Confiscations of physical capital have likewise seldom produced any major or lasting enrichment of those who do the confiscating—whether these are Third World governments confiscating (“nationalizing”) foreign investments or urban rioters looting stores in their neighborhoods. What they cannot confiscate is the human capital that created the physical things that are taken. However serious the losses suffered by those who have been robbed, whether by governments or by mobs, the physical things have a limited duration. Without the human capital required to create their replacements, the robbers are unlikely to prosper in future years as well as those who were robbed. #86 в контекст | | |
Human capital may also play a role in the fact that has often been pointed out, that many of the poorest societies have been located in the tropics, and many of the most prosperous have been located in temperate zones. Yet many peoples from temperate zones who have gone to live in the tropics have often prospered there, as the Chinese have in Malaysia and the Lebanese have in West Africa, far more so than people indigenous to those regions. Here, as elsewhere, the effects of a particular geographic setting can be both direct and indirect—presenting objective opportunities and either extending or restricting the development of the human capital necessary to make the most of those opportunities. #87 в контекст | | |
Sometimes the very advantages of a given geographic setting can make it unnecessary for the people indigenous in that setting to have to develop their human capital to the fullest. For example, a tropical land capable of producing crops the year round can make it unnecessary for the people there to develop the same sense of urgency about time, and the resulting habits of economic self-discipline, that are necessary for sheer physical survival in a climate where people must begin plowing the land soon after it thaws in the spring, if they are to raise a crop during the limited growing season in the temperate zone that will enable them to feed themselves throughout the long winter months. This was especially so during the millennia before modern transportation made it economically feasible to draw vast amounts of food from other lands around the world. #88 в контекст | | |
The unavoidable necessity of storing food to live on during the winter means that, for centuries, ingrained habits of saving were also essential for survival among peoples in the temperate zones. But, in the tropics, the development of such habits is by no means always so urgent. Moreover, the ability to store grain or potatoes to eat during the winter is much greater in temperate climates than the ability to store bananas, pineapples or other tropical foods in hot climates. {xxxi} Human capital includes not only information but habits, and the habits necessary for survival in some geographic settings are by no means the same as in other geographic settings. #89 в контекст | | |
Like many other things, natural abundance can have both positive and negative effects. The saying among the Thais, “Rice on the land and fish in the water”{902} expressed a confidence in the abundance of nature that was foreign to people struggling to survive in the very different geographic setting of southern China, where hunger and starvation were perils for centuries, forcing the people there to become frugal, hard-working and resourceful, under threat of extinction. When people from southern China migrated into more promising geographic environments in Thailand, Malaysia or the United States, these qualities—these habits, this human capital—enabled them to thrive, even when they began as destitute immigrants and later became more prosperous than the people who were living in the same environment before them. #90 в контекст | | |
Much the same story could be told of the Lebanese, the Jews and others who arrived in many places around the world as immigrants with very little money, but with much human capital that they had developed in other, more challenging settings. Many other groups have had similar patterns as migrants within their own countries: #91 в контекст | | |
Conspicuous among advanced groups are some whose home region is infertile and overpopulated. The Tamils of Sri Lanka, the Bamiléké of Cameroon, the Kabyle Berbers of Algeria, the Kikuyu of Kenya, the Toba Batak of Indonesia, the Ilocano of the Philippines, the Malayalees of Kerala in India, and the Ibo of Nigeria all come from regions too poor to support their populations, and all have unusually high rates of migration to areas outside their home regions, where they have taken up a variety of opportunities in the modern sector.{903} #92 в контекст | | |
The era of European colonialism put Western education and Western industrial, commercial and administrative skills within reach for groups previously among the poorer indigenous people such as the Ibos in Nigeria and the Tamils in Sri Lanka, who then rose to become more prosperous than others who had been more prosperous before. The resentments of their rise, and the politicized polarizations that followed, led to bloody civil wars in both countries. #93 в контекст | | |
