Basic Economics

by Thomas Sowell

  {827} “Going Global,” The Economist, December 8, 2001, p. 67.

  {828} Tom Hindle, “The Third Age of Globalisation,” The World in 2004, p. 109.

  {829} Sarah P. Scott, “U.S. International Transactions: Fourth Quarter and Year 2012,” Survey of Current Business, April 2013, p. 36.

  {830} Deepak Lal, Reviving the Invisible Hand: The Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 136.

  {831} Nikolai Shmelev and Vladimir Popov, The Turning Point: Revitalizing the Soviet Economy (New York: Doubleday, 1989), p. 49.

  {832} Peter Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 102.

  {833} “No Title,” The Economist, March 31, 2001, p. 20.

  {834} Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 20.

  {835} Ibid., pp. 33–34.

  {836} Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures, Chapter 6.

  {837} Hudson Institute Center for Global Prosperity, The Index of Global Philanthropy and Remittances, 2013: With a Special Report on Emerging Economies (Washington: Hudson Institute, 2013), p. 9.

  {838} Ibid., p. 25.

  {839} Robert Mundell, “Nobel Prize Lecture—Excerpt,” The Ottawa Citizen, December 9, 1999, p. A19.

  {840} Floyd Norris and Christine Bockelmann, editors, The New York Times Century of Business (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), p. 41.

  {841} “Beware the Super Euro,” BusinessWeek, May 19, 2003, p. 52.

  {842} David Leonhardt and Jonathan Fuerbringer, “Calculatingly, U.S. Tolerates Dollar’s Fall,” New York Times, May 20, 2003, p. C1; Daniel Altman and Sherri Day, “A Falling Dollar: Some Lose, Some Win, Some Break Even,” New York Times, May 20, 2003, p. C1.

  {843} David Fairlamb, “The Wonderful Falling Pound,” BusinessWeek, May 19, 2003, p. 52.

  {844} “Have Car-Boot, Will Travel,” The Economist, August 31, 2002, p. 42.

  {845} “Exchange Rates Against the Dollar,” The Economist, April 25, 2009, p. 102.

  Chapter 23: International Disparities in Wealth

  {846} Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1980), p. 146.

  {847} John R. Lampe, “Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining Balkan Backwardness, 1520–1914,” The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe: Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages Until the Early Twentieth Century, edited by Daniel Chirot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 177.

  {848} The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 2013 (New York: World Almanac Books, 2012), pp. 748, 770, 771, 796, 806, 818, 821, 839, 846.

  {849} Ibid., pp. 764, 785, 786, 793.

  {850} The Economist, Pocket World in Figures: 2013 edition (London: Profile Books, 2012), p. 25.

  {851} Frederick R. Troeh and Louis M. Thompson, Soils and Soil Fertility, sixth edition (Ames, IA: Blackwell, 2005), p. 330; Xiaobing Liu, et al., “Overview of Mollisols in the World: Distribution, Land Use and Management,” Canadian Journal of Soil Science, Vol. 92 (2012), pp. 383–402.

  {852} Robert Stock, Africa South of the Sahara: A Geographical Interpretation, third edition (New York: The Guilford Press, 2013), p. 152; Uzo Mokwunye, “Do African Soils Only Sustain Subsistence Agriculture?” Villages in the Future: Crops, Jobs and Livelihood, edited by Detlef Virchow and Joachim von Braun (New York: Springer, 2001), p. 175.

  {853} World Bank Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank Assistance to Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa (Washington: The World Bank, 2007), p. 14.

  {854} Rattan Lal, “Managing the Soils of Sub-Saharan Africa,” Science, Vol. 236, No. 4805 (May 29, 1987), p. 1069.

  {855} Frederick R. Troeh and Louis M. Thompson, Soils and Soil Fertility, sixth edition, pp. 329, 332.

  {856} Jun Jiang, et al., “Comparison of the Surface Chemical Properties of Four Soils Derived from Quaternary Red Earth as Related to Soil Evolution,” Catena, Vol. 80 (2010), p. 154.

  {857} N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 18; David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), p. 41.

  {858} Theodore W. Schultz, Investing in People: The Economics of Population Quality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 7.

  {859} William Jameson Reid, Through Unexplored Asia (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1899), p. 336; Yan Wenming, “The Cradle of Eastern Civilization,” New Perspectives on China’s Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century, edited by Xiaoneng Yang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 52; Andrei Simic, “Montenegro: Beyond the Myth,” Crises in the Balkans: Views from the Participants, edited by Constantine P. Danopoulos and Kostas G. Messas (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 114; Katherine McCarthy, “Bosnia-Hercegovina,” Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture, Volume 3, edited by Richard Frucht (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), p. 623.

  {860} Monica and Robert Beckinsale, Southern Europe: The Mediterranean and Alpine Lands (London: University of London Press, 1975), p. 33.

  {861} Ibid., p. 119.

  {862} Ibid., pp. 42, 43, 228.

  {863} Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 5.

  {864} National Geographic Society, Great Rivers of the World (Washington: National Geographic Society, 1984), p. 69.

  {865} “Light-Draft Stern-Wheel Suction Dredge for Navigation Improvement on the Niger,” Engineering News, Vol. 63, No. 24 (June 16, 1910), p. 689.

  {866} Georg Gerster, “River of Sorrow, River of Hope,” National Geographic, Volume 148, Issue 2 (August 1975), p. 154.

  {867} The New Encyclopædia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2005), Volume 13, p. 94.

  {868} N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, p. 20.

  {869} Ibid., p. 182.

  {870} Ellen Churchill Semple, Influences of Geographic Environment (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911), p. 260.

  {871} William A. Hance, The Geography of Modern Africa, second edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 497–498.

  {872} Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, French West Africa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 305.

  {873} Edwin O. Reischauer and John K. Fairbank, A History of East Asian Civilization, Volume I: East Asia: The Great Tradition (London: George Allen & Unwin. Ltd., 1960), pp. 20–21.

  {874} Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilization, second edition, translated by J.R. Foster and Charles Hartman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 321.

  {875} Glenn T. Trewartha, Japan: A Geography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), p. 78.

  {876} Yasuo Wakatsuki, “Japanese Emigration to the United States 1866–1924: A Monograph,” Perspectives in American History, edited by Donald Fleming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), Volume XII, pp. 414, 415.

  {877} Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), pp. 355–361.

  {878} Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Vol. I, p. 138.

  {879} Ibid., p. 35.

  {880} Chandra Richard de Silva, “Sinhala-Tamil Ethnic Rivalry: The Background,” From Independence to Statehood: Managing Ethnic Conflict in Five African and Asian States, edited by Robert B. Goldmann and A. Jeyaratnam Wilson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), p. 115; T.C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People: 1560–1830 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), p. 501; Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Every
thing in It (New York: Crown Business, 2001), Chapter 5.

  {881} E. Richards, “Highland and Gaelic Immigrants,” The Australian People: An Encyclopedia of the Nation, Its People and Their Origins, edited by James Jupp (North Ryde, NSW, Australia: Angus & Robertson Publishers, 1988), pp. 765–769; Eric Richards, “Australia and the Scottish Connection: 1788–1914,” The Scots Abroad: Labour, Capital, Enterprise, 1750–1914, edited by R. A. Cage (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 122; Maldwyn A. Jones, “Ulster Emigration, 1783–1815,” Essays in Scotch-Irish History, edited by E. R. R. Green (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 49.

  {882} J.R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 47.

  {883} Ibid., pp. 27–29.

  {884} Ibid.

  {885} Ibid., p. 7.

  {886} William S. Maltby, The Rise and Fall of the Spanish Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 18; Peter Pierson, The History of Spain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 7–8.

  {887} J.R. McNeill, The Mountains of the Mediterranean World, pp. 44, 46, 144.

  {888} Ibid., pp. 116, 139.

  {889} Ibid., p. 144.

  {890} Ibid., pp. 20, 35, 39–40.

  {891} National Geographic Society, Great Rivers of the World, p. 278.

  {892} Donald P. Whitaker, et al., Area Handbook for Australia (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 46, 361–362.

  {893} David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 247.

  {894} Ibid.

  {895} The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the Soviet Union, edited by Archie Brown, et al (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 36–37.

  {896} N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, p. 27.

  {897} G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries, Chaucer to Queen Victoria (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942), p. 125.

  {898} Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans, Volume II: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 176.

  {899} Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1988), p. 253. As of 1860, the total population of the South was 39 percent of the total population of the United States. Since slaves were about one-third of the population of the South, and were usually in no position to invent, that leaves white Southerners as 26 percent of the total population of the country and approximately one-third of the white population. For population statistics, see Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1933), Volume II, pp. 656, 811.

  {900} Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), p. 462.

  {901} John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, edited by W.J. Ashley (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1965), p. 75.

  {902} John E. deYoung, Village Life in Modern Thailand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), p. 100.

  {903} Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 152–153.

  {904} Luigi Barzini, The Europeans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 47.

  {905} Edward Nawotka, “Translating Books into Arabic,” Los Angeles Times, January 4, 2008, p. E24; “Self-Doomed to Failure,” The Economist, July 6, 2002, pp. 24–26.

  {906} United Nations Development Programme, Arab Human Development Report 2003 (New York: United Nations Development Programme, 2003), p. 67.

  {907} “Self-Doomed to Failure,” The Economist, July 6, 2002, pp. 24–26.

