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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32116 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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And they have plenty of human capital

Hard to say. Most of the births are now in the countryside to poor peasant farmers. Hardly “elite human capital”

One of Scott's book reviews had a neat thesis that homesteading peasants are the first step of the magic formula that produced the Asian tiger countries.

But even beyond this, Studwell talks up the almost spiritual benefits of land reform. In a typical land reform measure, an equal amount of land gets allotted to every peasant family. This is about as close as anything ever comes to the completely fair starting position that eg John Locke liked to fantasize about. Everyone gets to work for themselves in their own little small business, reaping the consequences of their own decisions. The generation who grow up immediately after a land reform tend to be thrifty, hard-working, honest, and civic-minded. They go on to found all of the giant world-spanning Toyota-style companies you get in the next round of development.

Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.

Tried very cursorily to search if the Chinese peasants are the homesteading sort and got as first hit a local paper which sounds like yes, and they now want to run down the homestead system. Maybe that's how they finally fall flat.

Totally would expect this to produce a better sort of human capital than the Western combo of iPad + tiktok + sleeping through primary ed.

Sure. Except the Chinese already have their own version of this. Many Chinese kids are basically checked out of society . “lying flat” is the name of the current youth movement in China, and it’s pretty self explanatory

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