| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
|
|
|
Counterpoints in Science Rich Land, Poor Land Nowadays we can fly from North to South America, or from Europe to Africa, in a few hours. The contrasts in living standards between San Francisco, say, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are both astounding and upsetting. The income of the average Swiss was 400 times that of the average inhabitant of Mozambique, even before the recent devastating floods in that unlucky country. How did this lopsided division of wealth between North and South, East and West, come about, and what, if anything, can the poor countries of the world do about it? Political economists, practitioners of what Thomas Carlyle called "the dismal science," have been wrestling with this problem for more than two centuries, since Adam Smith first tackled it in the late eighteenth century. Yet in 1976, Nobel laureate in economics Paul Samuelson wrote, "No new light has been thrown on the reason why poor countries are poor and rich countries rich." Recently, three authors have made separate attempts at illumination. Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond (interviewed on page 20) states that 25 years ago a friend in New Guinea asked him, "Why is it that you white people had so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had none of our own?" Diamond's answer is his Pulitzer-prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. (W.W. Norton & Company, 1997). Diamond would like to establish human history as a science on a par with evolutionary biology and geology. Why, he asks, didn't Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans subjugate and exterminate the Europeans and Asians, rather than the other way around? He narrows the Europeans' advantage to three things: their acquisition of guns, steel, and the nastiest germs to pass on to their victims. But how did that come about? After all, Africa is the continent where humans evolved the longest, where modern humans arose, where native diseases like malaria and yellow fever abound. Why, Diamond wonders, weren't Africans the first to develop guns and steel? Diamond attributes the fates of human societies to environmental differences. The most important factor, he argues, was food production. Food surpluses permitted the emergence of full-time specialists, technical innovation, chiefs governing large domains, armies, fleets, and wars of conquest. Food production arose first in the Fertile Crescent (modern Iran and Iraq), Diamond posits, because the right kinds of plants (wheat, barley, peas, olives, and figs) and animals (goats, sheep, pigs, cows, and horses) happened to be there. He tells us that equivalent plants and animals were not available in other Mediterranean climates such as California, Chile, South Africa, and southwestern Australia. That is why the natives of those lands were less successful. At this point in the book, I found myself questioning Diamond's thesis. What about Mesoamericans' domestication of corn, potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, squash, and melons? These crops now sustain the world's population at least as much as those that originated in Eurasia. Diamond further claims it was a great advantage to be living on a continent that stretched from east to west, like Eurasia, rather than from south to north, like Africa and the Americas. Human culture, including domesticated animals and plants, can expand much more readily east and west along the same latitude, he argues, than north or south where the shift in seasons, temperatures, and daylight hours act as barriers to successful adaptation. This argument aroused even more doubts in my mind. If it's so hard to spread north and south, how is it that the first Americans crossed the Bering Strait and within a few thousand years had populated North and South America from Alaska in the north, across the temperate and tropical regions of two vast continents? Finally, to answer the question that inspired his book, Diamond explains that the reason his New Guinea friend has no cargo is because the population of New Guinea never exceeded one million. Therefore, they could not develop food surpluses and the technology, writing, and political systems that arose among the tens of millions in the Fertile Crescent, China, and Mesoamerica. In summary, Diamond attributes the present distribution of wealth and poverty to environmental and geographical factors over which people had little or no control. Guns, Germs, and Steel left me with many unanswered questions. For instance, how do we account for the success of modern Japan, which has virtually no natural resources, is overpopulated and situated on a chain of islands with no land transport between them, yet is now the second richest nation on Earth? At the same time, some African nations like Tanzania, occupied by humans for the past five million years, have vast resources of land and climate favorable to agriculture; plants, animals, and minerals in abundance; do not suffer from overpopulation; yet remain among the poorest nations on the planet. It seems to me that an understanding of the modern world requires modern political and economic explanations beyond those presented in Guns, Germs, and Steel. Such explanations are offered in new books by historian David S. Landes and economist Mancur Olson. In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor (William Morrow 1999), Landes provides insights quite different from and often contradictory to Diamond's. Though Europe was lucky in its climate, he maintains that anyone who looked at the world a thousand years ago would have placed the probability of European dominance at around zero. "Europe was coming out of a long torment of invasion, plunder, and rapine, by enemies from all sides," writes Landes. The thing that made Europe different from other civilizations, in his opinion, was greater respect for individual property rights. In China, a much older civilization than Europe, everything belonged to the emperor, so the people had no motivation to be innovative and productive: the fruits of their work went to the emperor and his bureaucracy. But in the semi-autonomous city-states of medieval Europe, the governments encouraged merchants and trade. Rulers were willing to give up some of their power, because new lands, new crops, trade, and markets brought in more revenue. Implicit in this freedom to trade was a sense of rights and contracts. The result was that the Europe of the Middle Ages was one of history's most inventive