Killing sparrows led to famines in China
Someone once commented to me that rather than blaming Mao personally, the blame for the negative consequences of The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution should be placed on the systemic forces that legitimised the absence of domain experts in policy making.<p>It&#x27;s a nice sentiment but I have a gut feeling that these kinds of frameworks - where blame is taken away from people and attributed to abstract concepts - lead to worse outcomes long-term. Is that gut feeling just my evolutionary instincts talking or is it a sign of something useful?