Andrew Batson

Taxation in China (at least by law) is quite comparable to Germany's (40+% when you reach ~$144k) but without all the social benefits. Unlike Germany, there are gray areas in the Chinese system where people find ways to pay less tax. But there are also other cost-inducing things than tax. In lights of the evergrande crisis, I'm not sure how efficient China's hugely state-directed investment system is. And much won't be achieved had there not been Deng's economic reforms and the tax indulgence that followed. More than anything, high taxation stifles innovations in China. What you see in China is not real innovation (in the sense of inventing new things), but social-mobility [1] as a consequence of authoritarianism which can result in mass adoption of technologies, etc. Also, considering the recent Tang Ping (躺平) movement, I don't think China's social-economy is currently in a healthy state. [1] https://andrewbatson.com/2021/10/13/mobilization-and-modules-whats-cha…

Though I know the Nobel is focused on theoretical contribution, I found this discussion interesting: https://andrewbatson.com/2019/10/25/who-deserves-the-nobel-for-chinas-… The editorial Batson is reacting to (by Yao Yang) makes the point that the largest economic development project that lifted the vast majority of people out of poverty over the past 20 years was orchestrated by China, and the RCTs/small scale interventions that Duflo et. al. won the Nobel for had no role or relevance there. He focuses more on the policies guided by the "classic" development economists like Solow which emphasize domestic savings and investment. Batson's post delves into who in China actually was responsible for the economic policy changes that created that development. Personally, I welcome the the addition of RCTs to the economic research toolkit. For too long, economics has wrapped itself up in a mathematically complex knot that bears no resemblance to the real world. Behavioral economics has started to crack that by applying common sense, though too often they have dramatically overextrapolated their hard-to-replicate results. Hopefully economists can see RCT as a tool which can be used where appropriate, rather than an entirely new paradigm that much be applied to everything (as they did with highly mathematical economics).

Here’s an economics article at least: https://hbr.org/1996/07/increasing-returns-and-the-new-world-of-busine… And here’s a short article about his contribution to that article: https://andrewbatson.com/2016/12/13/cormac-mccarthys-contribution-to-t…