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One of the aspects of a culture that can be very important in its economic consequences is a willingness, or unwillingness, to learn from other cultures. This can vary greatly from one culture to another. Both Britain and Japan, for example, rose from being island nations lagging economically for centuries behind their respective continental neighbors, before eventually catching up and then surging ahead of them, largely as a result of absorbing the cultural and economic advances of other nations and then carrying these advances further themselves. The otherwise very different cultures of Britain and Japan were alike in their receptivity to incorporating features of other cultures into their own. This receptivity to advances made elsewhere is at least part of the answer to a question about Britain posed by an Italian scholar: “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?”{904} #95 в контекст | | |
By way of contrast, the Arab Middle East—once a culture more advanced than that in Europe—became resistant to learning from others, lost its lead, and then fell behind other nations that were advancing faster. In today’s Arab world—about 300 million people in 22 countries{905}—the number of books translated from other languages has been just one-fifth of the number translated by Greece alone, for a population of 11 million. A United Nations study showed that the number of books translated in the Arab world during a five-year period was less than one book for every million Arabs, while in Hungary there were 519 books translated for every million people, and in Spain 920 books per million people.{906} #96 в контекст | | |
Put differently, Spain translates as many books into Spanish annually as the Arabs have translated into Arabic in a thousand years.{907} Cultural isolation can be a factor in wealth differences among nations, just as geographic isolation can be.{xxxii} While highly educated people in the Arab world may not require translations to be able to understand what is written in other languages, the same is not true for the less fortunate masses of people. #97 в контекст | | |
Sometimes cultural isolation has been the result of a government decision, as in fifteenth-century China, when that country was far more advanced than many other nations. China’s rulers deliberately chose to isolate China from what they saw as foreign barbarians. In the seventeenth century, the rulers of Japan likewise chose to isolate their country from the rest of the world. In later centuries, both countries were shocked to discover that some other nations had far surpassed them technologically, economically and militarily during their self-imposed isolation. #98 в контекст | | |
Among the other ways in which cultures handicap themselves is in limiting which segments of their populations are allowed to play which roles in the economy or society. If only people from certain pre-selected groups—whether defined by class, caste, tribe, race, religion or sex—are allowed to have particular careers, this cultural distribution of economic roles can differ greatly from the individual distribution of inborn talents. The net result can be that, by forfeiting the potentialities of many of its own people, such a society ends up with a less productive economy than in other societies without such self-imposed restrictions on the development and use of their people’s talents and potentialities. #99 в контекст | | |
History is full of examples of societies whose cultural norms confined particular segments of their population to particular roles, or even drove some of their most productive groups out of the country, because the prosperity of those groups made them targets of resentments that resulted in persecution, mob violence or outright expulsions. Other societies whose cultures were less restrictive or repressive often benefitted economically from the arrival of refugees with valuable skills and talents, even if these refugees had little money with them when they arrived. #100 в контекст | | |
Seventeenth century England, for example, benefitted from the arrival of tens of thousands of Huguenots fleeing persecution in France. Huguenots created the watch industry in London, as other refugees created other enterprises and industries in Britain. Similarly, Spain’s mass expulsions of Jews in 1492—forcing them to leave most of their wealth behind—led many to settle in Holland, where the human capital that they retained helped make themselves prosperous again, and helped make Amsterdam one of the world’s great commercial ports.{908} #101 в контекст | | |
Over the centuries, tens of millions of people fled from various parts of Europe to the United States, whether to escape persecution or just to seek wider economic opportunities than were available to ordinary people in Europe. Many American industries were created, or greatly advanced, by immigrants who had been people of no real wealth or distinction in Europe, but who became economic titans in America, while transforming the United States from a predominantly agricultural country into the leading industrial nation of the world. #102 в контекст | | |
Cultural isolation takes many forms, creating economic and other handicaps that differ from group to group and from one society, nation or civilization to another. Differing levels of cultural isolation within and between societies add to geographic and other factors making economic equality unlikely among groups, societies, nations or civilizations. #103 в контекст | | |
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Because not all cultures developed written versions of their languages at the same time, there has been vastly larger and more varied written knowledge available in one language than in another language, at a particular period of history. Thus, in the nineteenth century, Czechs, Estonians or Latvians who wanted to become doctors or scientists, or to work in other professions that required advanced education, could more readily find the appropriate books and courses available in the German language than in their own languages. #105 в контекст | | |
