Did Chinese laborers on the Yangtze pay someone to whip them? Why can’t political scientists and economists resist telling this evidence-free story? And why do they keep embellishing it?

Someone sends in a bizarre story shared by an anonymous blogger. It starts with a political scientist and economist named Michael Munger, who said in 2018:

There’s a famous example in China, where a group of coolies … have to pull a barge up the Yangtze River … There’s a trade-off … how do you make the 30 guys work hard? The insight of the team production problem is we need … division of labor. … If I’m pulling, I can’t spend my time watching you and you can’t spend your time watching me. We’ll create a new job, called the monitor. … We’ll give the monitor a whip. Now this looks like slavery. The great thing about this, and this is from an article by an economist named Steven NS Cheung. He found that this guy with a whip—and this is the most incredible thing Russ!—this guy with a whip was hired and paid by the coolies!

Wow—I’d never heard that story before! Paying to get whipped? Hard to believe, huh?

Where did the story come from? Here’s Cheung in 2018:

In 1970, Toronto’s John McManus was my guest in Seattle. I chatted to him about what happened when I was a refugee in wartime Guangxi. The journey from Liuzhou to Guiping was by river, and there were men on the banks whose job was to drag the boat with ropes. There was also an overseer armed with a whip. According to my mother, the whipper was hired to do just that by the boatmen!

My tale went the rounds, and it was seized by a number of neo-institutional economists. I tried to dissuade McManus, tell him not to publish his piece based on my Guangxi story, but he went ahead nonetheless. (See his “The Cost of Alternative Economic Organizations”, Canadian Journal of Economics1975). In 1976 Jensen and Meckling (1976) published a widely-cited paper in Journal of Financial Economics (“Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure”). As a result of all this, the Guangxi boatmen and their hired whippers gained posthumous fame. However, this could be a story invented by my mother – the smartest person I have ever known – to entertain a boy of seven!

The anonymous blogger quotes economist Ronald Coase in 2006 discussing the general problem of people taking a story and using it to illustrate some social science principle, without checking out the details of the story itself. Here’s Coase:

Facts are not like clay on a potter’s wheel, that can be molded to produce the desired result. They constitute the immutable material that we have to accept. …

What is it about the conduct of economics that led these able and honest economists to embrace error? …

it is the result of economics having become a theory-driven subject. …

If it is believed that their theory tells us how people would behave in different circumstances, it will appear unnecessary to many to make a detailed study of how they did in fact act. This leads to a very casual attitude toward checking the facts. If it is believed that certain contractual arrangements will lead to opportunistic behavior, it is not surprising that economists misinterpret the evidence and find what they expect to find.

The blogger continues:

Instead of taking the time to study and verify the facts, the economist prefers to seize upon any purported facts and shoehorn them to fit her preferred theories and worldviews. “Never let the facts get in the way of a sexy and publishable theory” could be the economist’s motto.

Of course, there exists the possibility that at some time in history, some workers some place did on at least one occasion hire a monitor to whip them. The problem is that we have zero evidence that this ever happened, other than a story a mother told to her seven-year-old son, who then repeats it decades later. A few decades further, the academic urban legend becomes an established fact that can be cited as evidence for one’s preferred theories and worldviews (and ignored otherwise). . . .

It is not OK—indeed it’s intellectually dishonest to cite a story as evidence when you know it might be false.

We need to call BS whenever we see it (and not just when the BS happens to challenge our preferred theories and worldviews).

And the BS is out there! The anonymous blogger writes:

With Clement and McCormick (1989), the story has become the “famous Chinese boatpullers fable”, where “the monitor uses his vision, intuition, and experience to determine shirking, counseling the loafers with his whip.”

Other writers that repeat the story include Ricketts (1990), Miller (1992), Watts (1992), Pejovich (1995), Donleavy (2005), Surdam (2010), and Munger (2019).

The bit about “counseling the loafers with his whip”—that’s really creepy! I guess this is supposed to be one of those “repugnant ideas” that some economists are so proud of, but to me this sort of edgelord remark seems like a symptom of moral rot. Ha ha those loafers are getting whipped, pretty funny, huh?

