his mother was either in treatment centers or otherwise unable to care for them), and finally with his grandma—the Mamaw—after the freshman year in high school.

The constantly shifting family structure and endless domestic violence Vance endured in his youth must have left an indelible mark on his psyche.  Even as an adult, he regularly has nightmares in which Mom is the monster chasing him in a treehouse.   He writes that he “used words as weapons”, because he had to survive in a world where “disagreements were war”.    He had to fight hard to control the “demons” within him, feeling they were “as much an inheritance as his blue eyes and brown hair.”

Sociologists have shown that children experiencing such family instability often face severe developmental challenges.   According to Vance, he would have succumbed to them had it not been for Mamaw and his sister Lindsay, who provided him with a semblance of stability and much-needed emotional and material support when he needed them most.  Mamaw was his savior, protector and hero. Without her, Vance would probably never have made it out of Middletown, let alone earned a J.D. from Yale and become a disciple of Peter Thiel.  Looking back at his high school years, Vance wrote,

Those three years with Mamaw—uninterrupted and alone—saved me. I didn’t notice the causality of the change, how living with her turned my life around. I didn’t notice that my grades began to improve immediately after I moved in.

Yes, the book is about a poor kid achieving the American dream despite the odds stacked against him.  The young author can be forgiven for wanting to brag about it—his achievements do seem like a small miracle when you realize how close he was to complete ruin. However, the book is also about more than that.

Vance tries to generalize his lived experiences—his struggles as well as his triumphs—to those of his neighbors in Middletown, of hillbillies, and more broadly, of the white working class. He notes that many families in these groups faced similar problems. In fact, his grandparents had their fair share of domestic violence and alcoholism.  To help understand the nature of the violence, it is worth noting that Mamaw once tried to kill her husband by literally setting him on fire after he broke his promise to never get drunk again.

Vance describes his communities as a world of “truly irrational behavior.”  Wherever he looked, he saw only desolation, indolence, and cynicism. But who or what is responsible for the predicament of his people?

It appears that Vance has been pondering this question since his teenage years. While the book is, to some extent, an effort to seek answers, it is by no means a formal and comprehensive analysis. Instead, his thoughts are scattered throughout the book, often presented as spontaneous rants inspired by some random anecdotes. His opinions are nuanced—remarkably so for a writer in his thirties.

To Vance, the hillbilly elegy is, above all, an economic story. In the booming postwar era, vibrant communities sprang up around manufacturing centers in what is now America’s infamous Rust Belt. Yet, these communities, heavily reliant on specific well-compensated blue-collar jobs, were inherently fragile and vulnerable to disruption. When those jobs were lost to globalization and technological advancements, workers and their families faced drastic lifestyle adjustments. Those unable to adjust—often people without advanced degrees or resources—became the “truly disadvantaged.” They found themselves trapped in communities where meaningful social support is scarce. These people were Vance’s family, neighbors, classmates, and friends.

As economically disadvantaged as the hillbillies might be, Vance argues that their conditions are further worsened by several cultural and psychological traits.

The first of these traits is the belief that one’s choices and efforts don’t matter. According to Vance, hillbillies often assume those who “make it” are either naturally gifted or born into wealth and influence. In this view, hard work is not nearly as important. Vance, once influenced by this mindset himself, vehemently rejects it. Before joining the Navy, he doubted whether he had what it took to succeed, even as Mamaw insisted he was destined for something great. Only after enduring Marine Corps boot camp and excelling as a military journalist did he realize that he had been consistently “underselling” himself, mistaking a lack of effort for inability.

Vance urges hillbillies to take personal responsibility for their failures and to stop making excuses. A case in point is Mom. Although Vance acknowledges that genetics and upbringing may have contributed to her substance abuse and erratic behavior, he also believes she bears much of the responsibility. No one, he argues, should be granted “a perpetual moral get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Hillbillies share a deep-seated skepticism toward institutions: news media and politicians are seen as incessant liars, and universities, especially elite ones, are believed to be rigged against their children. This distrust reinforces a sense of helplessness and discourages engagement with society. The logic seems clear: if the path forward is blocked by liars and grifters, why try at all?  To his credit, Vance holds modern conservatism accountable for failing its “biggest constituent.” He writes, “Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers.” According to Vance, it’s the message of the right—that “it’s your government’s fault you’re a loser”—that has planted seeds of cynicism and despair in these communities.