  {908} Nathan Glazer, American Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 13.

  {909} Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, second edition (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), pp. 55, 56.

  {910} Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, second edition (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006), pp. 19–22.

  {911} Anders Henriksson, The Tsar’s Loyal Germans: The Riga German Community: Social Change and the Nationality Question, 1855–1905 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 6–7, 38; Ingeborg Fleischhauer and Benjamin Pinkus, The Soviet Germans: Past and Present (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1986), p. 16.

  {912} Hain Tankler and Algo Rämmer, Tartu University and Latvia: With an Emphasis on Relations in the 1920s and 1930s (Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2004), pp. 23–24; F.W. Pick, “Tartu: The History of an Estonian University,” American Slavic and East European Review, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (November 1946), p. 159.

  {913} Hattie Plum Williams, The Czar’s Germans: With Particular Reference to the Volga Germans (Lincoln, NE: American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1975), p. 141; Adam Giesinger, From Catherine to Khrushchev: The Story of Russia’s Germans (Winnipeg, Canada: A. Giesinger, 1974), pp. 61–63.

  {914} Toivo U. Raun, Estonia and the Estonians, second edition, p. 23.

  {915} Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival, second edition, p. 87.

  {916} Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 250.

  {917} A.A. Ayoade, “Ethnic Management in the 1979 Nigerian Constitution,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Spring 1987, p. 127.

  {918} Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race (New York: Basic Books, 2013), Chapter 4; Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 205–220; Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, pp. 97, 120, 133, 221, 225, 226, 238, 356, 357, 499; Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Doubleday, 2003), pp. 50, 74, 114, 115, 124, 132, 135, 165–170, 174, 208.

  {919} Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period, translated by Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 7.

  {920} N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, p. 91.

  {921} Ibid., p. 165.

  {922} Ibid., p. 374.

  {923} Shirley S. Wang, “Obesity in China Becoming More Common,” Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2008, p. A18.

  {924} Peter Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 43.

  {925} Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350 (London: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1993), p. 137.

  {926} The World Almanac and Book of Facts: 2013, pp. 753, 761, 783.

  {927} Peter N. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), p. 42.

  {928} Nationalism, Industrialization, and Democracy: 1815–1914, edited by Thomas G. Barnes and Gerald D. Feldman (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972), p. 174.

  {929} Andrew Tanzer, “The Bamboo Network,” Forbes, July 18, 1994, pp. 138–144.

  {930} Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 83; Herbert Heaton, Economic History of Europe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1936), p. 246.

  {931} John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1882), p. 353.

  {932} David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, pp. 171–173.

  {933} Ibid., p. 250.

  {934} U. S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), Part 1, p. 382.

  {935} The Economist, Pocket World in Figures: 2003 edition (London: Profile Books, 2002), p. 26; U.S. Census Bureau, “Money Income in the United States: 2000,” Current Population Reports, P60–213 (Washington: U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2001), p. 2.

  {936} Jaime Vicens Vives, “The Decline of Spain in the Seventeenth Century,” The Economic Decline of Empires, edited by Carlo M. Cipolla (London: Methuen & Co., 1970), p. 147; Carlo M. Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolutio
n: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700, second edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 1980), p. 252.

  {937} Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 160.

  {938} Roger Anstey, “The Volume and Profitability of the British Slave Trade 1761–1807,” Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, edited by Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 22–23.

  {939} David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, p. 251.

  {940} Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume I: The Birth of Britain (London: Cassell and Company, 1956), p. 31.

  {941} Thomas Sowell, “Assumptions versus History in Ethnic Education,” Teachers College Record, Fall 1981, pp. 42–45.

  {942} Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1996), pp. 163–167, 297–299.

  {943} Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 1976), p. 22.

  PART VII: SPECIAL ECONOMIC ISSUES

  Chapter 24: Myths About Markets

  {944} Charles Sanders Peirce, Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957), p. 35.

  {945} Essays of J.A. Schumpeter, edited by Richard V. Clemence (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley Press, 1951), p. 118.

  {946} “Quality and Prices at Local Supermarkets,” Bay Area Consumers’ Checkbook, Winter/Spring 2001, p. 47.

  {947} “Quality and Prices at Supermarkets,” Bay Area Consumers’ Checkbook, Fall 2003/Winter 2004, pp. 77, 80, 81.

  {948} Gurcharan Das, India Unbound: The Social and Economic Revolution from Independence to the Global Information Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), p. 153.

  {949} Nancy F. Koehn, Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers’ Trust from Wedgwood to Dell (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001), p. 33.

  {950} Ibid., pp. 59, 60.

  {951} John F. Love, McDonald’s: Behind the Arches, revised edition (New York: Bantam, 1995), Chapter 6.