Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (134): Famine in China

Famished Chinese child dying in a gutter, by George Silk 1946

(source)

by George Silk 1946

(source)

These images are not from the more infamous famine that occurred during the Great Leap Forward.

George Silk was a LIFE Magazine staffer, working for them 30 years. He extensively covered many aspects of the second world war, at one point being even captured by the Germans, and then fortunately escaping. He was also the first photographer to document Nagasaki after the atomic bombing. Immediately after the war, he was in China recording the poor social conditions and the lack of resources and its devastating effects on the Chinese populace. (source)

More iconic images of human rights violations. More about famine.

Human Rights Facts (74): Poverty in China, Africa and India, 1990-2013

(source)

More data on poverty in India, China and Africa

Sexism, A Collection of Images (5)

women clean the house, and stay slim at the same time

women make breakfast

women work in the kitchen

women do the dishes

women are responsible for educating their children

in China, beautiful women serve coffee on international women’s day

women look old rather quickly

women smell

some women can project their equipment

More sexist images here, here and here.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (36): The Economic Case Against Democracy

wealth in China

(source)

Democracy is a human right. But how do we justify this right? One common argument is that democracies tend to be wealthier than non-democracies. However, there’s some disagreement about this argument: not about the goodness of wealth and wealth-enhancing institutions, but about whether democracies are in fact such institutions. Impressive economic growth rates in non-democratic countries such as China have planted doubts in many people’s minds.

Some time ago, I offered a rather “philosophical” argument against the view that democracies perform worse economically than some types of authoritarian government (i.e. China-style). But in fact we’re dealing with empirically verifiable hypotheses here. So I looked for some numbers and found this article by Dani Rodrik:

The relationship between a nation’s politics and its economic prospects is one of the most fundamental – and most studied – subjects in all of social science. Which is better for economic growth – a strong guiding hand that is free from the pressure of political competition, or a plurality of competing interests that fosters openness to new ideas and new political players? …

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Authoritarian regimes, by contrast, ultimately produce economies that are as fragile as their political systems. Their economic potency, when it exists, rests on the strength of individual leaders, or on favorable but temporary circumstances. They cannot aspire to continued economic innovation or to global economic leadership. (source)

Some data on democracy and growth are here.

The darling of the “authoritarian=efficient” crowd is, of course, China. China has indeed performed extremely well economically under a rather authoritarian government. However, that government is much less authoritarian than it was during the post-WWII decades of stagnation and extreme poverty. So maybe it’s the relative move towards greater freedom that is the true cause of China’s economic performance, rather than its authoritarian government per se.

Moreover, China has done very well in terms of growth and poverty reduction, but in terms of levels of prosperity it’s still way behind most countries that are much more free. Its astounding progress is partly due to the very low starting point that was engineered by its authoritarian rulers.

And finally, the supposed economic success of authoritarianism in China – if it exists – isn’t necessarily proof of the economic ability of authoritarianism in general (authoritarian disaster stories are unfortunately far more common than authoritarian success stories). It may not even be proof of the economic ability of authoritarianism in China, since correlation doesn’t imply causation, especially not if there are only very few observations: China’s economic success may be due to other factors – and maybe this success would have been even greater without authoritarian government.

Jesus raises the dead man Lazarus back to the living world (mosaic from Ravenna, 500′s AD)

The economic case for authoritarianism is a bit like this: usually, people don’t return from the dead. But there’s this one guy, Lazarus, who did. Some claim that there was this other fellow, Jesus, who done the deed and made Lazarus walk again. There are no other Jesuses around, and this one Jesus only did his trick once. Nobody quite knows how he did it. Some say he just happened to be around when it occurred and people put one and one together. Lazarus would have walked anyway, perhaps even sooner had this other fellow not stolen all the attention.

More here, here, here and here on the myth of successful authoritarianism.

Related Articles

• The heavy hand (economist.com)
• Where will China’s long march end? (telegraph.co.uk)
• Is Democracy Necessary for Economic Success? (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• India or China: Which Model for the Developing World? (curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com)
• Democracy or Autocracy: Which is Better for Economic Growth? Becker (becker-posner-blog.com)

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (25): Globalization, Ctd.

globalization, cartoon by Deng Coy Miel, Singapore

(source)

Globalization is the usual suspect when people discuss the causes of contemporary increases in income inequality in many Western nations. As a result of easier transportation, trade and communication, low skilled workers in those nations now face ever tougher competition from cheap workers in developing countries, and this competition drives down wages at the poor end of Western income distributions: workers have to swallow wage reductions under the threat of outsourcing. Increased immigration – another facet of globalization – has the same effect.

At the top end of the income distribution, the reverse is happening: the job of a CEO is now more complicated in our globalized world, and hence his pay is higher. The threat of relocation also has an effect on income inequality through the channel of the welfare state: companies threaten to relocate, not just because of labor costs, but also because of tax rates. Taxes in Western countries tend to be relatively high because social security tends to be relatively generous. The threat of relocation convinces governments to reduce tax rates, but the price to pay is often a less generous welfare state. This as well puts pressure on the income distribution.

All this sounds convincing, but I’m afraid it’s too simple. The effects of globalization on inequality starts to look more complicated when we take consumption into account. Globalization tends to lower the consumption prizes of a lot of goods, and cheaper consumption can counteract downward pressures on wages and social security. If you can buy more and better stuff with your paycheck, your unemployment benefit or your disability check, then perhaos you’re not worse off.

There’s an interesting paper here by Broda and Romalis in which they look at

the compositional differences in the basket of goods consumed by the poor and the rich in America. Using household data on non-durable consumption between 1994 and 2005 we document that much of the rise of income inequality has been offset by a relative decline in the price index of the poor. By relaxing the standard assumptions underlying the representative agent framework we find that inflation for households in the lowest tenth percentile of income has been 6 percentage points smaller than inflation for the upper tenth percentile over this period. The lower inflation at low income levels can be explained by three factors: 1) The poor consume a higher share of non-durable goods —whose prices have fallen relative to services over this period; 2) the prices of the set of non-durable goods consumed by the poor has fallen relative to that of the rich; and 3) a higher proportion of the new goods are purchased by the poor. We examine the role played by Chinese exports in explaining the lower inflation of the poor. Since Chinese exports are concentrated in low-quality non-durable products that are heavily purchased by poorer Americans, we find that about one third of the relative price drops faced by the poor are associated with rising Chinese imports.

When measuring income inequality, we should correct for the different prices of goods and services consumed by people in different income groups. This doesn’t mean that we should be happy about the fact that poor people live on cheap stuff; it simply means that some of the rising income inequality is compensated by cheaper stuff. And we have cheaper stuff because of globalization. Turning globalization into some sort of bogey man is therefore rather too simple. Income inequality has many causes, and it’s not clear that globalization is, everything considered, an important one.

Finally, a word about the supposed wage pressures of increased immigration: they are indeed no more than supposed.

More on income inequality and globalization. More posts in this series.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (92): Nanking Massacre

The Nanking – or Nanjing – massacre occurred when Japanese troops occupied the city of Nanking in 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed soldiers were murdered and raped by the Japanese. Read the full story here.

head of a Chinese man, beheaded by Japanese, is wedged in a barricade near Nanking, during the Nanking massacre

(source)

Chinese man to be beheaded in Nanking Massacre

(source)

A Chinese POW about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer with a shin gunto during the Nanking Massacre

(source)

Chinese to be buried alive by Japanese soldiers during Nanking Massacre

(source)

The sheer volume of murdered civilians posed a formidable logistical challenge when it came to disposing of the bodies. Many Chinese were conscripted into burial teams

(source)

There’s also this particularly gruesome one, but I couldn’t verify its authenticity:

beheading of chinese woman

(source unknown)

More iconic images here.

Political Graffiti (205): Ai Weiwei

(source)

More on China and censorship. More political graffiti.

Annals of Heartlessness (26): Hire a Body Double to Serve Your Prison Sentence

Melanie Griffith in a scene from Brian De Palma’s “Body Double”

The practice of hiring “body doubles” or “stand-ins” is well-documented by official Chinese media. In 2009, a hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to “confess” and serve as his stand-in. A company chairman is currently charged with allegedly arranging criminal substitutes for the executives of two other companies. In another case, after hitting and killing a motorcyclist, a man driving without a license hired a substitute for roughly $8,000. The owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year hired a destitute man, who made his living scavenging in the rubble of razed homes, and promised him $31 for each day the “body double” spent in jail. In China, the practice is so common that there is even a term for it: ding zui. Ding means “substitute,” and zui means “crime”; in other words, “substitute criminal.”

The ability to hire so-called substitute criminals is just one way in which China’s extreme upper crust are able to live by their own set of rules. (source, source)

Similar stories about the effects the depths of hardship can have on people are here and here. More in the annals of heartlessness here.

Capital Punishment, A Collection of Images

Mansur al-Hallaj (858 -922 AD) was a Persian mystic, revolutionary writer and pious teacher of Sufism most famous for his poetry, accusation of heresy and for his execution at the orders of the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir after a long, drawn-out investigation.

(source, where you can read the full story)

The precise story about this picture is unknown, to me at least. I couldn’t find any reliable references. It’s assumed that this is an image of a public execution in China.

(source unknown, more on capital punishment in China is here)

“Pieta”, Jesus in the electric chair, by British artist Paul Fryer, in the private collection of François Pinault in France

(source, no doubt inspired by Lenny Bruce)

Francisco Goya, The Shootings of May 3, 1808. Goya sought to commemorate Spanish resistance to Napoleon’s armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War.

(source unknown)

Cook County kept a gallows around until 1977 in case “Terrible Tommy” O’Connor, who escaped on the eve of his execution in 1921, was ever apprehended

(source)

More images of capital punishment are here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. More on capital punishment in general here. Some data are here. And other collections of human rights images are here.

Migration and Human Rights (42): The Labor Cost Argument Against Open Borders

(source)

I’ve argued many times before against the popular view that increased immigration is detrimental to native employment and income. The simple argument about an increase in supply of cheap labor driving down wages and forcing expensive native workers out of the job market is just that: simple, too simple. There’s even evidence that the opposite is true: immigration increases native wages (because it allows native workers to move up the pay scale). But even if immigration did impose a cost on the host country, that wouldn’t be the final argument against immigration, since such a cost could be seen as a form of global redistribution and global justice: improving the lot of the poorest of the world surely justifies imposing a burden on those who have more wealth and who had the good fortune of being born in the “right” part of the world. True, this burden shouldn’t fall on the poorest members of the “right” countries, but if it does that can be corrected by national redistribution.

