• BOOK INFO: Wealth, Poverty and Politics. Thomas Sowell, Basic Books, 2015. ASIN: B012271UFW; 336 pages.
Kevin Baldeosingh
Thomas Sowell is African-American and a conservative, but this book addresses many erroneous socio-political beliefs prevalent in T&T as well as the United States.
Sowell presents a thesis so obvious that, on reading his argument, most readers would realise how blinded they have been by propaganda to the contrary.
“Within nations, as well as between nations, income disparities abound, whether between classes, races or other subdivisions of the human species,” Sowell notes.
“...Because many people regard these disparities as strange, if not sinister, it is necessary to note that such disparities are not peculiar to any time or place.” That is, inequality has always been the natural state of the world, and therefore it is equality which needs explanation.
The book has six chapters, each of which examines the overarching factors which account for the disparities in income—geographic, cultural, social, and political. The final chapter weaves all these together in a cogent analysis.
Along the way, Sowell dismisses nearly all the usual explanations for differences in income, especially between ethnic groups. In one paragraph, he shows up the fallacy of one especially popular assertion—greed—noting its absurd premise that “an insatiable desire for vast amounts of money will somehow cause others to pay those vast amounts for the purchase of one’s goods and services.”
Instead, Sowell cites culture as the key explanation for economic success, noting that certain groups have become prosperous no matter what part of the world they live in. His examples include overseas Chinese in southeast Asian nations and the Western hemisphere; Lebanese in West Africa, Australia; and North and South America; Jews in Europe, the Middle East, the Western hemisphere, and Australia; and “the various peoples of India on every inhabited continent.”
“That this is a matter of culture, rather than a matter of initial wealth upon arriving in a given country, is shown by how many groups have arrived in various countries far poorer than the existing population of the host country and have nevertheless eventually risen above the economic level of those who were there before them,” he argues.
By contrast, he also notes that politicians and demagogues promote a view, overtly or otherwise, that successful groups and individuals have achieved because of some kind of cheating or favouritism or other unfair practice. This strategy requires wooing a core constituency, and Sowell’s discourse on this will read all too familiarly to Trinidadians: “A dependent voting constituency is very valuable to politicians, and a paranoid constituency—resentful of social enemies supposedly dedicated to keeping them down—is even more valuable to politicians who play the role of defenders of the downtrodden, in exchange for their votes.”
Now that T&T is in a recession, such voices have become louder in proposing their standard ‘solution’. But Sowell warns: “By focusing on what is called ‘income distribution’, many people proceed as if the government can rearrange these flows of money, so as to have incomes become more ‘fair’—however defined—disregarding what the repercussions of such a policy might be on the more fundamental process of producing goods and services, on which a country’s standard of living depends.”
These are just some of the many correctives to conventional wisdom, which is not at all wise, prevalent in T&T.
