The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [32]
Without new technologies and techniques, Asia fell prey to the classic Malthusian problem. Thomas Malthus’ famous 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, is remembered today for its erroneous pessimism, but, in fact, many of Malthus’ insights were highly intelligent. He observed that food production in England rose at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4, . . .) but population grew at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . .). This mismatch, unless altered, would ensure that the country would be hungry and impoverished, and that only catastrophes like famine and disease could raise living standards (by shrinking the population).* Malthus’ dilemma was quite real, but he failed to appreciate the power of technology. He did not recognize that these very pressures would generate a human response in Europe—the agricultural revolution, which vastly expanded the production of food. (The continent also eased population pressures by exporting tens of millions of people to various colonies, mostly in the Americas.) So Malthus was wrong about Europe. His analysis, however, well described Asia and Africa.
Strength Is Weakness
And yet, how to make sense of those extraordinary Chinese voyages? Zheng He’s dazzling fleet is just one part of a larger picture of remarkable achievements in China and India—palaces, courts, cities—at the very time that the West was moving ahead of them. The Taj Mahal was built in 1631 to honor the Mogul emperor Shah Jahan’s beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal. A British traveler, William Hodges, was one of many to point out that there was nothing like it in Europe. “The fine materials, the beautiful forms, and the symmetry of the whole,” he wrote, “far surpasses anything I ever beheld.” Building the Taj took enormous talent and skill, as well as astonishing feats of engineering. How could a society produce such wonders of the world and yet not move ahead more broadly? If China could put together such spectacular and sophisticated naval expeditions, why could it not make clocks?
Part of the answer lies in the way the Moguls built the Taj Mahal. Twenty thousand laborers worked night and day on the site for twenty years. They built a ramp ten miles long just to move materials up to the 187-foot-high dome. The budget was unlimited, and no value was placed on the man-hours put into the project. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford the Taj. Zheng He’s flotilla was produced by a similar command system, as was Beijing’s Forbidden City. Begun in 1406, the city required the labor of a million men—and another million soldiers to watch over them. If all of a large society’s energies and resources are directed at a few projects, those projects often become successes—but isolated successes. The Soviet Union boasted an extraordinary space program well into the 1970s, even though by then it was technologically the most backward of all the industrial nations.
But throwing more manpower at a problem is not the path to innovation. The historian Philip Huang makes a fascinating comparison between the farmers of the Yangtze Delta and those of England, the richest regions of China and Europe respectively in 1800.6 He points out that, by some measures, the two areas might seem to have been at equivalent economic levels. But in fact, Britain was far ahead in the key measure of growth—labor productivity. The Chinese were able to make their land highly productive, but they did so by putting more and more people to work on a given acre—what Huang calls “output without development.” The English, on the other hand, kept searching for ways to make labor more productive, so that each farmer was producing more crops. They discovered new labor-saving devices, using animals and inventing machines. When the multi-spindle wheel, which required one trained operator, was developed, for example,