Capitalism – Page 11 – artdiamondblog.com

Hawaiian Culture Changed Swiftly in Century After 1777

(p. C1 & C6) It’s startling just how swiftly change came to Hawaii after Capt. James Cook first sighted the island of Kauai in 1777: In little more than a century, Ms. Moore writes, “a closed and isolated culture, bound by superstition and religious ritual, with no understanding of individual freedom or private property,” had been transformed into “a society of thriving capitalism, Protestant values, and democratic institutions.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “Hard Truths in the Past of a Tropical Eden.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPT. 22, 2015): C1 & C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPT. 21, 2015, and has the title “Review: ‘Paradise of the Pacific,’ the Hard Truths of Hawaii’s History.”)

The book under review, is:
Moore, Susanna. Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.

Haiti Stagnates Under Crony Capitalism

(p. A13) A May 2015 World Bank “systematic country diagnostic” on Haiti is instructive.
. . .
As the World Bank report notes, Haiti suffers from crony capitalism that holds back economic growth.
. . .
The record of Haiti’s elected politicians, since the transition to democracy at the beginning of the 1990s, is dismal. The political class still uses its power for personal aggrandizement, as the infamous dictators François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude did for almost 30 years.
Just as discouraging is that after more than two decades of going to the polls, Haitians have yet to taste economic freedom, and emigration has become the only option for those who hope to get ahead by hard work. The World Bank reports that between 1971 and 2013 gross domestic product per capita “fell by .7% per year on average.”
. . .
The World Bank authors gently speculate that there is “little competitive pressure.” They observe this “could be the result of high legal or behavioral entry barriers” and this “could facilitate tacit agreements among families/groups to allocate markets among themselves, which may harm productivity and incentive to innovate.”
This is polite jargon for collusion, which Haitians already know. They also know that absent the political will to open markets to competition, elections won’t matter much.

For the full commentary, see:
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY. “Diagnosing What Ails Haiti’s Economy; The World Bank fingers cronyism, of which Bill Clinton was for years a symbol.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 12, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Oct. 11, 2015.)

The World Bank report mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
HAITI: TOWARDS A NEW NARRATIVE SYSTEMATIC COUNTRY DIAGNOSTIC, May 2015.

China Looks to Innovation to Increase Growth

(p. 6) Wrapping up the 11-day session at a news conference on Sunday [March 15, 2015], Premier Li Keqiang said that while the economy faced downward pressure, the government has room to step in and has “more tools in our toolbox” should growth flag and affect employment.
. . .
As exports, investment and infrastructure become more ineffective in generating economic growth, China’s leadership is looking to innovation and entrepreneurship to pick up the slack.
Toward that end, Mr. Li said Beijing will continue to reduce regulatory interference. The number of government approvals required to begin a new venture has roughly halved to 50 to 60 steps in recent years, he said, although this level still raises costs and damps enthusiasm for startups.
But the Chinese state retains an oversized role in the economy and many of the outlined moves to limit its role are difficult to verify.

For the full story, see:
MARK MAGNIER. “Beijing Plans More Action to Spur Growth.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 16, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added. Where there was a small difference in paragraph structure, the quoted passages follow the print version.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 15, 2015, has the title “China Plans More Action to Spur Growth.”)

Refugee Walks Nearly 30 Miles Across English Channel, Dodging Hurtling Trains in Dark, Before His Arrest

(p. A1) LONDON — For one African migrant, there was nothing left to lose.
The migrant, Abdul Rahman Haroun, 40, risked his life this week by climbing four fences, evading international search teams and as many as 400 security cameras, and walking about 30 miles in the darkness of the Channel Tunnel in an effort to reach Britain from Calais, France. He dodged trains traveling to London from Paris as they hurtled by at up to 100 miles per hour.
He had made it nearly to the other side, Folkestone, England, before he was caught and arrested on Tuesday [August 4, 2015].
Three days later news of Mr. Haroun’s perilous journey was still reverberating in Britain, a country polarized by a spiraling migration crisis. Though much about him remains unknown — the police said he is Sudanese and has no fixed address — his story of determination had reduced the sprawling migration crisis to a human scale, . . .

For the full story, see:
DAN BILEFSKY. “In a First, a Sudanese Migrant Nearly Crosses the English Channel on Foot.” The New York Times (Sat., AUG. 8, 2015): A1 & A8.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 7, 2015.)

