The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
No short cuts allowed Margaret 9'Brien Steinfels conomic history merges the two dreariest of sciences, but you'd never know it from David Landes's new book. It is engaging, energetic, well...
...Too utilitarian...
...And who would deny that without a decent level of material goods, financial predictability, the rule of law, and a functioning economy, there could not be human flourishing at all...
...Though late to the industrial revolution, they ultimately surpassed the trailblazers with a work ethic that Landes argues most Europeans would have rejected...
...Innovation worked and paid, and rulers and vested interests were limited in their ability to prevent or discourage innovation...
...I doubt that Landes would dismiss these, or insist that GNP is the first measure of human flourishing...
...Their "industrious revolution" paved the way for the industrial revolution...
...He puts less stock than many in the economic advantages brought by exploration and discovery...
...But Weber's thesis, as Landes sees it, "is that in that place and time...
...and poverty is a potentially raging contaminant: it cannot be segregated, and o u r peace and p r o s p e r i t y depend in the long run on the well being of others...
...Not Landes, who, in a brilliant and brief digression, isolates those qualities of this-worldly rationality that Weber described, and offers data to show how often those rational, ordered, diligent, and productive people were, in fact, of the Protestant persuasion...
...Buying everything from the rest of Europe, they fell far behind in manufacturing and industrial development and left a parallel economic legacy in Spanish America, with consequences we continue to see today...
...The water wheels freed human and animal labor for other productive uses...
...But this is not a work of statistical comparisons or Western chauvinism...
...But it would be unfortunate if anyone set aside this history in order to protect an ideology...
...The Japanese displayed similar qualities...
...Here, Landes stops to examine one of the first, but not necessarily determinative, gaps between Europe and China, which, after all, was the first home of gunpowder, printing, paper, wheelbarrows, etc...
...those who come later can leapfrog...
...But when they were first invented (probably in Pisa at the end of the thirteenth century), they increased the working lives of scribes, toolmakers, weavers, metalworkers...
...In fact, Landes makes some points congenial to this perspective: racial and sexual equality, universal education, and democratic institutions are necessary for economic development...
...But that is the point, isn't it...
...But at bottom, no empowerment is so effective as self-empowerment...
...In contrast, Europe had a joie de trouver...
...Many historians now find that thesis "implausible and unacceptable...
...Not always, of course...
...As a historian, he also leaves most current policy questions unaddressed...
...But I cannot help concluding that the story of how we have come to be so prosperous, too prosperous, has lessons that we should heed as we extend a helping hand to others...
...Why else are our consciences so deeply troubled when we see the desolation wreaked by economic and social poverty, except that we have so much and others so little...
...its proliferation changed the way people thought about time and organized it...
...But his criticism does not change his conclusion: colonialism was not a determining factor in the race to the industrial revolution...
...Other things count: family loyalty, community solidarity, spiritual and religious practices...
...They "built on work," rather than easy money, again with consequences we continue to see today...
...Overseas empire waylaid some: the Spanish ultimately lost the riches they seized from "New Spain...
...Perhaps...
...The Japanese, for example, have no Sabbath, hence they can work seven days a week...
...By the fifteenth century, the British had done away with such local tolls, so that early on they created a national market in which to buy and sell among themselves...
...But not everywhere...
...As the human eye ages the lens begins to harden and it can no longer focus...
...But finally, he argues that "the most successful cures for poverty come from within...
...What counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity...
...Anyone seriously engaged in "reforming" economic, political, and social structures ought to absorb its sophisticated hardnosed empirical view of why, in the author's view, even the poorest Americans are generally better off than almost all the inhabitants, rich or poor, of China and the nations of Africa...
...It is engaging, energetic, well written, and, despite its length (524 pages of text, 126 pages of notes, bibliography, and index) and weight (2.5 pounds), hard to put down...
...They were but one of a number of singular technological innovations (the water wheel, the mechanical clock, printing, and gunpowder) that in Europe by 1500 had spawned their own little revolutions...
...The mechanical clock required skill at working metals and shaping fine parts...
...Landes is hardly complacent about that imbalance, but neither does he offer reassurances that there are any easy ways to redress it...
...concentrated wealth, whether in private hands or national treasuries, hinders economic development...
...Of course, eyeglasses in themselves didn't bring about the industrial revolution or raise any nation's GNP...
...and that this type created a new economy...that we know as (industrial) capitalism...
...not so in France, Germany, and points East, where barriers remained well into the nineteenth century...
