Planet Money - Summer School 6: China, Taiwan and how nations grow rich

Episode Date: August 14, 2024

Episodes each Wednesday through labor day. Find all the episodes from this season here. And past seasons here. And follow along on TikTok here for video Summer School. In the middle of the twentieth century, China and its neighbors in East Asia were poor, mostly rural economies. China had been wrecked by a brutal civil war. Taiwan became the home of people fleeing from that conflict. Japan and Korea were rebuilding after their own wars. And then in the later half of the twentieth century, they started their comeback. The governments made some explicit choices that unleashed the power of individual incentives and free market forces and lifted millions of people out of poverty. We focus specifically on China and Taiwan during this time, when they showed a burst of economic progress rarely seen on this globe. Why then? Why there? Can other nations copy that? We'll try to find out. This series is hosted by Robert Smith and produced by Audrey Dilling. Our project manager is Devin Mellor. This episode was edited by Planet Money Executive Producer Alex Goldmark and fact-checked by Sofia Shchukina. Help support Planet Money and hear our bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

If you're hearing this, that means you haven't gone sponsor free with NPR plus. Join us on the plus side for awesome podcast perks across more than 20 NPR podcasts, including bonus episodes, behind the scenes content, sponsor free listening, and more. Learn more and sign up at plus.npr.org and never hear this promo again. This is Planet Money from NPR. Welcome back everyone to Planet Money Summer School, Economic History of the World. We've spent a lot of this semester talking about capitalism gone wrong, the panics and the busts, the schemes and the cons.

So today we are going to visit a time period where capitalism did some amazing things. And we'll ask, how can governments harness the free market to make their countries richer? This is Lesson Number 6, The Asian Miracle. I'm Robert Smith. In the middle of the 20th century, China and its neighbors in East Asia were poor, mostly rural economies. China had been wrecked by a brutal civil war. In the middle of the 20th century, China and its neighbors in East Asia were poor, mostly rural economies. China had been wrecked by a brutal civil war. Taiwan had become the home of people fleeing from that conflict. Japan and Korea were rebuilding after wars of their own.

And then in the later half of the 20th century, they started their comeback. Today, we wanted to focus specifically on China and Taiwan during this time, when they showed a burst of economic progress rarely seen on this globe. Our summer school professor today is an expert in the Asian economies. He was born in Taiwan and grew up in South America from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, Cheng Tai-Shi.

Hi, great to be here. It's hard to get your head around how quickly the countries in East Asia changed. So in China, for instance, in the year 1960, millions of people died of starvation under Mao Zedong. And now it's the second largest economy in the world. And other countries in the region saw the same sort of remarkable growth. Can you give me a sense of how big a deal this is? I think it's clear that it's been an incredible transformation where most of these countries were in the 1950s and the 1960s is that they were mostly poor agrarian societies. It's a miracle in almost all senses of the word, dramatic societal, political and economic transformation,

just within a generation. Is there a unifying sense of like one thing they all had going for them? They all had their backs against the wall. There's this sense that they either got to do something or else they were going to go to hell. They weren't gonna be able to survive as a society. -♪ MUSIC PLAYING ‫- On today's show, we will have two stories, one from China and one from Taiwan, about

how places with their backs against the wall can figure out how to become rich. And after each story, we'll have our professor show us the big lessons in how a government can help or hurt a fragile economy. First up, a secret document signed by starving farmers shows an entire nation the way forward after the break. New from embedded. Who gets to compete as a woman? This question came up in ugly form at the Paris Olympics.

But it's not new. If she runs like a man and talks like a man, is she a man? Hear about the long history of sex testing women athletes on Tested, a new series from CBC and NPR's Embedded podcast. Here at Shortwave Space Camp, we escape our everyday lives to explore the mysteries and quirks of the universe. We find weird, fun, interesting stories that explain how the cosmos is partying all around us.

From stars to dwarf planets to black holes and beyond, we've got you. Listen now to the Shortwave podcast from NPR. Twelve years ago, Planet Money went on a reporting trip to China to do a bunch of episodes. And this one is my favorite. It really shows the radical changes China had to go through to get to where it is today. David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein took one of China's famed bullet trains and they traveled out to the rural countryside. They had heard a story about something that happened in a small village in 1978 that transformed

China. I'll let David and Jacob take it from here. The village is called Jiagang, and we went there. It's very nice to meet you. Thank you for talking to us. Oh, no, it's no trouble. Thank you for talking to us. It's no trouble. Thank you for coming. This is Yan Jinchao.

