The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

The worse the situation, the greater the potential for improvement.

Some things will never happen if one does not try to make them happen.

In all fairness, one should note that such personal ties are not absent from Western enterprise. People everywhere prefer to work with people they know and like.

Where the West pursues only “selfish” motives of profit and loss, Asia prefers a “sponsored capitalism,” in which government does the larger planning and takes the initiative in sponsoring meritorious branches and enterprises. The East also prefers to work, help, and lend (borrow) through a network of personal and political friends and allies. Credit worthiness is not the point. It is connections that count.

Britain had not adapted to the new technologies (automobiles, electricity and electronics, numerical controls) so well as the Japanese had. Manufacturing was stronger in Japan. And there was another difference, this time one that should have favored Britain: whereas the British had more or less welcomed immigrants, the Japanese did their best to keep all of them out except for Koreans, who were brought in for dirty tasks and, until recently, fingerprinted and politically segregated. The country didn’t want them marrying or melting into the Japanese bloodstream.

In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement, and success. Educated, eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.

We want things to be sweet; too many of us work to live and live to be happy. Nothing wrong with that; it just does not promote high productivity. You want high productivity? Then you should live to work and get happiness as a by-product.

History tells us that the most successful cures for poverty come from within. Foreign aid can help, but like windfall wealth, can also hurt. It can discourage effort and plant a crippling sense of incapacity.

We have the Russian case, where seventy-five years of anti-market, antiprofit schooling and insider privilege have planted and frozen anti-entrepreneurial attitudes. Even after the regime has fallen—people fear the uncertainties of the market and yearn for the safe tedium of state employment. Or for equality in poverty.

If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference.