Dan Hannan isn’t even wrong on the history of poverty
“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”.
So begins around 900 words of nonsense from Dan Hannan. He’s a politician, I am sure of that because he definitely can’t be a historian.
In South Africa you could see the creation of poverty. The people pushed off their land and forced into bantus. They were prevented from working many jobs and their wages forced down. Their capital was taken and their labour was bought cheaply. This was poverty creation on a grand scale and Dan Hannan doesn’t grapple with this for a second other than to say Mandela was talking talking utter, unadulterated bilge.
Rude though I acknowledge it is to say, it is Dan Hannan who is talking utter, unadulterated bilge. His post is long and littered with errors. Generously I will concede that his conclusions are not awful, but the body of the text is just terrible, you’ll find most of it below. As I’m writing this on lunch I must be brief, if you want more detail please click on the note to the side (if you’re reading on mobile these may not display correctly).
Perhaps 100,000 year ago, our distant fathers hit on the idea that, instead of having to do everything themselves, they could specialise and exchange.
Didn’t happen.
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?
Wrong order.
…From that simple discovery came, in due course, wheels and printing presses and spinning jennies and skyscrapers and antibiotics and the Internet…
“In due course” lol
People became longer-lived, more literate, more comfortable, better-fed, taller, more numerate and more numerous.
Actually no.
Unemployment is, if you think about it, our default status.
No it isn’t.
Hunter-gatherers are unemployed, in the sense that they don’t earn salaries.
Elephants are birds, in the sense they’re both animals.
None of this would need saying, except that an industry has grown up seeking to explain the “causes” of poverty.
Get her. And to think Dan gets annoyed when people question his motives.
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.
Who’s begging the question now?
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.
You mean no pay and land to farm, no wait oops.
In one sense, poverty can be “caused” by an exogenous shock, such as a natural disaster or a war.
Well yes, that’s true, but only to an extent.
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.
It depends.
There is a strong correlation between the poorest territories on Earth and civil or interstate conflicts.
Um….well this is awkward.
Most other “causes” of poverty fall into the same category: illiteracy, slavery, autarky, corruption.
Yes, corruption. Like poverty, corruption is primordial.
Corruption is actually pretty bad.
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 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.
Finally something not awful.
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.
Rational choices from a good set of options.
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.
It’s already happening (in China and other heavily interventionist economies).
Dan Hannan’s triumphalist and incorrect history of capitalism makes ending poverty sound easy. That it hasn’t ended should tell you his story is wrong (so will historians if he ever signs up for LSE’s excellent Economic History Masters).
Dan Hannan illustrates his post with a picture of Amazon Tribesmen, probably to indicate what real poverty looks like. This brings me onto a good story. I don’t have the book on me (1493 by Charles Mann), so this comes from memory. In the nineteenth century one Amazonian tribe tribe was found, living in abject poverty, they couldn’t work metal, they didn’t farm, they were held up as a discovery of the not-so-noble savage. They were more primitive than the Ug and Og which Dan Hannan posits at the beginnign of this post.
Later, as anthropology shed some of its colonialist baggage, and it was discovered that these were not some preserved poverty-stricken throwback to our past. They were the grandchildren of a relatively civilised local tribe. They had been brought low by diseases and land grabs by Europeans. In the space of a few generations they had lost everything. They went in a few generations from literate, healthy, indepenent Amerindians to abject poverty. What appeared like naturally occuring poverty had occured in a few generations. The stories we tell ourselves to feel good are nice, but they’re not always useful guides to reality.
