WP3: Being A Political Economist
I really wanted to be a great political economist, because I realized the importance and influence of great political and economic ideas on societies. This cognition developed along with the different stages of my life: from initial curiosities about the subjects in my childhood, to keenly observations and reflection when I was a teenager, and finally to independent critical thinking when I became an adult.
Part I: Curiosity
The most valuable treasures in my childhood were the dialogues between my grandparents and me. Living in the modern world, I lack the experience of the suffrage of poverty and never envisioned how society evolved to achieve today’s prosperity. Luckily born in a family whose members are adequate with historical knowledge and backgrounds, I received the heritage of historical stories and life experiences from my grandparents. Their sharing of knowledge and real-life experience connect me with the world of the past and ignite my initial curiosity about politics and economics.
One of the deepest memories of my childhood was the magic box of my grandmother. It was a rusty blue metal box that restores the collections of my grandmother from the old days. My grandmother never let me see what it looked like inside the box, whereas, she often secretly picked things out and told me the stories and meaningfulness behind those antiques. I always remembered that one day, my grandmother showed me two small-sized notes: one printed with red-colored millet while the other printed with a slice of blue-colored meat. Those two delicate notes attracted my curiosity.
What are those? Why haven’t I ever seen this in my real life? Brought those questions, I asked my grandmother what they are. She smiled and said: “They were “money”， which we used to exchange stuff.” She patiently told me that there was a period of time when China employed a Planned economic system, in which the government gathered and distributed materials to each and every household. Those notes are vouchers which can be used to exchange certain quantities of certain goods. For example, each of the red notes can be used to exchange one kilogram of white rice. During the dialogue, I was surprised by the difference between transactions in the past society and the modern one. This difference inspired me to think; I wondered why and how people lived in that way, and what money indeed means and how do they function? (Years later, with those questions in mind, I found money in the modern financial system is actually representing the liabilities of the government.) Those curiosities went with me throughout the whole process of my learning and are the starting points of my interest in economics.
If my grandmother was a careful collector, my grandfather would be an excellent storyteller. His vivid stories were the bridge that connected me to the world that I never lived in. Born in the 1930s, my grandfather witnessed the drastic changes in the social structure of China from feudal social structure to a more and more modern one. In his stories, I knew that, in the previous feudal society, there was a very serious economic inequality in the social structure. The landlord, who owns most of the land, would “enslave” and impoverish farmers by letting them be dependent on his land resource and controlling their incomes. This kind of structure lasts for hundreds of years and it was not destroyed until the great revolutions.
I was confused about how this form of sick social structure could have such longevity. I mean farmers are the majority who have the power to overthrow the landlords. Why didn’t they fight back? My grandfather sensed my confusion and he said “Try to understand this problem by analyzing the cost and benefits of farmers if they start a rebellion against the landlords.” I was confused more. My grandfather told me that even if the rebel was successful, the farmers would still be sentenced by the legal system to death and wouldn’t be able to acquire any benefits. If the rebel failed, however, the landlord could further exploit them or even took away their right to use his lands. In conclusion, no matter whether farmers successfully rebelled or not, there would not be a good end for them. The real problem was not the superficial conflicts between landlords and farmers but was the ill feudal political system, which could only be solved by revolution from up to down. My grandfather always extracted experience from history and fabricated them into little stories that amazed me. Within such dialogues with my grandfather, I became more and more aware of and interested in the relationship between society and individuals and started to actively research and observe the real world.
My grandparents always tried to expose me to a diversified context for learning and experiencing. There were lots of meaningful and educative dialogues that happened along the way of traveling. Once in Beijing, they brought me to a Bistro to eat small lobsters. During the meal, we agreed that the background music of the bistro is impressive, however, none of us know the name of it. When we were leaving the restaurant, the grandmother said to me “would you mind asking for the name of the song?” I replied, “Can you give me some money?” She asked, “For what?” I answered: “For paying to know the name of the music.” They looked at me for a moment and said “not everything has a price, remember that.” Then my grandmother handed me a fifty yuan bill and said “if you don’t believe what I said, try it by yourself.” All of a sudden, I realized that the waiters would feel humiliated to be paid, by a child like me, for the name of the music. Human dignity is priceless and only respect would be appropriate as a return for expressing appreciation. From this dialogue, I had a deeper understanding of the function of money. Money should be the tools that we can use to improve our life quality, however, things and desires that could be represented by money should always be limited within certain ethical boundaries. Otherwise, we would be enslaved by the money just like framers by the landlords.
Part II: Observation and Reflection
As I grow up, movies become another great means for me to observe the world and on a broader scale. The combination of my personal historical knowledge and enlightenment from the movies unfold the mechanisms of the societies to me. More importantly, I learned the horrible effects of a malformed political-economic system on human society.