Still, let’s return to the labor cost argument against immigration. Here’s another piece of evidence that tips the scales yet a bit further against the view that the extremely low cost of immigrant labor results in displacement of low-level native labor. The evidence I want to cite is about internal migration in China, but it’s perfectly possible to use it against arguments favoring restrictions on international migration:

Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have moved into Chinese cities since the early 1990s contributing greatly to economic growth, yet, they are often blamed for reducing urban ‘native’ workers’ employment opportunities, suppressing their wages and increasing pressure on infrastructure and other public facilities. This paper examines the causal relationship between rural-urban migration and urban native workers’ labour market outcomes in Chinese cities. After controlling for the endogeneity problem our results show that rural migrants in urban China have modest positive or zero effects on the average employment and insignificant impact on earnings of urban workers. When we examine the impact on unskilled labours we once again find it to be positive and insignificant. We conjecture that the reason for the lack of adverse effects is due partially to the labour market segregation between the migrants and urban natives, and partially due to the complementarities between the two groups of workers. Further investigation reveals that the increase in migrant inflow is related to the demand expansion and that if the economic growth continues, elimination of labour market segregation may not necessarily lead to an adverse impact of migration on urban native labour market outcomes. (source, source)

More posts about arguments against open borders are here, here and here. More posts in this blog series are here.

Related Articles

• Pros of Rural-urban Migration (socyberty.com)
• Worker Shortages Seen in Chinese Export Centers (nytimes.com)
• Immigration and the economy: Everything you believe is wrong (blogs.berkeley.edu)
• Why an immigration amnesty could benefit British workers (newstatesman.com)

Human Rights Nonsense (33): A Very Dirty Pot Calls the Kettle Black

demonstrators holding an image of dissident Ai Weiwei

(source)

While complaints about respect for human rights in the U.S. are often well-founded, it’s weird when these complaints are issued by the Chinese government:

[T]he US released its annual human rights report last Thursday. And in response, China’s Information Office of the State Council released its own report specifically about human rights in the United States.

In fact, they’ve been issuing reports like this for more than a decade. It’s called “Human Rights Record of the United States.”

That report points out–without a hint of irony–the US government’s so-called “woeful human rights situation.”

For example, it berates the US for how police have arrested “Occupy Wall Street” protesters–with no mention of how in China, police can detain suspects for up to 37 days before formally arresting them, compared to about 2 days in the US.

The Chinese report cites the US government’s, quote, “strict censoring and control over the press … [and] restriction on the Internet”; but China has one of the most restricted and censored Internets in the world. Human Rights Watch puts China’s Internet Freedom ranking in the world’s worst 5%–along with Syria, Iran, and Belarus by the way. America, while not the best, is still in the top 12%. (source)

More here. And here‘s a similar case. More human rights nonsense is here.

Annals of Heartlessness (19): “I Ain’t Got No Body”

A public decapitation in China on a postcard, with a heartless comment:

(source unknown)

The precise historical context of the scene is unclear to me, but it appears to be during or before WWII, and the executioners are probably Japanese soldiers.

The song that’s cited in the comment is here. More on decapitation here and here. More in the annals of heartlessness here.

Human Rights Ads (73): Child Abuse

Chinese anti-child abuse ad: "Only cowards beat their children"

(source)

A similar one is here. One can question the wisdom of such campaigns, comparing violence to a healthy pastime. Even more dubious is the fact that these punching bags have been placed in the streets, not in order to “try them out” but some won’t be able to resist.

More human rights ads.

Human Rights Nonsense (31): Dalai Lama is Nazi, Says China

27 year old Tibetan exile setting himself on fire last Monday in New Delhi, in protest against a visit to India by Hu Jintao. The man died of his injuries last Wednesday.

(source)

I did hear about some similar cases before - for example, North Korea lecturing Japan on human rights, and the late Gaddafi lecturing Switzerland (!) on human rights - but this is the best:

A state-run Chinese website has launched a bitter attack on the Dalai Lama, accusing the exiled Buddhist leader of Nazi racial policies and inciting Tibetans to set themselves on fire.

The commentary on China Tibet Online, also carried by the official Xinhua News Agency on Saturday, is one of the strongest reactions from Beijing to a string of protests in ethnic Tibetan areas of the country.

About 30 Tibetan monks, nuns and lay people have set themselves on fire in the past year in protest at what they say are repressive government policies toward their religion and culture. Many seek the return of the Dalai Lama.

The commentary follows other attacks by government officials on the Dalai Lama, who has praised the courage of those who engage in self-immolation and has attributed the protests to what he calls China’s “cultural genocide” in Tibet. But he also says he does not encourage the protests, noting they could invite an even harsher crackdown. …

The Chinese website was critical of the Dalai Lama’s comments that government policies, including the increased use of the Chinese language in Tibetan schools and the migration of ethnic Han Chinese into Tibetan areas, were eroding Tibetan culture. … The commentary added that the Dalai Lama’s remark that a future autonomous Tibetan region should be allowed to regulate who lives in the region, was “a public declaration to expel non-Tibetan residents out of Tibet”. … The Chinese commentary called the Dalai Lama a “tricky liar skilled in double-dealing” who wants to build a “Berlin Wall” of ethnic segregation and confrontation. “The remarks of the Dalai Lama remind us of the uncontrolled and cruel Nazi during the second world war … How similar it is to the Holocaust committed by Hitler on the Jewish!” the commentary said in criticising the Dalai Lama’s call for high levels of autonomy for Tibetan areas. (source)

Someone should tell the Chinese government about Godwin’s Law. More on Tibet and the Dalai Lama. More on the so-called “racial policies” promoted by the Dalai Lama. More human rights nonsense.

Human Rights Quote (85): Oppression in China

Soldier at Tian'anmen Square in front of an image of Chairman Mao, photo by Richard Fisher

(source)

When the young Mao Tse-tung agitated for revolution, he found a vivid way to get his point across to an uneducated audience: He picked up a single chopstick and snapped it in two. Then he picked up a handful of chopsticks: They would not break. Thus he showed that so long as everyone stood side by side, no force could withstand the tide of revolution. By gathering together China’s scattered, indignant chopsticks, Mao finally was able to ascend Tiananmen—the Gate of Heavenly Peace — on Oct. 1, 1949, and announce the establishment of his republic. Whether chopsticks come singly or in a handful is now an issue in China again. Mao’s successors, however, do the opposite of what he advocated, mobilizing immense resources to keep chopsticks from gathering together. The government knows that angry chopsticks are everywhere, but as long as they stay scattered, it believes it can break them in two, whatever their numbers. (source)

This is reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s theory about the difference between power and violence. Read it here.

The Causes of Poverty (54): Lack of Trade Liberalization

I mentioned before (here and here) that trade liberalization – the removal of trade barriers such as tariffs, subsidies and other distortions of international trade – is, on aggregate and in the medium term, a powerful mechanism for poverty reduction. I say “in the medium turn”, because some structural adjustment may be necessary, and “on aggregate” because some may lose while others gain.

The usual fears about trade liberalization – that it reduces government revenues necessary for redistribution, that it leads to labor competition, lower wages and higher unemployment rates, or that it raises prices in developing countries – are, in general and on aggregate, unfounded (an overview of the evidence is here). Of course, trade liberalization may cause local economic shocks, and there can be distributional effects: some people will benefit more than others, and some may even be worse of after liberalization, especially in the short term. But it’s the aggregate medium term effect on a country or an economy that counts.

This is similar to the positive effect of economic growth on poverty reduction:

The vast majority of the world’s poor live in the rural areas of these two countries [China and India]. Both countries achieved significant reductions in poverty during 1980–2000 when they grew rapidly. According to World Bank estimates, real GDP grew at an annual average rate of 10 percent in China and 6 percent in India during these two decades. No country in the world had as rapid growth as China, and fewer than ten countries exceeded the Indian growth rate. The effect on reduction in poverty in both countries was dramatic, entirely in keeping with the “Bhagwati hypothesis” of the early 1960’s that growth is a principal driver of poverty reduction. (source)

Not all of the poor will be automatically better of as a result of economic growth, and growth may widen income inequality or relative poverty while reducing absolute poverty. But on average and on aggregate, economic growth – like trade liberalization - reduces poverty. That’s not just a story of “trickle down” or “all boats rising on a rising tide”; economic growth also means that the government has more resources to fund welfare and redistribution. (Obviously, none of this implies that growth is always beneficial or that there isn’t room to make growth even more “pro-poor” than it already is).

Arguments in favor of trade liberalization

The interesting part of the argument is that the positive effect of trade liberalization on poverty reduction passes through enhanced economic growth: liberalization reduces poverty because it enhances growth.

[P]ractically no country that has been close to autarkic has managed to sustain a high growth performance over a sustained period. Furthermore, … if one classifies countries into globalizers and nonglobalizers by reference to their relative performance in raising the trade share in GNP during 1977–1997, the former group has shown higher growth rates… [T]he outward-orientation of the Far Eastern strategy … led to the Asian miracle. (source)

Free trade is one of the determinants of economic growth. Growth requires increased productivity, and that’s what free trade delivers. Free trade means more productivity because it means

• more specialization
• more use of comparative advantage
• better access to technology and knowledge
• better and cheaper intermediate goods (raw products etc.) and capital goods (machines etc.)
• benefits of scale
• and increased competition.

All these consequences of free trade have a positive effect on productivity and hence on growth. And that’s not just theory; there’s empirical proof. Reductions in trade barriers were almost always followed by significant increases in productivity (source).

And it’s not just productivity; trade liberalization has other effects as well. The removal of tariffs can reduces prices for consumers and hence reduce poverty. It’s often the case that goods consumed by poor people have a higher tariff tax than goods consumed by rich people:

In his research, [Edward Gresser, senior fellow and director of trade policy at the Progressive Policy Institute] found that the tariff rate on a cashmere sweater is 4 percent; the rate for one made of much cheaper acrylic is 32 percent. A silk brassiere has a tariff rate of less than 3 percent, but the rate on a polyester one is slightly less than 17 percent. The tariff rate on a snakeskin handbag is just over 5 percent but climbs to 16 percent for one made of canvas. Similar variations occur when it comes to household goods. Drinking glasses that cost more than $5 each have a tariff of 3 percent, while those that cost less than 30 cents each have a rate of 28.5 percent. A silk pillowcase has a rate of 4.5 percent; this goes up to nearly 15 percent for one made of polyester.

