Fewer, Richer, Greener by Laurence B. Siegel

Author:Laurence B. Siegel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119526926
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-11-18T13:00:00+00:00

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Why are some nations so rich and others so poor? So asked the economic historian David Landes in the subtitle to his elegant volume, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.16 The urbanist Jane Jacobs ventured, if not an answer, a way to look at the question: “To seek ‘causes’ of poverty . . . is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”17

Jacobs meant that poverty is the natural condition of man and animal, and what needs explanation is not poverty but wealth, which is an aberration that should astonish us. This idea goes back to Adam Smith and has been repeated from one author to another until it appears to have no progenitor. It’s part of our collective wisdom. Yet, as Steven Pinker reminds us, “even today, when few people believe that accidents or diseases have perpetrators, discussions of poverty consist mostly of arguments about whom to blame for it.”18

I’ve set up an apparent contradiction: poverty is the natural state of man, yet there is no reason that half the world should still be poor. What am I talking about? We now know how not to be poor, how to discover, innovate, save, and invest. This is knowledge that mankind did not have for most of its existence. Now that we have it, we can use it to continue the process of democratizing wealth until no one, pathological cases aside, is in serious want. What is stopping us?

At the macro level, as Tyler Cowen said in his recent book, Stubborn Attachments, we simply need to pursue policies that maximize global economic growth.19 These include:

free markets;

free trade;

borders that are as open as practicable;

sensible regulation (mostly minimal regulation, but with a sensitivity to legitimate concerns about the environment, safety, and honesty);

and, perhaps most important, the crafting of good laws and institutions that, among other things, convey secure rights in private property.20

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