{ 張亨來 }

Jeffrey Sachs, American economist, United Nations adviser, and Columbia professor, debates with Niall Ferguson, British historian, television pundit, and Harvard professor, about the Occupy Wall Street movement on Fareed Zakaria GPS. “Well, there’s still academics in the West who think that the root to salvation is to expand the root of the state,” Ferguson wrongly asserts, “because that’s certainly not what is happening in China”. Sachs politely points out that “the catching-up phenomenon is quite different from the problems that the United States or other high-income societies are facing right now”.

While Ferguson may have scored punditry points with his aggressive and frequent interruptions, he is dead-wrong with his comparison of the United States with China. Gabriella Montinola, Yingyi Qian, and Barry R. Weingast in “Federalism, Chinese Style” and Doug Guthrie in “The Politics of Market Reform” both argue that the transition from a command economy to a market economy was successful in China because of the government’s strong presence in guiding and stabilizing the process. So even in case of “catching up”, the state has a significant role to play, and this role only becomes increasingly important for the United State where the market economy eclipses government regulation.

Ferguson said that Sachs ceased to be an academic but had become a “demagogue”. I think this characterization applies much more readily to Ferguson himself.