Hillbilly families also have a massive parenting problem. Teachers feel powerless to help their students succeed in school because, as one teacher allegedly told Vance, these kids are “raised by wolves” at home. The cause of poor parenting, it seems, has more to do with culture than economics.  Even for those who do live in poverty, their basic material needs—food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and school supplies—are rarely at risk.  Mom always made sure Vance and Lindsay had the “trendiest Christmas gifts,” even if it meant spending money she didn’t have.  And Mom seems not alone in her desire to indulge her children’s craving for extravagant gifts. What seems lacking is a fundamental appreciation for raising kids to become educated, responsible individuals. Their actions ultimately harm the children, but they don’t care enough to change course.  As Vance observed,

We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools to succeed.

Are there solutions to the problems in these communities? Vance didn’t think so, especially not in the form “a magical public policy or an innovative government program.”  Public policy can help, he writes, “but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.”  In fact, Vance frequently points out—like a true conservative—how government intervention can make bad problems worse. His greatest frustration appears to be with welfare.   He describes, often with exasperation, instances like a neighbor who has never worked a day in her life but unabashedly complains about other welfare recipients abusing the system; or a jobless, drug-addicted acquaintance who often buys T-bone steaks at a grocer, which Vance could not afford while working part-time at the same grocer.

To Vance, the welfare system not only rewards and perpetuates indolence but also creates resentment among those who work hard to earn an honest living. He argues that welfare is one of the main reasons “Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation.” His objections feel passionate and authentic, though a bit ironic, given that both he and Mamaw were once welfare recipients themselves.

Vance urged hillbillies to stop “blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies” and to start asking themselves what they can do to make things better. But how? Vance admitted he didn’t have answers. However, he did suggest that his people might look to coastal elites—the new friends he made at Yale and in Silicon Valley—as potential role models, because

their children are happier and healthier, their divorce rates lower, their church attendance higher, their lives longer. These people are beating us at our own damned game.

If memory serves me well, the book never mentions Trump by name, so we don’t actually know what Vance thought of him back then.   That said, Vance the VP candidate is no longer the young Silicon Valley investor who wrote Hillbilly Elegy nearly a decade ago.  He has now enthusiastically embraced much of the MAGA agenda. He converted to Catholicism not long ago, reviving his once abandoned career as a devout Chrisitan.  He speaks fondly of government-imposed tariffs as if it is a panacea to the economic plight of the American working class. On social issues, he remains staunchly conservative—pro-life, pro-family, pious and patriotic.  I am sure many progressives find Vance unbearably repulsive: the sleazy, heartless spin of January 6, the adamant opposition to abortion rights, the sexist slur of “childless cat lady”, and the list goes on.   However, if you read Hillbilly Elegy, you can at least understand the origins of his politics and behaviors:  he was trained, as a child, to weaponize words to win petty battles, he longed for families where kids enjoy safety and stability, and he hated women who mistreat their children.

By now, I’ve listened to many of Vance’s interviews, with both friendly and hostile hosts. It’s clear to me that he possesses a talent rare even among politicians: the power of persuasion. His performance at the Vice-Presidential Debate was nothing short of a political masterpiece, a testament to his extraordinary abilities. He was attentive, respectful, articulate, and persuasive, yet he also conveyed a strong sense of fortitude and conviction. His countenance and tone remained steady throughout, projecting a stoic image remarkably mature for his age—I think that is a gift from his troubled upbringing.

Whatever happens next week, I have my fingers crossed that this man may use his political genius for the good of the American people.

Marco Nie, 11/2/2024

David Boyce and Huw Williams are both esteemed transportation scholars, each with their distinct areas of expertise. With their long and distinguished careers closely intertwined with the development of travel forecasting as an intellectual discipline, it is only fitting that they have chosen to write a book about its past, present and future.

I know Professor Boyce well. My master’s advisor, Professor Der-Horng Lee at the National University of Singapore, studied under Boyce while pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Lee’s own master’s advisor, Huey-Kuo Chen from Taiwan’s Central University, was also one of Boyce’s doctoral students during his tenure at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This means I am either Boyce’s academic grandchild, or great grandchild, depending on how you count. Thanks to Lee I was well aware of this academic lineage even before I came to the U.S. in the early 2000s. When I joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in 2006, Boyce was serving his alma mater by teaching transportation system courses as an adjunct professor. It took me a while to process the surreal news that I would now be a colleague of my academic forebear.

