Letters

Letters to the editor

On inflation, land reform, Britain, Johannes Vermeer, women, beer

When the price is right

You are right to argue that it would be clever for central banks to adopt a temporary price-level target if inflation is too low, the lower bound on interest rates has been reached and a recession hits (Free exchange, October 21st). That idea first came from William White, a former economic adviser at the Bank for International Settlements, and figures prominently in the bank’s 69th annual report, from June 1999.

Bill wrote the report with the assistance of a staff team (I helped him with the chapter on monetary policy). He was worried that falling prices in Japan would engender expectations of further price declines and raise real interest rates. To shift expectations, he argued that central banks should make up any price shortfalls by switching to a price-level target. To be credible, the possibility of such a switch would have to be announced well in advance of prices falling.

Although Bill is best known for warning before the financial crisis that rapid credit growth, rising leverage and opaque markets would end in tears, those who worked for him can testify that that was only one of his many insightful analyses.

STEFAN GERLACH
Former deputy-governor at the Central Bank of Ireland
Zurich

Land reform in Asia

Noting the connection between equitable, high-yield household farming and successful economic development, Banyan (October 14th) lauded Japan for its early and peaceful land-reform programme in 1945 and 1946, carried out under American occupation.

In that same period North Korea conducted what was at first a very successful, and peaceful, land-reform programme using little more than the remarkable persuasive powers of Kim Il Sung. If and when Kim Jong Un resolves the political challenges that face his country, and continues incipient moves to de-collectivise agriculture and return to the high-yield household farming his grandfather started with, it is likely that agriculture will underpin another of those growth “miracles” that Banyan praised.

In Ethiopia and Rwanda, meanwhile, land reforms and infrastructural, extension and financing support for high-yield household farming are underpinning the best development stories in Africa today.

JOE STUDWELL
Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Land reform has indeed played an important role in Asia’s leading development successes, including, as Banyan observed, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and mainland China. But the list is not complete without Vietnam, where the successful “land to the tiller” programme in the south from 1970 to 1973 ultimately led the pragmatists to break up all collective farms.

The resulting agriculture dominated by small farmers showed farm productivity and income gains similar to those in China.

ROY PROSTERMAN
Founder
Landesa
Seattle

Efficiency test

I would venture that the current Mr Bagehot confuses his predecessor’s “efficient” element of the British constitution—the prime minister, government ministries and so on—with smooth administration (Bagehot, October 21st). In 1877, the year that Walter Bagehot died, Irish nationalists embarked on a political quest for Irish home rule that over the next 50 years reflected the deeply held aspirations of a large portion of the Irish population. This was something that the “efficient” part of the constitution proved unable to resolve, leading to non-parliamentary and sometimes violent means to find a partial solution.

Today, some political issues require big answers. Managing the status quo is sometimes not enough, and an unsustainable status quo needs to be remade. The Brexit referendum was another extra-parliamentary action that involved the widest participation by the public on an issue of profound constitutional importance, one which the efficient machinery of government also had not been able to solve.

JONATHAN MOORE
London

Rescued from obscurity

The mistaken notion of Johannes Vermeer as an isolated genius cannot simply be ascribed to “a 19th-century art-historian” who nicknamed him “the Sphinx of Delft” (“Answering the riddle”, October 14th). The anonymous art-historian in question was in fact Théophile Thoré, a political journalist, art critic and historian best-known for his rediscovery of Vermeer.

His pioneering research into Vermeer began in the late 1850s during his exile from France at a time when only about five or six paintings securely attributed to Vermeer were generally known. Recognising Vermeer’s exceptional artistic qualities, Thoré was puzzled that so few paintings were identified and that virtually nothing was known about his life. This mysterious paucity of information about Vermeer led to Thoré’s sobriquet mon Sphinx.

Thoré’s championing of the artist prompted the rise in Vermeer’s posthumous historical and critical fortunes, but he never presented Vermeer as a lone genius, isolated from his contemporaries. On the contrary, Thoré studied Vermeer in the context of other 17th-century Dutch genre painters, such as Gabriël Metsu, Gerard ter Borch and Pieter de Hooch. The difference was that many of Vermeer’s superb paintings had been variously wrongly attributed to these contemporaries, and his identity had become unjustly neglected. Vermeer was an exceptional artist, but not a lone genius.

FRANCES SUZMAN JOWELL
Independent art-historian
London

Equal before the law

The news about the sexual abuse of women in the workplace (“Sex and power”, October 21st) made me reflect on an initiative that male politicians in America might want to reconsider to show the other half that we’re disgusted by what’s happening: reintroduce the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution. This was front-page news in the 1970s, passing Congress but just falling shy of ratification in the states. It declares that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Its time is now.

PAUL FEINER
Greenburgh, New York

A lifestyle choice

Oliver Reif remarked that “telling Americans to buy fewer guns is like telling Germans to drink less beer” (Letters, October 14th). Germans are drinking less beer. From 1980 to 2016 annual consumption per head drooped from 146 litres to 104. This probably isn’t because of exceptionally rational behaviour on the part of Germans. I guess it is rather a lifestyle issue. Maybe that’s the angle to try for reducing gun deaths in America as well.

KARL BARTELS
Potsdam, Germany

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