And by the way, none of the people we talked to in Zhaogang spoke English, so what you're hearing here is a translation. Yan Jinchao, he's one of the people who started China on this path to bullet trains. And one of the really fun things about reporting on China's economy is, well, so if you're in the U.S. and you want to talk to one of the founding fathers of the US economy, you want to talk to Alexander Hamilton, you're out of luck. He's been dead for hundreds of years. But in China, a lot of these key people, they're still around.

Yan Jinchao is not an economist. He's not a politician. He runs a small restaurant in Zhaogang. Thirty years ago when all this happened, he was a farmer. Yan Jinchao opens a big metal gate behind his restaurant, and he takes us out to the fields where he used to farm. Back in 1978, everyone here worked on a collective farm. Look, you can grow things in winter. Mount Zetong had just died,

and it was still basically the height of communism in China. And on our visit to this village, we actually spent a long time just trying to figure out how the system worked on a communist farm. The basic idea was that people would work together for the common good. And in this world, as Yan Jin Chao explains it, nobody owns anything. I used oxen to farm, but they weren't mine. They belonged to the group. Back then even a piece of straw belonged to the group.

Individuals didn't own anything. At one meeting with Communist Party officials, one farmer asked, What about the teeth in my head? Do I own those? No, was the answer. Your teeth belong to the collective. Everything in this world was centrally planned. The farmers were told what to plant by a Communist Party official from outside the village, and

sometimes they were told to grow rice even if they didn't have enough water to properly grow rice. Yen-jen Chow says, back in this era, every morning a whistle would blow to mark the start of the work day. Sometimes the guy blowing it would have to blow it twice. The farmers would drag themselves out of their huts and go to work on the fields. At the end of the day, the whistle would blow again and everyone would stop. You'd get points for working all day, but it didn't matter how much or how hard you worked.

You just had to show up. Even if you had decided to go out early and pull weeds or something, it wouldn't make a difference for you. Work hard, don't work hard. Everyone gets the same. So people don't want to work. And after the harvest, the government collects what everyone has grown and gives the village an allotment of food. But in the case of Xiaogang, the allotment was never enough. So they were hungry all the time. Their kids never had enough to eat.

And Yan Jinchao and the other Xiaogang farmers, they had to walk to other villages and beg for food. We were farmers. We were supposed to produce food. To beg for food was not honorable. We felt very ashamed. It was hard to knock on doors and beg for food. My face was burning.

This is the way things were all over China. This is basically the way the entire economy was set up. So the farmers in Zhaogang were starving, and they needed to do something. One farmer in particular was pushing for a change. His name? Yan Hun Chang. We tracked down Yan Hun Chang as well. We talked to him in this open garage attached to his house. There were sacks of grain piled up along the walls. He smoked cigarettes the

whole time. It was this really cold rainy day. And he told us that out of desperation, the farmers came up with an idea. But the idea they had was so dangerous, they had to call a secret meeting to discuss it. That day, it was about five in the afternoon. We met at Yan Lihua's home. This was a secret meeting. We snuck in one by one. There were 18 farmers crowded into this small room. Yan Jinchao was there. Were there enough chairs for all of you?

There were no chairs back then. How could there be chairs? Some of us crouched, some sat on the floor. There were some little tiny stools. But we had no chairs back then. Yan Hunchang says everybody there was afraid to talk, so finally he spoke up. I said, everyone is here and knows what this is about.

Everyone knew, but no one dared to speak. So I spoke up. So I spoke up. I said, today, I will take care of you. We have to do our own thing. I said, we are all here because we have to find a way to save ourselves. To save themselves, they have an idea that is both revolutionary and as old as dirt. Rather than farm as a collective, each family gets to farm its own plot of land. And if a family grows a lot of food, that family gets to keep some of that food. You own what you grow.

