You might recall Ha-Joon Chang as the author of the book "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism". If not, don't worry, it's basically an argument that the world would be a better place if it were run like the South Korea of Chang's youth. You know, military dictatorship with the President telling everyone what to make and how. Threatening to bankrupt any business that didn't do as he said. It's a fairly unappealing vision really.
Chang pops up in The Guardian today to tell us something very important. The economy these days is just too complex to be run by businessmen. As an example he gives us that old story about suicides at Foxconn, the factory making much of Apple's kit:
The multiple suicides of workers in Foxconn factories in China have revealed Victorian labour conditions down the supply chains for the most futuristic
Apple products. But the top managers of Apple escaped blame because these deaths happened in factories in another country (China) owned by a company from yet another country (Hon Hai, the Taiwanese multinational).
It really is time that the Reader in Economics at Cambridge University got with the program. At the time of that spate of suicides Foxconn had nearly 1 million workers in its plants. There were up to 14 suicides (it depends whose count you want to use) among that 1 million. The average rate of suicide in China is 22 per 100,000 people per year. That is, the suicide rate at Foxconn was under 5% of the general suicide rate of the Chinese population. It's extremely difficult to see why any blame should attach to Foxconn or Apple over this.
But it's not just his example that is hinky: his basic argument is most odd as well.
Welcome to the age of irresponsibility.
The largest companies today are so complex that top managers are not even expected to know fully what is really going on in them. These companies have also increasingly outsourced activities to multiple layers of subcontractors in supply chains crisscrossing the globe.
Increasing complexity not only lowers the quality of decisions, as it creates an information overload, but makes it more difficult to pin down responsibilities.
This is the man, recall, who desires to add at least two more levels of complexity to the system. The businessmen should be doing what they're told by the bureaucrats who should be implementing the priorities of the politicians. That is, we're going to move the decisions about what should be done and how it should be done even further away from the people who actually know what's happening. Or those who have any knowledge of the subject under discussion.
I do have to admit that I don't mind people being wrong: I've been so often enough myself and it would be a very harsh person who criticised their own faults when found in others. That mote and beam thing comes to mind. But it does irritate me immensely when we get people being contradictory even within their own plans for the world. Either we've got a world too complex to manage properly in which case we most certainly shouldn't be adding bureaucracy and politics to that management or we've a world that can be managed by the politicians. In which case it must be a pretty simple world given the intellectual capacity of the current politicians.
