What Makes Peoples Rich?

THE GROWTH of Japanese economic power during the 1980s has shaken the confidence of many Americans in their country’s ability to retain its world supremacy. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers predicts that the United States is destined to decline, as other world powers have declined in the past. And now further challenges loom from East Asia.

The rise of the miracle economies of the Pacific rim raises once again the question of why some countries are able to achieve spectacular rates of economic growth and sustain them over several decades, while others languish in apparently intractable poverty. It is a question that economists have not been able to answer. A couple of years ago Harvard economist David Landes gave a lecture to the American Economics Association with the arresting title, “Why Are We So Rich and They So Poor?” Landes wound up saying that economists have no idea why nations differ in their rates of economic growth. He suspected, as other economists have suspected before him, that the answer must lie somewhere in the psychological motivations and attitudes of the various peoples. But where?

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Richard Lynn

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THE GROWTH of Japanese economic power during the 1980s has shaken the confidence of many Americans in their country’s ability to retain its world supremacy. Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers predicts that the United States is destined to decline, as other world powers have declined in the past. And now further challenges loom from East Asia.

The rise of the miracle economies of the Pacific rim raises once again the question of why some countries are able to achieve spectacular rates of economic growth and sustain them over several decades, while others languish in apparently intractable poverty. It is a question that economists have not been able to answer. A couple of years ago Harvard economist David Landes gave a lecture to the American Economics Association with the arresting title, “Why Are We So Rich and They So Poor?” Landes wound up saying that economists have no idea why nations differ in their rates of economic growth. He suspected, as other economists have suspected before him, that the answer must lie somewhere in the psychological motivations and attitudes of the various peoples. But where?