The authors consider how and by how much China's stellar economic performance might be impaired by eight potential adversities that China may face in the next decade.

Fault Lines in China's Economic Terrain

Business & Money

Eberstadt, Nicholas

Zycher, Benjamin

Yeh, K. C.

Wolf RAND Chair in International Economics, Charles

Lee, Sung-Ho

Economics

RAND Corporation

In this wide-ranging study, Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates that some of the most basic of today's domestic and foreign policies have been buttressed or justified by what turns out to be mis-analysis or misuse of available facts and figures. The Tyranny of Numbers not only warns about the ways the statistics are being misused in government policy in the United States and abroad but explains how this process can end up injuring vulnerable groups or distorting the workings of the democratic system.

The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule (Aei Studies, 528)

Science & Math

Mathematics

AEI Press

In this wide-ranging study, Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates that some of the most basic of today's domestic and foreign policies have been buttressed or justified by what turns out to be misanalysis or misuse of available facts and figures. The Tyranny of Numbers not only warns about the ways the statistics are being misused in government policy in the United States and abroad but explains how this process can end up injuring vulnerable groups or distorting the workings of the democratic system.

The Tyranny of Numbers:: Mismeasurement and Misrule

Prolonging North Korea's life may actually increase the costs and the dangers of its inevitable demise.

The End of North Korea

Since its inception in 1965, America's official poverty rate (OPR) has been the single most important statistic used by policymakers and concerned citizens to evaluate success or failure in the nation's ongoing struggle against material need. But in a critical new examination of this widely followed measure, Nicholas Eberstadt charges that the OPR is, in reality, "a broken compass"―a flawed index generating increasingly misleading numbers about poverty in the United States. The OPR was originally intended to track an absolute level of poverty over time by comparing a family's reported pretax income against a corresponding poverty threshold. But for the past three decades, the OPR has reported trends that are jarringly inconsistent with other statistical indicators of material deprivation. What is the reason for this curious discrepancy? Eberstadt suggests that the OPR's most serious problem is its implicit assumption that poor families will spend no more than their reported annual incomes―in other words, that their income levels are an accurate proxy for their consumption levels. In the decades since the OPR was unveiled, the disparity between reported income and expenditures has progressively widened, making income an ever less reliable predictor of consumption patterns―and, consequently, living standards―for America's poorer families. In The Poverty of "The Poverty Rate," Eberstadt contends that the defects of the current poverty rate are not only severe but irremediable. Income-based measures cannot offer a faithful portrait of consumption patterns or material well-being in the United States. Central though the OPR has become to antipoverty policy, this "untrustworthy yardstick" should be discarded and replaced by more accurate measures of deprivation.

The Poverty of the Poverty Rate: Measure and Mismeasure of Material Deprivation in Modern America

The papers collected in this volume recount a 40-year struggle between scholarship and illusion on matters of great importance. They do much more than that: They present a matchless course of instruction in the demographics of poverty and prosperity, hardship and health, and progress and decline, and they paint a vivid, pointillist portrait of the circumstances of modern humanity. Nick Eberstadt, armed only with data and patient study, debunks Al Gore, Jared Diamond, and Planned Parenthood on population growth and population control; then demolishes a phalanx of ideologues on world hunger and famine; then shreds Jeffrey Sachs and UN officialdom on economic growth and international aid programs. And then he dares all of us to confront humanitarian catastrophes that many prefer to ignore, such as enforced immiserization in North Korea and the now-extensive global practice of selective abortion of females.

Population, Poverty, Policy: Essential Essays from Nicholas Eberstadt

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

The study analyzes and challenges the income inequality hypothesis, which purports to show that inequality in income―not poverty per se―is bad for people's health.

Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis: A Doctrine in Search of Data

Satel, Sally

Health, Fitness & Dieting

One third of the world's population today lives under governments that consider themselves to be Marxist-Leninist. In many of these places, severe poverty was endemic in the years before Communist authorities came to power. Communist governments claim to have a special understanding into and effectiveness in dealing with problems of poverty. Marxist-Leninist rulers have been in power for nearly thirty years in Cuba, nearly forty years in China, and over sixty-five years in the Soviet Union. How do the poor fare in such places today? Western intellectuals often assume there is an inevitable tradeoff between bread and freedom under communism. What populations lose in the way of civil and political rights, they gain in social guarantees that protect them against material hardship. In The Poverty of Communism, Nick Eberstadt challenges this assumption and shatters it. He shows that Communist governments in a wide variety of settings have been no more successful in attending to the material needs of the most vulnerable segments of the populations they govern than non-Communist governments against which they might most readily be compared. Indeed, measured by the health, literacy, and nutrition of their people, Communist governments may today be less effective in dealing with poverty than are non-Communist governments. The Poverty of Communism is a pathbreaking investigation. In a series of separate studies, Eberstadt analyzes the performance of Communist governments in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and Cuba. This is the first scholarly effort to assess the record of Communist governments with respect to poverty in a detailed and comprehensive fashion. Well written, carefully argued, and reflecting a sweeping range of knowledge, The Poverty of Communism will be of interest to specialists in the countries investigated as well as those concerned with comparative economic and political development. Above all, it gives testimony to the plight of voiceless populations about which all too little has been written from an objective standpoint.

The Poverty of Communism

History

Europe

Routledge

Viewed from afar, North Korea may appear bizarre, or positively irrational. But as Nicholas Eberstadt demonstrates in this meticulously researched volume, there is a grim coherence to North Korea's political economy, and a ruthless logic undergirding it--one that unreservedly subordinates economic welfare to augmentation of political power. Thus, paradoxically, even as official policies and practices consign the DPRK economy to a perilous realm between crisis and catastrophe, the country's leadership maintains unchallenged domestic control and has actually managed to increase its international influence.Through painstaking collection of hard-to-uncover data and careful analysis, Eberstadt provides a quantitative tableau of North Korea's terrible failure in its economic race against South Korea; its stubborn adherence to policies all but guaranteed to stifle growth and undermine economic performance; and the longstanding official effort to ignore, or mitigate, pressures for economic reform.Eberstadt is skeptical of optimistic accounts from South Korea and elsewhere suggesting that the North Korean leadership is interested in resolving the current nuclear impasse, and getting on with the business of reform and development. So long as Pyongyang's rulers entertain the ambition of reunifying the Korean peninsula on its own terms, Eberstadt argues, economic reforms worthy of the name will be subversive of state authority--and vigilantly resisted by Pyongyang's rulers. This authoritative volume has received widespread attention from Asian specialists, well as those concerned with nuclear proliferation and world peace, and international relations professionals in general.

The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe

Cavanaugh, Catherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eberstadt, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Eberstadt, Nicholas

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Eberstadt, Nicholas. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fault Lines in China's Economic Terrain

The Tyranny of Numbers: Mismeasurement and Misrule (Aei Studies, 528)

The Tyranny of Numbers:: Mismeasurement and Misrule

The End of North Korea

The Poverty of the Poverty Rate: Measure and Mismeasure of Material Deprivation in Modern America

Population, Poverty, Policy: Essential Essays from Nicholas Eberstadt

Health and the Income Inequality Hypothesis: A Doctrine in Search of Data

The Poverty of Communism

The Poverty of Communism

The North Korean Economy: Between Crisis and Catastrophe