What is sufficiency-first?
The idea that poor people benefit more when you generate opportunities that are small in scale and low-tech. Obvious as a prescription — heretical in development.
Writing
Foundational essays on sufficiency-first, the cases that illustrate it, and shorter pieces for general audiences.
Foundational essays — how the idea developed, what it claims, where it leads.
The idea that poor people benefit more when you generate opportunities that are small in scale and low-tech. Obvious as a prescription — heretical in development.
My 'discovery' of a fifty-year-old idea. How a puzzle about two neighboring Chinese provinces led, eventually, to what I now call sufficiency-first.
If we brought sufficiency-first to its logical conclusion, what would society look like? On scale, Kuhn, and the call for an epistemic community.
A new UN commission wants to move beyond GDP. The trouble: the UN built the architecture that makes GDP mandatory in practice — and a dashboard of voluntary indicators won't dethrone a metric that's required to belong.
Sufficiency First now has a logo: a bowl filled to the brim, with a sun rising above it. Three shapes carry the whole argument.
Examples of small works in practice — drawn from agriculture, industry, and beyond.
A ranching town of 140 in Montana, a poor province in southwest China, and the same bargain made in two languages. On data centers, the 'scissors gap,' and what self-rule turns out not to deliver.
What Taiwan forgot about its own pathway out of poverty. On TSMC's triumph, two divergent clocks, and the difference between an economy that includes its poor versus one that just redistributes to them.
Nepal cut poverty substantially over three decades despite slow growth, weak governance, and stalled land reforms. Co-authored with Siddharth Poddar for Stonebench's Perspectives blog — what actually worked, and why.
KFC, Nescafé, vegetables, cut flowers — all sourced from small Chinese farmers. How land rights kept agribusiness small-scale, for a while.
Lessons from Isan, the rice basket of Thailand, on what it takes to shift small-scale farmers into certified organic production.
Most poor people in poor countries farm. When subsistence becomes unviable, mainstream economists prescribe scaling up. But there are other ways.
Primers and explainers — reference pieces, teaching material, and sections that fell out of academic work. The machinery before the arguments start.
Five levels, forty thousand townships, and a single word that means four different things — a primer on why China's local state defeats the people who study it.
Observations on scholarship: how it is measured and mismeasured, and the big ideas we inherit without examining.
Progress builds; the dialectic breaks. Why the difference confuses almost everyone, and why both ideas deserve more suspicion than they get.
On the seductions and distortions of citation databases — from someone who has spent a lot of time reading them.
Commentary for general audiences — a few pieces with full text, audio, or video hosted here, and a longer list of op-eds published with external outlets such as Channel News Asia, Wall Street Journal, Straits Times, Brink Asia, and Karyawan.
Featured
Op-ed for Channel News Asia on the centrality of poverty in Chinese politics, a century after the founding of the Communist Party.
Featured
A brief interview on BBC Radio's News Day discussing the announcement that China had eradicated absolute rural poverty.
Featured
A short video on the persistence of poverty in China — a reminder that the 'end of absolute poverty' is not the end of poverty.
Wall Street Journal Webinar · with Jason Douglas
Karyawan (AMP Singapore) 16(3): 9–12
Karyawan (AMP Singapore) 14(1): 13–16 · with Pearlyn Neo
Karyawan (AMP Singapore) 13(1): 9–11
Karyawan (AMP Singapore) 12(1): 17–20 · with Abdul Shariff Aboo Kassim
Brink Asia
IPP Review · with Joel Moore
IPP Review · with Zhanping Hu and Q. Forrest Zhang
Lianhe Zaobao (in Chinese) · with Curtis Chin
Wall Street Journal Asia · with Curtis Chin
Straits Times · with Forrest Q. Zhang
Straits Times · with Forrest Q. Zhang
Lianhe Zaobao (in Chinese) · with Forrest Q. Zhang
Asian Post
Reviews of recent scholarship on China, rural development, and the politics of poverty.
China Journal
China Journal 87(1): 130–2
The Developing Economies 59(3): 327–30
Journal of Chinese Political Science 24(3): 551–53
China Quarterly 233: 250–52
China Journal 79: 154–6
China Journal 78: 133–5
China Review 1(2): 203–5
China Quarterly 223: 140–2
Pacific Affairs 86(1): 140–2
Journal of Asian Studies 71(2): 539–41