Of course, bad policies happen all the time without causing millions to die. Even in the absence of war or epidemic disease, bad policy within a totalitarian political system caused the deaths of tens of millions of people. Yet the catastrophic effects of bad policies can be all too obvious, as the Great Leap Forward shows. We sometimes have a hard time identifying the benefits of policies, or even convincing ourselves that policy makes a difference. Nearly a third of those born during the Great Leap Forward did not survive it. According to several accounts, life expectancy in China, which was nearly 50 in 1958, fell to below 30 in 1960 five years later, once Mao had stopped killing people, it had risen to nearly 55. If Mao had reversed course when the extent of the mass starvation first became clear to the leadership, the famine would have lasted one year, not three, and in any case there was more than enough grain in government stores to prevent everyone from starving. To do otherwise and admit the error of the Great Leap forward would have imperiled Mao's own leadership position, and he was prepared to sacrifice tens of millions of his countrymen to prevent that happening. (In any case, in these early years of the revolution, the Party was widely trusted.) When Mao learned of the disasters (though probably not of their full scale), he doubled down on the policies, purging the messengers, labeling them "right-deviationists," and blaming peasants for secretly hoarding food. Draconian restrictions on travel and communication prevented word from getting out, and the penalties for dissent were clear: three-quarters of 1 million people had been executed in 1950-51. Given the enormous increases in production that were confidently expected, peasant labor was diverted to public works projects and rural steel-making plants, most of which achieved nothing. At the same time, the Party caused chaos in the countryside by ordering that all private land be turned into communes, confiscating private property and even private cooking utensils, and making people eat in communal kitchens. Under the totalitarian system maintained by the Communist Party of China, rural communes competed to exaggerate their output, further inflating the already unattainable procurement quotas and leaving nothing for people to eat. Outlandish production targets were set to match the food needs of rapidly industrializing cities and to earn foreign exchange through exports of food. Mao Zedong and his fellow leaders were determined to show the superiority of communism, to quickly overtake production levels in Russia and in Britain, and to establish Mao's leadership of the communist world. Weather conditions were not unusual in these years the famine was entirely man-made. One of the worst in human history was China's "Great Leap Forward" in 1958-61, hewn of deeply misguided industrialization and food procurement policies led to the deaths of around thirty-five million people from starvation and prevented the births of perhaps forty million more. In spite of overall progress, there have been catastrophes. It should be quoted not merely because of his new prominence but also because this stunning horror is too little known. It includes his own short summary of Mao’s famine, on pages 38-40. His excellent book is called The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. The Nobel Prize in economics this year was given to Angus Deaton for his empirical work in measuring poverty and prosperity. And I whisper a small thank you for private property and markets that make oil - and my whole life that I take for granted - possible. Because I read about this China experience, I remember it almost every time I cook. Think of cooking without oils at all, no butter, corn oil, bacon, or any other fat at all. Think about this the next time you prepare dinner. (I will spare you the details of how people used human corpses.) Here was a result we don’t think about: there was no fat for cooking whatever food was left.
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