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From: samuel Igbu (ypfdjbc@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Apr 16 2011 - 09:04:20 EDT
By: Timur Kuran
Modern growth is not a replay,
or even a faster version, of earlier
episodes. The organizational and
technological innovations that
are driving modern growth are
continually evolving, keeping
societies and the global political
and economic order perpetually
in flux. In turn, societies
must continuously adjust
their economic expectations,
relationships, and routines. In
Morris’ telling the difference
between pre-modern and modern
life is lost. Someone born in
the age of Julius Caesar would
have understood daily life in
1700. A person born in 1700
would find daily life in 2011
--- with its skyscrapers, air
travel, computers, banks, cars -
-- bewildering.
The lack of unifying theory to
explain why the present growth
spurt is so different is the book’s
key shortcoming. According
to Morris, whereas geography
defines opportunities, sociology
and human motivations determine
how those opportunities are
exploited. But the sociological
side of the book’s narrative is
weak. Morris describes history
of the formation and fall of
dynasties, political centralization
and decentralization, spurts of
creativity followed by inertia,
and the evolution of beliefs. Yet
he does not weave these stories
together with an overreaching
theory of history. Once geography
has defined opportunities,
history is just “one damned thing
after another” --- to use Arnold
Toynbee’s characterization of
inadequately theorized historical
narratives.
By itself, of course, the lucky
geography of the West and the
resources it generated through
global exploration cannot
explain the explosive growth
of modern times. Morris’ index
has the East ahead of the West
until the eve of the Industrial
Revolution. But for centuries,
Europe had been building a new
type of economic infrastructure,
based on impersonal exchange
and a commercial life
dominated by large, durable,
and structurally complex profitmaking
enterprises. Those are
the developments that fueled
Europe’s global exploration
in the first place and prepared
the ground for the Industrial
Revolution. They also set the
stage for the West’s colonial
empires. In fact, the roots of the
West’s economic modernization
West is Best? Why
Civilizations Rise and Fall
Part II
stretch back to the beginning of
the second millennium, when,
according to Morris’ development
index, China under the Song
dynasty led the world. It is then
that Italian families in the West
started forming private medieval
“super companies,” or firm that
pooled the resources of dozens
of investors over generations, to
conduct finance and trade. These
enterprises enabled private
capital pooling and accumulation
on an unprecedented scale.
As they grew, these super
companies faced coordination,
communication, and enforcement
problems, which induced
experimentation with ever more
complex organizational structures
and business techniques. By the
sixteenth century, profit-making
European enterprises were
already using a corporate form
of organization. Comparable
complex private enterprises
could be found nowhere else, not
even in the rest of what Morris
defined as the West. Thus, by the
time Europe started benefiting
from the resources of its colonial
and its own conveniently located
coal deposits, it already had
the economic infrastructure
necessary for mass production,
industrialization, and mass
transportation. Geographic
advantages were not enough
to propel Europe forward; the
institutions invented in the West
were necessary to exploit those
advantages.
The regions that failed to
keep up with Europe could not
match the West’s economic
infrastructure. Most important,
they failed to develop institutions
for pooling labor and capital
on a large scale and to develop
sustainable organizations
capable of reallocating resources
efficiently. In the Middle East
, religion, and culture more
broadly, mattered, but not for
the cosmological reasons that
Needham might have thought.
Rather than Islam’s supposed
conservatism, lack of curiosity
about the natural world, or
unwillingness to learn from
foreigners, it was Islam’s
inheritance and marriage rules
that created the stumbling block.
These rule fragmented capital,
blocking the establishment
of large and durable private
enterprises. Meanwhile, in South
Asia, Hinduism hindered largescale,
impersonal cooperation
by encouraging families to hold
capital within family enterprises.
Some believe that China, India,
and the Middle East would have
eventually industrialized on their
own if the West had not done so
first and colonized them. Morris
is skeptical: “Even though
Eastern and Western development
scores were neck-and-neck until
1800, there are few signs that the
East, if left alone, was moving
toward industrialization fast
enough to have begun its own
takeoff during the nineteenth
century.” That is true. Yet having
ignored economic institutions,
Morris is not able to justify his
claim, exposing the inadequacy
of his index as a measure of
development. If by 1800, Europe
had already developed all the
key components of the modern
economy and China had not, the
two regions could not have been
equal in any meaningful sense.
The problem here lies in Morris’
use of city size as a proxy for
organizational capacity. Lagos
is now about as large as New
York, but the organizational
capabilities of Nigeria and the
United States obviously differ.
Nigeria is not yet ready to put a
man on the moon, for example.
A more refined measure of
organizational capacity --- would
have shown Europe to be in the
lead centuries earlier.
As it happened, modern
economic institutions failed to
emerge organically in the East.
After colonization, Eastern
leaders tried to overcome this
deficiency by adopting Western
institutions sp as to achieve, in
short order, the transformation
that Europe went through over an
entire millennium. Still today, the
reforms remain incomplete. For
modern economic organizations
to work well, a country needs
to have developed a host of
complementary institutions,
such as fair courts, norms of
impersonal exchange, and trust
in organizations. These are hard
to transplant. In most of the East,
they are still developing and
spreading slowly.
As the book’s title suggests,
Morris’ purpose is not only to
interpret the past but also to
present what the future holds
for the East-West development
gap. By extrapolating from
present trends, Morris predicts
that, according to his index, the
East will probably have regained
the lead over the West by 2013.
If China’s output, war-making
capacity, informational capacity,
and per capita energy use keep
growing faster that the West’s,
the East’s Morris score will be
higher within a few generations.
-- Sincerely *YPFDJ British Columbia Chapter* YPFDJ Goal and Purpose- Our goal is to build a strong, conscious and patriotic youth movement.
Our purpose is:
- To raise the awareness and level of organisation of Eritrean youth to serve our nation - To reassert the identity, patriotism and unity of Eritrean youth - To promote the participation of Eritrean Youth in the national reconstruction of Eritrea as well as guarding the sovereignty of Eritrea - To enhance the position and influence of Eritrean Youth in their respective countries of residence.
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