Although there was a written version of the indigenous language in Estonia before the nineteenth century, most of the publications in the Estonian language “remained religiously oriented” before 1850, and “the working language of all educated persons was German.”{909} Educated people in adjoining Latvia, and in the Habsburg Empire’s province of Bohemia —among other places in Eastern Europe and the Baltic—were likewise educated in German. #106 в контекст | | |
German was the language of the educated classes in Prague, whether those educated individuals were ethnically German, Czech or Jewish.{910} Similarly in the Baltic port city of Riga in the Russian Empire, most of the education in that city in the nineteenth century was conducted in German, even though Germans were no more than one-fourth of the city’s population.{911} When the czarist government opened a university in Estonia in 1802, most of its faculty and students were German, and this remained so for most of the nineteenth century.{912} It was not just in formal education, but also in many different craft skills, that Germans were more advanced than many of the peoples of Eastern Europe. German farm settlements along the Volga and in the Black Sea region of the Russian Empire were more productive and more prosperous than the farms of the indigenous population.{913} #107 в контекст | | |
There was a history behind such patterns. As already noted, Western European languages developed written versions centuries before Eastern European languages, as a result of Western Europe’s having been conquered by the Romans and having acquired Latin letters. During the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon for Western Europeans to be a majority of the population in various Eastern European cities. These urban Western Europeans were often Germans, though there were some Jews and other Western Europeans as well. Even when the Germans were not a majority of the urban inhabitants, they were often a majority of the economic elites, as in Prague in the Habsburg Empire or in Riga, Tallinn and other Baltic cities in the Russian Empire.{914} #108 в контекст | | |
While Slavs were usually an overwhelming majority of the people in the Eastern European countrysides, there were also enclaves of German farming communities in Eastern Europe, often deliberately recruited by Eastern European rulers, who were anxious to bring people with more advanced skills into their domains, so as to increase the wealth and power of the lands they ruled. Not only did this transplant more advanced knowledge, technology and experience into Eastern Europe, it also opened the possibility of indigenous individuals in Eastern Europe acquiring some of the cultural advances from Western Europe. #109 в контекст | | |
From a purely economic standpoint, these infusions of human capital into Eastern Europe contributed to greater opportunities for members of the indigenous population to advance economically by rising, as many did, through the acquisition of the German language and culture. However, from a social and political standpoint, a situation in which the German minority dominated the business and professional elites—when German families in Prague often had Czech servants but few, if any, Germans were servants{915}—was a situation provoking ethnic resentments and eventually ethnic identity movements expressing those resentments politically. Similar tensions and polarizations have been common in other countries, where an immigrant group brought more human capital than that of the indigenous population, and was conspicuously more prosperous as a result—the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Lebanese in West Africa, Japanese in Peru and Indians in Fiji, among many others. #110 в контекст | | |
Within nations, as well, particular groups have migrated from one part of their country to another, bringing economic benefits while provoking social and political backlashes because of others’ resentments of their higher economic achievements. However these conflicts turned out—and some have turned out tragically—from a purely economic standpoint these are among the many complicating factors which prevent regions, races and nations from having either equal outcomes or even the same pattern of inequalities over time. #111 в контекст | | |
Leaders and spokesmen for lagging groups have often tended to blame others for their lags, sometimes depicting qualifications standards for admissions to educational institutions or for employment as arbitrary barriers. This view was epitomized by an ethnic spokesman in India who asked, “Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?”{916} and by an ethnic spokesman in Nigeria who decried “the tyranny of skills.” {917}Very similar political responses to achievement differences have been common in other countries, with the German minority being blamed for the lags of Czechs in nineteenth century Bohemia or Latvians in Latvia, just as Fijians in Fiji blamed the Indian minority there and the peoples of various countries in Southeast Asia tended to blame the Chinese minority there. {xxxiii} #112 в контекст | | |
In other words, ethnic leaders have often turned their people against the cultures that could help advance them, and dissipated their energies in opposing both such cultures and the people who had the advantages of those cultures. These were not necessarily irrational actions on the part of ethnic leaders, whose promotion of an “us against them” attitude advanced the ethnic leaders’ careers, even when it was detrimental to the economic interests of the people they led. This pattern has been common at various times and places on every inhabited continent.{918} #113 в контекст | | |