Overall, clothes and shoes contributed nearly $10 billion in tariff revenue in 2009, while higher-cost items including audiovisual equipment, computers and even cars added less than $2 billion. Gresser contends that the $10 billion is disproportionately borne by people who can’t afford to buy luxury goods. What’s more, when customers pay sales tax on these products, that amount is also higher than it would otherwise be thanks to the tariff that drives up the retail price. (source)

Hence, not only does free trade alleviate poverty, trade restrictions and protectionism actually aggravate poverty. Take also the example of restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries:

At first glance, this seems understandable, because a country may not wish to send valuable foodstuffs abroad in a time of need. Nonetheless, the longer-run incentives are counterproductive. (source)

When farmers can’t export, there’s little incentive for them to farm rice. Result: the shortages that were meant to be avoided.

Arguments against trade liberalization

However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the undisputed downsides of trade liberalization. The removal of subsidies can hurt certain producers and it can, especially in the short run, depress employment and wages in certain sectors. It can therefore reduce some people’s incomes and push them into poverty. Trade liberalization can destroy entire markets: it can force a country to abandon tomato production for example, because nonsubsidized local producers are no longer able to compete with increased import competition coming from countries with a comparative advantage. The local producers will lose their jobs and income. However, these same people may benefit in other areas: products which they consume may become cheaper. So, when assessing the impact of trade liberalization on poverty, one has to aggregate all the losses and gains in different areas, and that’s ultimately an empirical question that has to be investigated country by country. Overall, the evidence is that, on aggregate, the effect is probably positive.

There can be individual losers from liberalization, and even individual countries can lose: countries that depend on mineral resources, for example, can take the fast lane towards the resource curse when trade is liberalized. But it’s the global balance of poverty alleviation that determines the desirability and success of trade liberalization.

The claim that liberalization negatively affects government revenues because of decreasing income from tariff taxes, and hence diminishes the generosity of the welfare state, is also not well founded. First of all, liberalization also means reduced subsidies, which should improve governments’ fiscal situation. Secondly, trade volumes increase as tariffs are reduced, and hence the net effect of reducing tariffs doesn’t have to be falling revenues. And finally, even if revenues fall, the poor don’t necessarily have to suffer: it’s ultimately a political decision where to spend which types of government revenues. Priorities can change when revenues change.

Another possible disadvantage of free trade is a cultural one. The claim is that free trade means cultural imperialism: small cultures don’t have the resources to export their cultural products and risk being overwhelmed by, in particular, American culture. Hence, there may be a case for cultural protectionism, but this case doesn’t extrapolate to protectionism writ large.

Conclusion

Liberalization isn’t a magic bullet, neither for economic growth nor for poverty alleviation. Sustained growth and substantial long term poverty reduction require more than free trade. Conflict resolution, good governance, education etc. need to accompany liberalization. It’s no secret that we don’t yet fully understand all the determinants of growth and poverty reduction. The advantage of trade liberalization, compared to other possible pro-growth or pro-poor policies, is that it’s relatively easy to implement: it is – or should be – easier to abolish tariffs and other trade restrictions (especially if there’s an element of reciprocity in global negotiations) than to create a solid education system or a non-corrupt judiciary able to enforce market rules and property rights.

The evidence in favor of the pro-poor effects of trade liberalization is compelling, but we shouldn’t underestimate some measurement difficulties: the measurement of poverty, of trade liberalization and of the effect of the latter on the former is by definition imprecise. The concept of trade liberalization may also be too broad or too vague. And the specific outcomes of liberalization policies depend not only on the precise reforms being undertaken, but also on the context in which they are undertaken. The same measures will have different results in different economic environments. The extent of multilaterality also determines the effects.

Read more on the topic here, here and here. More posts in this series are here.

Related Articles

• Q&A: Stopping the Slide Into Poverty (blogs.wsj.com)
• Global reform of trade policy will reduce poverty? (iipalbanjary.net)
• Further trade liberalization urged (search.japantimes.co.jp)

Human Rights Ads (69): Tienanmen Tank Man Spoof

(source)

The original is here. For the story on the Tienanmen Square protests and the violent crackdown, see here. More on freedom of the press here.

This is another one:

(source, where you can find even more)

The original. More human rights ads.

Human Rights Maps (164): Largest Chinese and Indian Immigrant Communities

More than 60 million Chinese and more than 20 million Indians live abroad. If all of the world’s migrants from all nationalities would form a separate nation, it would be the world’s fifth-largest.

Largest Chinese and Indian immigrant communities

(source)

Another version, only for China:

(interactive version here)

Within the US, this is the distribution of the Chinese population:

Percent Chinese population by US county

(source, the same map for the Indian population is here)

Also interesting, but without information about the origin of the migrants:

(source)

Amsterdam	Netherlands
Auckland	New Zealand
Brussels	Belgium
Dubai	United Arab Emirates
Frankfurt	Germany
Hong Kong	China
Jerusalem	Israel
Jiddah	Saudi Arabia
London	United Kingdom
Los Angeles	USA
Medina	Saudi Arabia
Melbourne	Australia
Miami	USA
Muscat	Oman
New York	USA
Perth	Australia
Riyadh	Saudi Arabia
San Francisco	USA
San Jose	USA
Singapore	Singapore
Sydney	Australia
Tbilisi	Georgia
Tel Aviv	Israel
Toronto	Canada
Vancouver	Canada

If you’re wondering in what sense immigration is a human rights issue, go here, here and here. More maps on immigration are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

Capital Punishment (37): Drug Offenses in Asia

These are the countries that take the “war on drugs” almost literally and execute drug offenders on a large scale:

Iran:

Saudi Arabia:

Singapore:

Malaysia:

Vietnam:

(source)

In China, the numbers are difficult to ascertain given the government’s tough stance on secrecy. Thousands are executed each year, but one can’t be more precise than that.

The Dui Hua Foundation suggests that approximately 5,000 people were executed in 2009, and states that “the manufacture, transport, smuggling, or trafficking of illegal drugs account for a significant number of executions reported by Chinese media”. (source)

Other countries in Asia also use the death penalty as a punishment for drug crimes, but to a lesser extent.

More on capital punishment in China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Human Rights Nonsense (28): China’s Human Rights Action Plan

I didn’t know China had a human rights action plan – more evidence of the normative universality of human rights I guess. Take a look at this Pravda-style article from China’s mouthpiece newspaper:

(source)

In view of this, what do you think happened?

1. China has made rapid progress in the field of human rights.
2. Maybe the Chinese government has been somewhat unambitious in its goal setting.
3. The Chinese government is just full of it.

More human rights nonsense here. More about human rights in China here.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (78): The Exploited Shall Not Commit Suicide

(source)

Factories making sought-after Apple iPads and iPhones in China are forcing staff to sign pledges not to commit suicide, an investigation has revealed.

At least 14 workers at Foxconn factories in China have killed themselves in the last 16 months as a result of horrendous working conditions.

Many more are believed to have either survived attempts or been stopped before trying at the Apple supplier’s plants in Chengdu or Shenzen.

And they were made to promise that if they did, their families would only seek the legal minimum in damages.

An investigation of the 500,000 workers by the Centre for Research on Multinational Companies and Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) found appalling conditions in the factories.

iPad

Foxconn admits that it breaks overtime laws, but claims all the overtime is voluntary.

Some officials within the company even accused workers of committing suicide to secure large compensation payments for their families.

Anti-suicide nets were put up around the dormitory buildings on the advice of psychologists. (source)

More absurd human rights violations. More about labor conditions, about work and about suicide.

Human Rights Maps (122): Indicators of Gendercide

The human sex ratio is approximately 1:1. In many countries, however, and especially in China and India, there are a lot more men than women. The most important cause of this are social and cultural pressures in favor of boys. It’s estimated that there are about 100 million fewer women and girls than there should be. The term “gendercide” has been coined to explain these “missing women”. Sex selective abortions, maternal mortality resulting from substandard healthcare systems, violence against women and girls and other forms of gender discrimination combine to create this gendercide.

Sex selective abortions in some of the richer states of Northern India are creating ratios of just 300 girls for every 1000 boys. This phenomenon is most common among richer families, who can afford to find out the sex of their fetus and pay for an abortion. In poorer families, the problem tends to be neglect of girls and sometimes infanticide. It’s against the law in India to tell expectant parents the sex of their fetus, but the law is poorly enforced.

In China, the one-child policy is aggravating the effect.

Here are a few maps showing skewed sex ratios (the current world wide sex ratio is 107 boys to 100 girls):

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More on gender discrimination is here. More maps on gender discrimination are here. More human rights maps in general are here.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (103): A Pole’s Three Wishes

Image by cnemil via Flickr

A Pole walking along the road happens to spy a lamp. He picks it up, and as it is covered in rust he gives it quick rub. Out comes a genie.

“I’m the genie of the lamp and I can grant you three wishes,” the genie says.

“OK,” says the Pole. “I want the Chinese Army to invade Poland.” Odd choice, the genie thinks, but nevertheless he grants the wish, and the Chinese Army comes all the way from China, invades, and goes back home.

“Right, second wish. Maybe something more positive,” says the genie.

“No,” replies the Pole, “I want the Chinese Army to invade again.” So the Chinese come all the way from China, lay waste to more of Poland, and then go home.

“Listen,” says the genie. “You have one last wish. I can make Poland the most beautiful and prosperous place on earth.”

“If you don’t mind, I want the Chinese army to invade one more time.” So the Chinese army comes again, destroys what’s left of Poland, and then goes home for the last time.

“I don’t understand,” says the genie. “Why did you want the Chinese army to invade Poland three times?”

“Well,” replies the Pole, “they had to go through Russia six times.”

More about Poland, Russia and China. More jokes.

Human Rights Facts (59): The Dalai Lama Effect in International Human Rights Discourse

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I’ve complained many times before about the reticence of Western politicians when it comes to discussing the human rights record of economically powerful states such as China. There’s a manifest reluctance to say anything about human rights violations in China. Even very carefully drafted questions are out of bounds, and sometimes a simple meeting with an opposition figure such as the Dalai Lama is enough to upset the Chinese leadership. The economic opportunities in China are considered too important to risk China’s ire. And Chinese leaders artfully exploit their economic power. When faced with possible criticism – or even a possible meeting with a dissident – it threatens to end or withhold lucrative contracts and to cooperate instead with more compliant countries.

double standard

As a result, international human rights discourse is stained by legitimate accusations of double standards. Poor and economically insignificant countries feel the full brunt of criticism for the rights violations occurring in their territories. Sometimes they even suffer military intervention (perhaps in some cases deservedly) while China is able to impose a quasi-silence. That doesn’t do the cause of human rights any good, not in China and not elsewhere.

