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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (平装)
by David S. Landes
| Category:
History, Non-fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 208.00
MSL price:
¥ 198.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Thought-provoking, controversial, and even politically disturbing, this book makes people think, debate, and search for the answer to the Big Question. |
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AllReviews |
1 2   | Total 2 pages 16 items |
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Eric Hobsbawm (Los Angles Times) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Powerful and lucid… There are fewer historians who would not be proud to the author of this book. |
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Andrew Porter (New York Times Book Review) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Readers cannot but be provoked and stimulated by this splendidly iconoclastic and refreshing book. |
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David Walsh (The Boston Globe) (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
[Landes] relates the economic history of the world since 1000 AD in 29 chapters that are shrewd, acerbic, and unfailingly entertaining. |
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Allen Hundley (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
As reviewers may note this is a controversial book. The continuing interest is due at least in part to its promotion by some political conservatives as an answer to books like Guns, Gems, and Steel by Jared Diamond. Indeed the very relevance of this book to contemporary policy-making is the fuel that maintains the flames of a healthy debate between those on the Left and Right. Landes' arguments are forceful and convincing as far as they go and his book is essential reading for every student of world history and economics. Whether his model takes us ultimately in the direction we as a civilization really want to follow is a more subtle and profound question.
First, let's refute some false charges against Landes. He is not a racist, or an apologist for capitalist exploitation, or an ethno-centrist. He fully acknowledges the influence that geography and natural resources have on a nation's development potential and his critique of European colonialism is devastating. He completely rejects the theory of comparative advantage and long sections of the book are devoted to describing the exploitation of women and children in the early industrial periods of England and Japan.
Landes is equally critical of forces that restrict or deny freedom of thought, showing clearly how they held back nations that should have played a more dominant role in world economics. In the case of European development the single most important villain was the Catholic Church but authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of all stripes come in for condemnation.
In a nutshell Landes argues that cultural values like honesty, thrift, initiative, respect for property rights, and openness to new ideas are the key determinants of whether nations succeed or fail economically. We've heard this argument before and Landes explicitly acknowledges his debt to Max Weber, the nineteenth century sociologist who popularized the idea of the `Protestant ethic' as a historical force.
China is a major test case for Landes. Despite an impressive lead in technology, from gunpowder to printing, during the early years of European expansion, China failed to take advantage of that lead and came under European domination. The problem was not a lack of technical ability on the part of the Chinese but the fact that the nation was controlled by an imperial court that had no interest in using practical knowledge. The people at the top had everything they needed and saw no reason to allow local entrepreneurs to develop a free market economy. Such an economy might create local power centers which could challenge central authority so all such efforts were quashed before they could begin.
The centralized totalitarian rule of Chairman Mao in the twentieth century can be viewed as just a modern manifestation of this continuing characteristic of Chinese civilization. When, after Mao's death, the communists changed course and decided that capitalism was not so bad after all, the result has been the fastest growing economy in the world, fueled by foreign investors who had enough confidence that they would see a return on their investment. All of which seems to prove Landes' argument that initiative, openness to new economic (but not political) ideas, etc. bring wealth to a society just about every time.
At least for some in the society. The problem for emerging economic giants like China and India is that only one in five, chiefly city dwellers, enjoy the fruits of their society's newfound prosperity. As to how to solve this problem of equitable distribution or the problem of workers who lose their jobs to cheaper labor markets overseas Landes admits he has no answers.
Thus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a splendid analysis of world economic development up until the beginning of the 21st century but it does not address the really profound problems now emerging. In particular it says nothing about the coming revolution on the horizon brought about by genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology. Nor does it address the equally important issue of global economic fragility due to extreme interdependence and complexity. For these the key books are The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter, arguably the most important book of the 20th century; Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond; and, if one is up to a darker but nonetheless carefully reasoned analysis, The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler.
Society is far more fragile than most Americans realize. This reviewer, having lived and worked in places like Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, El Salvador and many others, knows from first hand experience that the civilization we take for granted is a frightfully thin veneer. Once shattered it cannot be easily restored. Nor should we be lulled into the false belief that it could never happen here. We have only to look at our government's grossly incompetent response to a catastrophe affecting just a handful of states (Hurricane Katrina) to realize the impossibility of an effective response to a catastrophe national in scope.
