A preview of the unpublished book A CIVILIZATION WITHOUT A VISION WILL PERISH: AN INDEPENDENT SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH by David Willis. CHAPTER 1: INDIFFERENCE (Part 7). A continuation of the review of The Nature of Mass Poverty by John Kenneth Galbraith
The politics of poverty is different from the politics of affluence
Advice on the economic development in the last 30 years has come extensively from economists and technicians of the rich countries. They have seen what has worked well in these lands and, not surprisingly, have advised the same for the poor countries. Planned public and private investment, education, agricultural extension, public works, public development of industry, have been so urged. All too often these have foundered on the administrative or political inadequacy derived from the poverty they were meant to cure. That the politics of poverty is different from the politics of affluence has also been hard for politicians of affluent countries to perceive.
The greatly mentioned unmentionables
Next among the causes of poverty are the greatly mentioned unmentionables. One of these is intrinsic ethnic tendency. Englishmen are, or used to be, more industrious than the Irish, the Germans more so than the French or the Poles, the Swiss than the Italians, the Chinese and the Japanese than anyone else. It is a singular feature of such ethnic explanation that it is all but exclusively confined to conversation. What is wholly plausible in conversation is wholly impermissible in print. Climate or latitude as a cause of poverty is treated with somewhat similar ambiguity.
Temperate zone affluence
In the temperate zone affluence is far more nearly the rule. And within the larger affluent nations there is a recognizable tendency for incomes to decline as one moves from north to south, or in the southern hemisphere from south to north. Ellsworth Huntington, in Civilization and Climate, and S.F. Markham in Climate and the Energy of Nations, both associated the moderately cool areas of the globe, which are also subject to change in weather and season, with greater physical activity and initiative. The tropics involve an easier life and greater consequent lassitude, and their populations are more subject to endemic disease.
The legacy of colonialism
Explanations of poverty have most often been made by people in the rich countries of the poor. But a lesser current of explanation has run from the poor countries to the rich. Of these explanations the legacy of colonialism is the most important. Colonial rule deliberately enforced industrial backwardness for reasons of commercial interest, destroyed self-confidence, created habits of dependency. All this explains the present misfortune.
Inconsistencies
What is not explained is why this effect was so diverse – highly adverse in some parts of Africa and Latin America but much less so in other parts of these continents. Latin America has now had a century and a half of independence. Is the legacy of colonialism still in force? There is also the problem as to how the English-speaking colonies of the British Empire emerged so successfully from this blight and why a centuries-old tradition of independence did little for Ethiopia and not much for Thailand.
A more sophisticated explanation
A more sophisticated explanation from the Third World, that developed by Raúl Prebisch, holds that poor countries, producers in the main of raw materials and agricultural products, suffer persistently in the terms of their trade with the industrial lands. They have a persistent surplus of labor. Wages, and therewith prices, are kept down by this surplus of labor. Wages, costs, and prices in the rich, industrialized countries are kept up by the need to absorb labor – draw it from agriculture and other primary production. It is the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Australia that account for by far the largest share of the international trade in elementary food and like products.