But owning in Communist China in 1978, that's something like treason. I was scared. But if you were too scared, you wouldn't be able to do it. And that wouldn't work. So in this little dirt-floored room by the light of a broken-down oil lamp, these farmers are talking about this idea. The older farmers who remembered the days before communism when they could farm their

own land, they said, we have to try this. But a lot of the guys in the room, they were really scared. Most people said, yes, we want to do it. But there were others who said, I don't think this will work. This is like high-voltage wire. Back then, farmers had never seen electricity. But they had heard about it. They knew if you touched it, you would die.

But they decide they have to do this. The alternative is to continue begging and going hungry. They decide they have to do this. The alternative is to continue begging and going hungry. They decide they need to write this down, write down a contract laying out how this is going to work and put their names on it so they're all bound to it so no one can go back on it. Do you remember the exact words that you wrote? I wrote it myself. Of course I remember. Can you tell it to us? We will divide up the farmland between the families. Each family will give a share of

the crop to the government and the collective at the end of the year. If we are put in prison or executed, we will not complain. They are in a sense the first capitalists of modern China. Their livelihood is in their own hands. If it works, they'll have enough to eat. If they get discovered, they could be killed. But one by one, the farmers come forward to sign on to the contract. They realize they need to hide this thing, and eventually, Yen Hun Chang winds up slipping it inside a piece of bamboo in the roof of

his house. Yan Jinchao remembers the first day he went out to farm after they signed the contract. It just felt different. I felt comfortable in my heart, energized. I could really show off my abilities. Did you work harder than before? Of course I worked harder. We all did.

Because whatever I produced was mine. If you didn't work hard, that's your loss. And we all secretly competed. Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person. That got people working hard. It's amazing to think this is the same land, they have the same tools, it's the same farmers, but just by changing the economic rules, just by saying you get to keep some of what you grow, everything changes.

We started work before the sun came up, and we worked until it was dark. This working all the time thing actually gets them into trouble. Yan Jinchao says the neighbors noticed it, and they started to suspect something funny was going on. Why were these crazy farmers going out to work before the whistle blew, before dawn, and why were they working so late? And at harvest time, there was an even bigger problem. It was impossible to hide. They had an enormous harvest. It was more food, according to Yan Hun Chang, than they had grown in the previous five years combined. It was both exciting and terrifying. Eventually, word of what's happening in Xiaogong makes it up the chain of command through the Communist Party to the very top, to Deng Xiaoping, the guy basically running China at this time.

Deng Xiaoping is one of the pro-reform guys. At this moment, he is poised to become the key reformer who creates China's modern economy. Deng Xiaoping has been wanting to change the way farming works in China, and he likes what's happening in Xiaogong. but this is still Communist China. It's just two years after the death of Mao, and lots of people are opposed to what's going on in Zhaogang. So Deng can't say anything bad about Mao or collective farming. Deng's big picture idea is, let's not worry about whether something is capitalist or communist

or socialist. Let's worry about whether it works. There's this famous quote that's attributed to Deng that, David, we actually heard all the time when we were in China. It doesn't matter if a cat is white or black. As long as it catches mice, it's a good cat. Deng Xiaoping doesn't stand up in public and give these Xiaogong farmers medals. He's quieter about it.

He decides to have these two writers tell the story. He calls them in and says, I support this. You guys should go tell the Zhaogang story to the rest of China. And pretty soon, people all over China are farming like the people in Zhaogang. Farmers own what they grow. The government starts trying out other economic experiments. Factories spring up in cities along the coast. China lets foreign companies in.

Coca-Cola opens a plant in Beijing. And China's economy grows like crazy. And this crazy economic growth, it has gone on and on for more than 30 years now. Since the farmers in Xiaogang signed that contract, something like 500 million people in China have risen out of poverty. They moved from mud huts with dirt floors and oil lamps to houses with electricity. When you ask about what happened in that hut in 1978, everybody agrees, everybody tells the same story.

But when you ask about what has happened in Xiaogang since then, Yan Hun Chang and the party officials, they tell two very different stories. The official version is that everything in town is great. New factories are springing up, there are lots of jobs. Xiaogang is living happily ever after. Yanheng Chang says he's had a different experience. He says he started a few businesses over the years,

but once they became profitable, the government took them away from him. He also says those new factories springing up around town, a lot of them are just empty. Local officials say none of this is true. The tension you hear though, really throughout the Xiaog Gong story between free enterprise and state control, that is everywhere in China today.

