Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

Chapter 1

I S S U E S

The wealth of nations depends upon an infinite variety of causes.
Alexander Hamilton

It may be both understandable and commendable that people living in the
most prosperous nations today are often shocked by the far lower
standards of living in Third World countries, or by how the less fortunate
people in their own society live. But, if our purpose is to understand the
causes of such things, we cannot proceed as if what we happen to be used to
around us is something that can be assumed to happen so naturally or
automatically that the issue can be posed as to why other nations “fail”
when they do not have the same high standards of living, as suggested by
the title of a well-known contemporary study.
a The subtitle of another wellknown contemporary study includes “the origins of inequality,” as if
economic equality is so natural, automatic or common that its absence is
what needs explaining.
Despite how widespread such implicit assumptions may be in much that
is said today, it is questionable whether such assumptions can survive even
a modest survey of history. Even in a country long recognized as one of the
most prosperous on earth, the United States of America, at the beginning of
the twentieth century only ten percent of American homes had flush toilets
and only 3 percent had electric lights. There is nothing automatic about
prosperity. Standards of living that we take for granted today have been
achieved only within a very minute fraction of the history of the human
race, and are by no means the norm among most of the people in the world
today. Standards of living far below what we would consider to be poverty
have been the norm for untold thousands of years. It is not the origins of
poverty which need to be explained, since the human species began in
poverty. What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained
higher standards of living.
Equality of economic outcomes has been even rarer than prosperity.
How does one explain the origins of something like inequality, which has
been ubiquitous as far back as recorded history goes?
The ancient Greeks had geometry, philosophy, architecture and
literature at a time when Britain was a land of illiterate tribal peoples, living
at a primitive level. Athens had the Acropolis— whose ruins are still
impressive today, thousands of years later— at a time when there was not a
single building in all of Britain. The ancient Greeks had Plato, Aristotle,
Euclid and other landmark figures who helped lay the intellectual
foundations of Western civilization, at a time when there was not a single
Briton whose name had entered the pages of history.
Scholars have estimated that there were parts of Europe in ancient times
that were living at a level that Greece had transcended thousands of years
earlier. There were other complex civilizations in the ancient world— in
Egypt, India and China, for example— at a time when peoples in various
parts of Europe and elsewhere were just beginning to learn the rudiments of
agriculture.
Vast disparities in wealth, and in wealth-creating capacity, have been
common for millennia. But while large economic inequalities have persisted
throughout the recorded history of the human race, the particular pattern of
those inequalities has changed drastically over the centuries.
While Greeks were far more advanced than Britons in ancient times,
Britons were far more advanced than Greeks in the nineteenth century,
when Britain led the world into the industrial age. Britain alone produced
more than 40 percent of the major inventions, discoveries and innovations
in the world, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first quarter of the
nineteenth century.
Its technological preeminence was matched by its
preeminence as a conquering nation. A twentieth century Italian scholar
asked, “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive
squalor to world domination?”
At its peak, the British Empire included

one-fourth of the land area of the world and one-fourth of all the people on
earth.

Such historic changes in the roles of particular peoples and nations have
occurred in other places and other times. The Chinese were for centuries

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell