Challenging Nine Nobel Laureates in Economics

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Although the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was not one of the awards originally established by Alfred Nobel, most of the world’s population and media treat it as such, with that impression strengthened because it is announced around the same time.

Just as with the Nobel Prizes in Physics or Medicine, the award in Economics is often shared between two or three recipients, and a couple of weeks ago the 2024 honors fell to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson.

Not having expertise in that field, I can’t judge their academic work, but only their more public-facing activities. Johnson, an MIT professor, had served as the chief economist of the IMF and over the years I’d seen him regularly quoted on economic matters in my newspapers, with most of his comments being pretty sensible ones to a layman such as myself.

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However, Acemoglu and Robinson were much better known to me, and my opinion of them had been far less favorable. In 2012 they had received considerable attention as the authors of Why Nations Fail, a national bestseller. One of their main themes had been comparing the political and economic systems of America and China, very much to the benefit of the former. But although their work received a long list of glowing endorsements by leading economists including Johnson, as well as other prominent public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson, Steven Pinker, and Francis Fukuyama, my own appraisal had been decidedly negative.

Their book was released just a few years after America’s disastrous financial crisis had so severely damaged the world economy and not so long after our equally disastrous Iraq War had done much the same both to international law and to the political landscape of the Middle East, so I was greatly surprised by their apparent approval of our neoliberal economic policies and our neoconservative geopolitics. That prompted me to write a long article that similarly compared America and China but came to strikingly different conclusions, with much of my analysis sharply critiquing their Panglossian vision of America’s economic and political system.

I opened my discussion with the following couple of paragraphs:

The rise of China surely ranks among the most important world developments of the last 100 years. With America still trapped in its fifth year of economic hardship, and the Chinese economy poised to surpass our own before the end of this decade, China looms very large on the horizon. We are living in the early years of what journalists once dubbed “The Pacific Century,� yet there are worrisome signs it may instead become known as “The Chinese Century.�

But does the Chinese giant have feet of clay? In a recently published book, Why Nations Fail, economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson characterize China’s ruling elites as “extractive�—parasitic and corrupt—and predict that Chinese economic growth will soon falter and decline, while America’s “inclusive� governing institutions have taken us from strength to strength. They argue that a country governed as a one-party state, without the free media or checks and balances of our own democratic system, cannot long prosper in the modern world. The glowing tributes this book has received from a vast array of America’s most prominent public intellectuals, including six Nobel laureates in economics, testifies to the widespread popularity of this optimistic message.

I described the enormous economic success that China had enjoyed over the previous thirty years and sharply contrasted it with the difficulties that ordinary Americans had experienced in that same period.

During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years.

Furthermore, the vast majority of China’s newly created economic wealth has flowed to ordinary Chinese workers, who have moved from oxen and bicycles to the verge of automobiles in just a single generation. While median American incomes have been stagnant for almost forty years, those in China have nearly doubled every decade, with the real wages of workers outside the farm-sector rising about 150 percent over the last ten years alone. The Chinese of 1980 were desperately poor compared to Pakistanis, Nigerians, or Kenyans; but today, they are several times wealthier, representing more than a tenfold shift in relative income.

A World Bank report recently highlighted the huge drop in global poverty rates from 1980 to 2008, but critics noted that over 100 percent of that decline came from China alone: the number of Chinese living in dire poverty fell by a remarkable 662 million, while the impoverished population in the rest of the world actually rose by 13 million. And although India is often paired with China in the Western media, a large fraction of Indians have actually grown poorer over time. The bottom half of India’s still rapidly growing population has seen its daily caloric intake steadily decline for the last 30 years, with half of all children under five now being malnourished.

China’s economic progress is especially impressive when matched against historical parallels. Between 1870 and 1900, America enjoyed unprecedented industrial expansion, such that even Karl Marx and his followers began to doubt that a Communist revolution would be necessary or even possible in a country whose people were achieving such widely shared prosperity through capitalistic expansion. During those 30 years America’s real per capita income grew by 100 percent. But over the last 30 years, real per capita income in China has grown by more than 1,300 percent.

Ordinary Chinese workers have increased their real income by well over 1,000 percent in recent decades, while the corresponding figure for most American workers has been close to zero. If typical American wages were doubling every decade, there would be far less anger in our own society directed against the “One Percent.� Indeed, under the standard GINI index used to measure wealth inequality, China’s score is not particularly high, being roughly the same as that of the United States, though certainly indicating greater inequality than most of the social democracies of Western Europe.