The government has let go of some parts of the economy, but it's holding on tightly to other parts. David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein from a Planet Money episode from 2012. We're bringing back in our summer school professor, Chang Tai-shee, to talk about how we got from that document signed by farmers to the complicated Chinese economy we have today. Hey, professor. Nice to be here. So as we heard in the story, in the 1980s, the Chinese government relaxed a lot of the controls they had over the economy,

not just the collective farming. They got rid of price controls, allowed some businesses to compete. But how were they got rid of price controls, allowed some businesses to compete. But how were they trying to balance government controls and economic freedoms? What was the theory here? Maybe the best way to describe how they were going about this process is this famous saying by Deng Xiaoping, which is they were trying to cross the river by touching the stones. They didn't have an overarching theory or any grand plan of how they were going to cross the river by touching the stones. They didn't have an overarching theory or any grand plan of how they were going to cross the river. They were just going

to go step by step, you know, trying to find a way to get out of the desperate economic situation that they were in. The ideology will kick in later. I know a lot of the liberalization of the economy came to a halt after 1989. That's when we saw the protests in Tiananmen Square and the government crackdown. What starts to happen to the new business freedoms that we heard about in the story? What we start to see in a couple years after that was this beginning of what I'm going to call this new economic model. It was the strengthening of the control of the party and there's some local leaders,

some local party organizations that realized that, hey, I can do something with this power. And what they meant by doing something is that they can make these deals with local entrepreneurs in which they say, we work together, I'm gonna smooth the path for you and we can do business together. So this became the model. It's almost like the economic model of a mafia boss in which you're always gonna need the mafia boss. But the mafia boss is on your side.

And what we saw in China in the 20 years after 1989 is that, you know, the mafia boss was so incredibly powerful, was so entrepreneurial, and was so effective that this is when we saw sort of the blossoming of the private sector in China, the growth of these enormous, big Chinese private firms. And this is at the local level helped by local party officials. But then at the national level, we start to see something else, right? Something economists call industrial policy. What is industrial policy? I define industrial policy as being the government deciding what are the industries it wants to invest in and subsidizing whatever area they choose. In the 2000, China's official industrial policy was called the 16 strategic and industrial policy. What they did was that they basically announced that 16 industries, these are things like

steel, aluminum, cars, that only certain state offers would be allowed to produce in these strategic industries. So this was Chinese industrial policy. This was a state deciding what were the industries that China was going to dominate in and who was going to be allowed and who was not going to be allowed. So still this mix of tight government controls in some areas, some economic freedom in other areas, stone by stone, I guess. We'll hear more from our professor after our second story about Taiwan and a different

model of how a government can encourage economic growth. And I should note that Professor Xie and I talked much more about how the current leadership in China is trying to reestablish tighter control over their economy. That's a bonus episode in Planet Money Plus. Sign up at plus.npr.org. After the break, how Taiwan went from a rural economy to making the semiconductor in the device you're probably listening to right now. New from the Embedded Podcast.

Elite female runners are being told they can't compete because of their biology. Not only can you not compete, you're not actually female. Hear about the 100 year history of sex testing in women's sports and the hard choices these athletes are facing now. Listen to Tested, a new series from CBC and NPR's embedded podcast. Waylon, how much do you think it would cost to buy one of those big digital billboards in Times Square to promote our show, the indicator from Planet Money and big lights. In this economy?

I mean, you're probably right. But this question is the exact kind of thing that we find answers to on our show. We take one big economic idea, make it understandable, and you know, even fun. That's the indicator from Planet Money and NPR. If you think the economy makes no sense right now. You are probably right because even economists can't explain it lately. But our podcast, The Indicator from Planet Money...