“I’ll Be Lucky When I’m in England”

(p. A4) CALAIS, France — The sun had barely set when a 23-year-old Eritrean woman who gave her name as Akbrat fell into step with dozens of other men and women and started scaling the fence surrounding the entrance to the French side of the Channel Tunnel.
The barbed wire cut her hands, but she did not feel the pain. The police seemed to be everywhere. She thought of her 5-year-old son back in Africa and ran, zigzag through the falling shadows, once almost colliding with an officer in a helmet.
Then she was alone. She slipped under the freight train and waited, clambering out just as it began moving.
But before she could hurl herself onto the train bed transporting trucks filled with Britain-bound produce, a French officer caught up with her, she recalled in an interview on Thursday. Blinded by tear gas, she stumbled and bruised her right ankle. After being ejected from the complex around the tunnel, it took her five hours to limp the nine miles back to the refugee camp of makeshift shelters that its 3,000 inhabitants call the “jungle.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” someone told her.
“I’m not lucky,” she responded. “I’ll be lucky when I’m in England.”
. . .
For many of the migrants who have been coming to the Continent from Africa, the Middle East and beyond, Calais, a mere 21 miles from the white cliffs of Dover, is their last stop. If they make it across to Britain, many believe they will have reached safety and a better life.

For the full story, see:
KATRIN BENNHOLD and ALISSA J. RUBIN. “Migrants Taste Freedom at Tunnel’s Door.” The New York Times (Fri., JULY 31, 2015): A4 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JULY 30, 2015, and has the title “Migrants in Calais Desperately Rush the Channel Tunnel to England, Night After Night.”)

Dynamism “in Danger of Being Stultified by Planners”

(p. A25) . . . , the attempt to tame the market will end up stultifying it. Everybody knows that capitalism’s creative destruction can be rough. But over the last few decades, a ragged version of global capitalism in places ranging from China to Nigeria has brought about the greatest reduction in poverty in human history. America’s fluid style of capitalism attracts driven and talented immigrants and creates vast waves of technological innovation. This dynamism is always in danger of being stultified by planners who think they can tame it and by governing elites who want to rig it. We should not take it for granted.
The coming debate about capitalism will be between those who want to restructure the underlying system and those who want to help people take advantage of its rough intensity. It will be between people who think you need strong government to defeat oligarchy and those who think you need open competition.

For the full commentary, see:
David Brooks. “Two Cheers for Capitalism.” The New York Times (Fri., July 31, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Pope Rejects Market Mechanisms Because Pope Rejects Market’s Respect for Consumer Choice

(p. A19) The pope is not hostile to market mechanisms because he is a raving socialist, as some have suggested. Instead, his stance is a natural consequence of his theology.
To understand the pope’s position, remember that, even though he is adopting a progressive stance on the environment, he is not a liberal. Indeed, he rejects one of the central tenets of liberalism, which is a willingness to acknowledge genuine disagreement about the good.
The fundamental problem with markets, in Pope Francis’ view, is that they cater to people’s desires, whatever those desires happen to be. What makes the market a liberal institution is that it does not judge the relative merits of these desires. The customer is always right.
Pope Francis rejects this, describing it as part of a “culture of relativism.” The customer, in his view, is often wrong. He wants an economic system that satisfies not whatever desires people happen to have but the desires that they should have — a system that promotes the common good, according to the church’s specification of what that good is.

For the full commentary, see:
JOSEPH HEATH. “Pope Francis’ Climate Error.” The New York Times (Sat., JUNE 20, 2015): A19.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 19, 2015.)

Early Standard Oil Executive Preserved Shakespeare First Folios

(p. 17) “The Millionaire and the Bard,” by Andrea Mays, is an American love story. It is the engaging chronicle of a sober, hard-working, respectably married industrialist of the Gilded Age who became obsessed with the object of his desire. Though generally frugal and self-disciplined, he was willing to pay extraordinary sums in order to put his hands on his mistress, to gaze at her lovingly and longingly, to caress her. To possess her only once was not enough for him; he craved the experience again and again, without limit.
. . .
I am, as readers have probably surmised, speaking of the peculiar passion of book collecting. The lover in question was Henry Clay Folger, who made his fortune as one of the presidents and, by 1923, the chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York. And the beloved, which he pursued with unflagging ardor, was a single book: “Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, Published according to the True Originall Copies.” Printed in London in 1623, seven years after the author’s death, it is the book known to all lovers of Shakespeare simply as the First Folio.
. . .
Andrea Mays is a professor of economics, and the great strength of her book is an unflagging interest in exactly how Folger played the game.
. . .
Rarely has a mad passion brought forth such a splendid and enduring fruit.

For the full review, see:
STEPHEN GREENBLATT. “In Love with Shakespeare.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date MAY 22, 2015, and has the title “‘The Millionaire and the Bard,’ by Andrea E. Mays.”)

The book under review, is:
Mays, Andrea E. The Millionaire and the Bard: Henry Folger’s Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare’s First Folio. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015.

