New at Reason
Ron Bailey talks to World Bank economist Kirk Hamilton about the planet's real wealth.
Comments to "New at Reason":
Ron Bailey | August 3, 2007, 4:49pm | #
Dan: Very astute. It's fixed. Enjoy the article.anon | August 3, 2007, 5:18pm | #
"We do have some examples in recent history in developing countries-South Korea, India, Thailand -where some sort of crisis or impetus came and institutional change occurred very quickly and had a major impact."In the U.S., we have to take care that the same scale and speed of change does not happen _in reverse_ here.
JasonL | August 3, 2007, 5:28pm | #
And here we have the flaw in Georgist reasoning. It may have been true once that unimproved land and minerals were the source of wealth, but not so much now. Just look at the S&P and figure out to what extent command of land wealth is the basis of corporate value. The Dow is a goofy measure of the market as a whole not only because of its small number of components, but because it is by definition the Industrial Average.Guys like Chavez are able to sell a lot of snake oil based on the common misunderstanding of the basis of wealth. All over Latin America you hear critics spin "they steal our wealth!" as a criticism of open international markets. The idea is baked in that wealth = oil or copper or whatever you are standing on top of. You are doomed to be poor if you don't figure out that wealth is primarily generated elsewhere.
black_box | August 3, 2007, 5:45pm | #
In the U.S., we have to take care that the same scale and speed of change does not happen _in reverse_ here.Indeed. You have to wonder what the future for America holds when it seems that so few people find rewarding jobs in the civil service. I think we're still living off the fumes of a bye-gone era when, for example, the best lawyers became judges instead of high paid litigators...
Time for a drink =)
Mike Laursen | August 3, 2007, 8:51pm | #
Fascinating. Social and financial stability are products that have a market value just like real estate and washing machines.Neu Mejican | August 3, 2007, 9:05pm | #
Nice article.jh | August 3, 2007, 9:09pm | #
So why didn't Ron Bailey ask the relevant questions on most of our minds here: "Would moving to a more libertarian society increase our wealth, and how? Is the drift to authoritarian socialism and bigger government going to drive us into decline?"The answers, according to our resident statist commenters (you know who you are), would be "no" and "yes".
I really hope that there are some powerful people out there reading this report. I remember being in a enviromentalism class in college, when my professor brought out that quote that goes something like 'human beings are the most valuable natural resource'. Most of the class, himself included, laughed. Why is this so hard for people, especially fairly bright ones, to understand? Some aspects of the environmentalist movement certainly have a religious overtone, and so I suppose that explains much of their beliefs/actions. But the sane remainder would do well to read this report. Things are complicated - but people need to be shown, concretely and convincingly, that just a small amount of natural resources, in the hands of the right minds and institutions, can go along way to improving things for humans, and can even do much to advance the more worthy goals of environmentalists. The only limit to the value of an arbitrary amount of matter is the cleverness of its curator.
Leif | August 4, 2007, 2:04am | #
Leif-Just think back to the cro-magnon days, when there was more of every natural resource on the planet. People were much wealthier back then, and had a far higher standard of living. Then all the rest of us came along and ruined it all.
Neu Mejican | August 4, 2007, 2:53am | #
concretely and convincingly, that just a small amount of natural resources, in the hands of the right minds and institutions, can go along way to improving things for humans, and can even do much to advance the more worthy goals of environmentalists.Not sure who you are trying to educate with this. Seems like the basic message of environmentalism...
Leif | August 4, 2007, 3:34am | #
My point was that standard environmentalism doesn't seem to fully grasp that improvements to institutions/technology steadily increase the efficiency of resource use. Thats why conservationists assume that we're going to need the same amount resources to output the same amount of consumables in, say, 50 years. This obviously isn't true; for example one tree today ouputs many more sheets of paper than it did 50 years ago.When I said that 'a little can go a long way' I meant that the conversion from raw materials to consumables does not have the simplistic effects that standard enviro. assumes. The other night Stephen Colbert made some joke about how the 'overbreeding' of goats in china was guaranteeing him cheap cashmere - the punchline was supposed to show that the only thing people are getting in return for the nasty pollution is some cheap sweaters. This is the kind of trap that environmentalism falls into again and again - that mass production and 'consumerism' can be simplified into: nat. resources => pollution + product. The diamond mine example from the interview pretty much refutes this.
In short, to increase efficiency in the long run, we sometimes have to increase consumption in the short run. This is antithetical to 'basic environmentalism'.
Mr. F. Le Mur | August 4, 2007, 10:36am | #
That accords very much with that notion that what really makes countries wealthy is not the bits and pieces, it's the brainpower and the institutions that harness that brainpower. It's the skills more than the rocks and minerals.IOW, the report is an obscurant version of Lynn's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations."
Cesar | August 4, 2007, 1:05pm | #
IOW, the report is an obscurant version of Lynn's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations."Here we go again with the IQ Fetishists.
Neu Mejican | August 4, 2007, 2:23pm | #
LeifYou make a good point, but I think a common misconception occurs on the other end of the stick... many people think that when environmentalists say we need to reduce our consumption of natural resources they must mean that we need to reduce our consumption of products.
Given even your toy formula Nat. R => product + pollution... there is no reason that reduction in Nat. R. consumption can't result from reduction in the Pollution in that formula. In other words, environmentalists are arguing for the use of human and institution capital to increase efficiency.
atrevete | August 4, 2007, 4:45pm | #
What this article really answers is the charge that "Something is wrong when there are billionaires with more money than they can spend and 1.5 billion people are living on less than $1 a day".That "something" is that those 1.5 billion are living in god-awful political systems with no education, not that Donald Trump is cheating them out of the money they'd use to buy another bowl of rice and building Trump Palace.
too cheap to pay | August 5, 2007, 12:38am | #
Where Is The Wealth of Nations? isn't downloadable from the worldbank.org site, it's buyable for $25.00. Or have I missed a link?http://publications.worldbank.org/ecommerce/catalog/product?item_id=4980649
Neu Mejican | August 5, 2007, 3:32pm | #
Too Cheap to Pay,You can get it free here...
http://go.worldbank.org/7M49XI1HT0
Ventifact | August 6, 2007, 6:15pm | #
The World Bank seems to have realized that it's not omnipotent, not even close enough to wave their magic wands and develop countries at will. Now, frustrated at the corruption that they should have seen as an obvious and insurmountable (at least by sheer weight of investment) problem all along, they are accruing data to empirically prove that they do not bear the blame for this lack of development.Good for them. It looks like they've been working at it for a few years now. One obvious next step which they seem to have wanted to take for a little while but have been unable to is to take a firm stand against continuing to contribute money to heavily corrupt states, using these and similar findings to justify firmer policies.
Mark Plus | August 8, 2007, 11:44am | #
Just think back to the cro-magnon days, when there was more of every natural resource on the planet. People were much wealthier back then, and had a far higher standard of living. Then all the rest of us came along and ruined it all.But our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in state-free societies and didn't have to work. States and work didn't come along until the advent of agriculture and metallurgy. The upper classes have always shown the truth about our leisured pre-agrarian past by hunting for recreation.