We're a little dose of clarity on the biggest economic questions of the day. And about the forces that affect your life. In 10 minutes or less, every weekday, The Indicator from Planet Money from NPR. We're back putting the world into economic history of the world. In the second half of our lesson, we are going to hear another approach to growing an economy. Taiwan is about a hundred miles off the coast of mainland China, and they face some of the same struggles. But without the Communist Party, it picked a different form of industrial policy

to make itself into a technological superpower. You probably already know that Taiwan is the center of innovation in manufacturing semiconductors, companies like TSMC, but this wasn't an accident. It was the dream of one man in Taiwan, KT Lee. In 2022, Kenny Malone and Romtine Arab-Louie from NPR's Throughline podcast told us the story of how Lee lured industry industry and specifically in the story, one business genius back to Taiwan

from the United States. KT Lee was an economics minister and then finance minister and then basically minister at large in Taiwan. And in 1979, he oversaw the very funky and cool named task force of STAG, aka the Science and Technology Advisory Group. And so Taiwan, guided by KT Lee and his colleagues, poured money into building up the research and development at Taiwan's universities. They set up national laboratories that would share discoveries with

the private tech sector Taiwan hoped to develop. And this is when KT Lee rose up his sleeves. He started crossing over the Pacific to try and convince Taiwan's tech talent to come back. Bringing these people from Taiwan together and saying, look, if you come back, you know, we will supply you with laboratories, we'll supply you with all. We'll supply you with all of the infrastructure that you need. This is Tom Gold, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley, author of a book called State and Society and the Taiwan Miracle.

We'll supply you with engineers. We'll find loans. We'll invest with you. And we won't make political demands on you. In short, KT Lee was pulling out all the stops and trying to lure talent back home. At that time I was about 40 years old. Talent like Min Wu. So we already in California for 12 years. What is the name of that company and what are you doing?

Called Micronics Inc. Micronics Inc. Macronix Inc. And the way Min describes it, he sounds like the Willy Wonka of semiconductors. Like the company was playing with semiconductors and inventing all kinds of wild uses for this new technology. Everything from using them to store information to one product that I definitely remember hearing about

as a kid. One product we know we call the key finder. Do you know the key finder? Yeah. If your key lost, you know, you can whistle. And then that device responds with a beep. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. You know where they are.

You invented the key finder? Yeah, well, we are part of it. We are making a lot of money on that. These inventions, it's not like Min's company was inventing them and then selling them directly to customers. Macronix would mostly do research and develop technology and then license their inventions to bigger companies with the real power. Places with access to huge scale and enormous factories. And that is what Min wanted. Min wanted McCronix to have its own factories

to make its own semiconductor products. And he was hearing that maybe the place to build that kind of company was back in Taiwan. You know, I'm from Taiwan, so I have many alumni and friends in this field. You have your little birdies whispering to you, saying, Min. Yes.

There's some stuff going on back here. Some interesting things are happening back in Taiwan. So I think there's opportunity there. Min never personally met Katie Lee, but Min was exactly the kind of person Lee was trying to lure back to Taiwan. But Min wasn't gonna be able to do this alone. Eventually, he starts meeting

with other Taiwanese engineers like himself, who'd left Taiwan for the United States. And now he was gonna try and convince them to leave their jobs in the US and come back to Taiwan with him. Min was making the case that in the US, they're never gonna see you as a boss or a manager or a CEO.

You know, I recruit several people I know. So that was a reverse brain drain. Yeah. How many, how many brains did you drain from the US when you went back? Like how many people did you bring? In couple years, actually 40. 40? 40.

Whoa. All these engineers moving home? The KT Lee plan was ramping up, and the stakes were much bigger than just economics. If Taiwan could transform into Asia's Silicon Valley, then it would become indispensable to the world. The Taiwan miracle is indeed what people now call the extraordinarily fast shift in Taiwan's economy from growing things to making things to making high-tech things.

But it's important to note that even that miracle didn't include making semiconductors right away. In the 1980s, Minwu was on a mission to come home and open one of the earliest semiconductor factories on the island. And sure, maybe Taiwan was more friendly to the kind of long-term expensive business that Min wanted to build. But he was still going to need money. Lots of money. Well, at that time, only raised about $800 million and that means it's only $800 million NT dollars. And that means it's only 30 million US dollars.

Only 30 million US dollars. Min needed even more than that. And to get it, he would have to pull off a kind of like business trick shot, one of the most joyous global trade schemes we have ever heard of. A little bit of background here. By the late 70s, early 80s, semiconductors, memory chips in particular, were becoming super important. And the world's leader was not in Taiwan.