Which is why The Wealth and Power of Nations and the others cited above are so important. Heaven forbid that an economic or natural catastrophe should thrust upon us global political and economic disintegration but an honest analysis must admit the possibility. Should that happen we may hope that the wisdom and insights contained in books like these will guide those who survive toward a new, wiser, more responsible, and more gentle civilization. |
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Izaak van Garlen (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
David Landes, retired history and economics professor from Harvard University, has written an epic and grandiose work of economic history that attempts nothing less than to explain why some societies were economically successful and why others weren't over the last 1000 years. He has not retired, however, from academic controversy. In the politically correct discourse of today's universities it simply not fashionable to attribute economic success to cultural factors. He doesn't hesitate to demolish along the way arguments of those who explain the West's success in terms of exploitation of the Third World, imperialism, colonialism, and racism. These may have been symptoms of the West's success but not the causes. The breadth of this work is staggering: he covers not only economics, but technology, religion, military history, cultural practices, politics, and geography.
Some of the determinants of economic success are as follows:
Geography. The first chapter is called "Nature's Inequalities." Landes points out that the environmental determinism of the past has given geography a bad name, but that recent scholarship has seen a revival of the determinant effects of geography, climate, and natural resources. ( Such as Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel".) Extreme heat creates parasites, germs, and illnesses that have hampered countries located around the equator; whereas, Europe and North America has been favored by cold winters that kill dangerous pests and germs. We must not rule out geography as a determinant of economic success.
Property Rights. Along with Hernando De Soto (The Mystery of Capital), Landes believes property rights started the engine of capitalism. In Europe, in the late Middle Ages, peasants gradually gained property rights from the landed aristocracy, and were able to create and sustain businesses. In Asia, the aristocratic rulers owned everything and were unwilling to relinquish control, and, thus, held back economic growth for centuries.
Religion. Christianity was a positive force for capitalism in that it separated church from state power, and, thereby, opened the door to pluralism. Diversity of opinion was not tolerated in Asian and Islamic societies; only the rulers were allowed access to new knowledge and its uses. Openness to new ideas and the ability to exploit them was one of the keys to European success.
Science and Technology. Certain key inventions and the dissemination of these technologies throughout society was what caused the Europeans to excel at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age. The examples given by Landes are eyeglasses (enabling craftsmen to stay productive beyond age 40), the mechanical clock (widely used in Europe, but hoarded by rulers in Asian societies), printing (invented by Chinese, but widely used only in Europe), gunpowder (again, invented by the Chinese, fully exploited in Europe), the sextant (invented by the Arabs, but widely used by the Europeans), metal casting (allowed Europeans to produce superior weapons and subsequent military superiority), and the list goes on.
Aside from geography, it is clear that culture played a large role in the economic success of Europe and, later, the United States. It was about the relationship of the individual to the state or to their rulers that made the difference. People who were free and guaranteed certain rights and liberties were the most successful. The ones that were dominated and unquestioningly obedient to their rulers did not do so well. The conclusions that Landes reaches are not unlike those of Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. The wealth of a nation depends on private property, limited government, meritocratic advancement, hard work, rationalism, a healthy curiosity about other cultures, and openness to new ideas.
This should not be interpreted, as some reviewers have, that Western cultural practices are superior or enduring or the sole privilege of Europeans. What was true for the last millennium may change in the new millennium. Eastern Europe has cast off communism, China has retained communism in name only, and India has emerged from decades of Congress Party socialism. There are today billion's of new entrepreneurs that have adopted the cultural practices of economic success. The wealth and poverty of nations is not a permanent state of affairs, it is an ongoing work in progress. |
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Rolf Bobelli (MSL quote), Switzerland
<2006-12-25 00:00>
David S. Landes has written an extraordinary economic history that will open your eyes about countries' economic flops and good fortune. He also covers what makes a country achieve - and keep - great economic success. The book will appeal not only to economic history buffs, but also to the average person who needs to know how to keep a company or a country from economic trouble. Not to mention, he offers lots of great cocktail party anecdotes to impress your friends. Landes builds on solid economic data, but his unusual factual nuggets and vivid commentary are what make the book such a pleasure to read. In an age where politicians seek to make sure America stays economically relevant amid huge trade friction, We believe this book is a must-read for not just the chief executive officer, but for the rank-and-file workers who want to make sure they will be winners, not losers, in international trade. Landes has cooked up a great feast of economic history. Come, draw up a chair to the table and partake of this rich bounty. |
