A Troublesome Inheritance

by Nicholas Wade

The Middle East is, of course, not entirely tribal. It has large urbanized populations. But Middle Eastern governments, in Salzman’s view, follow the traditional Ottoman pattern of being largely predatory. They extract taxes from their citizens but provide few services except to protect the mulcted citizenry from other predators. Many people still rely on the tribal system for justice because the government provides none.

  The failure to develop modern institutions has led to economic stagnation. There was no economic growth in the region in the 25 years after 1980.23 Arab countries may have developed the form of Western institutions, but the practice still escapes them. “All Arab countries need to widen and deepen democratic processes to enable citizens to participate in framing public policy on an equal footing,” write the Arab authors of a United Nations report on Arab development. “A political system controlled by elites, however decked out with democratic trappings, will not produce outcomes conducive to human security for all citizens,” they predict.24

  The question of why tribalism has persisted in the Middle East but not in Europe has much to do with the nature of the Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman empires that ruled the region for the past two millennia. None was overly concerned with the welfare of its citizens. The Byzantine empire extracted heavy taxes and was widely unpopular, one reason for the success of the Arab empire when the Byzantine empire faltered. The overriding interest of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties that followed the Byzantines in ruling the Near East was in steady expansion of Islamic holdings. The Ottoman empire, which eventually displaced the Arabs, was a pure plunder machine. It had continuously to make new conquests and depredations to pay the soldiers on which its imperium depended. Under these circumstances, security of persons and property was consistently low for many centuries. There was nothing equivalent to the steady ratchet mechanism that in England enabled the less violent and more literate to prosper and leave more children like themselves. Because it has always been more rational for its inhabitants to trust the tribe more than the state, tribalism in the Middle East has never disappeared.

  In Africa too, tribalism has persisted and interacted poorly with the modern world. Throughout much of Africa, the standard mode of government is kleptocracy; whoever gains power uses it to enrich his family and tribe, which is the way that power has always been used in tribal systems. Extractive institutions, as defined by Acemog˘lu and Robinson, are prevalent in Africa, particularly in countries rich in natural resources.

  Despite substantial amounts of Western aid, many African countries are little better off than they were under colonial rule. Corruption is rampant. Many services for the poor are siphoned off by elites who leave only a trickle for the intended recipients. Some African countries have lower per capita incomes now than they had in 1980 or, in some cases, in 1960. “Half of Africa’s 800 million people live on less than $1 a day,” writes the journalist and historian Martin Meredith. “It is the only region where school enrolment is falling and where illiteracy is still commonplace. . . . It is also the only region where life expectancy is falling.”

  The root of the problem, Meredith believes, is that African leaders have failed to provide effective government. “Africa has suffered grievously at the hands of its Big Men and its ruling elites,” he writes. “Their preoccupation, above all, has been to hold power for the purpose of self-enrichment. . . . Much of the wealth they have acquired has been squandered on luxury living or stashed away in foreign bank accounts or foreign investments. The World Bank has estimated that 40% of Africa’s private wealth is held offshore. Their scramble for wealth has spawned a culture of corruption permeating every level of society.” 25

  As serious as the flight of capital is the flight of able and educated people. “The most common request to a white visitor to Africa these days, particularly from young people, is for help with a visa to Europe or America. Some 70,000 skilled people are reported to be fleeing the continent each year,” writes journalist Patrick Dowden.26

  Africa south of the Sahara is wracked by frequent violence, with about a third of its countries being at present involved in conflicts. Sudan, since its independence in 1956, has been locked in a series of civil wars. The Congo is a region of unending misery. Nigeria, cursed with oil, is a sea of corruption riven by religious and regional disputes.

  Despite all these serious problems, the GNP of the region has recently started to grow, expanding at an average rate of 4.7% a year between 2000 and 2011. Though the increase in GNP masks the extreme inequality that still persists, there are several long-term trends that point to sustainable growth. Overpopulation is not usually regarded as a blessing, yet demographic pressure has played a prime role in the urbanization of Europe and East Asia, though so far not Africa. This, however, may be about to change. “No country or region,” say two World Bank economists, Shantayanan Devarajan and Wolfgang Fengler, “has ever reached what the World Bank regards as high-income status with low levels of urbanization. African populations have traditionally been mostly rural, but the cities of sub-Saharan Africa are growing at astonishing rates.” Their projection is that in another 20 years, most of the region’s population will be urban, as is the case in the rest of the world.27

  Urbanization and empire building generated the first civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and the Americas. Whether it is necessary for Africa to take the same path to create modern states is far from clear. But fierce pressures are clearly at work in the continent, and people will adapt to them. These adaptations may include a reduction of tribalism.

