Anglosphere

Chua, Amy, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Doubleday (2003) 340 pp.

In a post earlier this year, Jim Bennett outlined both his concerns and his appreciation for Amy Chua’s book “World on Fire.”

Unlike Jim, I was less convinced that she was offering a “one size fits all” model but very much inspired by the utility of her model for understanding the relationship of the world to the United States and the Anglosphere. The US, and its occasional allies, are locked in a passionate love-hate relationship with the rest of the world — a discussion fought now on television that often appears deranged or infantile yet is driven by very real concerns and anxieties. There’s hypocrisy and cant aplenty on both sides of the argument as far as the eye can see. And it is the “do as I say, not as I do” conundrums facing the Anglosphere that will drive new and focused solutions — new legal structures, new ethical propositions, new responses to weapons of mass destruction and hyper-destructive individuals, new balances between individual and social rights, new clarity and, one assumes, a newly-minted sense of self-preservation.

Much of the reading I’ve been doing over the last year has focused on national productivity figures (cf. Lewis’s The Power of Productivity) and on the EU’s response to the increasing GDP per capita gap between it and the US (The 2000 Lisbon Agenda). To summarize: the United States (with 300 million people) has roughly 30% greater GDP per capita (purchasing price parity) than all other nations over 10 million in size. Canada (at roughly 78% of the US standard and 30 million people) is the only exception. US GDP percentage growth also leads its large industrialized competitors. My reading focus has been on the solutions offered by serious people around the world to close the gap or find a way to accommodate the gap within a successful sustainable social model. At the same time, I’ve been watching the figures, and discussion, on higher education and the “scientific wealth of nations.” In many ways, however, the responses and strategies put forward to catching up with the US, by both the industrialized and industrializing world, have been eerily parallel to those documented in the past by Chua for nations who have struggled to cope with free markets and democracy over the last forty years. There’s a lot more finger-pointing and bad-mouthing than concrete progress.

To quote Chua (p.6):

This book is about a phenomenon – pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo – that turns free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.

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Harrison, Lawrence E., The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself, Oxford University Press, 2006, 272 pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

To my mind, the Anglosphere discussion is part and parcel of a resurgence in interest in cultural matters after both communism, and vast amounts of post-WW2 Western international aid, failed to provide dramatic economic successes in the poorest parts of the world. The events of 9/11 have highlighted the disparities across the planet, their seeming intractibility, and the view that the rich part of the planet should be solving the problem.

Recently, I reposted a book review of Lewis’s Power of Productivity, which noted that only a single large nation has moved from relative per capita economic poverty to economic prosperity (“being rich”) in the twentieth century — Japan. And Japanese history in the 20th century was hardly without its tragedies. Accordingly to the current numbers, we aren’t likely to see another sizable country make the leap to notable GDP per capita prosperity any time soon. If the 20th century, despite a massive increase in global GDP, has essentially kept every nation running in place, what can be done to give nations with low or medium prosperity an effective boost?

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Lewis, William, The Power of Productivity: Wealth, Poverty, and the Threat to Global Stability, U of Chicago Press, 2004. 339 pp.

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Preliminary headlines on the upcoming riot season in Paris are starting to appear, recalling the difficulties that European countries face in boosting their economic performance: reducing unemployment and increasing economic growth. Fareed Zakaria’s article in the Washington Post earlier in 2006 entitled the Decline and Fall of Europe is a quick and readable summary.

Zakaria quotes a particularly interesting OECD report called “Going for Growth” that shows Europe, rather than catching up to America in per capita GDP, has in fact been falling behind over the last 15 years. Efforts to catch up, while noteworthy and politically difficult, have essentially failed. When the GDP figures are adjusted by purchasing power parity (PPP), from country to country and around the world, we end up with shocking tables like the following:

Source: CIA World Factbook

and this:

Source: Adapted from Lewis, The Power of Productivity, 2004.

The United States doesn’t simply lead the world in GDP per capita (PPP adjusted). It is in a class (fully acknowledging its size) entirely by itself. Adding 1 million net citizens every nine months (one every 13 seconds), America is extending its lead in prosperity over not only poor and moderately wealthy nations, but over virtually all of its erstwhile companions on the “heights” of Mount Prosperity. Next-door neighbour Canada is the only eight digit population close to the US, coming in at 78% of US per capita GDP (PPP adjusted).

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Crosby, Alfred W., The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600 (Cambridge Univ. Press), 1997. 245pp. (Issued in the US as The Measure of Reality: Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600)

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Recently, I reviewed a book (Nisbett’s Geography of Thought) that describes the social psychological research on thinking styles in East Asia and the West. Nisbett traces the origins of the Western predisposition to thinking with Platonic properties, objects and “actors” to Greek philosophy and culture. In an earlier review of a book about the Peloponnesian War by VD Hanson, certainly demonstrated the unusual economic nature of a 5th cent. BC Athenian democracy, harnessing extraordinary financial and physical resources, even in causes that were tragic, despicable, or ultimately misguided. But did the Greeks of that era, ordinary men and women, actually see the world as we modern Westerners do … in ways that Nisbett and his colleagues now claim to distinguish in the lab?

I have my doubts.

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