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D. Grant (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
This book is most definitely interesting, and most definitely worth your time. Though I got it from the library I'd not hesitate to recommend purchasing it. It's interesting enough to be worth keeping around. I was originally going to spend a little more effort on criticizing Landes' choice of economies to hold up as examples to the world (Japan today would definitely come first, and though he mentions it a lot less frequently, the model of old pre-WWI Imperial Germany would probably be another model held up for emulation). But on briefly reading other reviewers criticizing him for his ideological failings in their eyes has reminded me that this is a very personal viewpoint, so I will cut that short. Next: he's good at picking out all sorts of problems endemic to societies at various points in time, but I think he fetishes a few things far out of proportion to their relevance. 1, Comparative Advantage: As the discussion moves to the rise and fall of Western European economic powers, Landes talks of Comparative Advantage incessantly. To be sure the concept has its place, but I think he misses 2 salient points. First, that Comparative Advantage is NOT a concept that only applies to entire nations collectively. It applies to each individual within a nation as well. Therefore, to talk about mistakes of entire nations pursuing comparative advantage is to assume as necessary a degree of large scale planning I do not see as necessary. SOME people may pursue given occupation, maybe many, but its is an oversimplification to say that Nation X supported itself by commodity Y due to comparative advantage and failed because it did not move beyond commodity Y. That's the collective responsability of countless individuals, and depending on the level of the refusal to adapt, very possibly coercive barriers would play a role in said decline as well. Second, I think he tends to oversimplify here as well. Contrasting for example, the difference between pursuit of wheat farming or industrialization in Germany, the suggestion of the politician circa 1840 that he quotes is bound to come off as ignorant because regardless of the path Germany would take, he was suggesting he knew the optimal way for 10's of millions of individual people to employ themselves and no one man can do that.
Next, there is the way he seems to hammer on the decline of Britain. Maybe generations of arguing with Anglophile academics while Britain was stagnating and declining has colored his thinking, and to that I can add a guess that his book seems to have been largely written well before the initial publishing date listed in 1998. But his almost universal insistence that Britain's time is past (not that he thought their economy would totally regress, just continue to stagnate) seem rather premature in my opinion. With what is in part the benefit of hindsight I would like to point out that Britain today (2005) has the highest per-capita income of any major European economy (and is easily outpacing the EU average with regards to growth). It is slightly ahead of Japan in per capita income and grew faster in the past fiscal year even though Japan has bounced back. I'd also like to add that in places the language could be better. If he wants to write a book that reads more like a 470 page op-ed article than a really formal scholarly treatise he's entitled, and I'm sure it makes the book easier for a lot of people to read. But when he mixes intellectual jargon and informal conversation, the result can be annoying. The worst example I can cite is when he speaks of France changing "From a Bonapartist to a Napoleanic" regime, and when he states opponents of modern advances are "Pissing into the wind". The second is amusing but the transit from the unnecessarily intellectual to the casual could kind of grate on me. Next I'll add he seems to have an aversion to reading and understanding numbers. He makes a lot of the fact the early reliance of Japan's Meji industrialization on electricity (as opposed to the US and UK at the same time), and the advances of the German chemical industry of relatively the same period. But he fails to look at the end result of these advances even though he earlier includes a chart in his book of the output per head in all the listed countries as listed in 1960 dollars. They showed that in spite of these advances on the part of Imperial Germany and Meji Japan, the UK and even more so the US were well ahead of them in income per head and would remain so until well after WWII (though obviously some of this is because of the two World Wars). Meji Japan in particular, in spite of its advanced state of electrification, had a very low per capita output about on par with the poorest powers in Europe. This may have showed impressive efforts TOWARDS industrialization, but they did not at the time represent an impressive end result.
Lastly, there are occasional statements that are factually refutable. I am sure I would have seen more examples if I was better informed myself, but there was one I did catch that really stood out. In the first chapter, Landes claims that "Air conditioning made possible the prosperity of the New South. Without it, cities like Atlanta, Houston and New Orleans would still be sleepy-time towns". The thesis that air conditioning assisted the transformation of the Southern economy would be well enough. But that quote is categorically false. With Houston and Atlanta a person inclined to agree with him could at least make a case to support that claim. For New Orleans though, it is categorically false. In 1850 (obviously well before use of air conditioning became prevalent) New Orleans had a population of 116,000. That made it the 5th largest city in the nation behind Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. Today, with air conditioning cheap and easily available it ranks 30th in population (before Katrina).