During my first meeting with Boyce in Evanston, IL, I learned about his joint book project with Williams, which had already been in progress for several years. The book was an ambitious and intriguing endeavor aimed at reflecting on the achievements, missteps, and challenges in our field. It was finally published in 2015, nearly 12 years after they began the project. Shortly afterward, I was asked to oversee the translation of the book into Chinese, a project that would take another five years. Through this process, I had to read the book cover to cover — and between the lines — several times, ensuring I understood every word and phrase. It was a time-consuming and occasionally frustrating task, to be sure, but a rewarding learning experience nonetheless. Ultimately, it is this rare opportunity that inspired me to share in this essay what I learned from the book and the insights it brought to light.

You may find a preprint of the paper at ssrn. Also check the following podcast automatically generated by Notebook LM  based on a PDF of the paper I fed to it.

I was attracted to A Culture of Growth because I heard the book provides answers to the Needham question (李约瑟难题), namely why China, despite its early and significant achievements in technology, fell so far behind the West during the critical developmental phases of modern science.  Until I opened the book, I didn’t realize it was written by a Northwestern economist, Joel Mokyr, whom a friend in the economics department described as a leading authority on economic history.

Although Mokyr addresses the Needham question extensively in the final chapter, the book is neither motivated by nor primarily focused on that question.  Quite the contrary—if you read the book closely, you can’t miss Mokyr’s dismissal of the question itself. To him, what begs the question isn’t why China—or any other civilization, for that matter—failed to invent modern science, but rather why Europe succeeded. The book is devoted to providing an explanation.

Mokyr’s theory builds on Cardwell’s Law, which states that technological innovation tends to slow down or stagnate once an organization, economy, or civilization reaches a peak accomplishment. The stagnation occurs because the beneficiaries of the status quo become complacent and resist major creative disruptions that could threaten their dominance. Crucially, they often have the power to “suppress further challenges to entrenched knowledge” by either incentivizing would-be challengers to do their biddings or persecuting them as heretics.

How did Europe manage to break the spell of Cardwell’s Law? Mokyr attributed this success to Europe’s “fortunate condition that combined political fragmentation with cultural unity.” This unique environment gave rise to what he called a “Republic of Letters,” a loosely connected federation where intellectuals could freely exchange, contest, refine, and publish ideas across the borders of competing polities. This republic, along with the “market of ideas” it nurtured, rose gradually after the Middle Ages.

Europeans, following Bacon, began to recognize that knowledge could and should be harnessed for society’s material benefit, and that its creation, dissemination, and utilization should be a collective effort.  That is not to say the Republic of Letters was brought about by any concerted effort. Often motivated by the pursuit of lucrative patronage positions, the founding members of the republic sought to build strong reputations among their peers. This motive, in turn, pushed them to support free access to knowledge and uphold the right to challenge any idea, regardless of its origin.

The republic had no inherent hierarchy, except for the one that naturally emerged through fierce but largely free competition for peer recognition, based on a shared understanding of what constitutes merit.   Scholars who rose to the top of the pecking order often did fabulously well for themselves, attracting a “disproportionate amount of fame and patronage.”   They also became recruitment tools for the Republic of Letters and role models for future generations.  Newton was one such superstar whose influence as a model scientist is hard to overstate.  Mokyr wrote of Newton,

he was knighted, elected to Parliament, and became quite wealthy. In 1727 he was given a splendid funeral and interned in a prominent place in Westminster Abbey. Voltaire remarked that he was buried like a well-loved king.

Once the market of ideas took shape, it was sustained by Europe’s favorable geopolitical conditions.   On the one hand, political fragmentation meant that neither scholars nor their patrons could easily monopolize the market of ideas by blocking the entry of potential competitors or buying them off. Incumbents quickly realized that such maneuvers only pushed innovation into the hands of their rivals, ultimately undermining their own competitive advantage.   On the other hand, cultural unity allowed knowledge production and dissemination to benefit from scale. From an economic perspective, scale reduces the fixed costs of production, which is key to profitability and financial viability. It also created a network effect, meaning that scientists could learn from a relatively large pool of peers—standing on the shoulders of many giants, as Newton famously put it.

Mokyr’s “culture of growth” matured during the Enlightenment, an intellectual and cultural movement that promoted the progressive improvement of society through the expansion and application of useful knowledge, while advocating for more inclusive political institutions. In hindsight, it was clear why the Enlightenment played such a pivotal role in Mokyr’s theorization: it was the precursor to the Industrial Revolution, which triggered an unprecedented phase of economic growth that lifted much of humanity above subsistence living standards.

