Martin Ravallion of Georgetown University, who used to be director of research at the World Bank, has an interesting new working paper out that tries to estimate how much Mao Zedong and Maoism cost China in terms of economic growth and poverty reduction.
How China would have done without Maoism depends on what would have replaced it. Ravallion suggests that could have been “political capitalism” à la Taiwan and South Korea, two societies not dissimilar to China’s, with their “Confucian philosophical roots,” strong work ethics, reverence for learning, central importance of family, and so on. In 1950, after decades of regional and world conflict, all three countries were very poor, China poorest. But then the other two took off and China didn’t.