There’s an interesting study here looking at the seriousness of Chinese economic threats. The study coins the phrase “Dalai Lama effect” to describe the economic results of human rights criticism directed at China. Apparently,

Tibet's Dalai Lama in 1940

receiving the Dalai Lama … can decrease exports to China by as much as 8.1%. … [G]overnments of autocracies exert more influence on trade flows than democratic administrations. … Since China is neither a democracy, nor a free market economy, its administration has greater capacity to impact on trading decisions than democratic governments. Given the importance Beijing’s government attaches to the containment of its political opposition, it appears that China’s administration uses its extensive influence in the economy to exploit trade flows as a foreign policy tool. However, such an economic punishment mechanism will only prevail as long as the expected political gains from stabilising the regime outweigh the losses from trade diversion. … [T]he “Dalai Lama Effect” … disappears two years after a meeting took place. … [T]his “Dalai Lama Effect” is only observed for the Hu Jintao era and not for earlier periods. This result is in line with the increased political and economic power China acquired in the world in recent years. … At first glance, it may seem odd that China would be willing to forgo the gains that arise from trade under efficient importing decisions in order to punish trading partners for political reasons. However, China’s political leadership may be willing to bear the economic and political costs that arise from diverting trade away from Dalai Lama-receiving countries if such “punishment” increases the likelihood of its political survival. (source)

There’s an interesting map here that deals with the same topic. More on human rights in China, and in particular on the role of Confucianism as a justification of human rights violations, is here.

Related Articles

• The “Dalai Lama” effect on international trade (marginalrevolution.com)
• Dalai Lama hints at full retirement within a year (guardian.co.uk)
• Dalai Lama congratulates fellow Nobel laureate (reuters.com)

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (69): Arrested for a Tweet

Chinese online activist Cheng Jianping was sentenced to one year of ‘Re-education Through Labour’ on Monday for “disturbing social order”, having retweeted a satirical suggestion on October 17 that the Japanese Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo be attacked.

Cheng disappeared ten days later, on what was to be her wedding day, her whereabouts unknown until it emerged this week that she had been detained and sentenced by local police.

Sentencing someone to a year in a labour camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person’s clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China’s repression of online expression.

The offending tweet was originally posted by Cheng’s fiancé Hua Chunhui, mocking China’s young nationalist demonstrators who had smashed Japanese products in protest over a maritime incident between China and Japan involving the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. …

Cheng may be the first Chinese citizen to become a prisoner of conscience on the basis of a single tweet …

“It is possible that Cheng Jianping may have been targeted for her online activism over the last few years and her expressions of support for other Chinese dissidents and activists,” said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Director for the Asia-Pacific. (source)

More on internet freedom in China here. More absurd human rights violations here.

Human Rights Maps (104): Human Development Index, Migration and Borders

If you’re not familiar with the Human Development Index, go here first. In essence, the HDI combines measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries or regions.

When checking differences in HDI scores between countries or between regions of a country, you can clearly correlate those differences with migration patterns. The purpose of a lot of migration is to leave a low HDI region for a high HDI region. Take a look at these two beautiful maps:

(source, the border locality in the US with the lowest HDI still has a higher HDI than the Mexican border locality with the highest HDI)

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Obviously, there can also be a reverse causation taking place: poor migrants move to richer places, but these places can – in part – be richer because of the activities of migrants.

Also, one wouldn’t want to imply that economic opportunities explain all the reasons why people migrate, but they obviously do explain a lot.

More human rights maps.

Political Jokes & Funny Quotes (94): China Number One Asshole

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON–According to a new report released Monday by a panel of top economists and social scientists, the People’s Republic of China will overtake the United States as the world’s dominant asshole by the year 2020.

The findings, published in the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, support recent speculation that America’s unquestioned reign as the leading super-prick may soon be drawing to a close, leaving China as the foremost shithead among all developed nations.

“We are seeing a changing of the asshole guard,” said Andrew Freireich, noted economist and lead author of the article.

More political jokes. More about China (including serious stuff).

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (18): The Economic Case Against Human Rights

Some more comments following two previous posts on the topic (see here and here).

Do human rights promote or depress economic growth and prosperity? (I’ll focus on non-political rights for the moment because political rights – i.e. democracy – have very specific effects on the economy). The economic case against human rights could go something like this. Economic growth would be enhanced by different policies and actions that imply violations of human rights. E.g.

• Killing criminals instead of incarcerating them would make substantial resources available for more productive investments.
• The same is true for the resource that go into running legal and criminal judiciary systems that correspond to human rights requirements (e.g. high burden of proof, appeals systems, legal representation etc.). More about those requirements here.
• Human rights, and specifically those regulating the judiciary, make it more likely that suspects who have indeed committed a crime are set free, which imposes an economic cost on society.
• Killing the poor, the sick and the elderly rather than helping them would likewise liberate resources for more productive use.
• Less extremely, assisting the poor, the sick and the elderly means creating a large government and a heavy tax and regulatory burden. These are detrimental to entrepreneurship and business because they are disincentives for wealth creators. When wealth creators are burdened, prosperity suffers. (More here).
• Social and economic human rights such as a right to strike, to a decent wage, limited working hours etc. undermine productivity and hence prosperity.
• Etc.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that all these effects are real and not compensated by

• positive economic effects of respect for human rights
• other, negative economic effects of violations of human rights, or
• long term disadvantages following the possible short term advantages of rights violations (the fear, distrust and uncertainty resulting from some if not all of the claimed economic advantages of the rights violations that I just cited would likely harm long term prosperity).

Then you still don’t have a watertight case against human rights because people may still be willing to pay the economic price for respect for human rights. They may prefer to have their rights respected even if that has economic costs.

But, of course, that assumption doesn’t hold. The possible economic benefits of rights violations are easily offset by their costs and by the benefits of respect for human rights. Ultimately, the question of the effect of respect for human rights on the economy is an empirically verifiable hypothesis: we have data on economic performance, and – to some extent – on rights performance. It’s just a matter of linking the two. There’s an interesting paper here trying to do just that. The conclusion:

Our results show that high degrees of human rights are conducive to economic growth and welfare in a significant manner.

Through which channels is this effect supposed to operate? There are a few candidates:

• Physical security is a necessary precondition for the productive use of one’s resources and property.
• Property rights and the rule of law – both are human rights (see here and here) – are necessary for the effective operation of free markets, and free markets promote growth. Neither the rule of law nor property rights are safe in authoritarian regimes: why would a government that imposes physical harm respect property rights?
• Countries don’t attract Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) when they have a poor human rights record, rampant insecurity, ineffective rule of law and protection of property rights, poor labor conditions and the worker unrest that it implies etc. Stability, predictability, peace and calm lead to investment. Investment in rights abusing countries can also harm companies domestically when consumers revolt against the foreign conduct of their national companies.
• Education is a human right, and investments – especially FDI – usually follow the trail of education. Education is typically considered growth enhancing.

The discussion should separate between growth and levels of prosperity. There is an obvious correlation between respect for rights and levels of prosperity: the most prosperous countries in the world are also those where respect for rights has achieved a higher level. The case that growth rather than level of prosperity is also correlated with respect for human rights seems a lot harder to make, given the high growth levels of countries such as China. The argument could be that respect for rights promotes but is not a necessary condition for growth. Or it could be that authoritarian countries with high growth rates would have had still higher rates had they respected rights to a higher degree. Such a counterfactual is of course very hard to measure.

So, it’s not just that richer countries can start to afford human rights (to some extent that’s true, because rights cost money); it’s also the case that respect for human rights leads to higher wealth. There’s a two-way causation at work here.

Human Rights Maps (94): Internet Censorship in China

internet censorship in China

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There are more statistics on internet filtering in China here. And a more polemical post on the Great Firewall of China is here. And don’t forget that there is also non-internet censorship in China.

More on censorship and freedom of the press. More human rights maps.

Freedom of Expression and the Internet

cartoon by Angel Boligan, Cagle Cartoons, El Universal, Mexico City

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The internet is undoubtedly a huge boost for freedom of expression, and not only a quantitative boost. It has certain qualitative characteristics that older media don’t have, which make it particularly beneficial for free speech.

A first reason why the internet promotes free speech is its relative cost: it has made speech much less expensive. You even don’t need to own a computer since you can, with relative ease, use a public one. And even the cost of a computer pales compared to the cost of many older media.

Another reason is that governments find it much more difficult to censor speech on the internet. Speech is no longer bound to a particular carrier which can be easily confiscated or destroyed, or to a particular territory where a state can exercise its power. People can publish on websites in other countries without being there. Of course, governments do retain some considerable censorship power over the internet, as is demonstrated by the case of the Great Firewall of China, but it’s safe to say that this power is relatively weak compared to government’s powers over traditional media, precisely because of the international character of the internet.

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Unfortunately, we see that private actors sometimes replace the government as censors. The discussions on net neutrality for example result from some cases where internet providers have blocked access to competitor sites or favored access to friendly or related sites (see the case of Telus blocking access to a labor union website). One could also claim that Google, for instance, despite the good it does for free expression, also in a way limits it, since it systematically channels people towards speech that already has much exposure and freedom, and “buries” all the rest (read more about this here). There is still domination and inequality on the web; the question is whether on average the internet has done more to limit it or to advance it. I believe the former.

A third reason why the internet promotes free speech is the gradual disappearance of middle men. You don’t need editors, publishers or peer review to publish your views. In traditional media, these middle men normally filter out a lot of speech, often to the benefit of the public but never to the benefit of speech.

cartoon by Pat Bagley

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So these are three reasons (among many others) why the internet expands the amount of speech and promotes free speech in a quantitative way. But it can also be argued that the internet has improved speech in a qualitative way. That may be a counter-intuitive claim, given the amount of bullshit that’s present on the web, and yet I think it’s true for many pockets of the internet. Because the internet creates a quantitative boost for speech, it also produces a qualitative one. The internet has allowed more people to speak, listen and discuss, and it’s a common argument in philosophy that widespread participation in discussions tends to improve the quality of people’s opinions, under certain ideal circumstances. I won’t make the detailed argument here, since I’ve done that many times before. In a few words, the argument boils down to this: the freedom to speak, the equal freedom to speak, and massive use by large numbers of people of this freedom, result in the appearance and confrontation of a large number of points of view and of perspectives on issues. It means that a proposal or opinion or policy is subjected to intense scrutiny and criticism. If it survives this, it is bound to be of better quality.

More on the internet, on censorship and on freedom of speech.

Why Do We Need Human Rights? (15): Is Human Rights Talk Mere Signaling?

