This article about China's salt panic caught my eye because of its ridiculousness. This article is a blog post by John Kennedy on Global Voices on the salt buying panic in China. There were rumours that the radiation from Japan makes salt unsafe, so there was a mad rush to buy salt in the supermarkets. The blog shows pictures, news clips, as well as reader's comments and tweets.
This article was of particular interest to me because it depicted a demand shock and irrational choices in action. A lot of reports on the Chinese economy tend to assume that things will work exactly like economic models, and one of the big assumptions in such models is that people are rational. This salt panic demonstrates that such is not the case. And the salt panic seems to have slipped largely through the mainstream media cracks, perhaps because it is too 'soft' to be reported. It is then no wonder that mainstream news, that reports mostly on hard facts and figures of the Chinese economy and often forget about the actual people behind the numbers, make China's economic rise more foreboding than it actually may be. It's difficult to be intimidated by a country that believes in salt radiation rumours to such an extent that whole aisles of salt are cleaned out.
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