Retrospecting the past, the northeastern part of China was the main battlefield of the Sino-Japanese War, a war between the Nazi Japanese party and China. The Nazi Japanese government colonized the north-eastern part of China for as long as 14 years by establishing a puppet government — the Manchukuo government. During the years of colonization, the Nazi Japanese party conducted countless inhumane deeds on Northeastern Chinese utilizing their unsupervised military power and left unforgettable trauma for generations of northeasters. One of the most notorious ones was the bacteria experiments of detachment 731. I heard this story when I was young. However, I never truly realized the cruelty and inhumanity of those experiments until I became a high school student and actually visited themed museums which displayed evidence and pictures about what happened. To develop a bacteria weapon of mass destruction, detachment 731 conducted tens of thousands of experiments on the body of Northeastern Chinese without their personal agreement. Swollen body parts, rotten skin, malformed body shape… The inhuman experiment destroyed the lives of thousands of families.
Growing up in a region where people shared such painful memories, for a long time, I got a bad impression of Japanese people and their culture. I envisioned that only evil could conduct such deeds. However, my understanding of Japanese people and culture gradually changed when I became more and more interested in Anime. I sensed the justice and morality that their producers wanted to express. Thus I started to question myself: “Are the Japanese indeed bad?” With this question in mind, I flew to Osaka, Japan, to actually see and experience what Japanese culture is about. The results were astonishing. I realized that the people there are very friendly, helpful, and polite. A new question buffed me: “If Japanese people are just as kind and friendly as we are, how could they do such evil things in history?” The film, The Stanford Prison Experiment helped me to answer this question. Based on the real psychological experiment conducted at Stanford in 1971，the film illustrates an important theory, called the lucifer effect, of how unsupervised and perceived power could degenerate humans’ minds. I realized that people who worked in the Nazi Japanese parties were put inside a similar ill and unsupervised power system, in which the value of ethics and fairness were never emphasized. The Nazi Japanese army didn’t have a clear and complete regulation for dealing with prisoners of war and foreign citizens, thus there would be absolutely no consequence on those soldiers who torture Chinese people. The power of the strong was not properly restricted and the rights of the weak were not sufficiently supported. Silently but powerfully, Lucifer started to distort the humanities of those soldiers. The toxic political system of the Nazi party was the original sin of the criminal conduct of Nazi Japanese Armies in the Northeastern part of China.
Politics and economics are often referred to and studied as two separate fields. Politics is about power relations between individuals. While economics is concerned with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. I always wondered how they are related to each other? By revealing one of the darkest parts of human history, Schindler’s List and The Pianist taught me that it is the concept of resource distribution that connects them. Distribution of resources is all about who gets what stuff and it would naturally happen when we make transactions in our daily lives. Political parties are the enforcer and creators of the country’s legal system and rules of transactions. If the political system chose the wrong resource distribution method, the economic factors of the distribution of resources could easily be biased.
Certain groups of people would be benefited simply because they are politically favored, which would create large economic inequality and sabotage the stability of society. The two movies depicted the suffrage of Polish Jews during World War II from two different perspectives: a politically favored German Businessman and a politically opposed Jewish Pianist. They together fabricated a complete picture of how an unfair resource distribution system created by the government and economic agents could undermine the welfare of one society. During WWII, German is run by a military dictatorship regime, which was obsessed with violence and used it to plunder the wealth and labor of the Jewish population to benefit their own people. Nazi German capitalist, like Oscar Schindler, could use the labor and money of Jewish people for free to develop their own business, and then transfer the products created by Jews to improve the lives of the German population. While Nazi Parties’ “Polices” would violently rob the Jews’ wealth and use Jews’ savings to live lavishly. In contrast, Jews cannot fulfill their basic safety and physiological needs (food, water, warmth …) and are starved to death. The unsupervised military power gives Nazi members an illusion that they have the authority to conduct those evil behaviors. As a result, six million Jews were systematically murdered during the Holocaust of WW II.
Time might dilute those pains, but those blood spilled are worth remembering. They are warning us to learn the importance of distributive justice and ethical methods for the allocation of resources. They are telling us our today’s happy lives are all based on well managed economic and political systems. The realization of this point urged me to further my study in political economics and investigate methods for allocating resources that can improve the well-being of society.
