False Economy - Alan Beattie [132]
Corruption is by definition part of a system, and systems evolve for a reason. Corruption is not a good thing. But, depending on its nature and the way it has come about, it may well be less damaging than it first appears. Julius Nyerere was fundamentally a decent man; far fewer people would say the same about Suharto. Yet though personal corruption was one of the main differences between them, it does not alter the fact that the latter enriched his country while the former helped keep his desperately poor.
Chapter 9. Path Dependence: Why Are Pandas So Useless?
Giant pandas are incompetent, inefficient piebald buffoons, and we should end their public subsidies and let them die out. I once said that in the pages of an international newspaper, and the responses of outraged readers comparing me to a genocidal dictator flooded in for days. I stand by my views, however, and am now going to draw on them to create a slightly tenuous metaphor for economic development.
The giant panda's problem is that it went down an evolutionary cul-de-sac and has now found it too late to reverse. Of course, as panda apologists will quickly tell you, they are endangered because humans are encroaching on their locale. But that is the proximate, not the underlying, cause. Their real problem is that their incompetence at consuming and reproducing makes them hopelessly vulnerable. Pandas eat almost exclusively bamboo, which helps confine them to a narrow habitat and puts them at immediate risk from any change. Bamboo is, in any case, so low in nutrients that pandas have to spend up to sixteen hours a day chewing it—the equivalent of trying to subsist on sugarcoated cardboard. And, ridiculously, they have a short digestive tract far more suitable for a carnivore than a herbivore, so most of what they do eat passes through undigested. Finally, they are so bad at mating that in captivity they have to be shown panda pornography to get them to perform. (No, really.) The prosecution rests. Pandas are useless.
Contrast the panda with the domestic cat, a creature that has a clearly defined yet flexible business plan. Today's kitties are descended from African wildcats. These entrepreneurial felines emerged from the savannah and bushland just as hunting-gathering was giving way to settled farming techniques, including irrigation, in the Fertile Crescent of North Africa and the Middle East several millennia ago. Recognizing that Homo sapiens, the dominant species, was going to be a lucrative customer on an ongoing basis, cats instantly spotted and filled a gap in the market. Grain cultivation and storage had created a business opportunity in rodent control in which they had a clear competitive advantage.
Spreading across the worldwide human client base, cats merged with local providers where necessary, interbreeding with the European wildcat to produce the tabby. And aside from developing some niche specialty products along the way, like the deity service they delivered to the demanding ancient Egyptian consumer, they subsequently diversified into the increasingly popular domestic pet sector, in which they now enjoy a dominant market share. (Those related enterprises such as the tiger that chose to ignore business reality and base themselves in a more hostile market environment have had a much harder time.) Domestic cats are highly efficient hunters and eat a wide variety of foods; they can survive in urban and rural environments; they can afford to spend sixteen hours a day sleeping rather than stuffing themselves with biologically inappropriate and increasingly scarce vegetation. They breed easily and effectively. They are solitary but adapt to living alongside other cats and humans. Unlike pandas, cats do not require any state subsidy to thrive. The case for the defense is unanswerable. Cats are great.
This analogy is evidently self-indulgent and by no means precise. Societies are not species, and do not evolve in the same way through random variations in genes that get passed down over generations.