Taconic

NC: Do you think that egalitarianism has lost some of its appeal after more than 30 years of reform?

ZW: The situation has changed a lot over the years. A planned economy produces a society entirely based on an official hierarchy. Reform and Opening-up gave legitimacy to the private possession of wealth, and material capital began to gain social power.

The shift of power from the bureaucracy to capital is a form of progress. There is no such thing as a perfect system for a society. In a “capital centered” society, you can enjoy anything you can afford, while in an “official centered” society you have to hold a bureaucratic position to access anything at all. I agree with [economist] Friedrich August Hayek, who argued that a society in which wealth is the way to social status is better than a society in which social status is the way to wealth. Wealth should not be created either in the process of attaining power, or once one has obtained power. But this is what happens in China.

Chingiss Khan c. 1160 to 1227 Mongol invasions led to widespread abandonment of cultivation in China as to have had a noticeable effort on CO2 emissions and hence the global climate.

“Everybody is a reactionary about subjects he understands.” — Robert Conquest

“It’s much better to live in a place like Switzerland where the problems are complex and the solutions are unclear, rather than North Korea where the problems are simple and the solutions are straightforward.” — Scott Sumner in TheMoneyIllusion.com

Ida: Sorry! So, we’ve talked about Noon, we’ve talked about Pakistan and your father, what about India? You’ve said some pretty harsh things about a certain writer cum activists on the Left–no names!–who, we in the States, kind of like. She seems, in an environment of rapacious capitalism, to be a friend of the poor and marginalised. What possible objection could you have to her?

Aatish: None except that I don’t think she’s a friend of the poor at all. She would like to doom them to a permanent state of picturesque poverty. They are beautiful to her–the poor–beautiful, benign and faceless. And that is exactly how she wants them to stay. Let me say also that it is not the poor who animate her politics. Oh, no! The people who get her into the streets are the new middle classes. This class, still among the most fragile in India, people who have newly emerged from the most dire conditions, are despicable to her. She mocks their clothes; their trouble with English; she hates their ambitions; when India wins the cricket and she sees them celebrating, her skin crawls; she wants, more than anything, to do these people down. And it is her overwhelming hatred of them that allows her to be a friend of movements that are seemingly far apart. The jihadists, the Maoists, the Kashmir movement, the anti-development people…they’re all her friends. Anyone who can prove a credible threat to the future of India is a friend of that woman. I would go so far as to say she has a prurient fascination with the enemies of India. And where do they love her? In Pakistan, and in the faculty rooms of Europe and America. No surprise there.

Also, this business of pretending she’s a lone voice in the wilderness. What rubbish! At least have the good grace to admit that not one thing she says is provocative or new; it is perfectly banal. And we know how well the universities Europe and America reward this bogus cant!