Nelson Mandela was wrong about poverty
Amazonian tribesmen. AFP / Getty Images
“Like slavery and apartheid,” Nelson
Mandela told 20,000 people in Trafalgar Square ten years ago, “poverty
is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by
the actions of human beings.”
They were inspiring words, and the crowd
duly went wild. But the old man was talking utter, unadulterated bilge.
Poverty is not “man-made”: it is the primordial condition of all living
organisms, including humans. It is wealth that is “man-made”.
Perhaps 100,000 years ago, our distant
fathers hit on the idea that, instead of having to do everything
themselves, they could specialise and exchange. If Ug is particularly
deft at making flint weapons, let him stay behind and concentrate on
what he’s good at while the rest of the tribe hunts and brings him a
share of the meat. While we’re about it, Og from the neighbouring clan
has a rare gift for making fishhooks: why not trade some of them for
Ug’s flints?
From that simple discovery came, in due
course, wheels and printing presses and spinning jennies and skyscrapers
and antibiotics and the Internet. The greater the number of people
drawn into a commercial nexus, the more each individual can concentrate
on improving his or her particular métier. The hours which we need to
work in order to support ourselves fall, giving us more free time – both
to employ in leisure pursuits and to come up with yet more ingenious
inventions. People became longer-lived, more literate, more comfortable,
better-fed, taller, more numerate and more numerous. They also,
incidentally, become more peaceable: far from being ruthless or selfish,
capitalism joins men and women together in a cats-cradle of mutual dependency. That, in a nutshell is the history of homo sapiens.
None of this would need saying, except
that an industry has grown up seeking to explain the “causes” of
poverty. To pluck a more or less random example, the Child Poverty
Action Group blames the condition on unemployment, low pay and
inadequate benefits. But these explanations beg the question.
Unemployment is, if you think about it, our default status.
Hunter-gatherers are unemployed, in the sense that they don’t earn
salaries. They spend their days in a constant search for food, and
typically die in their thirties. The alternative to low pay is not
higher pay – if it were, the employee could just switch jobs – but no
pay: again, our elemental condition. Likewise, the alternative to
“inadequate benefits” is not more generous benefits, but no benefits at
all – the lot of the human race for almost the whole of its existence
and, for most people on the planet, their lot still.
In one sense, poverty can be “caused” by
an exogenous shock, such as a natural disaster or a war. These events
reduce people to indigence by breaking down the networks of trade and
exchange, both in the literal sense of destroying roads, bridges and
buildings, and sometimes also in the wider sense of eroding the mutual
confidence on which such networks depend or wrecking the legal
infrastructure which secures property rights and contracts. There is a
strong correlation between the poorest territories on Earth and civil or
interstate conflicts. One way to think of marauding militias is as a
regression toward our original state, an undoing of law-based
capitalism, a reversion to the mean. Most other “causes” of poverty fall
into the same category: illiteracy, slavery, autarky, corruption.
Yes, corruption. Like poverty, corruption
is primordial. As soon as wealth became portable – that is, around the
time of the first cities some 10,000 years ago – some of our ancestors
began to predate upon others. Instead of growing their own crops, they
found it profitable to raid other people’s, and more profitable still to
regularise that predation through tithes, tolls and taxes. A modern
African kleptocracy is little different, in this sense, from an Iron Age
slave empire or a mediaeval European monarchy: all are what happens
when a small elite systematically loots resources. Again, it is
free-market capitalism, allied to representative government, that is the
exception.
Why does this matter? Because many
anti-poverty activists are unwittingly pushing for precisely the
policies that cause a reversion to penury. Look at the manifestos of the
mega-charities and campaign groups which say they want to help
developing nations. Almost all of them aim to prevent, or at least to
limit, the one thing that is doing the most to help people in the
poorest places on Earth, namely integration into global markets.
It’s very easy to become angry about, say,
women working for two dollars a day in a tropical sweatshop. But,
please, do those women the credit of being able to make rational
choices. To Western eyes, they might have abandoned wholesome villages
for sprawling shantytowns. But perhaps the shantytown offered amenities
that the village didn’t: electricity, running water, rudimentary schools
and clinics and, above all, jobs. Sure, you and I wouldn’t want to work
for two dollars a day; but we should be wary of imposing an essentially
aesthetic judgment on people when it retards their chances of
advancement.
What’s the alternative? More trade. More
specialisation. More globalisation. The wider we extend the web of
exchange, the more people we lift out of poverty. And shall I tell you
the best bit? It’s already happening.
No comments:
Post a Comment