Laissez-Faire Hong Kong Meets the Five-Year Plan

Milton Friedman was baffled by Hong Kong. During his second visit in 1963, there was pulsating activity all around him — but no official data. Why wasn’t the colonial administration crowing about its achievements, he asked. The absence of a gross domestic product series wasn’t an oversight, as John Cowperthwaite, Hong Kong’s financial secretary at the time, explained to the celebrated American economist: “If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”