7.8 /10 1 Votes
Originally published 1998 Genre Non-fiction | 3.9/5 Goodreads Nominations Baillie Gifford Prize | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Similar David Landes books, Economic growth books, Economic history books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (ISBN 0-393-04017-8), published in 1998 (with an epilogue added to the 1999 paperback edition), is a book by the late David Landes, formerly Emeritus Professor of Economics and former Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. In it, Landes elucidates the reasons why some countries and regions of the world experienced near miraculous periods of explosive growth while the rest of the world stagnated. He does this by comparing the long-term economic histories of different regions of the world, giving priority to Europe and the United States, as well as Japan, China, the Arab world, and Latin America. In addition to analyzing economic and cliometric figures, he gives substantial credit to such intangible assets as culture and enterprise in the different societies he examines in order to explain economic success or failure.
In doing so, he revives, at least in part, several theories he believes have been incorrectly discarded by academics over the last 40 years:
He also spends a good deal of effort to debunk claims that the Asian miracle did not happen, was not significant, or was financed by European colonialism, and he draws a correlation between the economic level of a country and the way it treats its women.
In short, he argues that the vast economic growth of the Industrial Revolution was no accident but instead resulted from several qualities of Europe, including its climate, political competition, economic freedom and attitude towards science and religion, more specifically from certain countries in Western Europe, primarily England.
Criticism and response
Critics have charged Landes with eurocentrism in his analysis, a charge which Landes himself does not deny; in fact, he embraces it explicitly, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe (though he deals with the later 'Asian miracle' in Wealth and Poverty) must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis, thus siding at least at some level with thinkers such as Bernard Lewis. Following Daniel Bell, knowledge is the necessary link between 'The European miracle' and the American post-industrial society.
Landes and Professor Andre Gunder Frank, author of ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (ISBN 0520214749), are noted for having come to very different conclusions about the long-vie significance of economic developments in "the West" during the modern era and publicly debated their findings in 1998 at Northwestern University.
Additionally, an alternate theory relies on literacy and the gap between Protestants and Catholics as an explanation for the difference in economic results.