Part III：Independent Critical Thinking
While I got more and more involved in the subject of political economics, I understand that this field consists of many different schools of thought which are based on vastly different priorities and assumptions. For example, some theories might assume that humans are totally self-interested, while others might assume humans are inherently altruistic — which could lead to two totally different ways of constructing political and economic systems. Came across by such diversified ideologies, I knew, to develop my own perspectives and ways of analysis, I must find specific assumptions and ideal basis which corresponds to my own worldview. However, the journey of tracing and developing my own ideal basis was struggling. Because I felt my subjective feeling and ignorance kept stopping me from seeing the world in a complete and objective sense. Luckily, I had the chance to take the philosophical classes, which not only guided me to witness the evolution of human wisdom and human society but also gave me insights about the fundamentals of human nature. Two theories that impacted me the most are Kantianism and utilitarianism. Utilitarianism emphasized that all humans are equally valuable and moral action is the one that maximizes the sum of the happiness of individuals in a society. Kantianism, on the other hand, assumed humans are rational beings and emphasized that the intention of particular action determines whether it is moral. I thought both of them are inspiring but incomplete. Because utilitarianism tends to ignore the benefit of the minority and Kantianism over-estimated the rationality of human beings.
Incorporating all my personal historical knowledge into the two theories, the prototypes of my own idea basis grow. I started to define my basic assumption of human nature and moral social structure, and thus have a more mature and independent view of the world I lived in. First, I believed that instead of assuming that humans are completely rational and self-interested as in classic economics, I assumed that human beings are very emotional, partly altruistic, and partly self-interested. Moreover, as to the political social structure, I think a moral political structure should incentivize and prioritize the importance of justice and good intentions and, under such priority, starve to maximize the sum of all individuals’ happiness. This prioritization is vital because if the intentions of one country are evil, it is impossible for citizens inside it to enjoy true happiness. For example, during WWII, the Nazi German party plunder the wealth and products of other countries and brought them back to German; these evil deeds indeed temporarily enhanced the living qualities of German citizens, and improve the happiness of the society. However, without justice in its intentions and behaviors, the Nazi German government was bound to fail under the revenge of other nations.
Having my own ideology and professional knowledge collected since young, I felt more confident than ever to really get involved in the world today. The world political economics is facing a challenge more complex and serious than ever. The tension between the U.S and China kept escalating, while the pandemics destroyed countless countries’ domestic economics and the global supply chain. Covered by such chaos, political and economic unfairness would most likely appear. Let’s start the analysis with one of the most vulnerable minorities of the era, Chinese international students in the U.S; President Trump had accused China as the reason for the pandemic, without any real evidence. His simple twitter ignited a huge trend of bias from the U.S population to Chinese citizens. As one member of the minority, I pragmatically felt the fear and grievances of being wronged. The feeling of being sworn as “Chink” and the suspicions from the eyes of others was hurtful. To be more general, the whole group of international students is suffering from policies in this pandemic. Our visa and status are facing the risk of being canceled at any time; the U.S. government created a policy that forced international students to go back to the U.S. and separate them with their families in this time of uncertainty. Such a policy is indeed beneficial to U.S. domestic economics because it could bring back consumptions, whereas the injustice and unfairness are more than evident. Another strange phenomenon one could observe is that the U.S stock market, which usually shared the same trends with the U.S economy, is rising dramatically, while the U.S domestic economy is hit severely. Why? First, we need to understand that the stock markets represent the benefits of large firms and relatively wealthy populations. In contrast, it could barely reflect the economic situation of the poor. While the Fed prints billions of money, lots of them flow into the stock market which further stuffed the wallet of the wealthy population. However, it is the poor population who are suffering from unemployment and lack of incomes. Thus, the unfairness in the financial market, a key component of the economic system, became the accomplice of economic inequality in this time of emergence. Covid-19 pandemic is a test for the quality and ability of one countries’ political and economic system. In a devastating situation like this, it is more important than ever to ensure and prioritize social justice.
Abuse of political and economic power might sound far away from us, but they are not. From a micro perspective, there were School bullying, discriminatory treatments in the workplace, and corrupted bureaucracy. From a macro perspective, there are conflicts between political entities that are hurting vulnerable minorities. My determination for being a political economist root in my social responsibility for protecting the welfares of individuals living in society. I hope this passage is not solely an autography, which described my personal cognition growth, but also a passage that ignites people’s awareness and interest in this important field of study, political economics.
Bibliography:
Alvarez, K. P. (Director). (n.d.). The Stanford Prison Experiment [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Stanford-Prison-Experiment-Billy-Crudup/dp/B017O67TJ2
Chazelle, D. S. (Director). (n.d.). Whiplash [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn0sMRLrbp0
Muccino, G. (Director). (n.d.). The Pursuit of Happyness [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIZKoak6gp8
Polanski, R. (Director). (n.d.). The Pianist [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo_5Qy32wPg
Spielberg, S. A. (Director). (n.d.). Schindler’s List [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEY0dQAF4k4
