The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [88]
Trade, for example, could transform Africa’s prospects. China’s purchases from Africa (not counting its direct investments there) quintupled in the Nineties and quintupled again in the Noughties, yet they still account for just 2 per cent of China’s foreign trade. China may be about to repeat some of Europe’s colonial exploitative mistakes in Africa, but in terms of being open to trade from the continent it puts Europe and America to shame. Farm subsidies and import tariffs on cotton, sugar, rice and other products cost Africa $500 billion a year in lost export opportunities – or twelve times the entire aid budget to the continent.
Yes, of course, trade is disruptive. Cheap imports can destroy jobs at home – though in doing so they always create far more both at home and abroad, by freeing up consumers’ cash to buy other goods and services. If Europeans find their shoes made cheaply in Vietnam, then they have more to spend on getting their hair done and there are more nice jobs for Europeans in hair salons and fewer dull ones in shoe factories. Sure, manufacturers will and do seek out countries that tolerate lower wages and lower standards – though, prodded by Western activists, in practice their main effect is then to raise the wages and standards in such places, where they most need raising. It is less of a race to the bottom, more of a race to raise the bottom. Nike’s sweatshops in Vietnam, for example, pay wages three times as high as local state owned factories and have far better facilities. That drives up wages and standards. During the period of most rapid expansion of trade and out-sourcing, child labour has halved since 1980: if that is driving down standards, let there be more of it.
The apotheosis of the city
Trade draws people to cities and swells the slums. Is this not a bad thing? No. Satanic the mills of the industrial revolution may have looked to romantic poets, but they were also beacons of opportunity to young people facing the squalor and crowding of a country cottage on too small a plot of land. As Ford Madox Ford celebrated in his Edwardian novel The Soul of London, the city may have seemed dirty and squalid to the rich but it was seen by the working class as a place of liberation and enterprise. Ask a modern Indian woman why she wants to leave her rural village for a Mumbai slum. Because the city, for all its dangers and squalor, represents opportunity, the chance to escape from the village of her birth, where there is drudgery without wages, suffocating family control and where work happens in the merciless heat of the sun or the drenching downpour of the monsoon. Just as Henry Ford said he was driven to invent the gasoline buggy to escape the ‘crushing boredom of life on a midwest farm’, so, says Suketa Mehta, ‘for the young person in an Indian village, the call of Mumbai isn’t just about money. It’s also about freedom.’
All across Asia, Latin America and Africa, a tide of subsistence farmers is leaving the land to move to cities and find paid work. To many Westerners, suffused with nostalgie de la boue (nostalgia for mud), this is a regrettable trend. Many charities and aid agencies see their job as helping to prevent subsistence farmers having to move to the city by making life in the countryside more sustainable. ‘Many of my contemporaries in the developed world,’ writes Stewart Brand, ‘regard subsistence farming as soulful