China: More Good News

China's Premier has announced his expectation that economic growth this year will fall below the amazing 8% average of the past 25 years: to about 7.5%. Behind the raw number - which is still massively greater than the world's average rate of growth - is the important fact that this is a period of consolidation and change in patterns of consumption.

In the terms of Personal Political Economy the great shift is that there is an increasing number of empowered consumers each year: people with greater disposable income [and in some cases borrowing power that enables them to make bug purchases] are able to move from subsisting only on marcoms [basic commodities that meet needs] t being able to enjoy the experience of consuming quons. Just a few western Economists, including notably Harry Johnson, recognised in broad terms the difference between quons and marcoms. Johnson called quons 'positional goods' but he did not live long enough to develop any significant theory; and it remains probable that the mainstream of his 'profession' would not have accepted the concept. In the decades since that aborted airing of the issue, naive Economists have continued to treat 'goods' as a whole; while Chinese economic planners - in particular - have recognised the significance of the differentiation and the importance of fostering a shift of consumption from having more 'essentials' [which in excess can make people obese] to being able to acquire quons which embody consumer experiences that invoke a different sense of satisfaction.  

As Chinese consumers gain flexibility over spending their increased wages they acquire the power to make a different sort of choice. In their millions they have opted to acquire different sorts of meat as well as computer games and, more recently, a whole range of 'aps'. Higher up the income scale, people have bought hundreds of thousands of quintessential quons: new apartments. Financing the boom in property has led to a huge extension of borrowing, both overt and illicit, and the authorities have not been completely successful in controlling that expansion. In periods when restraints on funding property purchases have really bitten, the market has lost momentum; then measures have been found for expanding credit again and restarting the building and the sales - and confounding the western Economists who have seen the 'property crunch' as evidence of the fundamental instability of the Chinese economy and an imagined 'need' to move to a neo-marginalist market model.

China is a much more rational system than those Economists can understand. People rising from abysmally low standards of living have been brought in their hundreds of millions into a market economy, where at first they receive subsistence wages [which a majority of urban workers still receive]. Then their productivity rises to enable them to be paid enough to become highly selective consumers of quons. The first little luxuries are the most highly prized, as they open up a new horizon for the individual. The payment made for them is sacrificial, and the satisfaction received is incalculable. Of course, if the buyer is cheated and receives consumption that is not what they had been led to expect, the anger and disappointment experienced by the consumers is also incalculable: which justifies significant control of products and markets.

The best way to raise workers' productivity in an already-industrialised country is by adding quon production to marcom production. If China can produce the majority of the quons that spread over the country from its own industries, that is the best way of combining the dissemination of quons with spreading around the incme that enables more people to consume more quons. This is precisely what is happening: and the slight reduction in reported economic growth while an increasing commitment to quon .is implemented will be followed by a period of rapidly rising productivity and then of incomes. Once Chinese quons are well proven in the home markets they will be ready for export: often under established western trade marks, which the Chinese have assiduously been buying over recent years.

Those who choose not to recognise what is happening will suffer when the development of the Chinese economy faces them with further reductions in their western standards of living. The sadness is, that Economists will not bear the brunt of the impact: that fate, as usual, falls to the poor who have been so appallingly deceived by the politicians who remain deluded by market models.