There’s certainly a lot of signaling going on in human rights talk. People who engage in human rights talk don’t necessarily have as a first priority the goal of improving respect for human rights, but rather want to convey some meaningful information about themselves and use human rights talk to do that.

For example, it’s possible that some of the people who are very expressive about perceived discrimination of a particular minority group may be primarily motivated by a possible leadership position within that minority group. Their human rights talk signals leadership aspirations. Some allegations by torture victims may not be intended to stop a torture regime, but to signal extremist credentials to like-minded people. Also regarding torture, I’ve written not so long ago about a study suggesting that some governments sign torture conventions, not to rid the world of torture, but to signal ruthlessness: they sign the convention and just continue their torture methods, thereby telling their victims and their population in general that they are so powerful that they can voluntarily submit to laws and then deliberately and openly break them in the face of impotent international opprobrium.

Another example is the ritualistic condemnation of China’s human rights record. Western leaders, when visiting China or playing host to Chinese leaders, are expected to repeat some standard phrases about human rights in China. That’s what their national constituencies expect from them, and they grudgingly comply. It has become part of protocol, like kissing the Pope’s ring. It’s utterly meaningless because real action to pressure China is completely lacking. China knows this, but goes along and issues its equally ritualistic counter-claims of national sovereignty blah blah. The West signals that it cares about human rights; the Chinese leaders that they don’t.

Something similar is happening with universal jurisdiction. Countries engaging in universal jurisdiction often start court cases against foreign dictators, without the slightest hope of actually punishing and imprisoning those dictators, but at least they signal that the “world community” doesn’t silently accept atrocity. And perhaps they also signal their own country’s moral superiority. A lot of human rights talk seems to be about moral superiority.

Karl Marx

Karl Marx already identified signaling as a important function of human rights, although he pushed his point a bit too far. Human rights, according to him, are an ideology. An ideology pretends to be a description of the world but in reality it masks certain key aspects of it in order to maintain the economic status quo. It is an instrument in the continuation of the existing social order. Those who may threaten the status quo in a revolutionary way can be convinced by the ideology of human rights to work within the system and struggle for equal rights. However, these equal rights, according to Marx, can only deliver formal equality, not real equality. Only a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism can achieve the latter. Human rights signal equality but in reality serve to maintain class rule.

Those who benefit from the existing order and who are therefore part of the ruling class, will tend to produce and propagate ideologies. Religion is another example of an ideology, and one that works in much the same way as the ideology of human rights. Desires that can harm the existing order and the status quo - such as desires for equality – must be neutralized. The idea of the Christian paradise expresses certain desires for a better world but makes it impossible to realize them and to threaten the existing order. By convincing people that these desires can only be realized in the afterlife, the idea or better ideology of paradise pacifies relationships in this life. Why revolt if you know that equality and happiness are there for the taking in a future life? Especially when you will only get paradise if you respect morality in this life and when morality is often and conveniently incompatible with the consequences of revolt.

Religious ideology neutralizes desires by situating them in the afterlife. Religion is opium for the people, a drug that makes them forget the pain of this world, or at least convinces them to accept this pain, because pain can lead to revolt and those in power never like revolt. Something similar is inherent in the ideology of human rights. The use of force or coercion by the state in the defense of the right to capitalist property, for example, is not necessary when the poor can be convinced that property is a human right which is in their interest, rather than a right of the wealthy. The economic relationships and structures are maintained with political and legal force but also with legal ideology.

All ideologies are similar. Christianity can convince people to accept their situation by promising salvation in a future life, and the ideology of human rights does the same by convincing people, all people, that they have the same rights and that they are therefore equal. When this universality and equality of rights is accentuated, people do not see that others who have the same equal rights profit more from these rights. Human rights signal freedom and equality, and give the impression of guaranteeing freedom and equality, but in reality give those who are better off tools to improve their situation even more, and at the expense of the poor. Instead of real equality there is only legal and formal equality, and the latter takes us further away from the former because the rich can use their equal rights to promote their interests. Rights, according to Marx, give us the freedom to oppress rather than freedom from oppression.

Human rights, he says, are a set of false ideas that have to cover up class rule and make it acceptable. The continuation of inequality by political and legal means is based on the combination of coercion and false consciousness. Christians are equal in heaven and thereby maintain inequality on earth, and believers in human rights are equal in the heaven of their political ideals and thereby forget the inequality that these ideals help to maintain.

I think that view is far too pessimistic and takes the signaling thing way too serious. It ignores the transformative power of human rights. There is signaling going on in human rights talk, but a lot of other stuff as well. Some talk is really aimed primarily or exclusively at a real transformation of reality toward a higher level of human rights protection. And a lot of that talk really works in the sense that life is changed by speech. Sometimes human rights aren’t about human rights, but often they are.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (47): Great Firewall of China Untestable Because of Great Firewall of China

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I’ve talked before about the so-called catch 22 of human rights measurement. In order to measure whether countries respect human rights, there has to be already some level of respect for human rights. Organizations, whether international organizations or private organizations (NGOs, newspapers etc.), must have some freedom to control, to engage in fact finding, to enter countries and move around, to investigate “in situ”, to denounce etc. Victims should have the freedom to speak out and to organize themselves in pressure groups. So we assume what we want to establish.

In this example, the level of respect for human rights is so low that it’s impossible to measure this level.

More on human rights measurement, on the Great Firewall, on censorship in general and on freedom of expression. More on human rights and China in general. More absurd human rights violations.

The Causes of Poverty (36): Overpopulation (Because the Extent of Wrongness in Overpopulation Discourse is an Infinite Number)

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I never cease to be amazed by the persistence of overpopulation discourse in the face of irrefutable counter-evidence. The coming explosion of the population bomb is predicted time and again, with the same accuracy as the Christian Apocalypse. The spectacular failure of Paul Ehrlich‘s predictions in 1968, for example, seems to have had the same dissuasive effect on overpopulation discourse as Obama’s birth certificate on a large part of the Republican Party. Look at some of these statements:

Paul Ehrlich

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate … India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980 … One general prediction can be made with confidence: the cost of feeding yourself and your family will continue to increase. There may be minor fluctuations in food prices, but the overall trend will be up … The United States would see its life expectancy drop to 42 years by 1980 because of pesticide usage, and the nation’s population would drop to 22.6 million by 1999. (source)

Most of these statements are regularly repeated in some form or other, even today. Now, confront this with the following basic facts:

When Paul Ehrlich wrote his famous book ["The Population Bomb"], women were having an average around the world of five or six children; now they’re having an average of 2.6. Fertility rates around the world have halved. That’s not just true in Europe and North America; they’re way below replacement levels in most of East Asia now. Not just China but Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Burma have replacement rates of fertility or below. Around the world, fertility rates have been coming down really sharply. So the population bomb as we’ve conceived it before really isn’t there. There’s still population growth going on, but that’s going to stabilize. … birthrates are coming down fast, with Indian women, for instance, having fewer than three children on average today; and even African women have falling fertility. Fred Pearce (source)

What’s causing this population bust?

[T]hanks to advances in sanitation and medicine, women no longer need to have five or six children to make sure that two of them will live to adulthood. … Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger. Fred Pearce (source)

More on fertility rates and overpopulation is here. Now, you could argue that even with falling fertility rates overpopulation can still be a problem. Heck, even with falling population rates you could say that there’s still overpopulation. Overpopulation is then a problem of relative population numbers rather than absolute numbers: if there are more people than the number that can be fed, then you have overpopulation. But this is also wrong: planet earth could feed a number of people that’s a lot higher than the current number.

Africa faces a food crisis, but it’s not because the continent’s population is growing faster than its potential to produce food, as vintage Malthusians such as environmental advocate Lester Brown and advocacy organizations such as Population Action International would have it. Food production in Africa is vastly less than the region’s known potential, and that is why so many millions are going hungry there. African farmers still use almost no fertilizer; only 4 percent of cropland has been improved with irrigation; and most of the continent’s cropped area is not planted with seeds improved through scientific plant breeding, so cereal yields are only a fraction of what they could be. Africa is failing to keep up with population growth not because it has exhausted its potential, but instead because too little has been invested in reaching that potential. (source, source)

Famines in general have causes that are completely unrelated to overpopulation. Read more here.

Overpopulation discourse isn’t just the proverbial barking up the wrong tree; it’s keeping company with some seriously rotten fruit. Look who else worried about overpopulation:

What was Hitler’s argument for attacking other countries? You might think he didn’t have one, but he did. His argument is frankly Malthusian: Our population is growing, and we will run out of food unless we get more land. …

The annual increase of population in Germany amounts to almost 900,000 souls. The difficulties of providing for this army of new citizens must grow from year to year and must finally lead to a catastrophe, unless ways and means are found which will forestall the danger of misery and hunger. Hitler in Mein Kampf

Hitler then reviews various policies to deal with the threat of over-population:

1. Artificial birth control. Hitler rejects this because it short-circuits natural selection. Furthermore, there is an international prisoners’ dilemma: The one country that lets its numbers rise will outnumber and militarily dominate the rest…

2. Increasing productivity via “internal colonization.” Hitler rejects this on a priori Malthusian grounds – there is no way for productivity to permanently outpace population growth:

Adolf Hitler

It is certainly true that the productivity of the soil can be increased within certain limits; but only within defined limits and not indefinitely. By increasing the productive powers of the soil it will be possible to balance the effect of a surplus birth-rate in Germany for a certain period of time, without running any danger of hunger. But we have to face the fact that the general standard of living is rising more quickly than even the birth rate. The requirements of food and clothing are becoming greater from year to year and are out of proportion to those of our ancestors of, let us say, a hundred years ago. It would, therefore, be a mistaken view that every increase in the productive powers of the soil will supply the requisite conditions for an increase in the population. Hitler in Mein Kampf

3. Acquire new territory outside of Europe. The problem with this plan, says Hitler, is that other European countries have already taken the good non-European land. So you would have to attack European countries to get the land:

In the nineteenth century it was no longer possible to acquire such colonies by peaceful means. Therefore any attempt at such a colonial expansion would have meant an enormous military struggle. Consequently it would have been more practical to undertake that military struggle for new territory in Europe rather than to wage war for the acquisition of possessions abroad. Hitler in Mein Kampf

4. Acquire new territory inside Europe. At last, a solution to the imbalance between people and land that Hitler likes! And of course, he doesn’t contemplate buying the land:

Of course people will not voluntarily make that accommodation. At this point the right of self-preservation comes into effect. And when attempts to settle the difficulty in an amicable way are rejected the clenched hand must take by force that which was refused to the open hand of friendship. If in the past our ancestors had based their political decisions on similar pacifist nonsense as our present generation does, we should not possess more than one-third of the national territory that we possess to-day and probably there would be no German nation to worry about its future in Europe. Hitler in Mein Kampf (source)

Of course, you can’t judge people by the company they keep, especially not if it’s involuntary company. One wouldn’t want to commit the error of reductio ad hitlerum or fall into the trap of Godwin’s Law. It’s not because a stupid or despicable person happens to believe something that it’s necessarily wrong and that other people should feel the need to reject their beliefs simply because they are shared by someone like Hitler (I am and will continue to be a vegetarian for instance).

