For a book that purports to recount “an economic history of China, Russia, and the West,” Vladimir Popov's Mixed Fortunes is conspicuously short: just 164 pages (not including references) of distilled wisdom scattered between layers of tables, graphs, and pie charts. Though painfully concise, the book sets out to answer a big, old question: Why is it that some countries are so rich and others are so poor? Specifically, Popov tries to explain China's success in its economic reforms compared to the former Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
In explaining why the West got ahead of the rest from about 1500, Popov highlights the importance of the breakdown of collectivist institutions in Western Europe and accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many: growing social inequality made industrialization possible. Other factors, including scientific inventions, were decidedly secondary.
Popov argues that Russia adopted Western methods of economic growth, dismantling collectivist institutions at a high social cost. But for reasons Popov never quite explains, the Russians did not make it, not even with Sergei Witte's and Pyotr Stolypin's reforms; by the early twentieth century, the gap between Russia and the West had widened, leading ultimately to “the courageous attempt to restore social justice capacity of the state,” that is, the Bolshevik revolution (p. 58). The Soviet economic system, he continues, delivered growth but it could not work forever. In what counts as the only vaguely interesting claim of the book, Popov suggests that the Soviet command economy followed the life cycle of the fixed capital stock. That is, when the original industrial capacities aged, the Soviets, for structural reasons, could not renew them, spending on the expansion of production rather than on the refurbishment of existing capacities. This, Popov argues, gave the Soviet command economy a natural life span of twenty or so years, at which point (in the 1960s) market reforms became necessary—but the required decisions were never made and the economy stagnated.
Not so in Communist China. Like the Soviet Union, the Chinese experienced dramatic growth under a command economy minus the “drawbacks” of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until the Chinese capital stock also aged and had to be replaced; it was just then that Deng Xiaoping arrived on the scene with his program of market reforms. The timing worked better for the Chinese than for the Soviets, says Popov, who adds that unlike Russia, which squandered its socialist achievements in the 1990s, the Chinese were able to maintain the continuity of traditional collectivist institutions that brought about social stability and facilitated reform.
Popov's discussion of China is misguided in almost every way. One of the biggest problems is his discussion of its “traditional collectivist institutions” that minimized social inequalities, enabling economic growth without the high social costs associated with Western industrialization and post-1991 Russian reforms. For all this emphasis on the importance of these institutions, Popov never says what they are. The term “Asian values” creeps up periodically (without any engagement with the vast literature on these so-called Asian values), though in a footnote on page 89 we learn that these include “respect to the ancestors and elderly and Confucian values.”
On the whole, Popov is bullish on the “extremely successful” Maoist experiment, crediting it with the creation of a “strong state” that allowed Deng Xiaoping's reforms to go forward (p. 81). Never mind the cost. Indeed, China historians tired of reading about the twenty to forty million lives lost in the famine in the wake of Mao's Great Leap Forward will be pleased to learn from Popov that the “biggest ‘man made’ economic disaster ever to happen” was actually the post-Soviet transition (p. 95).
Throughout the book, Popov makes the case that strong institutions are an important component of economic growth, while the collapse of a functioning government is not so helpful. Fair enough. But when it comes to identifying these strong institutions, Popov vacillates between stressing the state's ability to enforce rules in regulations (as, we learn with satisfaction, they have done in China since 1949) and the ability to maintain “order.” From this vacillation comes Popov's counterintuitive conclusion that the “stories of success” among the post-Soviet states include Belarus and Uzbekistan, both fine examples (in Popov's assessment) of the state's success in the fight against corruption (p. 107). I got the impression that in reaching this conclusion, Popov accidentally flipped the Corruption Perceptions Index upside down (in 2014, Uzbekistan scored 166 out of 174, Belarus 119).
The list of strange arguments may well be continued but this is not the worst problem with the book. The bigger problem is Popov's research methodology. Readers will discover that he relied on such reputable resources as HowStuffWorks (howstuffworks.com) for discussion of the savings rates in ancient Egypt; a blog called China Expat (chinaexpat.com) to explain the building of the Great Wall; and, sure enough, Wikipedia to comment on the achievements of the Marshall Plan. That said, maybe Popov did not rely enough on Wikipedia. Had he done that, perhaps he would have correctly spelled the name of the first Chinese Emperor (misspelled on p. 82) or even correctly identified the century of the Mongol invasion of China (p. 89).
Readers of the book will also discover that it varies widely stylistically, shifting between historical metanarratives and nitty-gritty details like a typology of recessions. The first impression that the book was glued together from previously published papers is confirmed on closer examination. Recent discussion around Zygmunt Bauman highlighted the problems of self-plagiarism; most scholars engage in it in one form or another, but not quite on Popov's scale.
Comparing the book line by line with previous publications is a tedious process, so I randomly sampled just two sentences: “Manufacturing growth is like cooking a good dish—all the necessary ingredients should be in the right proportion; if just one is under- or over-represented, the ‘chemistry of growth’ will not happen. Fast economic growth can materialize in practice only if several necessary conditions are met at the same time” (p. 112). A cursory and incomplete search revealed that the preceding two sentences have appeared in Popov's previous work an astounding six times (“The Long Road to Normalcy: Where Russia Now Stands,” in Piotr Dutkiewicz and Dmitri Trenin, eds., Russia: The Challenges of Transformation [2011]; “Is Chinese Variety of Capitalism Really Unique,” MPRA Paper No. 28109 [May 2010]; “Development Theories and Development Experience: Half a Century Journey,” MPRA Paper No. 28111 [March 2010]; “Russia: Austerity and Deficit Reduction in Historical and Comparative Perspective,” Cambridge Journal of Economics [2012]; “Transformational Recession,” in Michael Alexeev and Shlomo Weber, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy [2013]; “The Economic Situation in Present-Day Russia,” in J. L. Black and Michael Johns, eds., Russia after 2012: From Putin to Medvedev to Putin—Continuity, Change, or Revolution? [2013]). Some things are so important, of course, that one never tires of repeating them. Still, I am somewhat puzzled as to how problems like this slipped past the watchful eyes of Oxford University Press editors, who are among the world's best, and how the book could have been approved by anonymous reviewers—not to mention the exalted professors who wrote the blurbs: “filled with fresh thinking,” “remarkably original,” “big, bold book.” Not on my bookshelf, thank you very much.