This reminds me of a story . . .

There was this business school professor, Karl Weick, who went around telling a story about soldiers in the snow in World War 1 . . . Weick lifted the story from a somewhat obscure poem . . . in retelling the story he altered it in a way that allowed him to make the points he wanted to make. I learned about this episode from Thomas Basbøll, and we later wrote two papers on the topic:

To throw away data: Plagiarism as a statistical crime

When do stories work? Evidence and illustration in the social sciences

“Stories” vs. “parables”

In that second article, Basbøll and I distinguished between true stories, on one hand, and parables, on the other. We argued that one of the valuable things about an evidenced story is its immutability—the facts of the story are there, and our theories need to accommodate these facts. This is a key reason why stories are important: they constrain our models of the world; they falsify our simplistic ideas.

In contrast, a “parable” is flexible; it can be altered to serve the teller’s purpose. An evidenced story is a bit of truth, a rock upon which at theory can stumble. A parable is an illustration of a theory. Parables can be useful, as they can help us understand the implications of a theory.

In short: a story backed by evidence is an immutable fact that can be used to refute a theory. A parable is an illustration of a theory and does not bring additional information to the table. Stories and parables are both useful, but they’re different things. It is a mistake to present a parable as if it is an evidence-based story.

Not just economists

The anonymous blogger writes that this is “a common error made by economists” and refers to “We as economists and social scientists . . .”; also there’s the quote by Coase attributing it to “economics having become a theory-driven subject.” Fair enough: economists are out there with this story so they can get the criticism. But really I don’t think this has much to do with economics and economists; it’s more of a general problem of how we learn from stories.

As Basbøll writes, “It’s not just about trusting social scientists. Stories like this circulate in the executive suites of major banks and pharmaceutical companies, sometimes justifying very impactful decisions.” Just as the repugnant story of the whipped laborers has circulated among academic economists and political scientists, Weick’s distorted story of soldiers in the snow has been influential in management science.

How a story gets distorted in the retelling

I did some googling of *coolie yangtze whip* and found an article, “Self-Control at Work,” by Supreet Kaur, Michael Kremer, and Sendhil Mullainathan, published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2015:

. . . in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

Interesting. Now it happened “in the 19th century.” Perhaps setting it so far in the past makes the story more plausible?

Also the detail about the “titled English woman”—maybe that’s supposed to make us dislike her? Recall that in the original story she was not a titled English woman in the 19th century, she was a Chinese war refugee in the 20th century.

Changing her from a Chinese refugee to a “titled English woman” . . . that’s interesting, actually, as it fits with a common academic-social-scientist ploy to portray skeptics as out-of-touch elitists. You might naively think that laborers getting whipped is a bad thing, but that’s just you being a “titled English woman.” Let the experts explain to you how the real world works, you foolish bleeding heart liberal etc etc. The story would sound different if it were a Chinese refugee with her seven-year-old son.

In the earlier mistelling by McManus (1975), she was described as “an American lady”—I guess “a titled English woman” made a better story. Why not just go all the way and say it was Queen Victoria???

And one other thing . . . Cheung’s the original source, so how exactly did this “titled English women” enter the story in the first place?? Cheung (1983) is easily accessible online, and here’s what it says on page 8:

My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the Communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.

Hey—wait a minute! It seems that Kaur et al. just made up all those details—the Yangtze River, the 19th-century setting, the titled English woman, and of course the “burly” laborer—but then they put it all in quotes as if it had been written by Cheung (1983).

What the hell? This is really weird. Who would make up all these details, write them up, and then put the story in quotation marks like that?

From the first page of the Kaur et al. article: “We thank Lawrence Katz, David Laibson, John Matsusaka, Derek Neal, Ted O’Donoghue, three anonymous referees, and participants at numerous seminars for helpful comments.” Not one of them expressed suspicion about the “burly coolie” story.

