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My post title here is of course Deng Xiaoping’s slogan celebrating the opening of China’s economy to private enterprise. It is also an allusion to the tendency of prominent academic economists to line their pockets by serving as (typically secret) “hired guns” post on Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs’ troubling defense of China As Alan points out, there is nothing inherently wrong with an academic writing in support of some entity. But as I have noted, if the academic in question is accepting funding from that entity, serious ethical issues arise: > If one takes money from a given source and wants to continue > receiving the funds, one cannot do work antagonizing the source. And the corollary is that, if the entity asks the academic to write on something specific, it’s difficult if not impossible to decline. Alan notes that Sachs then blocked Fish from following Sachs’ Twitter feed. But there’s more. Sachs did reply that he had received no Huawei funding. But then I wrote, > Just to be clear: Huawei has not funded Columbia or your > organization? Then, after having taken so much flak on Twitter, Sachs actually closed his own Twitter account In spite of China’s many recent troubling actions, there are things that economists might praise. The question is whether the praise is Last Wednesday at 10 pm, I decided to check the TV news. Here’s what I found: The Chinese-language channel KTSF led with the latest on Canada’s arrest of Huawei’s CFO, with a US request to extradite; the local English station KTVU (Fox, but liberal) led with the Bush funeral; and CNN…well of course, it was Mueller, Mueller, Mueller as usual. Arguably, only the Chinese program got it right. US-China relations are spiraling out of control. China is threatening to mean arrest of Canadians in China, and of course denounced the US for “illegally” requesting Canada to extradite Meng Wanzhou, the even if the advisory is lifted, not only with this event but many other troubling actions by China in the last couple of years, e.g. the