Market economy may make the world boring if people are busy in the same way. Things may get disgusting, as one can see at times in this country, from copying other people's designs to imitating their styles.
That was my experience when I saw, on an airplane back from a business trip to Shanghai recently, a young man in his 20s carrying an LV bag and wearing a pair of wide black framed Chanel sunglasses.
What a nightmare, I thought, if one morning all consumers would find themselves carrying the same design of bags to go to work and go to school.
Fortunately, you do not have such encounters as often in Beijing, a city where people often claim to own a longer history and richer tradition. But that is only on the surface, as I also found recently. Wherever there is the drive for instant returns, be it money or vanity, people tend to become crazy in more or less the same way.
An economics professor from Peking University, one of the most famed schools in the nation, virtually took a bet by declaring that at a certain point of time, the housing price of Shenzhen would continue its upward spiral.
He announced that this time last year, during a press debate with some opponents. But last week, when that point of time arrived, what he had thought to be a good bet turned out to be quite the opposite. A number of factors have been working, most noticeably the government policy, to dampen the rising prices.
At the same time, the stock market has not generated much return for the investors, when the Shanghai Composite Index hovered below 3,000 points as compared with 6,000 points last year.
Not just in one city, but in many business cities in the Chinese mainland, the property market is beginning to see a crisis (which, incidentally, my bet is, is not a major one).
So the economics professor could only do what he had promised to do if he would fail to win the bet. Out of his own pocket (reportedly 30,000 yuan), he published an open "apology to the people of Shenzhen" in a half-page newspaper ad - although in his "apology" he never admitted anything wrong in his economics theory.
There is certainly something wrong. It is close to an abuse to his own learning to use it as a bet - particularly for a certain event at a certain time. Academic theory cannot be a toy like that. Even in analyses of the financial market - that usually just about one company, it is subject to many serious constraints.
It is always highly risky, and potentially requires intensive data analysis and readjustment, to try to forecast that something would occur at a precise point of time.
Just as contributors to some online forums have pointed out, the Peking University professor is only one of the many "monkeys" striving for personal fame by throwing up casual economic forecasts - often betting on for how long the property boom would continue and when the property market would go bust. The game has been going on for at least four years, with some betting on down, and others betting on up.
Yet till now, none of them has successfully forecast the market slump now and none of them is forecasting how long the current slump would continue, and how much the general property price would fall.
None of them seems capable of, or interested in, coming up with some ideas about China's housing strategy by relating with such factors as demography, national income, and consumer propensity.
But why, one may ask, are many professors and researchers so tireless in copying each other's irresponsible way of talking to the public and in making such sensational but useless forecasts? A desire for instant success may be the answer, even though in the end they can only fail and look silly.
E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn
(China Daily 07/14/2008 page4)
