Thomas Sowell on how grievance-based politics holds people back, and why the remedy is Japan

Renowned free market economist Thomas Sowell recently released a 5th edition of his classic and simply essential "Basic Economics."

In a new chapter on international wealth inequality, one of the factors that Sowell discusses behind differing economic outcomes is the significance of culture, and in particular the detrimental effect of an "us against them," grievance-based set of beliefs.

Thomas Sowell (Image Source: YouTube screengrab) 

Sowell writes:

Leaders and spokesmen for lagging groups have often tended to blame others for their lags, sometimes depicting qualifications standards for admissions to educational institutions or for employment as arbitrary barriers. This view was epitomized by an ethnic spokesman in India who asked, "Are we not entitled to jobs just because we are not as qualified?" and by an ethnic spokesman in Nigeria who decried "the tyranny of skills." Very similar political responses to achievement differences have been common in other countries, with the German minority being blamed for the lags of Czechs in the nineteenth century Bohemia or Latvians in Latvia, just as Fijians in Fiji blamed the Indian minority there and the peoples of various countries in Southeast Asia tended to blame the Chinese minority there.*

[sharequote align="center"]"ethnic leaders have often turned their people against the cultures that could help advance them"[/sharequote]

In other words, ethnic leaders have often turned their people against the cultures that could help advance them, and dissipated their energies in opposing both such cultures and the people who had the advantage of those cultures. These were not necessarily irrational actions on the part of ethnic leaders, whose promotion of an "us against them" attitude advanced the ethnic leaders' careers, even when it was detrimental to the economic interests of the people they led. This pattern has been common at various times and the places on every inhabited continent.

This argument reminds us of a couple of points Wall Street Journal editorial board member and author Jason Riley makes in his "Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed."

Riley argues that leaders akin to those Sowell describes have done serious harm to the black community in America for their own personal gain:

So many in the civil rights industry as I refer to it and in the black political leadership have a vested interest in…this idea that the black man is so put-upon by white society, and that that is what is driving these outcomes. And so you get your sort of professional agitators like [Al] Sharpton and Jesse Jackson getting to work…it serves their interest.

...If you go around talking about how white racism is responsible for all these bad black outcomes, you get a tv show…If you go around talking about personal responsibility and black behavior…you don’t get a tv show.

...[W]hen it comes to black political leaders, they also have a vested interest here. And that is in the case of Holder and Obama, driving black turnout; continuing their black support, political support. And so in Holder and Obama you have people who think nothing of dividing us along racial lines when it suits their political interest.

Second, in a related point in "Please Stop Helping Us," Riley writes that the political gains made by those public officials who for example exploit racial tensions, often thwart socioeconomic gains when it comes to their own constituency, citing Sowell himself:

Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity…economic gains have generally preceded political gains…Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress.”

The Scots, and perhaps more impressively the Japanese represent the counterexample of peoples who avoided grievance-based politics, thereby greatly improving their respective lots:

[instory-book ISBN="9780465060733"]

It was the exception, rather than the rule, when the great philosopher David Hume urged his fellow eighteenth century Scots to learn the English language for the sake of their own advancement--which they did, and rose rapidly in many fields. Ultimately the Scots surpassed the English in engineering and medicine. That too was the exception, rather than the rule. The nineteenth century Japanese were another exception. Once their isolation was ended, the Japanese openly acknowledged their long lag behind Western nations, and proceeded to bring in experts from Europe and America to introduce Western technology into Japan.

In the twentieth century, Japan caught up to the West in many areas and surpassed the West in others. But, as of the time when Commodore Perry's American naval forces pressured the Japanese government to open their country to the outside world in 1853, the backwardness of the Japanese was demonstrated in their reaction to a train that Perry presented as a gift:

At first the Japanese watched the train fearfully from a safe distance, and when the engine began to move they uttered cries of astonishment and drew in their breath.

Before long they were inspecting it closely, stroking it, and riding on it, and they kept this up throughout the day.

Yet from such levels of technological backwardness, Japan began a massive importation of European and American technology and engineers, and a widespread learning of the English language to directly acquaint themselves with the science and technology of the West. Slowly at first, but more rapidly as they acquired more experience, the Japanese rose in the following century to the forefront of the world technology in many fields, producing trains that surpassed any produced in the United States.

As a country with a population almost entirely of one race and with no history of being a conquered people before 1945, there was little basis on which nineteenth century Japan could blame others for their lags. Nor did they or their leaders attempt to do so. But, again, Scotland and Japan were rare exceptions, and so was their spectacular rise to economic success. Both countries had meager natural resources and were in previous centuries poor and backward. Neither had the same geographic prerequisites for originating an industrial revolution as some other countries did. But the fact that both acquired knowledge of the advances already made by other people, who lived in more fortunate environments, enabled them to transcend the geographic handicaps of their own environment and move to the forefront of human achievement.

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*The very concept of blame seems questionable in this context, when no one can choose what culture to be born into, nor in which geographic setting or in which period of history.

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