Secrets of Success

Joel Mokyr from the December 1998 issue

Conquests and Cultures: An International History, by Thomas Sowell, New York: Basic Books, 493 pages, $35.00

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, New York: Norton, 480 pages, $27.50

Global economic history is "in" again. Along with the two books reviewed here, I could mention David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Richard Easterlin's Growth Triumphant, Robert McC. Adams's Paths of Fire, and Patrick Verley's L'échelle du Monde. More are on the way. All of these books are trying, in one way or another, to answer the question posed by Thomas Sowell: Why does 17 percent of the world produce four-fifths of its output? A more elegant way of raising the same issue is what Jared Diamond calls "Yali's question." Yali is a New Guinea notable who one day asks Diamond why white people have so much "cargo"--Western manufactured goods desired by New Guineans --while New Guinea produces no cargo of interest to Westerners.

Everyone understands that these questions can never be answered in a definitive way, comparable to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. The distribution of prosperity is hopelessly "overdetermined": There are far too many answers that all seem to be right. Culture, geography, institutions, war, religion, and even historical accidents all seem to have played a role. But what role, and which factors are most important, remain matters of controversy.

Thomas Sowell's Conquests and Cultures is the third volume of a trilogy, preceded by Race and Culture and Migrations and Cultures. Sowell, a noted economist and social commentator at Stanford's Hoover Institution, raises the interesting issue of what happens when two culturally and economically different societies clash militarily and one of them "conquers" the other. Using this general framework, he analyzes four historical cases in which conquest played a major role: England, Africa, the Slavic people, and the Western Hemisphere Indians. These chapters show that conquests do not have much in common, yielding a somewhat confused picture. In Africa, conquest led to slavery for a large proportion of the population; in the Western Hemisphere, to the physical destruction of much of the indigenous population; in Eastern Europe, where conquerors and conquered changed positions over time, to an unstable and variable clash of cultures.

Conquests come in many forms, from the long-term occupations of the Romans in the Mediterranean to the short-lived mega-empires of Tamerlane. Some of them led to a forced or voluntary assimilation of the conquered to the language and customs of the victors, but in other cases the reverse occurred (for example, the Roman conquest of Greece or the Mongol conquests of China). Sowell points out that being conquered often led to a long-term increase in living standards and economic performance, and in some cases when the occupiers withdrew (as the Romans did from Britain in the fifth century) the occupied countries sank into poverty and barbarism. In Sowell's view, exploitation and theft do not go nearly as far in explaining economic differences as culturally caused differences in productivity.

The key concept in Sowell's view of history is "cultural capital," which is transferred and diffused among societies. The concept is nowhere defined with any precision, and at times it seems to be interchangeable with "human capital," though Sowell uses that term rather loosely as well, often more in the sense of mentalité and social institutions than in the sense employed by economists (an economically useful formal education). Yet his overall view of history is quite clear: People are born with very similar innate abilities, but their economic achievements differ enormously due to differences in "cultural capital," which determines not only such matters as technological sophistication but also "attitudes" such as diligence, honesty, and ambition. For Sowell, the most important form of cultural capital is freedom, which is Britain's gift to the world. Free markets and the aggressive pursuit of economic success within them are the central answers to Yali's question.

The question of why and how these ideas caught on or did not occupies the bulk of Conquests and Cultures. Some of the themes announced at the start, especially the effects of "conquest," are lost in the shuffle, and when the reader puts the book down, its basic message remains fuzzy. What is clear is that, much like David Landes, Sowell believes that Western culture and values hold the key to economic progress. His knowledge of economic history, unfortunately, cannot hold a candle to Landes's, and because of his very cursory discussion of the key elements in this story, the book will probably only preach to the converted and irritate the skeptics.

This is not to say that Conquests and Cultures has no valuable messages. Sowell points out that statements about general characteristics of a large group (ethnic, racial, religious) are not necessarily inadmissible if these groups share a culture or an environment that might affect their traits. Essentialism (the notion that groups share certain inherent traits), fervently denounced by politically correct scholars, is not the same as racism. Sowell also points to the dynamic role played in economic history by population movements and minorities, perhaps not a novel insight but worth stressing. At times immigrants and minorities enriched the local inhabitants with their culture and knowledge; in other cases they were the winners.

Sowell surely will annoy some pious liberals by noting that the lighter the skin color of American blacks, the higher their scores on tests of intelligence "and other social qualities." This, he proclaims, is not a subjective perception or a stereotype but a fact. The explanation is that the lighter-skinned group had "earlier and better access to higher levels of European culture." Without, of course, endorsing oppression and slavery, Sowell argues that the more Africans (in either hemisphere) had contact with European culture, the better off they were economically.

Even more courageously, Sowell admonishes us to examine seriously racist theories that correlate genetics with achievement. While these theories are incorrect, he says, something useful can be learned from the conversation with racists, and blanket dismissals are uncalled for. For instance, biological differences between races may exist even if they are not caused by genes: Norwegians are taller than the Japanese (and Americans are fatter than anyone else), but this is primarily due to environmental and nutritional differences, not genetics.

As a work of scholarship, unfortunately, Sowell's book is broad rather than deep. Although the book contains an amazingly large number of notes (1,626, to be exact), they point mostly to textbooks, atlases, works of reference, and well-known (usually dated) syntheses. Of course, nobody can be an expert on the huge literature of any of the four cases that Sowell analyzes, let alone all four. All the same, the net result is that many of his chapters read like potted histories, distilled from the secondary literature.

At least for the small subset of Sowell's material on which I can claim some expertise, the research behind this book does not inspire confidence. The small section on the British Industrial Revolution seems to have evaded every important book written on the subject in the past two decades. Sowell's pitiful survey of Ireland, seemingly a superb case through which his theories about the effects of conquest on the diffusion of cultural capital could be tested, contains the howler that the dire poverty of the Irish in the early 19th century is indicated by a life expectancy of 19 years.

The actual number is probably twice as high (see Cormac Ó Gráda's Ireland Before and After the Famine, 1993, page 18). And unbeknownst to Sowell, modern research has discovered that the Irish were taller than their English contemporaries, indicating that measures of "poverty" and "backwardness" are ambiguous. In a brief section supposed to explain how "religion played important roles in the secular development of the world," Sowell somehow fails to mention either Max Weber or Lynn White. My point is not to nitpick on one or two errors so much as to point out that in books such as this one no reader knows the "topic" as a whole; if a reviewer finds glaring errors and poor coverage in an area in which he has some expertise, his confidence in the rest of the story is inevitably reduced.

Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, shares with Sowell's the premise that all nations and ethnic groups possess the potential for economic success, even if that potential is not realized to the same degree everywhere. Otherwise, the two books are quite different. Diamond is a professor of physiology at UCLA's medical school whose range marks him as one of the true Renaissance scholars of our time. He is also a highly original thinker whose scholarship in many areas is sound and reliable. This book, honored recently with a Pulitzer Prize, is mandatory reading for anyone who purports to engage big questions in the area of long-term global history.