It wasn't in the US either. It was Japan. Japan was in fact so good at certain kinds of semiconductors that the US government had started complaining about Japanese semiconductors flooding the US and world markets. But after pressure from US businesses and a tense negotiation, the Japanese eventually agreed to open up its local microchip market to US companies. Specifically, Japan agreed that 20% of semiconductors they used would come from the US. Dan agreed that 20% of semiconductors they used would come from the US. Min Woo caught wind of this and thought, this might be the break he needed. And specifically, Min knew exactly the right Japanese company to go after.

This boy is doing more than just playing a video game. He has entered another world. Ah, yeah. Nintendo. Nintendo is, well, almost the most fun a kid can have. Yeah, sure. Anyway, we're talking about the original 8-bit and 16-bit systems here. The ones where you, you know, you have to blow on the cartridge and then maybe that seemed to make them work. It may be the most addictive toy in history. In just three years, they've sold more than 11 million hardware units at about a hundred bucks each.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, Nintendo was exploding in popularity and like any other computer system, it needed semiconductors. And what Min realized was that Nintendo was probably going to want a lot of American-made semiconductors because of that new 20% trade agreement. If Min could somehow land that contract, maybe that would be enough money to fund his dream of building a proper semiconductor factory. But it was going to take an epic scheme to land that deal.

Okay, problem number one. Min was in the process of leaving the US and setting up shop in Taiwan. Nintendo did not need a Taiwanese company. But Min thought he did found a US company, Macronics Inc., the place that made the key whistling stuff. And so he goes to Nintendo and says, Look, we're Macronics. Sure, I'm in Taiwan now, but it's a US company that I founded.

So I'm the only one, so they have to buy from me. And Nintendo apparently says like, oh, okay, we're interested. Let's get some of these semiconductors then. Now, of course, this is problem number two. Min does not have a semiconductor factory yet. That is what he's been trying to get money to build. And they take a long time to build. So whose semiconductors actually ended up in the Nintendos

that were then shipping to the United States? At that time, the biggest company called Samsung. Oh, they're Samsungs. We are buying Samsung and they sell it to them, okay? Min was buying South Korean Samsung semiconductors through a US-based version of his company in order to sell them to a Japanese company, and the whole scheme was a way to fund his real dream of building his own semiconductor factory in Taiwan. So this loophole on the 20%, this deal that had cut with the US, that was your opportunity? Yes, precisely. Min, that is genius.

And if you think about what was really happening, like the global forces of it, you have these three global superpowers, China feuding with the US, who is feuding with Japan. Min realized that when these titans fight, there are ways to take advantage of that, almost like a video game. Min was this clever sprite running circles around these giant bosses. And at that point, is Nintendo your biggest client?

Yes. Still? Still. Wow. Even today, still number one. I got one of these guys here. Do you recognize this here? Nintendo, yes. This is a Switch. This is a Switch. So this is the best

video game ever made and you're telling me one of your semiconductors is inside the best video game ever made? Or maybe two and another one could be controller and both for me. Amazing. It is the full realization of KT Lee's vision to rapidly evolve Taiwan's economy and it's the reason why he is known as the godfather of tech in Taiwan. He planted these like seeds, these policies and then tended to this idea and it's now grown up. We talked about how Japan used to be the world's semiconductor leader. I mean, they used to make half of the world's semiconductors. But now they're trying to catch up with Taiwan. Frankly, the US is too.

Because today, almost all of the world's advanced semiconductors come from Taiwan. Min's company has now grown into a roughly $60 billion company by market cap. And you can tell, like, if you ask him about any of this bigger stuff, China, the US, Taiwan, Min has gotten very good at not saying anything at all. Are you worried about what that success is going to do in terms of Taiwan's position and safety as it's stuck between, you know, China and the US obviously both having interest there? as it's stuck between, you know, China and the U.S., obviously both having interests there. What is good to me?

What is good to me to worry about that? I'm a scientist. I'm the businessman. All I want to do is to create the best solution for the world. Ramtin Erebloui and Kenny Malone from a 2022 episode of Planet Money. After the break, we'll bring back our professor to tell us the secrets of East Asian success. How to get rich quick as a nation coming up. They're all over the internet and bumping out of people's cars. They're the songs of the summer.

