Mongolia
I'm off to Mongolia (a statement that one doesn't get to make every day) for an extended trip, mixing business and pleasure. My posts will therefore be light for a bit, since I suspect internet connections will be sparse as well.
In preparation for my trip, I've been reading Morris Rossabi's Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (2005). It's a well-written and well-researched book, with lots of fascinating details about a fascinating country, about which I was woefully ignorant before this trip was scheduled. It is also an incredibly frustrating book, as Rossabi, a history professor at City University of New York, has only a loose grasp of economics. He portrays much of the post-Communist era in Mongolia (since 1990) as a struggle between "democratic reformers" and "pure market" advocates, as if those are natural polar opposites.
To take but one example, Rossabi devotes a chapter to the nomadic herder economy and criticizes the privatization of the herds and introduction of markets as having been done corruptly and poorly. He also criticizes the introduction of privatization, even if done well, noting that the 'market economy model'
Really? Has he not heard of the American west, where the enormous "Cattle Kingdom" of the late 19th century was not a government enterprise, was built around private organizations, and was most successful in Texas, where private property rights prevailed, and least successful in Wyoming, where federal land law prevented privatization of land. (See Helen Huntington Smith's excellent War on Powder River for a thorough account of the Wyoming experience. My own Hayek and Cowboys, in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, compares the two briefly.) Moreover, the extensive work on property rights among Native Americans, including Plains tribes, done in part by Terry Anderson and others at PERC and in part inspired by their work and by the pathbreaking article by Harold Demsetz on property rights among Native Americans, shows that property rights and markets have a long history among North American civilizations, even those that were nomadic.
Rossabi makes two crucial errors. First, he thinks economics is just a point of view, using quote marks around economic terms to emphasize that they aren't really definitional. Second, he buys an excessively romantic notion of primitive communism among nomads, without asking (at least through this chapter) whether the pre-Communist nomadic civilization included institutions that were destroyed by the Communists and which take time to recreate. It's a lovely world in which the herders get low or no interest loans, free well digging, free hay, free medical care, free boarding schools for their kids, etc. and pay only the price of a little political oppression (which he acknowledges) and a fair amount of slacking by "lazy herders," who his sources criticize.
No where is it acknowledged, however, that this economy was funded by transfers from the Soviet Union (which used Mongolia as a buffer between it and China). Moreover, the early chapters' brief account of the incredible repression of the Stalinist regime in Mongolia is seen as simply an aberration and not tied to the state system, whose demise he mourns.
Lastly (and I know this is not a particularly well edited entry, but, it is a blog not a paper and I'm writing it in an airport lounge), he relies heavily on a herder named Namkhainyambuu for support for his critique of the market system in herding. Namkhainyambuu "achieved remarkable reknown for his expertise in herding" under the Communists. (Namkhainyambuu's book, Bounty from the Sheep, sounds worth reading.) Could it just be possible that someone who "told [the author] that he worked very hard to be awarded the titles of 'Champion' or 'Hero of Labor' and to receive the 'Star of Sukhbaatar' and the 'Golden Soyombo' medals," whose wife received the "Best Herder" gold medal and "Champion Youth" silver medal under the communists and who "himself became possibly the most reknown herdsman, partly for fulfilling his pledges to raise 10,000 white sheep in twenty years and for his advice to herders in newspapers, and partly because of his appearances in films and at important public events." Could it be that such a person might (just maybe) not be an entirely unbiased observer of the post-Communist system? There's no hint of that in the book.
In any event, I look forward to seeing Mongolia. I'll post something about it when I return.
In preparation for my trip, I've been reading Morris Rossabi's Modern Mongolia: From Khans to Commissars to Capitalists (2005). It's a well-written and well-researched book, with lots of fascinating details about a fascinating country, about which I was woefully ignorant before this trip was scheduled. It is also an incredibly frustrating book, as Rossabi, a history professor at City University of New York, has only a loose grasp of economics. He portrays much of the post-Communist era in Mongolia (since 1990) as a struggle between "democratic reformers" and "pure market" advocates, as if those are natural polar opposites.
To take but one example, Rossabi devotes a chapter to the nomadic herder economy and criticizes the privatization of the herds and introduction of markets as having been done corruptly and poorly. He also criticizes the introduction of privatization, even if done well, noting that the 'market economy model'
had been developed and applied to sedentary agricultural or industrial economies but had not been tested in a society in which about one-third of the population sustained itself by pastoral nomadism. Several economists and officials questioned its validty, declaring that 'such tenets of economic theory as wealth accumulation, [and] the innate desire of individuals to acquire material goods' were not necessarily true of Mongolia. (p. 120)
Really? Has he not heard of the American west, where the enormous "Cattle Kingdom" of the late 19th century was not a government enterprise, was built around private organizations, and was most successful in Texas, where private property rights prevailed, and least successful in Wyoming, where federal land law prevented privatization of land. (See Helen Huntington Smith's excellent War on Powder River for a thorough account of the Wyoming experience. My own Hayek and Cowboys, in the NYU Journal of Law and Liberty, compares the two briefly.) Moreover, the extensive work on property rights among Native Americans, including Plains tribes, done in part by Terry Anderson and others at PERC and in part inspired by their work and by the pathbreaking article by Harold Demsetz on property rights among Native Americans, shows that property rights and markets have a long history among North American civilizations, even those that were nomadic.
Rossabi makes two crucial errors. First, he thinks economics is just a point of view, using quote marks around economic terms to emphasize that they aren't really definitional. Second, he buys an excessively romantic notion of primitive communism among nomads, without asking (at least through this chapter) whether the pre-Communist nomadic civilization included institutions that were destroyed by the Communists and which take time to recreate. It's a lovely world in which the herders get low or no interest loans, free well digging, free hay, free medical care, free boarding schools for their kids, etc. and pay only the price of a little political oppression (which he acknowledges) and a fair amount of slacking by "lazy herders," who his sources criticize.
No where is it acknowledged, however, that this economy was funded by transfers from the Soviet Union (which used Mongolia as a buffer between it and China). Moreover, the early chapters' brief account of the incredible repression of the Stalinist regime in Mongolia is seen as simply an aberration and not tied to the state system, whose demise he mourns.
Lastly (and I know this is not a particularly well edited entry, but, it is a blog not a paper and I'm writing it in an airport lounge), he relies heavily on a herder named Namkhainyambuu for support for his critique of the market system in herding. Namkhainyambuu "achieved remarkable reknown for his expertise in herding" under the Communists. (Namkhainyambuu's book, Bounty from the Sheep, sounds worth reading.) Could it just be possible that someone who "told [the author] that he worked very hard to be awarded the titles of 'Champion' or 'Hero of Labor' and to receive the 'Star of Sukhbaatar' and the 'Golden Soyombo' medals," whose wife received the "Best Herder" gold medal and "Champion Youth" silver medal under the communists and who "himself became possibly the most reknown herdsman, partly for fulfilling his pledges to raise 10,000 white sheep in twenty years and for his advice to herders in newspapers, and partly because of his appearances in films and at important public events." Could it be that such a person might (just maybe) not be an entirely unbiased observer of the post-Communist system? There's no hint of that in the book.
In any event, I look forward to seeing Mongolia. I'll post something about it when I return.
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Sunday September 3, 2006 at 10:17am