The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [85]
Then came the calamities of the 1200s and 1300s. First the Mongol invasion, then the Black Death, then a series of natural disasters, followed by the all too unnatural disaster of totalitarian Ming rule. The Black Death, as I shall argue in the next chapter, spurred Europe into further gains from trade and escaping the trap of self-sufficiency; why did it not have the same effect in China, where it left the country half as populous as before and therefore presumably rich in surplus land to support disposable income? The blame rests squarely with the Ming dynasty. Western Europe only bounced back from the Black Death because it had regions of independent city states run by and for merchants, notably in Italy and Flanders. This made it harder for landowners to reimpose serfdom and restrictions on peasant movement after the plague had briefly empowered the labouring classes. In Eastern Europe, Mamluk Egypt and Ming China, serfdom was effectively restored.
Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialisation; thus, even Genghis Khan’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the Silk Road, thus lowering the cost of oriental goods in European parlours. But then, as Peter Turchin argues following the lead of the medieval geographer Ibn Khaldun, governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.
Not only did the Ming emperors nationalise much of industry and trade, creating state monopolies in salt, iron, tea, alcohol, foreign trade and education, but they interfered with the everyday lives of their citizens and censored expression to a totalitarian degree. Ming officials had high social status and low salaries, a combination that inevitably bred corruption and rent-seeking. Like all bureaucrats they instinctively mistrusted innovation as a threat to their positions and spent more and more of their energy on looking after their own interests rather than the goals they were put there to pursue. As Etienne Balazs put it:
The reach of the Moloch-state, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, goes much further. There are clothing regulations, a regulation of public and private construction (dimensions of houses); the colours one wears, the music one hears, the festivals – all are regulated. There are rules for birth and rules for death; the providential State watches minutely over every step of its subjects, from cradle to grave. It is a regime of paperwork and harassment, endless paperwork and endless harassment.
Do not be fooled by the present tense: this is Ming, not Maoist, China that Balazs is describing. The behaviour of Hongwu, the first of the Ming emperors, is an object lesson in