Economic development

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I find the writings of Thomas Sowell extremely insightful in understanding the world I live in. And I think they give great insight into the mind and characteristics of the liberal left versus the conservative outlook and mind.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Conquests and Cultures. pp. 347 - 352

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Geographic Influences

Geography played a major role in the development of the British, the Slavs, the Africans, and the Indians of the Western Hemisphere—especially when geography is conceived broadly, to include climate, flora, fauna, and disease environments. The industrial revolution was greatly facilitated in the British Isles by the proximity of its key ingredients—iron ore and coal deposits—at a time when land transport costs were enormous and when potential rivals like Germany had such deposits at a greater distance from one another. p. 347

[The difference between having iron ore and coal deposits close by one another and both close by the sea, as in parts of Britain, and having them just 10 or 20 miles apart, as in parts of Germany, was enormous in the era before railroads, when transporting vast amounts of heavy material would mean loading it into innumerable horse-drawn carts—except that the prohibitive cost of doing this was so apparent from the outset as to cause many rich mineral deposits to remain unused. p. 352 ]

In the Balkans, industrialization was all but impossible at that time, given the absence of such mineral deposits and a lack of waterways capable of bringing shipments of the necessary minerals from other parts of the world without prohibitively high transport costs.

The development of large, ocean-going commerce was physically obstructed in Africa by an absence of waterways capable of carrying such ships and bringing such commerce to the interior of the continent or, in many places, even to the shores, given the shallowness of some African coastal waters and the scarcity of natural harbors. In North America there were ample waterways capable of floating large vessels from the ocean to deep inside the continent. However, before the European invasions, there were no draft animals anywhere in the hemisphere capable of handling the kinds of huge cargoes that would have made such ships economically viable. Even local trading, whether by land or by water, was limited in its volume by the absence of pack animals or draft animals, which made human porters as necessary in the Americas as in much of sub-Saharan Africa—and as limiting in terms of what kinds of goods could be transported and how far. These were not simply economic limitations of the times but cultural limitations with enduring consequences. In neither Africa nor the Western Hemisphere did the cultural universe extend as far as in Europe or Asia, both of which had ocean-going vessels that traded over thousands of miles.

Diseases were a large geographic factor shaping the history of imperialism in Africa and in the Western Hemisphere. Although Africa was known to Europeans for centuries before they discovered the Western Hemisphere, large-scale conquests were launched first in the Americas, where disease was a major ally of the Europeans, rather than in Africa, where it was a major enemy. The happenstance that Europeans had greater biological resistance to Indian diseases than Indians had to European diseases made the ultimate outcome of their struggles for control of the Western Hemisphere virtually inevitable, given that diseases were even more devastating to the Indians than European weapons were. In Africa, the situation was the reverse, for here the indigenous diseases were devastating to Europeans, so that invasions that were militarily possible for centuries were not in fact feasible in practice until European medical advances allowed whites to survive in regions where tropical diseases abounded.

In short, while man may discriminate against various minorities, nature discriminates against whole nations and continents. Moreover, the consequences of radically different geographic advantages and disadvantages last long after the peoples from given regions have relocated to other parts of the world, for the cultural development of the people themselves is affected by their geographical opportunities, and especially by the extent to which geography has facilitated or impeded their contacts with a wider world. This cultural development or human capital has proved to be crucial to the economic and social advancement of the numerous groups around the world who have been discussed in this trilogy.

While such geographical influences as rich natural resources—petroleum in the Middle East or gold in South Africa, for example—have played major roles in the economies and in the histories of particular nations, it is also very common for countries with rich natural resources (such as Mexico or Nigeria) to be poor countries and for countries with very few natural resources (such as Japan or Switzerland) to have standards of living that are among the highest in the world. Similarly, it is not uncommon for immigrants to arrive destitute in a new land and then rise above the average income or wealth level of the population of that country. Whether with nations or with individuals and groups, it is human capital that is crucial to the creation of wealth and higher living standards, often far more so than their initial endowment of natural or other wealth. Immigrants who arrive without money but with occupational skills—Jewish immigrants to the United States being a classic example—are analogous to nations without natural resources but with the skills and entrepreneurship to import other countries' natural resources and process them into valuable finished products, as Japan has done in its rise to industrial pre-eminence.

Educated Intelligentsia

Human capital must not be confused with formal education, which is just one facet of it, and still less with the growth of an intelligentsia, which may be either a positive or a negative influence on economic development and political stability, depending on the particular kinds of skills they possess and the particular attitudes they take toward those with the productive capacity to advance the economic level of a country. Modern Western industry and commerce developed at a time when the intelligentsia were a small and relatively uninfluential group. However, many Third World societies in the twentieth century became independent nations led by elites based on formal education and political charisma, but with little or no experience in economic matters and a hostility toward autonomous economic institutions and toward economically productive minorities in their own countries.