Now for the positives, he does provide numerous insights into the workings of cultures all over the world. Obviously the limitations of the placed on this by the size of the book (and the capacity for human learning for that matter) mean they are not DEEP insights. But he does give at least a practical working knowledge. It did answer some questions I was chewing over for quite some time. Like how did a nation like India so advanced in some areas as late as the 18th century, end up the colony of such a relatively small nation as Britain so quickly? Explanation: though they had incredibly skilled craftsmen in some areas (gunsmithing for example, also weaving of cotton). The ready availability of cheap labor killed the impetus for industrialization. Also there was an ingrained aversion to other areas of metallurgy and to the diffusion of metallurgy. For example, the same nation that could make fine cannon and viable ocean-going ships in the 18th century was incapable of making clocks or even wood screws. That’s just one example, the book is filled with others from beginning to end. It's a trove of useful historical information like that to help the reader understand how the world has ended up the way it is. Emphasis on the word *help*. Landes has been a professor for a very long time and with that in mind this book reads like a self-authored textbook he's lecturing from. It is his grand vision for how the world has become what it is (or at least a section of it), but since each individual must acquire their own knowledge in this area and ultimately draw their own conclusions this book is not and cannot be the end-all. It will rather be a convenient (because it is well organized, and contains a lot of information)and notable addition to your stores of knowledge on its intended topic. I can't call it brilliant, but all in all, since there's no reason a person who's willing to do the thinking to justify their positions always has to agree with me, I can call it very good. Like I said this is interesting and worth the read. Better, it is interesting and worth paying to purchase so you can reread it as well. And if I did any nitpicking in the course of this review, it is because this is a 4 star book. Taken all in all, very good, but not ideal. There may have been some flaws I bothered to mention but they ARE relatively minor for the most part. |
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Tim Martin (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
Landes is a great writer, and this book sheds light on the many complex and interacting causes of national economic situations. Landes doesn't seem to have any particular axe to grind. He is not out to convert liberals to conservatism or vice versa. He is mainly interesting in presenting the historical facts, and interpreting them in as fair a manner as possible. Of course, historical interpretation is largely subjective, and some assertions are made without strong evidence or argument. Nevertheless, it is thought-provoking, brings a great deal of information together in a coherent way, and provides a very readable introduction to the complex question of why some countries are rich and others are poor. |
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J. Tillson (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-25 00:00>
While it is easy to get sucked into this book as a result of David Landes' smooth writing style, the content and more importantly the research behind his book is wildly flawed. Landes refers to himself as a source more times than I can count, and relies wholly on Adam Smith as a methodology for his economic analyses. Moreover, he often uses sources out of context. His research has clearly been conducted to prove a point, and not to support a possible hypothesis. He uses sections of several works that disagree with his thesis wholeheartedly just to make his point seem more valid. The bibliography of this book is lengthy and impressive, but the endnotes are certainly not. Not only are both exceptionally dated views of the world, but they are also simply inaccurate. With specific references to his analysis of Latin America, I am exceptionally disturbed. His colloquial writing style, while making the book seem more accessible to readers unfamiliar with development theory, is often offensive to those of us who are aware that the New World's poverty was not as simple as mere "macho warlordism" leading to "economic retardation." His assumptions are abrasive and incorrect. If you purchase this book, do so only to see what all the hype is about but read it with a pound of salt, rather than a grain.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.) |
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Lemas Mitchell (MSL quote), China
<2006-12-25 00:00>
The book loses one-half star based on the author's insistence on using parenthetical phrases in every other paragraph. And the other one-half star is for his vocabulary: It could have been toned down just a skosh. There is no need for so many words to make a point that can be explained in a simpler way.
The idea of the book was supposed to be a synopsis of EVERYTHING of significance that has happened over the last millenium. When considered that people have written entire books just about the Reconstruction period of the United States (and still left issues open to question), can it reasonably be expected that the author will be able to explore every single detail of every issue that he raised in the book? Not likely.
If this book is understood to be an alternative to some of the theses presented by the likes of Murray, Herrnstein, Jensen, Rushton, and Lee Kwan Yew (i.e., some people are inherently genetically inferior and they deserve their failure), then it serves its purpose very well. And that is to show that societies are very complicated institutions and that myriad possibilities exist that can derail their potential for vertical mobility. Kudos to the author for explaining to the uninformed (of which I happen to not be one in this case) about China's smothering hubris as a reason for its decline over the last 900 years.
In fact, it can be read in a much less demanding way just to get a general idea of what happened in some particular period (i.e., the labor unions and class divisions in the United Kingdom that he feels led to a lot of their decline), with authors who are specialists in that field to fill in the details/ construct the arguments and counterarguments.
With that understanding, this book can be taken in the spirit in which it was meant. |
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