...economic interpretation and historical events are intertwined and his thesis finely argued with an eye to telling detail and example...
...What a model to have to follow...
...religion encouraged the appearance in numbers of a personality type that had been exceptional and adventitious before...
...The Wealth and Poverty of Nations shows how very subtle the balance can be...
...Rather the confluence in some countries of manufacturing, shipbuilding, navigational instrumentation, commercial acumen, political and social values, and simple curiosity that led men to sail unknown seas also laid the groundwork at home for the economic revolutions that followed...
...The task of the rich countries is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier," Landes writes...
...in manufacturing them, millwrights experimented with toothed gears and cranks devising new ways to direct water-driven power, for example, in grinding grain and making paper...
...Commonweal 2 0 May 22, 1998...
...Not everyone will share his assumptions that material wealth is the sine qua non of human happiness and well-being...
...Enterprise was free in Europe...
...And he helpfully reminds us that the original "restraint of trade" consisted in exorbitant, and sometimes extortionary, road and canal tolls that inhibited the development of "free trade...
...Thus, "around the age of forty, a medieval craftsman could reasonably expect to live and work another twenty years, the best years of his working life...if he could see well enough...
...Eyeglasses solved the problem...
...Being among the first industrializing nations does not assure continuing prosperity...
...Success bred imitation and emulation...
...What we say and do can hinder as much as help...
...Political and cultural values were simply not attuned to innovation or enterprise: the absence of free markets and of institutionalized property rights played a part, and through most of its history, China's top-down government worked mightily to prevent change...
...Government action, not private investment and the working of markets, continues to be the focus of these activists' recommendations...
...His contempt is palpable for the human and economic waste of the slave trade, the extermination of the Amerindians, the expulsion of the Jews, and the exploitation of African labor that the Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, and later colonial powers practiced...
...These machine-making skills would subsequently be put to other manufacturing uses...
...Although they have long recognized the fatal weaknesses of centralized command economies and have come to a grudging respect for markets, they continue to view povertyracked societies as victims largely of outside forces rather than their own values...
...His brilliant treatment of a complex subject--why some nations are so rich and some so poor-provides multiple answers, some of them obvious, some debatable, some convincing, some provocative...
...Consider eyeglasses: those who are lifelong wearers regard them as mere ocular appendages...
...The invention of convex glass lenses and a device to hold them corrected that...
...Within Europe, some nations did better than others...
...Italy led the medieval commercial revolution (and invented those eyeglasses), but it was a prisoner of the Mediterranean and guild structures that kept the great merchant city-states from joining in the Great Opening, as Landes terms overseas expansion to China, India, and the New World...
...The Wealth and Poverty of Nations reaches as far back as the fall of the Roman Empire to show how that truism became true, first in England, then in North America and the rest of Europe, at least as far as economic progress can be measured by per capita GNP...
...There is no easy way to move from poverty to wealth--at least as Landes defines it...
...and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people...
...Margaret O'Brien Steinfels is the editor of Commonweal...
...In contrast, the English colonies in North America were less remunerative and less appealing--at least in the short run...
...And that is Landes's bottom line: the Japanese, like their industrializing predecessors were committed to "work rather than wealth...
...If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make...
...The assumption that "knowledge and knowhow are cumulative" d i d n ' t hold in China: smelting, once invented, fell into disuse, spinning machines for hemp were never adapted to cotton, paper remained a handmade luxury...
...Why didn't the Chinese ultimately prosper...
...They caught fish, tapped and refined whale oil, grew and bought and resold cereals, wove cloth, cast and forged iron, cut timber and mined coal...
...Rather than adapting and refining their own inventions, the Chinese suffered from what Landes calls "technological oblivion and regression...
...It was, then, no single invention or innovation but the accumulation of them that early on set Europe, and especially England, apart from the rest of the world and on the road to exponential economic growth...
...What happened...
...To people haunted by misery and hunger, that may add up to selfish indifference...
...In short, wealth is an irresistible magnet...
...Sounds familiar perhaps (shades of Benjamin Franklin and Ronald Reagan), but--and this is crucial--the evidence, argument, and interpretation are not...
...Landes cites several long-accepted explanations: the Judeo-Christian respect for manual labor, subordination of nature to man, and sense of linear time, but he himself stresses the role of the marCommonweal | 9 May22, 1998 ket...
...Wealth is not so good as work, nor riches so great as earnings...
...Shades of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism...
...Landes's book is a challenge to the mindset of many on the left, especially religious activists...
Vol. 125 • May 1998 • No. 10