And they draw from this story a suspiciously management-friendly bit of advice:

Discipline at the workplace—such as the coolie in Cheung’s story—may reflect demand for arrangements to help avoid the temptation to shirk.

I guess that’s the sort of attitude that will get you a faculty position in economics at some of American’s finest universities. After all, who among us has not hired someone to whip us “to help avoid the temptation to shirk”?

Here’s another, from an article by G. D. Donleavy:

Steven Cheung [23] relates that on the Yangtze River in China, there is a section of fast water over which boats are pulled upstream by a team of coolies prodded by an overseer using a whip. On one such passage an American lady, horrified at the sight of the overseer whipping the men as they strained at their harness, demanded that something be done about the brutality. She was informed by the captain that nothing could be done: ‘Those men own the right to draw boats over this stretch of water and they have hired the overseer and given him his duties.’

I looked up reference [23], and it’s not by Steven Cheung at all; it is an article by John McManus which contains all those fabricated details (the Yangtze, the “section of fast river,” the “coolies,” the “American lady,” and the mansplaining quote at the end).

And then there’s this book by David George Surdam, which tells the story as, “a Westerner was traveling by boat up the Yangtze River in China,” and continues, “The Westerner was horrified by this cruel treatment of the obviously overworked coolies. That is, horrified until it was pointed out . . .”

Ahhhh, those silly Western liberals who don’t understand the real world! Good thing we have economists around to explain reality.

And then there’s this “simpler version of Cheung’s account” told by Munger:

Imagine a group of workers pulling a barge upstream. There is a footpath beside the river, and the coolies struggle to pull the large, heavy cargo boat against the current. Walking alongside the coolies is the boss, a man with a whip. He looks at the calf muscles of the coolies, and if he sees them bunch up with strain, he does nothing. If he sees slack calf muscles, he whips the back of the offender.

“Slack calf muscles” . . . where did that come from??? I’d call this an elaboration, not a simplification! And Munger’s a political scientist—he has no excuse here. Political scientists are supposed to live in the world of reality.

Also, it’s kinda weird how every telling of this story (except for Cheung’s) uses the word “coolies.” Who talks that way? Are they just into being performatively “politically incorrect”? Something like, using some rude slang shows how fearless you are, so we should trust you even more??

“Yangtze” is the tell

Also, one funny detail. The anonymous blogger points out that the “Yangtze River” bit seems to be an embellishment adding in the retelling:

The route from Liuzhou to Guiping does not seem to be anywhere near the Yangtze River. And of course, the Yangtze River just so happens to be the one river someone non-Chinese will have heard of.

This reminds me of how the organizational theorist Karl Weick, when he retold the map-in-the-Alps story without attribution, described it as “an incident that happened during military maneuvers in Switzerland,” even though the original story said nothing about Switzerland and almost certainly would have occurred in a different part of the Alps. Weick, typical American that he was, read “Alps” and just assumed “Switzerland.”

As the anonymous blogger says, nobody seems to care about the details of these stories—but that doesn’t stop people from writing about them as if they’re true, and using them to support their views of the world. I don’t like it when Gladwell does it, and I don’t like it when political scientists and economists do it.

Connection to the Davies principle

Daniel Davies famously wrote, “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.”

I feel like there’s something similar going on here. Not lies, but some mixture of made-up stories and confused attribution, leading people to draw conclusions based on things that never happened.

Here’s my question: if you use a story to make a point (as Munger puts it, “That’s why I like the barge-hauling example so much”), and it turns out the story is made up—given how striking this laborers-hire-a-man-to-whip-them-story is, if it had ever been a real practice, I’d assume there’d be actual witness reports of it, not just someone remembering a story that his mother told him as a child—, then, does this cast doubt on the point you’re trying to make? Maybe it should!

“Discipline at the workplace may reflect demand for arrangements to help avoid the temptation to shirk.” Yeah, right. Funny—you never see the writers of these articles hiring “burly” guys to whip them. Why not, if it’s such a great idea??

