How China Escaped the Poverty Trap

De: Yuen Yuen Ang

Narrado por: Catherine Ho

How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth."

Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate.

Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms.

Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.

©2016 Cornell University (P)2022 Tantor

An important read

Some of the facts and research presented would be otherwise counterintuitive for people who posses a snapshot understanding of modern China. I think everyone interested in politics and development should read it. Especially policy makers.

In-depth, but slightly "academic"

The answer this books gives to the question in the title is a thorough and mostly grippingly told.

A slight drawback for a lay reader like myself is the somewhat excessive and repetive discussion on the methodology at the beginning. Also, the way previous work is discussde seems over-detailed. I guess, however, that this book is a more academic one than I anticipated so these stylistic things are maybe standard practise in the field. Casual listeners be aware, though!

The above are luckily only small annoyances. On the meat of the matter there is really a story fleshed put of the subject and a gripping one at that. With plenty of great anecdotes as well as a nice arc.

The generalisation of the template, used for studying China and the appendices are a great add.