{"id":192,"date":"2006-06-12T15:27:12","date_gmt":"2006-06-12T09:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2006\/06\/12\/pankaj-mishra\/"},"modified":"2006-06-12T15:27:12","modified_gmt":"2006-06-12T09:57:12","slug":"pankaj-mishra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2006\/06\/12\/pankaj-mishra\/","title":{"rendered":"Pankaj Mishra"},"content":{"rendered":"

Readers of Maajorly Shadymax Arbit Fundaes are obviously too intelligent to be taken in by this Pankaj Mishra editorial<\/a>, which manages to contradict itself repeatedly and also indulges in some very selective reporting of facts.<\/p>\n

To take just one of the contradictions, Mishra first claims that when China adopted free market policies, the result was a 25% inflation rate in the late 1980s, and even says that the Tiananmen Square protests were not for greater democracy and accountability, but against rising prices (So was the Goddess of Democracy<\/a> actually the Goddess of Low Prices?). But he then goes on to say that China’s adoption of free market policies is undermining European economies through cheap<\/em> exports. You can’t have it both ways. Why do ‘neoliberal’ policies cause inflation in the 1980s, but 15 years on, with greater adoption cause deflation? And why are rising prices bad in China, and falling prices bad in Italy?<\/p>\n

Tim Worstall has a rebuttal<\/a> up on his blog. It makes some very excellent points about the things not mentioned in the editorial, and leaves Mishra looking pretty silly.<\/p>\n

I disagree with Worstall’s opening paragraph, though, where he says Mishra seems to be suggesting that India and China need a healthy dose of socialism. Actually, Mishra’s beef with free market economics is not that it doesn’t work, but that it is a Western idea based on Western values, and thus unsuitable for India and China. If you were to take this to its logical conclusion, socialism is also ruled out as it too has Western origins. Mishra would presumably be satisfied if India and China were operating under pre-imperialistic conditions. Of course, this would mean scuppering democracy, free speech, the university system and bringing back untouchability, sati<\/em>, absentee landlords, and foot binding, but at least these are homegrown concepts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Readers of Maajorly Shadymax Arbit Fundaes are obviously too intelligent to be taken in by this Pankaj Mishra editorial, which manages to contradict itself repeatedly and also indulges in some very selective reporting of facts. To take just one of the contradictions, Mishra first claims that when China adopted free market policies, the result was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","category-society"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-36","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}