However, I think it should at least worry those who talk about overpopulation that they share the same concerns with a genocidal fool who was genocidal precisely because of those concerns. Maybe there is some kind of link between those concerns and genocide. Also, it should worry them that genocidal war for Lebensraum is only the most unlikely perverse effect of concerns about overpopulation. Look for example at the effects of the one-child policy in China on gender balances (something which has been called a kind of genocide, not without reason).

Jonathan Swift

As a throwaway, a satirical quote from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 work “A Modest Proposal“, suggesting feeding the children of poor Roman Catholic families to wealthy Protestant landowners to deal with Ireland’s unsustainable population growth:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.

More on overpopulation is here.

Capital Punishment (27): In 2009

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More statistics on the death penalty here. There’s also more about capital punishment specifically in China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Gender Discrimination (22): Gendercide

The Economist has a front page story this week on “gendercide”, the millions of girls missing in the world, especially in India and China. Perhaps as many as 100 million girls have disappeared in the last decades because of

• selective abortions encouraged by new medical technology (ultrasounds and fertility technology)
• childhood neglect of girls (nutritional, educational neglect and neglect in health care)
• prejudice, preference for male offspring and
• population policies such as the “one child policy” in China.

I’ve written about this several times before (see here, here and here), and even called it a “boomerang human rights violation“: the skewed sex ratios that result from gendercide (in some areas of China, 130 boys are being born for every 100 girls) are coming back to haunt the men that are responsible (although many mothers probably aren’t without fault either). Because of their relative scarcity, women have found an unlikely source of power. They have a competitive advantage in the marriage market, and can demand more in marriage negotiations, or at least be more selective when choosing a mate.

Causes

In my view, the word “gendercide” is somewhat overwrought because, contrary to genocide, the word that inspired the neologism of gendercide, there’s no centralized plan to exterminate women. Femicide would be a better term since it’s obviously only one of two genders that’s targeted, but it still sounds like a government organized campaign of extermination. Gendercide is the result of a combination of causes:

• individual choices based on
• plain prejudice against girls
• cultural and legal traditions, or
• economic incentives that have been formed by historical prejudice.

Perhaps girls still need a dowry, and poor parents may find it difficult to save enough and hence prefer a boy. Or perhaps they prefer a boy because the law of their country or tribe – inspired by age-old prejudice – says that only boys can inherit land or the family business. Again, the parents may prefer a boy for this reason, not because they dislike girls. Or perhaps tradition holds that girls marry off into their husbands families, and parents simply want to be sure to have someone in their home to care for them when they are old (“raising a daughter is like watering your neighbor’s garden”, is a Hindu saying).

Consequences

The consequences of gendercide are mixed. It’s obviously horrible to the girls that are aborted or neglected to death. But, as in the “boomerang” case cited above, gendercide may ultimately empower women. However, the skewed sex ratios also spell trouble: the presence of armies of men who can’t find wives and have children (“bare branches” or “guanggun” they are called in China) may result in more sexual violence, depression, suicide, human trafficking etc. It’s estimated that in 10 years time, one in five young Chinese men won’t be able to find a bride. On the other hand, a shortage of women will encourage immigration, and immigration may help some women escape poverty, and perhaps will also result in more intercultural tolerance.

Solutions

Economic development won’t stop it. In China and India, the regions with the worst sex ratios are wealthy ones, with educated populations. Even in some population strata in the U.S. sex ratios are skewed. When people escape poverty, fertility rates drop, and when families have fewer children, the need to select for sex only becomes more important in order to realize their son preference. In poor societies with high fertility rates, families are almost destined to have a boy at some point. Female children will suffer relative neglect and may die more often and more rapidly (skewing the sex ratios), but selective abortions aren’t much of a risk: families don’t really feel the need to limit the number of children (on the contrary often, because children are a workforce), and ultrasound technology for sex determination of fetuses isn’t as readily available as in rich countries or regions. When families want few children – as they do in more developed regions – or are forced by the government to limit their number of children (as in China), they will abort female fetuses in pursuit of a son.

Ultimately, only a cultural change will help. The son preference has to die out. Education probably will help, as it always does. Ending pernicious policies such as the one child policy will also help, but then overpopulation hysterics will have to be dealt with. This policy didn’t help stop population growth anyway. Other East Asian countries reduced population pressure as much as China without brutal policies.

Old customs and discriminating laws should also be abolished. Think of the dowry system, or inheritance rights. Stigmatizing abortion, especially sex selective abortion, will also help.

More on gender discrimination, on prejudice, on India, and on China.

Iconic Images of Human Rights Violations (44): Chinese Baby Victim of Japanese Bombing

Read the story here. See the whole series on iconic images of human rights violations.

The Most Absurd Human Rights Violations (33): China’s Cultural Revolution

A Golden Oldie in the charts of inhuman absurdity, from Jonathan Spence’s biography of Mao Zedong:

An announcement from the “Beijing Number 26 Middle School Red Guards,” dated August 1966, gave the kind of program that was to be followed by countless others. Every street was to have a quotation form Chairman Mao prominently displayed, and loudspeakers at every intersection and in all parks were to broadcast his thought. Every household as well as a trains and buses, bicycles and pedicabs, had to have a picture of Mao on its walls. Ticket takers on trains and buses should all declaim Mao’s thought. Every bookstore had to stock Mao’s quotations, and every hand in China had to hold one. No one could wear bluejeans, tight pants, “weird women’s outfits,” or have “slick hairdos or wear rocket shoes.” No perfumes or beauty creams could be used. No one could keep pet fish, cats, or dogs, or raise fighting crickets. No shop could sell classical books.

All those identified by the masses as landlords, hooligans, rightists, and capitalists had to wear a plaque identifying themselves as such every time they went out. The minimum amount of persons living in a room could be three — all other space had to be given to the state housing bureaus. Children should criticize their elders, and students their teachers. No one under thirty-five might smoke or drink. Hospital service would be simplified, and “complicated treatment must be abolished”; doctors had to write their prescriptions legibly, and not use English words. All schools and colleges were to combine study with productive labor and farm work. As a proof of its own transformation, the “Number 26 Middle School” would change its name, effective immediately, to “The Maoism School.”

More on the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution. More on Mao here and here. More on China and on communism. More absurd human rights violations.

The Causes of Wealth Inequality (5): Globalization

Another one in our series about the causes of wealth inequality (see here, here and here). (If you want to know why we think this is a human rights issue, go here or here first).

Globalization is supposed to have lowered the earnings of less-educated workers by putting them in direct competition with low-wage workers around the world. This competition put pressure on wages through international trade in goods and services; through the relocation or threat of relocation of production facilities to overseas locations; through competition with immigrants in local labor markets; and through other channels. …

U.S. and European workers are told that … our societies can no longer afford a generous welfare state. …

Contrary to the standard framing, which presents globalization as something that no nation can escape or even attempt to shape, we can choose the terms under which we integrate capital, product, and labor markets across countries. Over the last 30 years we have indeed “chosen” a particular form of globalization in the United States – a form that benefits corporations and their owners at the expense of workers and their communities. If we had chosen globalization on different terms, however, economic integration would not have required rising inequality. Another globalization is possible. (source, source)

So globalization, as it has occurred and is occurring, causes higher inequality in the West in two ways:

• The direct competition with overseas workers who can produce at lower wages puts downward pressure on wages in the West, especially for low-skilled workers at the wrong end of inequality.
• Governments in developed countries react to this competition by restricting social safety nets because the taxes necessary for the funding of these safety nets hurts the competitiveness of local businesses, a competitiveness already under pressure from low-cost labor in the developing world. Less generous safety nets obviously also have a negative effect on inequality.

If these effects are real, perhaps they can explain the decline of manufacturing in many developed countries.

However, I’m not sure this pressure on wages is real and significant (I’ll try to find some data), and we also shouldn’t dismiss the benefits for low-wage workers in the West of cheaper products. This particular result of globalization can offset the possible negative wage effects of wage competition.

Also, I’m not sure governments in the West are actively attacking safety nets (here it says they haven’t during the last decades, but it seems that the recent economic crisis has convinced some to start cutting benefits). And finally, we should remember that inequality isn’t just a national problem. The inequality between countries is just as, if not more, important. And globalization has had a beneficial effect on inter-country inequality because it has redistributed wealth from rich countries to poor countries. For example, it’s hard to imagine how China could have had the same success in poverty reduction without globalization. The question is of course whether this redistribution had to come from low skilled workers in the West, rather than from their more wealthy fellow citizens. The fact that it did come, however, was undoubtedly beneficial to the poor in the receiving development countries.

If we put all the causes of wealth inequality discussed in different posts together, we get this tentative list:

• globalization (i.e. outsourcing, trade liberalization) and the resulting competition between low-skilled workers in the West and in development countries
• competition between low-skilled workers in the West and immigrants
• the development of technology and a decreasing demand for low-skilled workers
• the increased importance of cognitive skills relative to physical labor
• declining manufacturing employment
• shrinking unionization and fragmenting of collective bargaining
• changes in household size and composition (due to later marriage and more prevalent divorce, more and more households have just one adult, and hence only one potential earner)
• coupling between people with similar education and thus similar earnings potential (“marital homogamy”)
• “positive feedback”: wealth begets wealth.

More on income inequality. More on outsourcing. More on globalization.

Human Rights Facts (51): Dramatic Decrease in World Poverty

I already mentioned some data about the evolution of world poverty (see here). Also interesting is this study:

World poverty is falling. Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006.

one dollar a day poverty rate from 1970 to 2006

And this is notwithstanding an increase of world population by 80% over the same time. Somehow you never hear about this from the overpopulation hysterics.

The decrease in poverty rates is mostly thanks to China:

From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa.

The study also estimates relative poverty, not only absolute poverty, or – in other words – income inequality, which is also decreasing:

world gini coefficient from 1970 to 2006

This is despite rising inequality in countries such as the U.S. (see here, here, and here). More on the gini coefficient here.

