------- Forwarded message follows ------- origins of 3rd world poverty: white foreign devils or homegrown greed? http://www.reason.com/0108/cr.lb.how.html ---excerpt--- ... | To evaluate the claim that British imperialism, political and | economic, explains the development gap, we need to start by | recognizing that the gap was a very long time coming. The living | standards of Western European farmers and other humble folk began | to improve about A.D. 1000 at a rate fast enough to be noticeable | from century to century, though not from decade to decade. Asian | and Islamic farmers were probably living better than Europeans in | 1000, but they did not experience a comparable, long-sustained | improvement during the second millennium. At some much-debated time | between 1450 and 1820, European living standards inched past Asian | and Asiatic standards. | | Then, about 1820, as Europe settled down from the Napoleonic wars, | the European rate of improvement turned up sharply, which, in this | context, means an increase from an average rise in per capita real | national income from about 0.3 percent a year to around 1.5 percent | a year. There was no similar upturn in the Third World, and the | wonders of compounding growth over 180 years produced the present | large and growing gap. | | Thus the gap "shaped decisively," according to Davis, in the last | quarter of the 19th century, had begun to widen unmistakably by | 1820, more than half a century earlier. It continued to widen | through the late Victorian period, the decades until India gained | its independence in 1947, and still continues to expand more than | half a century later. | | A large part of the present development gap is attributable to | rural poverty, particularly in India and China, and Davis is right | to stress rural poverty and its causes. Here, too, the roots of | poverty are ancient. The limitations of agricultural technology | before the 19th century required that the great majority of the | people of all civilizations be farmers. Over a period of more than | 5,000 years, wherever farmers produced a surplus of food over their | own needs, the urban elites, possessing military power, could be | counted on to take advantage of their power to appropriate their | food supply and in the process reduce the farmers to penury. | | Economic historian Alan Macfarlane recounts the emergence of a | viable agriculture of family farms in England (in 1978�s The | Origins of English Individualism). He describes the history of | peasant societies as a crisis cycle of population expansion, | followed by a reduction in population through war, famine, or | disease. | | Modern economic development literature is concerned with two very | different types of growth, not always clearly separated. One type | roughly parallels the upswings in Macfarlane�s "crisis" cycles, | when societies recovering from disaster repopulate themselves and, | one hopes, experience a recovery in living standards. This is a | painless and ever-welcome kind of growth, in that it consists in a | moderate rise in per capita output of much the same goods by people | in the same occupations as before, without severely discommoding | anybody. Significant technological advances are welcome but by no | means required. The peaks are remembered as "Golden Ages," though | they are golden only in comparison to the troughs. By the standard | of modern growth economies, the golden ages were marked by short | life expectancy, high infant-death rates, deficient nutrition, | dwarfed human beings, coerced religious conformism, negligible | medical care, widespread illiteracy, little or no vertical economic | mobility, and despotic government. That is what made a fall from a | Golden Age truly a disaster. | | The other type of growth is the one that produced the $22,640 side | of the development gap. This type of growth is not linked to any | historical cycles and is uniquely Western European in origin. In | contrast to Third World countries, growth economies moved from | labor-intensive production to capital-intensive and energy- | intensive production. The result was an immense increase in | physical output. Labor did not respond with a fully off-setting | rise in the birth rate, as Malthus had predicted, and the effect | was a shift to economies in which labor is scarce and expensive and | capital and energy are abundant and cheap�though that is not the | way populists usually perceive them. | | Western European growth and its $22,640 incomes depended critically | upon a rate of scientific and technological advance more rapid than | any experienced anywhere before 1600. It entailed a slow but | complete change in society and almost everybody�s role in it. For | example, advances in agricultural technology have reduced the | current proportion of the American population engaged in | agriculture from 44 percent in 1880 to 2 percent currently. The | whole pattern of economic output changed, not once but | continuously. Over the past 200 years, economically advancing | societies transformed themselves from rural to urban to suburban, | from despotic to democratic, from work-energy supplied by wind, | waterwheels, humans, horses, and oxen to work-energy supplied by | steam and other mechanical sources, and from majority illiteracy to | nearly universal literacy. They transformed themselves also by | repeated radical physical changes in their infrastructures, | housing, and stocks of capital goods. The West�s numerically | dominant "peasantries" faded into small, government-subsidized | minorities practicing capital-intensive and land-intensive | agriculture. | | The simplest strategy for Third World countries that want to become | growth economies is to imitate, to the best of their ability, the | Western institutions and practices that appear to have played a | part in growth. The feasibility of doing so has been demonstrated | by a number of countries that deliberately imitated Western means | to economic growth and are, by and large, well on their way to | imitating Western results. | | In the process they have overcome most of the differences of | geography, history, politics, culture, and experiences with war, | foreign conquest, and natural disaster that have been advanced as | reasons why progress was impossible. Even in China and India, the | per capita income of urban dwellers is rising, and the South | Koreans, whose colonial experience at the hands of the Japanese was | exceptionally degrading, shine in contrast to the leftist famine | culture of their fellow Koreans to the north. | | Given the existence of an obvious and tested development strategy, | there are at least two reasons for the long delay in closing the | development gap. One is the intrinsic difficulty of shifting the | huge rural populations of China and India to a land- and capital- | intensive agriculture. [***] The other is that objections to some or all | of the institutional means of Western economic growth are part of | the working ideologies of influential people in both Western and | Third World polities. [***] A faithful soldier of the left like Mike | Davis should have no difficulty understanding why Asian and African | societies did not quickly borrow the economic institutions that | produced the gap. They [Asian and African societies] | agreed with neo-Marxist, anti�free market, | anti-individualist ideology similar to his. ... ---end--- --------------------------------------- additional background on the reviewer: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465031099 | Editorial Reviews | | Book Description | | In this elegant synthesis of economic history, two scholars argue | that it is the political pluralism and the flexibility of the | West's institutions--not corporate organization and mass production | technology--that explain its unparalleled wealth. ... | Customer Reviews ... | "How the West Grew Rich" is a thorough treatise on the rise of | capitilism in the nation-states of the west, from feudal society | towards modern times. Rosenthal and Birdzell discuss in the | appearances of the requirements for capitilism, such as | acknowledgment of property rights and consistent and predictable | law. Also discussed are the political, social, or economic changes | that caused feudal society to crumble and a variety of free markets | to gradually take root and then blossom in Europe. | | This book was thorough and informative, though a bit repetitive and | somewhat dry. It makes a wonderful companion to Diamond's "Guns, | Germs, and Steel", filling in where the later left off. | ------- End of forwarded message ------- -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com -- Author: Eric D. Pierce INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists -------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). 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