societies. The waterwheel ground grain and hammered metal. Eyeglasses were produced in Florence and Venice. The mechanical clock gave new importance to keeping accurate time. Ironically, clocks, printing, and gunpowder were all invented in China, but were used mostly as toys for the emperor and his court, and were only fully exploited in Europe. Though China was far ahead of Europe a thousand years ago, its fatal flaw, according to Landes, was the absence of a free market and institutionalized property rights. The state was always interfering with private enterprise, taking over lucrative businesses, manipulating prices, and exacting bribes. Initiative and free inquiry were squelched. Science, writes Landes, is an essential ingredient of successful rich societies. Islamic science in the years 750-1100 far surpassed that of Europe. Islamic nations advanced astronomy and gave stars the names we still use today. Algebra and algorithm are Arabic words. But there was a backlash, then as now, by religious zealots, and science was suppressed. For militant Islam, the truth had already been revealed in the Holy Book, and other lines of inquiry were heresy. The Catholic Church in Italy, Spain, and Portugal took a similar tack, burning Giordano Bruno and condemning Galileo. These countries lost their scientific eminence, and became minor players in the new world order that was shaping up. Landes has a three-point program for an ideal growth-and-development society: 1) Know how to build and operate the tools of production and pass this knowledge on to the young; 2) Hire people by merit, then encourage enterprise, initiative, and competition; 3) Allow people to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The reason why the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the eighteenth century and not somewhere else, writes Landes, is that Britain, despite its many faults, was closer to this ideal than any other society. By the early eighteenth century, Britain was ahead of other countries in cottage industries, use of fossil fuel (coal) and energy (the steam engine). All industrial societies, however different, are descended from the common British predecessor, just as all humans on Earth today are descended from the common African ancestors. Though he admits it's politically incorrect to say so, Landes comes to the opposite conclusion of Diamond. He believes that the national culture, not the natural environment, is the main determinant of a nation's wealth or poverty. His critical test of a modern society is the status of its women. Those like the more fundamentalist Islamic societies, that have eliminated half the population—the women—from the public spheres of education, occupation, and achievement, have severely handicapped themselves in the competitive modern world. The third author to weigh in on this weighty issue, economist Mancur Olson, carries Landes's cultural explanation for wealth and poverty even further. In his book Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing communist and capitalist dictatorships (Basic Books 2000), he dismisses the notion that natural resources and geography have any importance in making modern nations rich or poor. All nations nowadays, he points out, have access to markets, resources, and technology. Yet some succeed and others fail. Olson sets three necessary conditions for success: 1) the right to private property; 2) impartial enforcement of contracts; and 3) absence of predatory corruption. These conditions, he maintains, are most likely to be found in rights-respecting democracies. How does a society get a market economy generating increasingly high incomes? Even in Third World countries, markets are everywhere, yet the people are poor. Why did Japan, West Germany, and Italy have economic "miracles" after World War II, but since Communism collapsed, the new countries have not done well and suffer from official corruption and organized crime? Societies prosper, he believes, when there are clear incentives to produce. They fail when there is a stronger incentive to take than to make, resulting in kleptocracies where those in power seize most assets for themselves. Olson distinguishes between a narrow and an encompassing interest. For instance, an individual thief has a narrow interest and will take all he can get. But if the Mafia controls a neighborhood, it has an encompassing interest in seeing that the neighborhood remains prosperous, and it won't squeeze so much that the economy collapses. Autocracies often start with an encompassing interest but may turn into kleptocracies, like the Roman Empire, the Bourbons in France, and the Soviet Union. When that happens, the economy is destroyed, and the empire breaks up into fragments. Olson reinforces Landes's observation that individual rights give people a motivation to produce. In contrast, workers of the Soviet bloc used to joke, "They pretend to pay, and we pretend to work." Contract enforcement makes it possible to plan for the future, and to undertake transactions that require later payment, like building a house with a 30-year mortgage, or financing a railway network. Lack of contract security inhibits long-term planning and industrial development. Olson and Landes concur that national poverty is not a result of geography or resources or colonialism, as Diamond and many others maintain, but a consequence of governments and institutions that suppress instead of encouraging individual rights, innovation, and enterprise. Scottish economist Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. Smith believed that in a free economy, rational self-interest would benefit the public welfare. Was it just a coincidence that Adam Smith's pioneering treatise and Thomas Jefferson's manifesto for personal and national liberty were both born in the same year? Two centuries later it appears that the democratic institutions favored by Smith and demanded in the Declaration of Independence are not just feel-good luxuries but the answer to the most fundamental questions about why some lands are so rich and some so poor. If Jared Diamond's overview is correct, the poor nations are victims of their geography and history, and there's not much they can do about it. If, on the other hand, David Landes and Mancur Olson are right, prosperity is available to any nation with the will and wisdom to promote honest government, universal literacy, property and contract rights, and personal liberty. Jerold M. Lowenstein is professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. jlowen@itsa.ucsf.edu |
Summer 2000
|