  If running a productive, Western-style economy were simply a matter of culture, it should be possible for African and Middle Eastern countries to import Western institutions and business methods, just as East Asian countries have done. But this is evidently not a straightforward task. Though it was justifiable at first to blame the evils of colonialism, two generations or more have now passed since most foreign powers withdrew from Africa and the Middle East, and the strength of this explanation has to some extent faded.

  Tribal behavior is more deeply ingrained than are mere cultural prescriptions. Its longevity and stability point strongly to a genetic basis. This is hardly surprising, given that tribes are the default human social institution. The inbuilt nature of tribalism explains why it took so many thousands of years for East Asians and later Europeans to break free of its deadening embrace. It’s this escape that is so unexpected, not that the populations of Africa and the Middle East have so far lacked the opportunity to lose the ancient heritage of tribal political behavior.

  The Escape from Tribalism and Poverty

  The entry to the modern industrial world has two principal requirements. The first is to develop institutions that enable a society to break away, at least to some substantial extent, from the default human institution of tribalism. Tribalism, being built around kinship ties, is incompatible with the institutions of a modern state. The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviors as higher levels of trust toward those outside the family or tribe. A second required evolutionary change is the transformation of a population’s social traits from the violent, short-term, impulsive behavior typical of many hunter-gatherer and tribal societies into the more disciplined, future-oriented behavior seen in East Asian societies and documented by Clark for English workers at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

  Looking at the three principal races, one can see that each has followed a different evolutionary path as it adapted to its local circumstances. From an evolutionary perspective, no path is better than any other—nature’s only criterion for success is how well each is adapted to its local environment.

  Consider first Caucasians, the grouping of populations that includes Europeans, Middle Easterners and people of the Indian subcontinent (Indians and Pakistanis). Most European countries followed England almost immediately in transitioning to modern economies. Their populations, like that of England, had abandoned tribali
sm in the early Middle Ages. Europeans had long lived in the same Malthusian economies that Clark has documented for England. Within a few decades, all had been able to import English production methods and develop modern economies. Thus the Industrial Revolution was not particularly English, given that the evolutionary change that preceded it had occurred throughout Europe and East Asia. For an unrelated reason—the population spurt described above—the Industrial Revolution just happened to manifest itself first in the English economy.

  Why did the Industrial Revolution not spread so fast to China or Japan, which differed little from England in the state of their labor, land and capital markets? Clark argues that their upper classes were less fertile than their English counterparts, so that the engine that drove the spread of bourgeois values through the population operated somewhat more slowly in East Asia.28 The economic historian Kenneth Pomeranz, on the other hand, argues that there were few significant differences between Europe and China until England, with access to the extensive resources in its Caribbean and American colonies, was able to escape the constraints that held China back. He concludes that “forces outside the market and conjunctures beyond Europe deserve a central place in explaining why western Europe’s largely unexceptional core achieved unique breakthroughs and wound up as the privileged center of the nineteenth century’s new world economy, able to provide a soaring population with an unprecedented standard of living.” 29

  From an evolutionary standpoint, the populations of both Europe and East Asia had been primed by the selective pressures of their agrarian economies to escape the Malthusian trap, and it makes little difference which particular factor or event was the trigger for the transition to begin. It seems more likely that institutions, rather than human nature, were the impediment to East Asian progress. The peoples of China, Japan and Korea were fully ready to embrace the Industrial Revolution and market economies once the necessary institutions were in place. For Japan, that was after the Meiji Restoration of 1868; for China, after the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping after 1979.

  In East Asian populations, history has performed an instructive control experiment with the case of Korea. North and South Koreans are probably very similar to one another genetically, yet North Koreans are poor while South Korea has developed a tiger economy that is post-Malthusian, modern and prosperous. The difference, evidently, lies not in the two countries’ genes or geography but in the fact that the same set of social behaviors can support either good or bad institutions. Before 1945, Korea was a single country. After partition, North Korea instituted a collectivist system and a command economy run by a hereditary elite. North Korea lacks property rights or a reliable court system, giving people little incentive to invest for the future, since the state can confiscate property at will. Its population is denied education except for state propaganda. South Korea, by contrast, was directed toward a market economy by its first two authoritarian leaders.

  By 2011, South Koreans had become almost 18 times richer than their former compatriots in North Korea, with an estimated GDP per capita of $32,100 compared with $1,800. “Neither culture nor geography nor ignorance can explain the divergent paths of North and South Korea. We have to look at institutions for an answer,” say Acemog˘lu and Robinson in Why Nations Fail.30

  The fact that China, Japan and South Korea developed modern economies so easily, once the appropriate institutions were in place, is evidence that their populations, like those of Europe, had undergone equivalent behavioral changes to those documented in England.

  Another major impact on the Chinese population would have been urbanization. Cities are an environment that rewards literacy, the manipulation of symbols, and high-trust trade networks. With prolonged urbanization, those who mastered the skills of urban living would have had more children, and the population would have undergone the genetic changes that accomplish the adaptation to urban life. In Western countries, the affluent now tend to have fewer children, and China has had its one child policy, both of which set up different evolutionary forces. But until modern times, populations in both Europe and East Asia have partially been shaped by the ability of the rich to raise more surviving children, another instance of the ratchet of wealth.

