Two major criticisms of my suggestion for addressing world
poverty--that those who are concerned about it should focus their efforts on
developing and sharing a set of national public policies to cure it--have
emerged, namely, (1) that each of the world's 200 countries is
"different," so at least 200 such sets of policies would be needed, and (2)
that it is unhelpful--indeed, presumptious--for "outsiders" to offer policy
advice to other countries, i.e., that indigenous peoples are the most
qualified to develop the policies that are best for them. Both are, in my
view, mistaken.
I am persuaded by the anthropological and other kinds of scientific
evidence that the human family is essentially the same the world over--that
among the 5.8 billion humans in our 200 nations there are no significant
differences in, for example, their average intelligence or ability to learn.
The notion that the citizens of some countries are starving because they
lack either the good sense or the desire to, for example, till a few acres
of their own is one that I don't believe is supported by the facts. Nor do
I believe that the poverty of the world's poorest countries--as contrasted
with the wealth of their more affluent neighbors--is caused by some
deficiency in their natural resources. (Japan, to repeat, is poorly endowed
in that regard but is quite prosperous, while India and a host of other very
poor countries are the opposite.)
My hypothesis is this: It is the quality of the public POLICY
pursued by each of our 200 countries that determines their poverty or their
prosperity. The poorest nations are simply those that have the worst public
policies. The richest are the ones that have done at least marginally
better on the policy front. To make a poor country rich, get rid of the
policies that are keeping it impoverished and substitute those that have
made its neighbors prosperous. Which policies are these? I believe they
can be usefully classified into the 3 following categories:
1. Land Reform. This is nothing more complicated than introducing
that ancient and enormously productive institution for provisioning a
society, the family farm. It means (as was done in Japan during the
1945-1952 Occupation at the insistence of the Allies) breaking up the giant
feudal estates and converting them into family-size parcels privately owned
by the farmers who till them. Given the 10- to-1 productivity advantage of
the family farm over the "collective" variety (as was copiously demonstrated
over more than half a century in the late Soviet Union), this one policy
change, alone, would cure the hunger/malnutrition problem of the 3rd world.
(See my earlier posts on this issue.)
2. Antimonopoly Policy. It is the responsibility of governments to
see that its reforms are not undone by either local or international
predators, a responsibility that inheres in national sovereignty and in its
fundamental police powers. The creation of new business
enterprises--entrepreneurship, the wealth creation process --is the
mainspring of a nation's prosperity and it would of course make no sense for
a government to encourage its citizens to build such productive enterprises
and then permit them to be plundered by monopolies and cartels. (I
mentioned earlier the report that Madagascar, having sensibly reformed its
agricultural sector in the '90s, mistakenly allowed the DISTRIBUTION process
to be monopolized--which cancelled the farm gains and left the country no
better off than before.) For those who are interested in the economics and
law of antimonopoly policy--some 70 countries now have such laws--I invite
you to visit my antitrust Web site, below.
3. Infrastructure. Under this category, I include all the usual
social needs, the things that are essential to a society's prosperity but
that can't reasonably be expected from its private sector. Schools. Roads.
Communications. Sanitation. Courts. Honest police and other officials.
(All of these are familiar elements in the development equation and their
implementation, while relatively expensive, is not prohibitively so, even
for the poorest countries.) I have only two additions to make to that
traditional list of infrastructure reforms. In the educational curriculum,
I would require the teaching--at virtually every grade level--of the
critical subject of enterprise building, of entrepreneurship, of the
wealth-generation process. (On my recommended reading list would of course
be the book, "Small Is Beautiful," by E.F. Schumacher.) Second, I would
institutionalize a recent social innovation known as the "micro loan" or
micro credit, the lending of very small sums to individuals (women in
particular) and families to start tiny enterprises. Teach the job-creation
skills in the schools. Encourage their exercise with modest loans.
This is my program for curing world poverty. Would I implement it
if given the opportunity. In a heartbeat. No doubt I'll be told that it's
wrong, won't work, is undesirable, could never win approval anywhere, and so
on. I disagree but that's all fine. Let's hear about the alternatives.
It's not enough to just say, every country is different and, besides, they
need no advice from us. They do, as is indicated by the army of "expert"
consultants in Washington, D.C., and other major cities that routinely
steals them blind for dollops of very poor economic guidance. The "folded
hand" posture is an unsatisfactory and indeed unbecoming one, as is
reflected in that ancient adage, "All that's required for evil to triumph is
for the good to do nothing."
A small illustration of my central argument--that public POLICY is
the great difference between our 150 poorest nations and the few dozen
relatively rich ones-- appeared in today's newspaper (Miami Herald, 9/11/97,
p. 20). In Haiti, some 250 people drowned Monday when a ferry capsized.
Why? There was no pier--the passengers get ashore by clamoring over the
side and into skiffs that carry them in. A surging crowd on one side turned
the ferry over. The country's president, Rene Preval, and his cabinet
visited the scene but, in the Herald's words, "failed to make a connection
between government's failure to build a pier and the grief around them."
They declared it all "unfortunate" and went back to their offices. "Their
resignation carried a surreal detachment, as if by denying their power to
effect change, those in charge justified the evident lack of WILL to effect
change... It is important that Haiti break its cycle of helplessness...
Governments throughout the world take responsibility for the safe operation
of ferries and the infrastructure of commerce. It is time that Haiti's did,
too."
Some of the policy failures of the governments of the world's poor
countries are of course due to official indifference, corruption,
incompetence, and the like. I am convinced, though, that much of it is also
due to the fact that their leaders simply don't KNOW what policies would
enrich their people. In other words, I believe that a great deal of the
world's poverty is due, tragically, to something so simple and
straight-forward as inadequate INFORMATION on the part of its leadership.
Can we do anything about that?
Of course we can. 2.5 billion people--43% of the planet's 5.8
billion citizens (probably well over half of its adults)--reportedly watched
the weekend funeral of Britain's Princess Diana. And the New York Times
reported today (9/11/97, p. 1) that within weeks we'll all have available,
at a cost of a few dollars, a small "converter box" that will transform a TV
set into a computer with Internet access. The powers that be aren't going
to give us access to their TV cameras (or the pages of their newspapers) but
can they keep us off the Internet? Do they outnumber us? Are they (and
their hired guns) smarter than we are, more persuasive? Working with all
the "progressive" lists on the Net, one should be able to put together a
"superlist" of formidable dimensions, one capable of making serious and
sustained contact with virtually every village on the globe. Tell them
about how they can become owners of their own private land and you'll
assuredly have their attention.
All that, of course, comes after we've discussed and laid out the
details of our recommended set of policies. Before trying to sell
something, it helps to know the product. Remember the library? My local
librarian, when I asked her about land reform, took me to one of the
standard directories of books in print, flipped to the "la" section, and
pointed me to a list of well over 50 studies on the subject involving dozens
of countries. I can't read them all. But together we can.
Charles Mueller, Editor
ANTITRUST LAW & ECONOMICS REVIEW
http://webpages.metrolink.net/~cmueller
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