But, but, but. It is popularization, and--little wonder--on many subjects it looks weak from a specialist's point of view. When Landes speaks on the subjects of his other three books--19th-century Egyptian finance, technical change in the past 200 years, clocks in history--you believe him. His forte is the clinching anecdote. He gets less believable when he ventures into the two areas in which he doesn't claim expertise--numbers and theory.
I've known Landes and his work for over 30 years--my dissertation at Harvard was an attack on his views of British economic "failure" in the late 19th century (views he repeats without revision in the present book). What's wrong with Landes's method now is what has always been wrong with it: Like the aristocrat buying up art by the roomful, he doesn't ask "how much?" Historians can't raise the question unless they are trained in some quantitative discipline, such as demography or economics. Although Landes has taught quantitative methods, he has never troubled to learn them. So he gives lists of "factors" in the classic historiographic style, and you never know how to weigh them.
A minor instance among hundreds is his repetition of the usual calumnies against "Sicily's persistent backwardness." Backward by what standard? Where on the scale of economic success does Sicily now fall? Landes waxes eloquent: "[I]n spite of huge subsidies...the landscape is dotted with idle factories, unfinished housing developments, roads that go nowhere." Unlike what? Massachusetts? "This slough of failure and despond testifies to deep failings: ignorance, bias, want of community, organized criminality." One wonders if Landes has thought economically about what he saw in Sicily. Sicily by the standard of most of the world is a fantastic economic success. If Sicily were a country it would have an income comfortably within the top decile of the world's population. Failure?
Head-shaking disbelief is not a counter-argument, but Landes is always doing it. About A.G. Frank's notion that Europe did not break away materially until around 1800 his only reply--in a footnote--is, "Bad history." No, bad shot selection, quantitatively speaking. Recent findings in China and India have persuaded most economic historians who have troubled to examine them that in 1800 some parts of those countries were as wealthy as Western Europe. "European exceptionalism" may have its roots in the Middle Ages, but in the 18th century the plant was not much different from Chinese or Japanese or Indian varieties. Which is just what the Blessed Smith said in 1776.
As to theory, Landes's book is full of sage evocations of "theoretical" reasoning, but that sort of thinking is not his strong point. A small example among scores: He attacks throughout the book the economist's notion of comparative advantage. But of course he does not understand it. His obduracy is bound to annoy an economist. For God's sake, you can get comparative advantage right once and for all, and never again misapply it (as Landes does in about half the instances), by reading the chapter on it in any economics text. I have to agree with Paul Krugman, who is quoted by Landes as saying that nationalist economics is "based on a failure to understand even the simplest economic facts and concepts." Comments Landes: "Peremptory and dismissive." But how much patience are we economists supposed to have? When Landes says that "[c]omparative advantage is not fixed, and it can move for and against," he is combining a truism with nonsense.
Even so, we agree on an awful lot. He says, "[C]ulture does not stand alone. Economic analysis cherishes the illusion that one good reason should be enough, but the determinants of complex processes are invariably plural and interrelated." The first big paper I wrote in college about economics was an attack on the social psychologist David McClelland's notion of "need for achievement." I was a sophomore, a very wise fool, and did not agree with McClelland. Landes does agree. Of the Asian Tigers, he writes, "this achievement reflects in my opinion the culture of these societies."
I wish I knew as much now as I did as a sophomore, but I now think my younger self was wrong. You can't just drop the Sacred and Sociology (the S variables) in favor of an exclusive focus on the Profane and Profit and Price (P variables). That's what economics has tried to do since Jeremy Bentham--with some successes and a lot of silliness. To do the science right you have to control for all the variables, not just pray that the S variables won't interfere. That said, Landes and I would now get back to quarreling about numbers. He would say that S variables are not measurable. Fiddlesticks. (A drop shot: Handle it if you can.)
The trouble is that culture is startling, ironically unpredictable. "Culture makes all the difference," Landes says frequently, adding, "Here Max Weber was right on."
Fine. Let's perform a mental experiment to test how culture can "make all the difference." No fair using hindsight. Suppose in a very backward country named R---- the established church decides to clean up the liturgy by eliminating some old corruptions. A group of believers, themselves stupidly conservative in every way, rejects the new liturgy. Which of the following occurs?
1) The establishment is hostile to these Old Believers.
2) The Old Believers retreat into self-imposed isolation.
3) The Old Believers sink into poverty and obscurity, on account of 1) and 2).
4) The Old Believers go on to become the dominant force in the country's economy for the next two centuries, on account of 1) and 2).
This bizarre scenario played out in 17th-century Russia, and the correct answer to our quiz is 1), 2), and 4), as Alexander Gerschenkron noted in Russia in the European Mirror (1970). The example does not refute Landes; but it shows as difficult what he thinks is easy: to tell who will win. The Old Believers in Russia were the only successfully bourgeois portion of Russian society in the 17th through 19th centuries, except for an occasional Jew and lot of what Landes calls "metics" (noncitizen workers).
There was nothing easy or inevitable about this: Some minorities do well when the establishment tries to crush them and they shrink back into their own ghettoes--witness the Old Believers, but also the overseas Chinese. But some badly treated minorities just do badly. It can go either way. One is reminded of Arnold Toynbee and his famous--and empty--theory of "challenge and response." Too much challenge, as in Greenland, or too little, as in 18th-century China, and you get stagnation. It's difficult--even impossible--to say which will apply.
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