It was the exception, rather than the rule, when the great philosopher David Hume urged his fellow eighteenth century Scots to learn the English language for the sake of their own advancement—which they did, and rose rapidly in many fields. Ultimately the Scots surpassed the English in engineering and medicine. That too was the exception, rather than the rule. The nineteenth century Japanese were another exception. Once their isolation was ended, the Japanese openly acknowledged their long lag behind Western nations, and proceeded to bring in experts from Europe and America to introduce Western technology into Japan. #114 в контекст | | |
In the twentieth century, Japan caught up to the West in many areas and surpassed the West in others. But, as of the time when Commodore Perry’s American naval forces pressured the Japanese government to open their country to the outside world in 1853, the backwardness of the Japanese was demonstrated in their reaction to a train that Perry presented as a gift: #115 в контекст | | |
At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance, and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and drew in their breath. #116 в контекст | | |
Before long they were inspecting it closely, stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day.{919} #117 в контекст | | |
Yet from such levels of technological backwardness, Japan began a massive importation of European and American technology and engineers, and a widespread learning of the English language to directly acquaint themselves with the science and technology of the West. Slowly at first, but more rapidly as they acquired more experience, the Japanese rose in the following century to the forefront of world technology in many fields, producing trains that surpassed any produced in the United States. #118 в контекст | | |
As a country with a population almost entirely of one race and with no history of being a conquered people before 1945, there was little basis on which nineteenth century Japan could blame others for their lags. Nor did they or their leaders attempt to do so. But, again, Scotland and Japan were rare exceptions, and so was their spectacular rise to economic success. Both countries had meager natural resources and were in previous centuries poor and backward. Neither had the same geographic prerequisites for originating an industrial revolution as some other countries did. But the fact that both acquired knowledge of the advances already made by other people, who lived in more fortunate environments, enabled them to transcend the geographic handicaps of their own environment and move to the forefront of human achievement. #119 в контекст | | |
Because nations that are culturally and economically more advanced are not necessarily more advanced militarily as well, their prosperity and the culture that created it can be destroyed by militarily more powerful peoples who may not be as advanced otherwise. When invading barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire, they destroyed most of the institutions that had perpetuated Roman culture, leaving the peoples of the former Roman Empire both economically and technologically living below the level their forebears had achieved under Roman rule. #120 в контекст | | |
Artifacts from medieval Europe reveal that the quality of their workmanship had declined significantly since the days of the Roman Empire. {920}Central heating, which was introduced into Britain in Roman times, became rare or non-existent, even among the nobility, in the centuries after the Romans withdrew. Medieval cities in Europe, including Rome itself, had much smaller populations and fewer amenities than in Roman times.{921} As late as the early nineteenth century, no European city had as dependable a water supply as many Roman cities once had, more than a thousand years earlier.{922} History does not always move in an upward line of progress. Sometimes the retrogressions can be deep and long lasting. #121 в контекст | | |
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Populations can affect economic outcomes by their size, their demographic characteristics or their mobility, among other factors. The concentration or dispersion of a population can also greatly affect economic progress, which often varies with the degree of urbanization. Either the physical or the social separation of different segments of a country’s population can also affect the extent of their cooperation and coordination in economic activities. #123 в контекст | | |
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The danger of “overpopulation” has long been a recurrent concern, even before Malthus raised his historic alarm at the end of the eighteenth century that the number of human beings threatened to exceed the number for which there was an adequate food supply. At various places and times throughout history, famines have been monumental tragedies that some have regarded as confirmation of Malthus’ theory. #125 в контекст | | |
As late as the twentieth century, a famine in the Soviet Union under Stalin took millions of lives and, in China under Mao, tens of millions. But even catastrophes of this almost unimaginable magnitude do not prove that the world’s food supply is inadequate to feed the world’s population. Famines in particular countries or regions are often due to factors at work in those particular countries and regions at the time, such as a local crop failure or the disruption of transportation due to war, weather or other causes. In the case of the Soviet Union, the famine was concentrated in a region—the Ukraine—that was before, and is again today, a major producer and exporter of wheat. #126 в контекст | | |