The Causes of Poverty (30): Lack of Economic Growth

As stated in a previous post on the same subject, when a country achieves a certain level of economic growth – or, more precisely, rising levels of GDP per capita because economic growth as such can be the result of rising population levels – it is assumed that this reflects a higher average standard of living for its citizens. Economic growth is therefore seen as an important tool in the struggle against poverty (if you wonder why poverty is a human rights issue, go here). If a country is richer in general, the population will also be richer on average. On average meaning that GDP growth isn’t necessarily equally distributed over every member of the population. That is why GDP growth isn’t sufficient proof of poverty reduction. Separate measurements of poverty and inequality are necessary.

So in theory, you can have GDP growth and increasing levels of poverty, on the condition that GDP growth is concentrated in the hands of a few. However, that’s generally not the case. GDP growth benefits to some extent many of the poor as well as the wealthy, which is shown by the strong correlation between poverty reduction and levels of GDP growth (always per capita of course). It’s no coincidence that a country such as China, which has seen strong GDP growth over the last decades, is also a country that has managed to reduce poverty levels substantially.

Unfortunately, growth isn’t a silver bullet. Poverty is a complex problem, requiring many types of solutions. Promoting economic growth will do a lot of the work, but something more is required. In a new paper, Martin Ravaillon gives the example of China, Brazil and India. The levels of poverty reduction in these three countries, although impressive, do not simply mirror the levels of economic growth. Although half of the world’s poor live in these three countries, in the last 25 years China has reduced its poverty level from 84% of the population in 1981 to just 16% in 2005 (see chart below). China is exceptional, but Brazil also did well, cutting its rate in half over the same period (8% of Brazilians still live on less than $1.25 a day). Regarding India, there are some problems with its statistics, but whichever statistic you use, there’s a clear reduction.

poverty reduction in China, India and Brazil

(source)

Ravaillon points out that the intensity of poverty reduction was higher in Brazil than in India and China, despite lower GDP growth rates.

Per unit of growth, Brazil reduced its proportional poverty rate five times more than China or India did. How did it do so well? The main explanation has to do with inequality. This (as measured by the Gini index, also marked on the chart) has fallen sharply in Brazil since 1993, while it has soared in China and risen in India. Greater inequality dampens the poverty-reducing effect of growth. (source)

Which is rather obvious: higher levels of income equality means a better distribution of the benefits of growth. So the “pro-growth strategy” against poverty is important but not enough, and should be combined with Brazilian type anti-inequality measures (focus on education, healthcare and redistribution).

Human Rights Facts (50): Internet Filtering in China

Some more information on internet filtering in China, following this older post on the same topic.

More about the Golden Shield Project – also called the Great Firewall of China – here. More about the Green Dam Youth Project here. Since China’s obviously not the only country limiting access to the internet, there’s an interesting paper here on global attitudes towards internet filtering. More on China and human rights. More on free speech, censorship and privacy in general.

Political Graffiti (77): Free Tibet

(source)

Left over from the time of the China Olympics. More on the Dalai Lama and on Tibet. More political graffiti.

The Ethics of Human Rights (25): Free Organ Trade and the Commodification of the Body

Organ trade cartoon by Dario Castillejos

(source)

The case for allowing free organ trade seems a no-brainer. Many countries, including the U.S., now forbid the sale and purchase of most organs, and, as a consequence, sick people die because of organ shortages, and poor people stay poor because they can’t “monetize” their organs. Poor people suffer a “double injustice”:

[We say] to a poor person: “You can’t have what most other people have and we are not going to let you do what you want to have those things”. (source, source)

Organ-GATT?

However, when organs are freely tradable, many extremely poor people, especially those struggling to survive, will be tempted and even forced to sells parts of their bodies. Moreover, the rich will be able to benefit disproportionately from the market because prices will be high, given that demand will outstrip supply in an ageing society. The most obvious means to balance supply and demand, and to force down prices and allow the less than wealthy patients to participate in and benefit from the market, is to create a global market without trade restrictions, an organ-GATT if you want. This will bring in the masses of poor people from Africa and Asia, pushing up supply of organs and hence bringing down prices. This will supposedly benefit both the less than wealthy patients and the very poor donors. The latter will benefit even with prices for organs falling because of increased supply, because they start at extremely low levels of income. Even the sale of a cheap kidney can mean years of income for them.

The problem with this global market is that organ extraction will take place in sub-optimal medical conditions, creating risks for donors (if you can still call them that), also in the case of renewable tissue donation. Paradoxically, the poor are driven to risk their lives in the process of saving their lives. Even in the best healthcare systems in the world, organ extraction is often very risky. In the U.S., the extraction of a section of the liver, for example, carries a risk to the donor’s life of almost 1 percent (source). That’s not negligible. I doubt anyone would cross a street if that were the odds of getting hit by a car.

I’m convinced that an opt-out regulation for cadaveric donors (meaning that everyone’s a donor after death unless an explicit opt-out), combined with non-financial encouragement of voluntary pre-death donation, is the best way to solve the organ shortage problem. A free organ market will obviously also solve the organ shortage problem, but will create new problems instead.

Renewable and non-renewable organs

The distinction between renewable tissue such as bone marrow, and non-renewable organs such as kidneys, eyes, etc. is a relevant one. If the donation of renewable tissue can take place in medically safe conditions, I can’t see a problem with being allowed to trade, on the condition that poor patients have the same opportunity and power to buy as rich ones (and that’s a pretty big “if”). The needs of the sick or disabled who risk dying or suffering because of a lack of available organ, clearly outweigh any remaining concerns.

Commodification

One of those remaining concerns is the problem of the commodification of the body. Organ trade is obviously commodification, and commodification is dehumanization. I don’t want to imply that organ trade liberalization necessarily results in “organ farms”, dystopian places where people are “cultivated” solely for the harvesting of their organs – although the Chinese criminal justice and capital punishment system for instance comes awfully close. (I sometimes wonder if deterrent and punishment is the real goal of executions in China). But people can commodify and dehumanize themselves.

The logic of economics tends to overtake all other domains of life, even those where it doesn’t belong and can do serious harm. Why is it so evident to so many that body parts are something that it supposed to be tradable? Even the most outspoken proponents of organ trade draw the line somewhere: they won’t allow people to sell parts of their brains, I guess, or their children and wives, or the parts of aborted fetuses (perhaps fetuses specially conceived and “harvested” for their parts), not even if this would fill a great social need. And yet they accept as natural that non-vital body parts should be tradable and seem to forget that irreplaceable body parts form our body and that we can hardly exist without our body. If we allow total freedom of organ trade, we will have to accept the case in which a poor father decides to sell off every single one of his organs for the survival of his family. After all, he is the master of his own body, he has a right to self-determination, and the government has no right to limit what masters of their own bodies should be allowed to do with it. If you don’t accept the legitimacy of this extreme case, you accept limitations on the freedom to trade organs. Since most opponents of organ trade also accept certain types of trade – e.g. renewable organs such as bone marrow and skin – the disagreement isn’t a principled one but one about degree.

Underlying the argument in favor of organ trade is the fiction of a market populated by free, equal and self-determining individuals who make free and rational economic decisions and agreements on what to sell and buy, free from government interference. The reality is of course that organ trade isn’t an expression of self-determination or autonomy but rather of the absence of it. And that organ trade, just like a lot of other trade, is radically asymmetrical: some are forced to sell in order to survive, especially if the price and hence the reward is very high, as it will be relatively speaking for the poor. And others will sell without rationally examining the benefits for or risks to their interests (absence of informed consent). It’s beyond my powers of comprehension that all this can be denied:

It’s true that I don’t find any of the arguments about the coercive effects of money on peoples’ decisions particularly compelling.  Megan McArdle (source)

Any potential paid organ donor is always free to decline the transaction, and is left no worse off than before. What next, will you tell me that I “coerced” Apple into sending me a Macbook? (source)

This seems to me to be more correct, or at least less outrageous:

Talk of individual rights and autonomy is hollow if those with no options must “choose” to sell their organs to purchase life’s basic necessities. … Choice requires information, options and some degree of freedom. (source)

transplanting of teeth

Free trade except for the poor?

Of course, some would say: if someone is forced by poverty to sell her organs, would you stop her and make her worse off by imposing legal restrictions on her autonomy and “reducing her resources”? That’s again the myth that markets always make things better. What if she does get some money, has a better life in the short run, but gets sick because of the operation (or do we also assume the myth of perfect healthcare for the world’s poor?) or because of the lack of an organ? Who would make her worse off? The one allowing her to sell, or the one stopping her? And anyway, there are better ways to protect the poor than to allow them to harvest their organs.

So, if we’re afraid that free organ trade might be exploitative for the poor, why not allow free trade but exclude the poor from selling? Because the poor will be, in general, the only ones tempted to sell. A wealthy person has no incentive to sell organs. Hence a free trade system restricted in this way will not solve the shortage problem, the main concern of proponents of free trade.

I’ve stated before that government interference can promote rather than restrict freedom. In the case of organ trade and donation, two specific types of interference can help:

• Restricting the freedom to trade non-renewable organs, as well as renewable organs in circumstances in which extraction poses a health risk to donors, will protect the freedom of the poor. Not their freedom to sell organs obviously – which isn’t freedom for them anyway but compulsion – but the freedom to live a healthy live.
• Imposing default cadaveric donation with an opt-out clause will protect the freedom to live a healthy live of patients in need of replacement organs. Of course, if it’s the case that for some organs cadaveric donation isn’t possible medically, I’m willing to accept an exception.

Trade restricted to post-mortem trade?

How about allowing people to sell their organs after death? This would evidently remove the health risks for donors. It could be considered a kind of life insurance for the deceased’s family. That would indeed remove all the concerns from the donor side. (The counter-argument that such a system would encourage families to kill their members for the “insurance money” seems a bit weak, and just as weak as the similar counter-argument against generalized organ trade liberalization, namely that people would murder in order to sell organs; I guess they already do).

Photo by Jonathan Cook

But assume that we would allow free post-mortem trade: what would happen with the organs? They would be sold of course, but to whom? The most wealthy first, and hence we still have our problem on the beneficiary side: wealth yields better health. Of course, that’s already the case in healthcare in general: rich people also have better dental care etc. But do we want to add to the existing injustice by allowing wealth to determine who gets an organ?

If we allow limited organ trade of deceased’s organs, we’ll have to do something on the beneficiary side in order to neutralize the effects of wealth. A lottery system could be an option. Or subsidies for the poor, or price caps etc.

More on organ trade here and here. More posts in this series are here.