An interesting aspect of Mokyr’s theory is its focus on what he calls cultural entrepreneurs—or thought leaders, in today’s parlance—who played an outsized role in the evolution of the culture of growth. Mokyr believed that useful knowledge was created by “a minute percentage of the population” whose primary occupation is, in Adam Smith’s words, “to think and or to reason” for “the vast multitudes that labour.”  In fact,

 what the large majority of workers and peasants knew or believed mattered little as long as there were enough of them to do what they were told by those who knew more.

While Mokyr’s assessment is supported by historical evidence, I imagine many would find such an unapologetically elitist view of cultural development difficult to accept. For me, it feels almost antithetical: growing up in China, my history and political science teachers repeatedly taught, with absolute certainty, that it was proletariats who, through class struggle, drove societal progress and historical development.

Mokyr’s theory can explain why China experienced a burst of intellectual development during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770 – 221 BCE).  There are striking similarities between the geopolitical conditions of China in this classical era and those of Europe after the High Middle Ages: numerous relatively small states engaged in intense and perpetual competition for dominance, a vast territory with diverse terrain, and a shared cultural tradition including language, institutions, and faith.  Many cultural entrepreneurs—collectively known as “Hundred Schools of Thought”—emerged at this time and left indelible marks on the Chinese Literary Canon.  Like their European counterparts nearly two millennia later, these intellectuals built their reputations by creating and sharing knowledge, and when opportunities arose, they happily crossed the borders of rivalry states to seek more profitable employment for their skills.

As mentioned earlier, in Europe, the greatest achievement of the market of ideas was the Enlightenment. In China, however, a similar market of ideas culminated in a political philosophy that blended Confucianism and Legalism—what I shall refer to as “Confuleg” for lack of a better term (in Chinese, 儒法, or more precisely儒表法里).

Confuleg went on to become the political philosophy that underpinned the key institutions of the Qin-Han Empire, the first to truly unify what is now China under a powerful and centralized state. In the ancient world, this was a towering achievement—socially, politically, and economically. In fact, the state model based on Confuleg was so successful that one could argue, to some extent, China still operates in its long shadow even today.  However, Confuleg’s ascent to hegemony in China was effectively a death sentence for the market of idea.

Since the Qin-Han empire, China has seen dynastic succession once a few hundred years, each usually accompanied by an extended period of turmoil, violence and destruction.

When China is ruled by a centralized state, the Republic of Letters cannot survive, as Mokry’s theory predicts.  Since the best employment opportunity for intellectuals could only be found in the state’s bureaucratic system, producing new knowledge or earning a reputation among peers no longer promises financial security.  Instead, survival requires pledging allegiance to the state (i.e., the emperor himself), internalizing the principles of Confleg as one’s own beliefs and values, and excelling the exams designed to test the ability to memorize and interpret classical texts.   More importantly, the state does not tolerate any competition with its monopoly over ideas.  Questioning the state-sanctioned ideology is viewed not only as heresy but as an act of treason, often carrying the gravest of consequences.

When the centralized state collapsed, one might expect that the ensuing chaos and factional warfare would create an environment favorable for a thriving market of ideas. After all, isn’t that exactly what happened during the Warring States period? Not quite.    The Chinese Canon maintained its powerful grip on intellectuals through these turbulent times. It even survived the brutal and repressive Mongol rule, which lasted nearly a century.  Why?

David Hume (1711 – 1776) observed that few Chinese after the classical period had courage to “dispute what had been universally received by their ancestors.”  John Stewart Mill (1806 – 1873) echoed this view, noting that Chinese tended to “govern their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules,” and as a result (emphasis mine),

they have become stationary—have remained so for thousands of years; and if they are ever to be farther improved, it must be by foreigners.

Today, these words may sound condescending, if not outright discriminatory. However, I often wonder what China might be like today had Westerners never forced their way in. Would it still more or less resemble the world under the reign of Emperor Qianlong in the late 1700s?

Beyond conformity to the same maxims, most Chinese thinkers shared a peculiar, pessimistic nostalgia for a world once ideal and perfect but irretrievably lost. Mokyr identified this trait among the Neo-Confucians—the followers of Cheng Hao, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming—who dominated the intellectual world during the Ming dynasty.  These scholars regarded antiquity, Mokyr wrote, as “the ideal period, followed by a decline, with no guarantee that the world would ever be better.”   However, the mindset did not originate form Neo-Confucians; it can be traced back to Confucius himself, who lamented the disintegration of the Western Zhou institutions he regarded as ideal, writing

Zhou observed the two preceding dynasties, flourishing with culture and refinement! I follow the Zhou. (周监于二代，郁郁乎文哉！吾从周)

It is hardly surprising that such an inherently backward-looking worldview would become an obstacle to new ideas.