Crop failures are not sufficient, by themselves, to bring on famine, unless food from other parts of the world cannot reach the stricken areas in time, and on a scale sufficient to head off mass starvation or the diseases to which undernourished people become vulnerable. Poor countries lacking transportation networks capable of moving vast amounts of food in a short time have been especially susceptible to famines. The modern transportation revolution has reduced such conditions over most of the world. But a country or region isolated for political reasons can remain susceptible to famine, as in the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao. After radical changes in China’s economic system in the decades following the death of Mao, an estimated one-fourth of China’s adults were overweight by the early twenty-first century.{923} #127 в контекст | | |
Contrary to Malthusian theory, few—if any—countries have had a higher standard of living when their population was half of what it is today. Studies based on empirical evidence show results very different from those projected by advocates of “overpopulation” theories. For example: #128 в контекст | | |
Between the 1890s and 1930s the sparsely populated area of Malaysia, with hamlets and fishing villages, was transformed into a country with large cities, extensive agricultural and mining operations and extensive commerce. The population rose from about one and a half to about six million. . . The much larger population had much higher material standards and lived longer than the small population of the 1890s. Since the 1950s rapid population increase in densely-populated Hong Kong and Singapore has been accompanied by large increases in real income and wages. The population of the Western world has more than quadrupled since the middle of the eighteenth century. Real income per head is estimated to have increased by a factor of five or more.{924} #129 в контекст | | |
Nevertheless, “overpopulation” theories of poverty have endured and have had sporadic resurgences in the media and in politics, much like theories that we are running out of various natural resources. Moreover, the arguments are similar in both cases. The indisputable fact that there are finite limits to the amount of each natural resource has led to the non sequitur that we are nearing those limits. Similarly, the indisputable fact that there are finite limits to the number of people that the planet can feed has led to the non sequitur that we are nearing those limits. #130 в контекст | | |
Poverty and famine in various parts of the world have been taken as evidence of “overpopulation.” But poverty and famine have been far more common in such thinly populated regions as sub-Saharan Africa than in densely populated Western Europe or Japan, which each have several times as many people per square mile as in sub-Saharan Africa. Travelers in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages often commented on the large amount of land that was unused in this poorer part of Europe.{925} While today there are densely populated poor countries like Bangladesh, there are also sparsely populated poor countries like Guyana, whose population density is the same as that of Canada, which has several times as large an output per capita{926} and one of the highest standards of living in the world. #131 в контекст | | |
In short, neither high population density nor low population density automatically makes a country rich or poor. What seems to matter more is not the number of people but the productivity of those people, which is dependent on many factors, including their own habits, skills, and experience. To the extent that population density, as in urban communities, can facilitate the development of human capital, people in small isolated societies have tended to lag behind the general progress of others. #132 в контекст | | |
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While peoples in different regions of the world might live, and their cultures and societies evolve, in their own respective regions for millennia, at various times they have also moved to other regions of the world, whether as conquerors, immigrants or slaves. Some have migrated singly or in families, and others have migrated en masse, whether settling among existing inhabitants or driving the existing inhabitants out and displacing them, as invaders from Asia in centuries past set off chain reactions of population displacements in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, or as invaders from Europe would later displace indigenous populations in North America. #134 в контекст | | |
In the early years of the industrial revolution, when technology advanced through the direct practical work of people in factories, mines and other productive facilities, rather than through the application of science as in later times, the movement of migrants was the principal means of diffusion of technology from its sources to other nations and regions. Thus British technological advances could spread more readily to an English-speaking country like the United States than to nearer countries on the continent of Europe. The government of Britain, where the industrial revolution began, tried to restrict the movement of British workers to other countries, in order to protect Britain’s technological advantages.{927} However, as technological advances became more and more a matter of applying science, knowledge could more readily be spread on paper, rather than requiring the actual movement of people. #135 в контекст | | |