Human Rights Cartoon (63): Human Rights in China

Obama in China, talking about human rights

(source)

What a delightful way to expose the lack of seriousness with which world leaders address human rights in China. Other cartoons about human rights and China:

• About China’s support for rogue states
• About China’s role in Africa
• About China and Tibet; see also here and here

More about China and human rights is here. More about the human rights hypocrisy that is typical of relations between China and the West is here, here and here.

Capital Punishment (21): In China

A woman, convicted of murder, shouts before she is taken to be executed in Ghangzhou, April 11, 2001, Reuters

(source)

China executes more people than any other country – 1,700 in 2008. (This is an estimate because the exact numbers of people executed in China is classified as a state secret). In terms of the number of executions per capita, however, there are other countries which are more bloodthirsty, notably Iran (also here) and Saudi Arabia. (See here for statistics on the absolute and relative numbers of executions by country).

Apart from the numbers of people executed in China, there are some other problems:

• Capital punishment in China is also common in the sense that it’s a punishment for many different crimes, not just violent ones: corruption, tax evasion, embezzlement, drug trafficking… Most of these crimes are punishable by death in no other judicial system in the world.
• Another problem is the speed at which the sentences are carried out, leaving little room for appeals or the examination of possible miscarriages of justice.
• The methods of execution are also archaic. Usually it’s a bullet in the head. Lethal injections have been introduced recently and are carried out in so-called “execution vans” driving around the country administering their morbid services. For those still killed by fire arms, the practice of collecting a “bullet fee” from the family of the deceased has fortunately been abandoned.
• A lingering problem, however, is organ harvesting.
• Other problems include:
  • No immediate access to a lawyer.
  • Seriously inadequate legal representation.
  • Torture used to extort confessions, and confessions extracted under torture used as evidence in court.
  • Obviously fabricated evidence used in court. (source)

Some good news, perhaps:

The Chinese government says it will show more leniency to those given death sentences… In a series of interviews, the vice president of the Supreme People’s Court said that China was not ready to abolish capital punishment but that the penalty should be reserved for a small number of serious crimes, particularly those that threaten social stability… Although he did not spell out exactly how the judiciary would reduce executions, Mr. Zhang suggested that the number of eligible crimes would be scaled back through legislation and that lower courts would be encouraged to mete out a sentence known as “death penalty with reprieve”. (source)

Indeed, while the number of executions is still high, it’s down from what it was a few decades ago when in some years more than 15,000 people were executed.

More on human rights in China. More on capital punishment in general. More on the rules regarding the fairness of criminal trials.

Political Graffiti (62): China Out Of Tibet

More about Tibet. More political graffiti.

Types of Human Rights Violations (1): Fake Zero-Sum Human Rights Violations

zero sum game

(source, © iStockphoto.com)

We usually, and correctly, think of human rights violations as a zero-sum game (although the word “game” is hardly appropriate here). A rights violation is a harm inflicted by one person on another, for the benefit of the former. And although the benefits for the violator do not always equal the harm for the victim in a quantitative sense, we can safely call it zero-sum. In fact, neither the harm nor the benefits that result from rights violations can always be quantified.

I have represented these harms and benefits in the table below (just look at row number 1 for the moment): a plus sign for “violator value” means that he or she receives some benefits from the violations (otherwise there probably wouldn’t be a violation); a minus for “victim value” means a harm done to him or her. And indeed this is the usual case. But you can see in the table that other combinations of values and signs are possible. But more on that in a moment.

The usual case – number 1 – is what we could call the typical human right violation. It’s zero-sum: the thief who steals from me gains what I lose; the oppressive government that limits my right to free speech or movement or assembly or organization, gains stability and regime security while I lose freedom. In case number 1, the violator always wins, and the person(s) whose rights are violated always lose(s), in roughly the same proportion (if proportions are at all relevant here).

The second, more exceptional case, occurs when not only the victim of the violations loses out, but also the perpetrator. Examples: the suicide bomber (except when he or she is right about Paradise, which I doubt); the use of torture, invasion, drone attacks etc. by the U.S. in its “war on terror” (tactics which create more terrorists than they eliminate).

The third case is still more exceptional, unfortunately, because it is really a win-win situation, disguised as zero-sum. Two examples. Take the development of the economies of India and China. It can be argued that these economies “take jobs away” from the developed countries, and that in a sense the right to work of many people in the West are violated because of it (the fact that none of this is intentional isn’t sufficient to claim that no rights are violated). However, as these developing countries increase the size of their economies, they will provide valuable and relatively cheap goods and services to businesses and households in developed countries, stimulating the economies there, and boosting disposable income, which reduces poverty in developed countries. As developing countries develop, they will also start to consume more western goods and services, with the same result. Again, no guarantee of course that the gains of one will equal the gains of the other, but at least it’s win-win and not zero-sum.

A second example, also to do with work: when a government withholds or stops unemployment benefits, it violates the rights of the unemployed. But when done under certain circumstances, this will encourage people to find work, and hence will make them better off in the end.

At first sight, these two examples look like typical zero-sum human rights violations, but not when look a bit closer.

The fourth case, where the victim of rights violations benefits from them, and the perpetrators lose out, is extremely exceptional, I guess. I could only come up with one example: the dictator becoming so oppressive that he creates revolt and ushers in his own downfall and the liberation of his people.

Gender Discrimination (18): Missing Women and Gendercide in China and India

Some more data following two earlier posts on the subject of gendercide (see here and here). The word gendercide describes the results of sex-selective abortions that take place on a massive scale in some countries, particularly India and China. These abortions have led to the “disappearance” of perhaps more than 100 million girls and women (or about 1 million a year). Evidence of this can be found in the abnormal sex-ratios in both countries:

The sex ratio at birth was only 893 female births per 1,000 male births in China and India and 885 in South Korea (as compared to 980 for Kenya and South Africa and 952 for Cambodia and Mexico). … In India, the juvenile sex ratio (often defined as the sex ratio among children aged 0-6 years) has been falling … over the last 3-4 decades – from 964 females per 1,000 males in 1971 to 927 in 2001. … In China, too, the problem has become more acute over time. A study based on a survey of over 5 million children in China found that among children born between 1985 and 1989, there were 926 female births for 1,000 male births. But, among children born between 2000 and 2004, the number had fallen to 806. Thus, in both countries, the situation appears to be worsening. (source)

The main reason for these gendercides seems to be a strong cultural preference for male offspring. This makes it difficult to do something about it. Cultures change very slowly. Outlawing sex-selective abortions and prenatal ultrasounds doesn’t seem to work very well. It has been tried in both China and India, but the sex-ratios don’t seem to improve much.

It might seem that improving literacy and schooling among women might reduce the parental preference for sons. However, here, too, the evidence is not encouraging. There is disturbing evidence from India which points to a worsening of the juvenile sex ratio with increased female education and literacy. Why the perverse effect? A possible explanation has to do with the negative effect of female literacy on fertility. Educated women tend to have fewer children than less-educated women, and, in the context of a strong son-preference culture, the lower levels of fertility lead to greater pressure on couples to have boys instead of girls. This relationship between fertility decline and lower juvenile sex ratios has also been observed in South Korea and China. (source)

The only successful counter-measures are those that tackle gender discrimination at the root. There will no longer be parental preference for male children when man and women are considered equal human beings.

It is important to recognize that one (although not the only) reason for son preference is that, historically, inheritance laws in both countries have favored sons over daughters. While both countries now do not restrict women’s access to parental property, customary practices which consider sons the natural heirs of land are still prevalent in much of rural China and India. India only recently (in 2004) removed the discriminatory provisions of earlier legislation and allowed parents to bequeath their property to their daughters.

What is needed in both countries to combat the scourge of low juvenile sex ratios is a package of interventions that includes stricter enforcement of equal inheritance laws, economic incentives for parents to have daughters and educate them, and an educational curriculum at the primary and middle school levels that highlights the importance of equal treatment of boys and girls in the family. Even with such a package, it will take years for attitudes to change and for the practice of prenatal sex selection and neglect of the girl child to end. (source)

More on gender discrimination.

Migration and Human Rights (21): China’s Demographic Aggression and Provocation of Racism, The Cases of Tibet and Xinjiang

Dalai Lama

(source)

If only Han Chinese inhabit Tibet, what is the meaning of autonomy? Dalai Lama (source)

The recent protests and violence by Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province are reminiscent of the March 2008 protests in Tibet. Like the Tibetans, the Uighurs believe that they are colonized by Han Chinese who have settled in the Tibetan and Uighur provinces in large numbers, and continue to do so. (92% of Chinese are Han). As a result, the ethnic Turkic Muslim Uighurs now make up less than half of the 20m population in their province, and probably less given the tendency of official Chinese statistics to underestimate internal migration flows. This is compared to 75% in 1949. (In Tibet, the indigenous population is still the majority according to official statistics, but this is likely to change with the new train link to the province).

It is widely accepted that these migration flows are part of official Chinese government policy. Populating border regions with Han Chinese is believed to lessen separatist tensions and demands for autonomy, and is handy when it comes to expropriating the local resources. The local populations however see this as demographic aggression and an attack on their culture. If their land is taken over, so will their culture, language, traditions and religion. In Xinjiang, evidence of this is the prohibition on headscarves, the languages used in schools etc.

Not surprisingly, these policies of demographic aggression – which the Dalai Lama has called a form of cultural genocide – combined with other authoritarian policies, provoke a reaction, and unfortunately, this reaction often takes the form of anti-Han racism. (Most victims of the recent clashes in Tibet and Xinjiang were Han, although – as usual – the victims of the government’s reaction don’t get mentioned).

More on Tibet.

Statistical Infatuation in China

Andy Warhol's Mao

Since this blog loves statistics, I couldn’t resist writing about this: China’s National Bureau of Statistics has launched a call for submissions of writings celebrating the creation, 60 years ago by Chairman Mao, of the People’s Republic of China. At the same time, the campaign is intended to boost the public’s confidence in its national statisticians (source) – and some boosting seems to be necessary (see here as well).

One entry is a “poem” titled “Love the Homeland, Love Statistics”, apparently from one of CNBS’s own employees, and it reads like this:

Some mock me for doing statistics
Some loathe me and statistics
Some don’t understand what statistics are
Why is it that statistics
Put a calm smile on my face?
Because of statistics
I can solve the deepest mysteries
Because of statistics
I will not be lonely again, playing in the data
Because of statistics
I can rearrange the stars in the skies above
Because of statistics
My life is different, more meaningful
I love my life, my statistics.

Man, are you serious…? More about China.