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Clifford Cobb's avatar

Thank you for providing us with the details of the Special Action Plan for Boosting Consumption. A few elements of the plan may succeed, but overall it will fail. I will tell a story to explain why.

An economy is like a jigsaw puzzle. It is made of millions of pieces that must fit together properly to function well. If you force one piece into a space where it does not belong, it will make the whole puzzle become unsolvable.

My father enjoyed jigsaw puzzles. A few years ago, I gave him a puzzle with 2,000 pieces in it, which was double the usual puzzle of 1,000 pieces. He later told me that he never tried to put that one together. He said it was too complicated, and he did not want to start it because it would take more than twice the time as the ones with fewer pieces. So, I switched back to giving him the 1,000-piece puzzles.

When I saw the Special Action Plan for Boosting Consumption, I noticed there are 30 big pieces, and each of those pieces is made up of many smaller pieces. That means it is like the 2,000-piece puzzle or perhaps even a 5,000-piece puzzle. In the case of the economy, the situation is even worse because each "piece" is also made of 100s of smaller pieces. With a system so complicated, the human mind is overwhelmed by the complexity. We lose the ability to understand the system as a whole, and we become lost in endless details. It might seem that this problem can be solved by hiring 100,000 people to work on the giant "puzzle" of the national economy, but that would be like hiring 100 cooks to work in the same kitchen. They will get in each other's way.

No solution is perfect. What is needed is a balance between general principle and precise detail. It takes both theory and practice to work out that balance. I am not going to try to make a case for a particular approach. I would merely note that this issue has repeatedly arisen in China's history, starting with Discourses on Salt and Iron (Chinese: 鹽鐵論; pinyin: Yán Tiě Lùn). A similar debate arose during the Qing Dynasty in the 18th century about the merits and problems of a state granary that was intended to stabilize food prices during famines. There is much to be learned from past debates about issues that are again significant.

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