  Turning to the third of the major races, the population of Africa south of the Sahara, the transition of these countries to modern economies has proved considerably slower. Africa is heavily beset with poverty, disease, war and corruption. Despite copious amounts of foreign aid, its living standards have failed to show substantial improvement over those attained under colonial rule. A recent spurt in economic activity in several countries has still not closed the widening gap with East Asia and Europe.

  Yet 50 years ago, Africans were as poor as many East Asians. Why has it been easy enough for East Asians to make the transition to modern economies but so hard for Africans?

  As discussed, one reason is tribalism. African countries have not developed the institutions to replace tribalism, an essential development for a modern state. African populations have not gone through the same Malthusian wringer that shaped the behavior of the European and East Asian populations. In Africa, population pressure has long been much lower than in Europe and Asia, probably because of poor soils and adverse climates that have restrained food production. State formation, as mentioned, depends on warfare between sizable polities that are forced to compete because of geographical constraints, such as living along a fertile river valley. But intense, large-scale warfare is unlikely to occur until population densities have become so high that people have few other choices.

  Until modern times, populations in Africa remained very low, constricted by disease and the grudging fertility of the soil in many tropical regions. For lack of demographic pressure, they thus escaped the urbanization and regimentation to which the populations of Europe and East Asia were subjected for many generations.

  From an evolutionary perspective, African populations were just as well adapted to their environment as were those of Europe and Asia to theirs. Small, loosely organized populations were the appropriate response to the difficult conditions of the African continent. But they were not necessarily well suited to the high efficiency economies to which European and East Asian populations had become adapted. From this perspective, it is understandable that African countries should take longer to make the transition to modern economies.

  Turning to the Near East, these populations belong, along with Europeans, to the Caucasian grouping. But unlike Europeans and East Asians, they have lacked the shaping experience of living under relatively stable agrarian economies. The Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman empires that held sway in the region for the past 1,500 years were predatory regimes whose purpose was not to serve their populations but to extract wealth from them for the support of the ruling elite. Generations of such rule habituate people, quite rationally, to look to their family and tribe for help, not the government. And under these conditions, it is hard for tribal behaviors to give way to the more trusting behaviors found in modern economies. Countries of the Near East, particularly Arab states, have not yet developed institutions to transcend tribalism and hence face serious obstacles in achieving the transition to modern economies.

  These obstacles presumably reside at the level of societies and less with the abilities of their individual members. A worldwide diaspora of accomplished and wealthy Lebanese, for instance, is proof of how successful Lebanese can be outside of Lebanon, a situation similar to that of the overseas Chinese communities during the past two centuries. But China has since been able to improve its institutions more easily than has Lebanon.

  The Problem of Economic Development

  The view of economic development generally taken by economists is that people have little or nothing to do with it. Since all humans are identical units that respond the same way to incentives, at least in economic theory, then if one country is poor and another rich, the difference cannot have anything to do with the p
eople but must lie in institutions or access to resources. Just supply enough capital and impose business-friendly institutions, and robust economic growth will surely follow. Strong evidence to this effect seemed to be furnished by the Marshall Plan, which helped revive European economies after the Second World War.

  On the basis of this theory, the West has spent some $2.3 trillion in aid over the past 50 years without managing to improve African living standards. Could something be not quite right with the theory? Might the human units of the world’s economies be less completely fungible than economic theory assumes, with the consequence that variations in their nature, such as their time preference, work ethic and propensity to violence, have some bearing on the economic decisions they make?

  To account for the discrepancy between theory and practice, a few scholars interested in development have begun to suggest that maybe people do matter after all. Their suggestion is that culture plays an important role in people’s economic behavior.

  In the early 1960s Ghana and South Korea had similar economies and levels of gross national product per capita. Some thirty years later, South Korea had become the 14th largest economy in the world, exporting sophisticated manufactures. Ghana had stagnated, and GNP per capita had fallen to one fifteenth that of South Korea. “It seemed to me that culture had to be a large part of the explanation,” the political scientist Samuel Huntington remarked in pondering this divergence of economic fates. “South Koreans valued thrift, investment, hard work, education, organization, and discipline. Ghanaians had different values.” 31

  Even the economist Jeffrey Sachs, a tireless advocate of increased aid, has conceded the possibility that culture might play some minor role in differences in economic development. Although “the great divisions between rich and poor countries involve geography and politics,” he writes, “nonetheless, there are indeed some hints of culturally mediated phenomena. Two are most apparent: the underperformance of Islamic countries in North Africa and the Middle East and the strong performance of tropical countries in East Asia that have an important overseas Chinese community.” 32