What does Mokyr’s theory suggest about the future of innovation in human society?

The Republic of Letters that once thrived in pre-industrial Europe has long since disappeared, replaced by a vast scientific enterprise supported by a plethora of public and private institutions. However, some key principles from the old republic remain.

First, freedom of expression is still a foundational value. In universities, this is institutionalized through tenure, ensuring that professors’ livelihoods are protected from those who dislike their ideas. Second, a scholar’s value continues to be largely determined by their reputation among peers. This is why peer review, whether for publications or grants, remains the gold standard in academia, despite frequent criticisms of inefficiency, inconsistency, and unfairness.

The value of the science enterprise as an indispensable pillar of modern soceity is almost universally recognized today. Thanks to globalization, science has truly become a global affair: ideas, money, and scholars can now move freely across borders.   This all sounds uplifting until you realize where innovations are first made and adopted still matters a lot.  As Chris Miller explained in Chip War, leadership in science and technology has been the cornerstone of America’s national security strategy.   Until recently, the open science enterprise has served this strategy pretty well.

From pioneering semiconductors to exploring space, from mapping the human genome to advancing artificial general intelligence, the U.S. has consistently led the way. While much of this success can be attributed to America’s global hegemony, her strong commitment to the core values of liberal democracy—free speech, property rights, and limited government—must have also played a crucial role, according to Mokyr’s theory.

The meteoric rise of China apparently has shaken America’s faith in open science.  Reasonable people can disagree on the nature of the current Chinese regime; but few can claim with a straight face that Chinese citizens enjoy much political freedom, as the term is usually understood in the West.  The Chinese do not elect their leaders through open and free elections; their speech is tightly monitored and censored; and they are largely ruled by law, rather than being protected by the rule of law.  In theory, such an environment should be hostile to the market of ideas, hence innovations.

Yet, China has made remarkable strides in science and technology since the turn of the century. By 2025, China is projected to produce nearly twice as many STEM PhD graduates annually as the U.S.  In 2022, Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific publishers, reported that China had surpassed the U.S. to claim the top spot in the Nature Index for natural sciences. Additionally, a recent report indicated that by 2024, China was home to 369 unicorn startups (compared to about 700 in the U.S.), with nearly a quarter focused on AI and semiconductor sectors. Companies like Huawei have become such formidable tech giants that Chris Miller asks nervously in Chip War: “Could the United States allow a Chinese company like this to succeed?”

China’s rapid advances in science and technology raise a fascinating question that Mokyr’s theory seems unable to fully address: can innovation flourish and economic growth be sustained under an authoritarian regime like modern-day China?

If China were isolated from the global science enterprise, I would respond with a resounding “NO.” History has shown that when intellectuals are not allowed to freely speak their minds—as seems to be the case in China today—the market of ideas withers, dragging down opportunities for creative disruption and sustained economic growth.  However, could China simply grab the fruits produced by the global science enterprise, without ever having to maintain a thriving market of ideas of her own?  Could Chinese intellectuals and entrepreneurs continue to be creative and productive in advancing science and technology, even while their other rights, including freedom of speech, are severely impaired?

These are open questions.  However, the U.S., understandably anxious about her security, is not taking any chances. In recent years, she has taken drastic steps to restrict China’s access to cutting-edge technology and to limit interactions between the scientific communities of the two nations, particularly in areas with potential national security implications.   It is disheartening to see the leader of the free world openly retreating from a foundational principle of that world: that science should be freely accessible to all for progress and prosperity.   America’s China Initiative may also lend credibility to the popular narrative of Chinese nationalists that the so-called Westerns values are mere disguise for self-interests –– or worse, deep-seated racism against non-white people.

It is too early to determine whether America’s isolation measures will be effective, or even necessary, in curbing China’s ambition to lead global innovation in the coming century. What we can say with some certainty is that a less open science enterprise will be less vibrant and productive, and likely a less desirable place for scholars, especially those who are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  Politicians and strategists who support the China Initiative argue that this is a price worth paying to protect our freedoms and uphold the liberal world order. Only time will tell if they are right.

Marco Nie， Wilmette

September 22， 2024