Hamilton Fostered the Preconditions for Capitalism

(p. 345) In a nation of self-made people, Hamilton became an emblematic figure because he believed that government ought to promote self-fulfillment, self-improvement, and self-reliance. His own life offered an extraordinary object lesson in social mobility, and his unstinting energy illustrated his devout belief in the salutary power of work to develop people’s minds and bodies. As treasury secretary, he wanted to make room for entrepreneurs, whom he regarded as the motive force of the economy. Like Franklin, he intuited America’s special genius for business: “As to whatever may depend on enterprise, we need not fear to be outdone by any people on earth. It may almost be said that enterprise is our element.”
Hamilton did not create America’s market economy so much as foster the cultural and legal setting in which it flourished. A capitalist society requires certain preconditions. Among other things, it must establish a rule of law through enforceable contracts; respect private property; create a trustworthy bureaucracy to arbitrate legal disputes; and offer patents and other protections to promote invention. The abysmal failure of the Articles of Confederation to provide such an atmosphere was one of Hamilton’s principal motives for promoting the Constitution. “It is known,” he wrote, “that the relaxed conduct of the state governments in regard to property and credit was one of the most serious diseases under which the body politic laboured prior to the adoption of our present constitution and was a material cause of that state of public opinion which led to its adoption.” He converted the new Constitution into a flexible instrument for creating the legal framework necessary for economic growth. He did this by activating three still amorphous clauses–the necessary-and-proper clause, the general-welfare clause, and the commerce clause–making them the basis for government activism in economics.

Source:
Chernow, Ron. Alexander Hamilton. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004.

Moral Progress Accelerated in the 18th Century

(p. A11) For hundreds of years, people flocked to public hangings as a form of entertainment. Onlookers crowded into town squares and brought their families, reveling in the carnival atmosphere. Today most people are sickened at the idea of merriment at an execution. (Many are disturbed that executions take place at all.) We recoil from other once-common practices, too: slavery, the mistreatment of children, animal cruelty. Such shifts in attitude or belief surely constitute a form of moral progress and suggest, for once, that civilization is advancing and not receding.
. . .
Mr. Shermer defines moral progress as an “increase in the survival and flourishing of sentient beings,” which he illustrates with graphs and charts that reveal, among other things, a decline in war-related deaths, the expansion of the food supply, the reduction in major epidemics, the growth of world GDP and the spread of democracy.
Humanitarian achievements in the West, Mr. Shermer notes, began in earnest [in] the 18th century. Yet the ability to reason ethically is not a product of the Enlightenment. A moral instinct seems to be present at birth: Even infants possess innate intuitions about fairness and reciprocity, as Mr. Shermer explains. All societies punish free riders. The Golden Rule and Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi (advocating proportionate punishment) predate the ancient Greeks. So why did we need an Enlightenment to jump-start our moral progress?

For the full review, see:
SALLY SATEL. “BOOKSHELF; Getting Better All the Time; Crowds once flocked to watch executions. Now we recoil at the idea. What causes such transformations of ethical standards?” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Jan. 20, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 19, 2015.)

The book under review is:
Shermer, Michael. The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2015.

Economic Hope Cures Terrorism

(p. C1) As the U.S. moves into a new theater of the war on terror, it will miss its best chance to beat back Islamic State and other radical groups in the Middle East if it doesn’t deploy a crucial but little-used weapon: an aggressive agenda for economic empowerment. Right now, all we hear about are airstrikes and military maneuvers–which is to be expected when facing down thugs bent on mayhem and destruction.
But if the goal is not only to degrade what President Barack Obama rightly calls Islamic State’s “network of death” but to make it impossible for radical leaders to recruit terrorists in the first place, the West must learn a simple lesson: Economic hope is the only way to win the battle for the constituencies on which terrorist groups feed.
I know something about this. A generation ago, much of Latin America was in turmoil. By 1990, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had seized control of most of my home country, Peru, where I served as the president’s principal adviser. Fashionable opinion held that the people rebelling were the impoverished or underemployed wage slaves of Latin America, that capitalism couldn’t work outside the West and that Latin cultures didn’t really understand market economics.
The conventional wisdom proved to be wrong, however. Reforms in Peru gave indigenous entrepreneurs and farmers control over their assets and a new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow–spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.

For the full commentary, see:
HERNANDO DE SOTO. “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism; Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment and entrepreneurship to give the Arab world another path.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 11, 2014): C1-C2.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Oct. 10, 2014, and the title “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism; Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment.”)

Soto’s masterpiece is:
Soto, Hernando de. The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World. New York: Basic Books, 1989.