The specific kinds of education received affect not only technological and economic development in a country, but also the direction of its social and political development. Education in science and technology has obvious economic benefits, but not all groups or all nations have been equally drawn to that kind of education. In Malaysia, for example, the Chinese minority received more than 400 degrees in engineering during the decade of the 1960s, while the Malay majority received just four. Differences in fields and/or qualities of education have also existed between Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, caste Hindus and untouchables in India, Russians and Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, Middle Eastern versus European and American Jews in Israel, Tamils versus Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and whites versus blacks or Hispanics in the United States. Lagging groups and lagging nations tend toward the easier subjects, rather than such difficult fields as mathematics, science, engineering, and medicine. These differences affect not only their economic productivity but also their political attitudes towards those who do have the skills to make a society more productive.

Newly educated classes have been especially likely to specialize in softer subjects and to be prominent among those fostering hostility toward more advanced groups, while promoting ethnic "identity" movements, whether such movements have been mobilized against other ethnic groups, the existing authorities, or other targets. In various periods of history, the intelligentsia in general and newly educated people in particular have inflamed group against group, promoting discriminatory policies and/or physical violence in such disparate countries as Hungary, India, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Romania, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Canada, and Czechoslovakia.

Whether at the level of minority activists in a given society or at the level of leaders of national revolts against external powers, promoters of nationalism have been disproportionately intellectuals—and intellectuals from a limited range of fields. "Few nationalist militants were engineers, or economists or professional administrators," as a student of nationalism said of the generation of African leaders during the transition from colonial status to that of independent nations. Kwame Nkrumah was a British-educated lawyer, Jomo Kenyatta an anthropologist, and Leopold Senghor a poet. Much the same pattern could be found in other parts of the world as well. Leaders of the Basque separatist movement in Spain and of the Quebec separatist movement in Canada were also soft-subject intellectuals. In the less developed eastern regions of Europe, the rising intellectual class during the years between the two World Wars likewise tended to concentrate in the softer subjects, rather than in science or technology, and to seek careers in politics and government bureaucracies, rather than in industry or commerce. Much the same pattern would be apparent half a century later in Sri Lanka, which was all too typical of Asian Third World countries in having "a surplus of unemployed graduates" who had specialized in the humanities and the social sciences.

Ethnic leaders who would later promote the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the atrocities that followed, in the last decade of the twentieth century, included professors in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as a novelist and a psychiatrist. The mass slaughters in Kampuchea under the Khmer Rouge were likewise led principally by intellectuals, including teachers and academics. Historian A.J.P. Taylor has said that the first stage of nationalism "is led by university professors" and that "the second stage comes when the pupils of the professors get out into the world." Whatever the actual sequence, the intelligentsia have played a central role in promoting intergroup and international animosities and atrocities—and in trying to artificially preserve, revive, or fabricate past glories.

Newly educated and semi-educated classes have often sought positions in government bureaucracies, rather than in industry and commerce, for which their education has usually given them few skills likely to be useful in the marketplace. Moreover, the growth of the bureaucracies needed to absorb such people, in order to prevent them from becoming a political problem, is often a handicap to the development of industrial and commercial activities, while the social and political attitudes spawned by those with diplomas and degrees, but without productive skills, constitute yet another barrier to economic development. What was said of Romania's institutions of higher education between the two World Wars—that they were "numerically swollen, academically rather lax, and politically overheated," as well as "veritable incubators of surplus bureaucrats, politicians, and demagogues"—could be said of such institutions in other nations in Eastern and Southeastern Europe during that era and in various nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in later times.

The direct economic drain of supporting an intelligentsia with little to contribute to the economy is by no means the sole or most important cost they impose on the rest of the people in such poor societies. The kinds of policies and attitudes they promote and the internal strife they generate or aggravate are often major impediments to economic advancement or political stability. The post-independence histories of many African nations, especially, have shown the tragic results of following policies diametrically the opposite of those which developed the economies of the Western world in earlier centuries or of Japan more recently. In multi-ethnic societies, confiscatory policies toward the most economically productive groups have been promoted for the short-run benefit of those seeking a way out of their own poverty at the expense of others, rather than by becoming more productive themselves. Those targeted have included the Germans and Jews in Czechoslovakia and Romania, the Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Indians and Pakistanis in Kenya and Uganda, among many others. Those losing in the long run have included the poorer and less skilled masses, who cannot replace the more productive groups they suppress or drive out of the country.

Both internally and internationally, Western intellectuals have for centuries romanticized "noble savages" in various parts of the world, peoples who supposedly lived in some sort of Eden before evil was introduced from outside by modern Western society. Facts about the carnage, oppression or brutality in such societies have been glided over, totally ignored, or brazenly denied by those pursuing a vision—and disseminating that vision through their writings, teachings, motion pictures and other channels. To the extent that they are successful in creating a "virtual reality" different from the factual realities that public policies must contend with, this causes such policies to be misdirected, ineffective, or counterproductive. Sometimes a foreign Eden is ideologically defined, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao, and again a lovely "virtual reality" has for decades completely submerged facts that included the slaughter of millions. In these and other ways, an intelligentsia can make policies less informed—indeed, misinformed—and less intelligent than otherwise.

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15 July 2024