Summary

Of all the parts of this story, what stuns me the most is the 2015 article by Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan, where they wrote:

The second view—that joint production necessitates the need for monitoring (Alchian and Demsetz 1972)—is summarized in a story by Steven Cheung (1983, 8): “On a boat trip up China’s Yangtze River in the 19th Century, a titled English woman complained to her host of the cruelty to the oarsmen. One burly coolie stood over the rowers with a whip, making sure there were no laggards. Her host explained that the boat was jointly owned by the oarsmen, and that they hired the man responsible for flogging.”

Looks like a direct quote, no? But go to Cheung (1983), and all you find is:

As examples of the gain from collaboration and the difficulty of delineating contributions, Alchian and Demsetz13 cite the examples of loading and of fishing. My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the Communist regime, when a large group of workers marched along the shore towing a good-sized wooden boat. The unique interest of this example is that the collaborators actually agreed to the hiring of a monitor to whip them.

Kaur, Kremer, and Mullainathan made up all those details—and then they put it all in quotes! This is the opposite of plagiarism, I guess, to make up a story and then attribute it to a trusted source.

I ca see how you could get the details of a story garbled, or remember a story without recalling exactly where you heard it, or believe a tale without checking the evidence—but how exactly do you make up all these details and then put them in quotes, without checking the source? How does that happen?? I’m frankly baffled. I guess maybe the quotes were added by the copy editor? Still, the authors cited the exact page of Cheung (1983) where the story appeared, so you’d think they would’ve noticed that there was no Yangtze River, no 19th Century, no titled English woman, and no “burly coolie.”

And, hey, I just noticed one more thing! The story is that they were towing the boat, so there were no “oarsmen” either!

This has got to be the world record for the most extraordinary collection of errors that has ever been gathered in a single paragraph of an academic publication—with the possible exception of when Richard Tol dined alone.

Oh well, it’s just the Journal of Political Economy, nothing serious.

P.S. As noted above, it seemed strange to me that these academics kept using what seemed to be an old-fashioned and offensive term to refer to Chinese laborers. I found some definitions:

Britannica.com : “(from Hindi Kuli, an aboriginal tribal name, or from Tamil kuli, “wages”), in usually pejorative European usage, an unskilled labourer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages.”

Dictionary.com: “noun Disparaging and Offensive. an unskilled laborer, especially formerly in China and India.”

Merriam-Webster: “usually offensive : an unskilled laborer or porter usually in or from the Far East hired for low or subsistence wages.”

Wikipedia: “a term for a low-wage labourer, typically of South Asian or East Asian descent. . . . The word has had a variety of other implications and is sometimes regarded as offensive or a pejorative, depending upon the historical and geographical context . . . The word originated in the 17th century Indian subcontinent and meant day labourer, but since the 20th century the word has been used in that region to refer to porters at railway stations. . . . now regarded as derogatory and/or a racial slur in the Americas (more so Caribbean), Oceania, and Africa / Southeast Asia – in reference to other people from Asia. . . . In modern Indian popular culture, coolies have often been portrayed as working-class heroes or anti-heroes. Indian films celebrating coolies include Deewaar (1975), Coolie (1983), Coolie No. 1 (1991), Coolie No. 1 (1995), and Coolie No. 1 (2020).”

So, yeah, I guess my instinct was in line with common usage, and it does seem obnoxious for those political scientists and economists to keep using the term. Not the biggest deal, but it seems related the larger problem that they’re just making stuff up about people they know nothing about, “slack calf muscles” and all that, and then bringing in the “titled English woman” as a foil. Using that rude and old-fashioned term for laborers is a kind of literary device that puts the story in the past, Gunga Din-style.

The usual contrarian ploy is to take some apparently horrible practice that normal people would disapprove of, and then demonstrate through logical reasoning that it is actually a good thing. In this case, though, these clever academics went to the trouble of making up what may well be a nonexistent practice, and continued by inventing a completely fictional character to personify society’s disapproval of this practice, as this provided a sharp contrast to their own hard-edged rationality.