False Economy - Alan Beattie [153]
It was not as if everyone was ignoring the crisis. A group of reformers known as the arbitristas wrote stacks of policy documents with a range of suggestions. Some were sensible, such as a limit to the number of days that the extravagantly expensive royal court could sit in session. Some were understandable but misguided, like banning exports of raw materials and imports of manufactured goods to help domestic industry. And some verged on the surreal. A kind of proto-government policy unit, the Junta de Reformacion, in 1623 recommended to the king that he prohibit the teaching of Latin in small towns, to prevent peasants getting grand ideas and moving to the cities.
Yet there was not enough willpower to follow through with any of the suggestions. As a symbol of willingness to reform, the royal court did affect a mode of ostentatious austerity after the Junta made its recommendations. Just a few months later, however, they discarded their hair shirts in favor of silk when a lavish reception was arranged for a visit from the Prince of Wales. Perhaps the only lasting success of the reform movement was the widespread abandonment of the expensive and cumbersome ruff collar. It may have saved the nobles on laundry bills; it was not enough to save an empire. When it came down to it, the aristocracy would not give up enough of their privileges to preserve the system that had made them rich. As one contemporary observer said of reform: "Those who can will not, and those who will cannot."
But before we start drawing contemporary policy lessons from history, are we even right in suggesting that countries can turn themselves around quickly with the right policies? This book suggests that, yes, they can.
Not everyone agrees. A huge amount of effort has gone into investigating why Europe, and specifically England, was the first country to enter the Industrial Revolution, and by doing so to achieve the first substantial sustained growth in average incomes for its citizens in history. The recent account by the historian Greg Clark suggests it was the process of higher-quality human capital spreading itself through the population over the generations. Richer and better-educated people had more children, and so, gradually, the attributes that make people suitable for industrialized economies—hard work, rationality, and education—became widespread. This suggests that such a process cannot be forced, or changed by better policies from the top. It is simply a matter of waiting for higher-quality human capital to emerge.
Clark's book was a remarkable contribution to the sum of knowledge. In particular, it accumulated a large pile of evidence to support the thesis that human life on average (in terms of income, life expectancy, calorie intake, and so forth) had not substantially improved for millennia before the Industrial Revolution. Increases in any given society's income had been followed by increases in population, making each individual no better off. Paradoxically, the biggest boost to per capita income in Europe before the Industrial Revolution was the Black Death (bubonic plague) outbreaks of the mid—fourteenth century, which made labor scarcer by reducing the population and hence increased the incomes of those who survived.
It is an interesting thesis. But the contention that the dissemination of different attitudes and, possibly, genes throughout the population sparked the Industrial Revolution doesn't do much to explain what has happened since—and certainly not in the past fifty years. The remarkable postwar performance of the Asian tigers came in the form of sudden takeoffs in growth. China's high rate of growth can be traced pretty directly to the market-based policy reforms it initiated in 1979. It seems somewhat implausible that a sudden outbreak of cultural or genetic diligence had much to do with it.
Countries close