Daily Archives: January 22, 2007

Interesting Discussion on China

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Janes Pethokoukis:

When will the Chinese middle class push for greater political freedom to match growing economic freedom?

The $64,000 question. The extent of the ideological bankruptcy of the Chinese Communist Party is not widely understood in the U.S. It claims single party rule because it is the trustee of the 1949 Communist revolution governing democratically for China’s workers and peasants. Its problem is that communism is in reverse worldwide, and under the doctrine of the “Three Represents” invented by Jiang Zemin, the party now accepts that class war is over and that it must represent all Chinese society. In which case: Why no accountability? Change came in the Soviet Union with the fifth generation of leaders; the fifth generation of leaders succeeds Hu Jintao in 2012. I don’t expect any change until after then, but my guess is that sometime in the mid-to-late 2010s, the growing Chinese middle class will want to hold the Chinese official and political class to account for how they spend their taxes and for their political choices.

The Wall Street Journal posted an email interview with Friedman which included a few words on China.

Requiem for Magic Bullets

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Steve Silberman:

The golden age of antibiotics began in 1944 with the widespread use of penicillin in Europe, which saved many thousands of lives during World War II. But the first sign that this new era of easily treatable bacterial infections would not last appeared just a couple of years later, with the emergence of penicillin-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium responsible for a wide variety of ailments, from skin infections to fatal pneumonia.


By 1950, 40 percent of the staph strains in hospitals had already become immune to the drug. Now a form of staph known as methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, or MRSA, which is resistant to nearly every known antibiotic, is responsible for the majority of tens of thousands of deaths a year from infections picked up in U.S. hospitals alone.



Bacteria develop immunity to antibiotics by rapidly evolving genetic defenses against the drugs or by acquiring pieces of DNA and RNA from organisms that are already resistant — even from other bacterial species. Bacterial pathogens that have learned how to survive in hospitals have an evolutionary advantage, because there are plenty of other resistant organisms in the environment from which they can borrow resistance factors.