Why The West Rules - For Now: The Patterns of History and what they reveal about the Future

"Of all the books that left an indelible impression on my mind, this is certainly one of them. It’s a veritable tome — some 900 plus pages, but it is very interestingly written. It’s about the development of mankind from primitive times to the present day. Morris articulates a part of a very interesting narrative, which feeds directly into the whole contemporary debate about emerging countries. What he is interested in demonstrating is how, over vast swathes of time, the West and the East were basically playing catch-up with one another. He’s an archaeologist and historian, and he demonstrates—through his research and discoveries of archaeological material—that, actually, for all of history until about the 18th century, there was very little difference in the pace of development of mankind between what we now call the ‘western hemisphere’ and the ‘eastern hemisphere.’ “What is it that causes countries to grow and develop and become part of the global system, the trading system, the investment system and then, suddenly, reach a point in their development when they are not making relative progress anymore?” He traces the key factors, and he devises a measurement system to try to understand what caused human development to accelerate and sometimes, again, to regress, and then to accelerate, and then to regress. These factors were not dissimilar between East and West, and there was never really much to choose between them until the very early stages of the Industrial Revolution. When that really got going, the West stole a lead on the rest of the planet and just powered ahead in the way that we now understand. I think it’s very interesting to understand why that happened, and what the critical success factors were. Because when we try to understand, today, countries which, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, we thought were going to be really successful, and we look around now and find that, actually, many of them either have not been successful, or have run into roadblocks, those same questions come back to us. What is it that drives human development and how do you secure it for the future? How do you keep going? The contemporary economic way of looking at this is basically trying to understand a concept that’s been called the ‘middle income trap.’ What is it that causes countries to grow and develop and become part of the global system, the trading system, the investment system and then, suddenly, reach a point in their development when they are not making relative progress anymore? That’s what Ian Morris’s book prompted me to think a lot harder about. That and much, much more. His skill sets and his academic orientation obviously lead him to that conclusion. I suppose, in the economics profession, we probably wouldn’t tilt quite as much to happenstance. We think it’s a little bit more than random. It’s probably being a bit harsh, but we probably do think that it is a bit more deterministic, or at least that political economy is more deterministic. Although some of the things that Morris cites throughout his analysis—which include climate change and other physical issues and war: I mean just the capacity of people to destroy what they create sometimes—are pretty important factors in the history of human development. If you’re just looking at it through an economist’s eyes, you would tend to say, ‘Well, OK, if these things happen, then we have to start again.’ We assume that they won’t happen, at least in any kind of predictable pattern."