History

The Origins of Poverty and Wealth

2025-01-23 By Rob Weir Leave a Comment

I, like most Americans, remain rationally ignorant of the political currents outside of my own country. Other countries might be better suppliers of opera, cheese, or ancient ruins, but they have had little new to teach us about liberty, at least not since Hayek came to Chicago in 1950. That’s my prejudice and I want to make that clear up front. However, after reading Rainer Zitelmann’s new book, The Origins of Poverty and Wealth, I’ve somewhat revised my views. More on that later.

The title of Zitelmann’s book is an apparent nod to Adam Smith’s pivotal An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, a book which is still highly relevant 249 years after its publication. Why are some nations prosperous while others languish in backwards poverty? The question was timely in Smith’s day and has remained so ever since.

Zitelmann, who comes to the question from the perspective of a sociologist and historian, earlier had commissioned public opinion surveys around the world on perceptions of wealth and capitalism. The results from these surveys featured prominently in two earlier books, The Rich in Public Opinion (which we reviewed here) and The Power of Capitalism.

Zitelmann’s new book is a travelogue of sorts, covering a tour he made of 30 countries he visited over the last couple of years, where he spoke to various liberal groups, at universities and other institutions, and with liberal politicians. Each chapter follows roughly the same course: the author describes the country’s recent political and economic history, tells of the various pro-market groups and individuals he meets with, discusses prospects for the growth of liberalism in those countries, and relates outcomes back to perceptions regarding capitalism. Generally, countries that harbor resentment toward capitalism and the wealthy, like Serbia, are doing poorly, and those who have positive attitudes toward wealth and free markets, like Poland and Vietnam, are doing better.

This is not a deeply analytical book. It is anecdotal and entertaining. I enjoyed it. But did I profit from reading it? I believe I did. The great investor, Warren Buffett, one said, “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” And, one might add, to learn from the successes of others. Any nation has but one timeline, one history, and one path to its future. To the extent we can learn from the successes and failures of other nations, which decisions lead to wealth and which to poverty, we can better guide our own path. That’s the value here, the opportunity to learn about alternative timelines for a society, and perhaps discern warnings signs in our own.

(This review was based on complimentary review copy of the book.)

Our First Revolution

2020-01-08 By Rob Weir Leave a Comment

If your secondary education was like mine, British history was taught as part of “world history” (in my days, essentially Greco-Roman antiquity and Western European history). We were taught about William the Conqueror, the Magna Carta, the War of the Roses, Henry VIII and his marital troubles, Elizabeth I and her lack of marital troubles, Charles I and his head troubles, perhaps a mention of Cromwell, but that was about it with England. I think I learned more about Cromwell from a Monty Python song than I did from school. As far as the English-speaking world went, there was nothing of interest to an American classroom after Cromwell until WWII. The discussion shifted to Plymouth Colony and Puritans in America, and went on from there, with American history.

Now, to be sure, there are only so many hours a year available for teaching history in public schools, and it is proper for an American school to focus on American History, and that portion of world history that particularly influenced American history. But by these criteria I still believe I was short-changed by not having been exposed, in my early years, to the story of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the downfall of James II, the parliamentary election (essentially) of William and Mary as dual-monarchs, and the English Bill of Rights that followed.

The fact is, these events were American events as well as British events, since they came at a time when the colonies were still yoked to Mother England. Although they were not alive at the time, the American Founding Fathers were students of the the Glorious Revolution, internalized its lessons, and had it in their minds as they crafted a new government. You can see this in our own Bill of Rights, which essentially cribbed from the 1689 English Bill of Rights items such as the right to bear arms and the prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. We cannot fully understand our own American history without understanding the Glorious Revolution.

Michael Barone’s Our First Revolution: The Remarkable British Upheaval that Inspired America’s Founding Fathers is an excellent introduction to the topic, and an easy and engaging read. He targets an American audience, which is most welcome. (Some other treatments, out of England, tend to assume greater background knowledge in English history.) He does a good job presenting the historical context, in England, the Netherlands, France, Scotland and Ireland (a big task), as well as the personalities involved, not only the principals but also the supporting cast, like John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whose shift of allegiance tipped the balance in William’s favor.

Although neither this book nor the author are particularly libertarian in outlook, I recommend the book to libertarians for a few reasons:

It is important history that I suspect is missed by most American students.
It does provide important context for understanding our American Bill of Rights, for example understanding the 2nd Amendment. A good response to those who say the 2nd Amendment existed only to prevent slave revolts would be to point out its antecedent in the 1689 English Bill of Rights, where slavery was not even relevant to the debate.
Similarly, it helps understand why the Founders were skeptical of standing armies and instead favored militias.
There is ample material provided in Barone’s history to suggest a revisionist interpretation, where a tolerant monarch (James II) was overthrown by paranoid Protestant supremacists, bent on forming a military superpower, with a strong, central government, and a new Bank of England to fund it. It is worth exploring whether this was all as “glorious” as the Whigs would claim.

Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China

2019-07-30 By Rob Weir 1 Comment

When it comes to tales of life under communism, narratives of soul-killing repression, the most-read and most-heard ones deal with experiences in the former Soviet Union. From Arthur Koestler’s fictional Darkness at Noon and Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to news stories of the repression of scientists like Andrei Sakharov and over-the-top Hollywood treatments in the 1980s, we’re familiar with that genre.

From China, however, we’ve heard far less. Sire, we have a picture of pre-war China in Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. And we have Bertolucci’s evocative treatment in the movie The Last Emperor. But these are views from the outside. Where is the view from the inside? Where is a Chinese writer to stand with Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak?

For your consideration, I’d like to suggest Kang Zhengguo’s autobiographical Confessions: An Innocent Life in Communist China as a strong contender.

Kang was not (at least not until the end) a political dissident as we think of the term. He was apolitical, bookish, shy, a Walter Mitty daydreamer of sorts. But as his life progressed, from as an upper middle class childhood at the end of WWII, through the Communist Revolution, Civil War, the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, etc., we see his insufficient embrace of the new political order drive him further and further downward, with greater and greater deprivations, from his expulsion from the university, to time in labor camps, to laboring on a collectivized farm, along the way losing status, friends, even his family. (After a few surprising twists, he ultimately lands, in the 21^st century, at Yale University, as a Chinese language instructor.)

This is the kind of book that is hard to put down. Aside from the gripping portrayal of the psychological toll of communism, eerily familiar to students of the Soviet dissident narratives, this is a fine work of literature in its own right. Susan Wilf’s marvelous translation, and ample footnotes that elucidate unfamiliar aspects of Chinese history, culture and allusions to Chinese classical literature, guide the reader to fuller appreciation of this autobiography. Highly recommended.