The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (ISBN 0-393-04017-8), published in 1998 (with an epilogue added to the 1999 paperback edition), is a book by the late David Landes, formerly Emeritus Professor of Economics and former Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. In it, Landes elucidates the reasons why some countries and regions of the world experienced near miraculous periods of explosive growth while the rest of the world stagnated. He does this by comparing the long-term economic histories of different regions of the world, giving priority to Europe and the United States, as well as Japan, China, the Arab world, and Latin America. In addition to analyzing economic and cliometric figures, he gives substantial credit to such intangible assets as culture and enterprise in the different societies he examines in order to explain economic success or failure.
In doing so, he revives, at least in part, several theories he believes have been incorrectly discarded by academics over the last 40 years, including:
- The 'cultural thesis' or Protestant work ethic of Max Weber, whereby the values imposed by the Protestant religion on its adherents would have pushed them to value hard work, timeliness, enterprise and free-thinking to a much greater extent than for their catholic brethren. This would explain the great success of northern Protestant regions such as Holland, Great Britain and parts of Germany as compared to catholic nations such as Spain and France.
- The 'hydraulic thesis' or 'Oriental Despotism thesis' of Karl A. Wittfogel, where despots would control the use of water in order to submit the population to its will.
- The 'climate thesis' that posits that tropical climes are, ceteris paribus, poor candidates for development.
- Many of the theories of Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations is borrowed from for the title. But this does not necessarily mean a doctrinaire neoclassicism, as Landes notes that 'comparative advantage' can change over time, and also that developed countries, contrary to neoclassical theory, typically developed in an environment of protectionism against foreign trade.
In short, he argues that the vast economic growth of the Industrial Revolution was no accident, but instead resulted from several qualities of Europe, including its climate, political competition, and attitude towards science and religion, and more specifically from certain countries in Europe, primarily England.
Criticism and response
Critics have charged Landes with Eurocentrism in his analysis, a charge which Landes himself does not deny—in fact, he embraces it explicitly, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe (though he deals with the later 'Asian miracle' in Wealth and Poverty) must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis, thus siding at least at some level with thinkers such as Bernard Lewis. Following Daniel Bell, knowledge is the necessary link between 'The European miracle' and the American post-industrial society.
Landes and Professor Andre Gunder Frank, author of ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (ISBN 0520214749), are noted for having come to very different conclusions about the long-view significance of economic developments in "the West" during the modern era and publicly debated their findings in 1998 at Northwestern University.
- Great Divergence
- Guns, Germs, and Steel
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
- The Civilizing Process
- The European Miracle
- The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
- The Clash of Civilizations
- A Farewell to Alms
- Civilization: The West and the Rest
- Economic History Debate between David Landes and Andre Gunder Frank on C-SPAN2 (Northwestern University World History Center, 1998-12-02)
- David Landes discusses The Wealth & Poverty of Nations on C-SPAN2 (Boston Public Library, 1998-03-10)
- Book review
- Review by J. Bradford DeLong