And this year includes the domination of Charlie XCX and Brat Summer. She's really tapping into this moment where we are all chronically online, but also chronically outside. We are talking about the songs of the summer and why they're so catchy and inescapable. Listen to the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast from NPR. Okay class, phones down, eyes forward. Or I guess ears forward, you know what I mean. Anyway, summer school's back in session, we have Professor Shia back with us. And let's just start big. How did the East Asian economies become very rich, very quickly. We told stories today of China and Taiwan, but we saw the same rapid development in South

Korea and Japan and Singapore. I know you've talked in the past about three things that East Asia had to help them succeed. So go. Number one, I think you see this all the examples is that there's got to be some sense of urgency, some sense of hunger, some sense that you're willing to do whatever it takes in order to make it work. And this is what you saw in, you know, all of these places, the ones that have been successful, they all had this philosophy that the hordes are just around the corner and we've got to out hustle them.

So principle number one, you need a sense of urgency. What else does a country need in order to act on that urgency? The second thing that they need is that they need to have a mechanism of accountability. They need to have a mechanism of competition, by which I mean, yes, you have thousands of people trying to put forward their ideas. Invariably it turns out that only some of these ideas are good ones and most of these ideas are bad ones. So a government needs to not just pick individual companies

as winners, but it needs to encourage those companies to compete in some way. So I know in South Korea, for instance, the government gave a lot of subsidies to young companies, but then it required them to export their goods in the world market. It required them to compete with the US and Europe. Exactly. And if they were not successful in competing in the world markets, the subsidies were gone.

And the idea of using the export market is that would be the test, right? That is, you could gain the domestic market because you have political power at home, but you have no political power in the American market. And it would be American consumers that would decide whether what you did was worth their while or not. So we have urgency, we have a sense of competition. What is the third thing East Asia can teach us about growing an economy? Successful companies need to have a way in order to scale. That is, you need to have a way to grow from this small startup to become this multi-billion

dollar company. What do you need for that to happen? You always need resources for that to happen. You need money, you need talent. In the case of China, a lot of what these companies need were licenses, right? Which was what was one of the things that was facilitated to them by Chinese local governments. So in the case of Taiwan, they brought back talent from abroad.

They invested money in research institutes and in this new Silicon Valley. But the key is Taiwan supported a lot of different companies. They provided the infrastructure for them to grow. They didn't just pick one and it let those companies compete over who could make the best semiconductor. Again, I just going to say that it's, it's, it's an easy thing not to think about, but you cannot forget the importance of the market. There are some cases where you do need the government to step in, but the

accountability of the market is crucial to make it work. Professor Cheng Tai-She teaches economics at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. Thank you so much for being our professor today. Thank you for having me on. It's been fun. Here at Simon School, we like to leave you with some big principles you can take out with you into the world. We heard in the first story the economic concept of self-interest. The

Chinese farmers worked harder when they received the benefits of their work. Adam Smith wrote that self-interest is the motivator of economic activity. We also heard about industrial policy. That's when a government decides which industries and which companies are going to receive government support. This can be helpful for a growing economy, but some economists think that it can also prop up bad businesses. And, of course, we have the three lessons that worked for East Asia at least. According to our professor, they had a sense of urgency to change. They had resources that allowed companies to scale. And number three, even though companies got government support, they had to compete. They had to sink or swim in the marketplace. If your hand hurts from writing all this down, there is an easier way. Our Planet Money TikTok team

is taking the lessons from this year's summer school and making them even more entertaining than I am. They have cavemen talking about the origins of money and a robot teacher explaining workers' rights. You have to see it to believe it. And don't forget to check out Planet Money Plus. We already have an extended interview up with Professor Shia about how current-day China might be endangering their own economic success.

Audrey Dilling produces Planet Money Summer School. Devin Miller is our project manager. Sophia Shukina fact-checked this episode. And Alex Goldmark is our editor and executive producer. Our engineer today is James Willits. I'm Robert Smith. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. The candidates for November are set. I know Donald Trump's tight. Between now and election day. We are not going back. A campaign season unfolding faster.

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