These facts do not provide much evidence for the thesis in Why Nations Fail that China’s leaders constitute a self-serving and venal “extractive� elite. Unfortunately, such indications seem far more apparent when we direct our gaze inward, toward the recent economic and social trajectory of our own country

Against the backdrop of remarkable Chinese progress, America mostly presents a very gloomy picture. Certainly America’s top engineers and entrepreneurs have created many of the world’s most important technologies, sometimes becoming enormously wealthy in the process. But these economic successes are not typical nor have their benefits been widely distributed. Over the last 40 years, a large majority of American workers have seen their real incomes stagnate or decline.

Meanwhile, the rapid concentration of American wealth continues apace: the richest 1 percent of America’s population now holds as much net wealth as the bottom 90–95 percent, and these trends may even be accelerating. A recent study revealed that during our supposed recovery of the last couple of years, 93 percent of the total increase in national income went to the top 1 percent, with an astonishing 37 percent being captured by just the wealthiest 0.01 percent of the population, 15,000 households in a nation of well over 300 million people.

The central theme of Why Nations Fail is that political institutions and the behavior of ruling elites largely determine the economic success or failure of countries. If most Americans have experienced virtually no economic gains for decades, perhaps we should cast our gaze at these factors in our own society.

One of my last paragraphs summarized my rather negative verdict on the weighty volume produced by those two future Nobel laureates.

Thus, the ideas presented in Why Nations Fail seem both true and false. The claim that harmful political institutions and corrupt elites can inflict huge economic damage upon a society seems absolutely correct. But while the authors turn a harsh eye toward elite misbehavior across time and space—from ancient Rome to Czarist Russia to rising China—their vision seems to turn rosy-tinted when they consider present-day America, the society in which they themselves live and whose ruling elites lavishly fund the academic institutions with which they are affiliated. Given the American realities of the last dozen years, it is quite remarkable that the scholars who wrote a book entitled Why Nations Fail never glanced outside their own office windows.

My provocative article prompted considerable discussion and attracted quite a bit of favorable attention in the opinion media.

• China’s Rise, America’s Fall
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 17, 2012 • 7,000 Words

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In recently revisiting the Acemoglu/Robinson book, I noticed that the name of Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University was notably missing from the long list of academic luminaries who had provided glowing endorsements, and that hardly surprised me. I suspect that his reaction may not have been too different from my own given that he had been a strong critic of both the Iraq War and our reigning neoliberal economic policies.

Moreover, he had long worked closely with the Chinese and praised their successful efforts to promote global economic development and alleviate poverty, so I doubt he regarded their country as run by a corrupt, extractive elite, whose mistaken policies would soon lead to the failure and collapse of their economic development model.

Twelve years have now passed and a few days ago I happened to watch his illuminating discussion with Leung Chun-ying, a former head of the Hong Kong government who now holds a senior position in the Chinese government.

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In that interview, Sachs noted with astonishment the rise of the Greater Bay Area, a Chinese region bordering Hong Kong. Its largest city is Shenzhen, which in the late 1970s had been a small, impoverished fishing town with a population of around 25,000. But in less than two generations, the population has expanded by nearly a thousand-fold, creating the wealthiest city in all of China and the third largest after Shanghai and Beijing, with the surrounding region now including 85 million people. He noted that region was not merely a global leader in one or two important areas, but in so many of them, including technological development, industrial production, financial services, shipping, and higher education, with no other area of the world having that combined distinction.

Predicting China’s Global Rise More Than a Century Ago

Acemoglu and Robinson have now been elevated into the pantheon of Nobel laureates, but a dozen years provides a reasonable time frame for evaluating their predictions about the world’s largest economy, and those have proven sufficiently erroneous as to raise serious doubts about the theoretical framework that they had championed. According to their analysis, China’s economic rise should have long since sputtered to an end, but despite the unprecedented regime of Western sanctions that America recently imposed, aimed at crippling or killing China’s most important global champions such as Huawei, this has not happened, and China’s growth rate has merely been reduced.

Indeed, despite the glowing public accolades they had received in 2012 when they boasted of America’s enormous economic and institutional superiority over China, many powerful elements of the DC establishment quickly concluded that such braggadocio was completely unwarranted. Within just a couple of years, our political elites became so alarmed at China’s seemingly unstoppable economic rise that they began reorienting America’s entire global strategy towards containing that country, whose growing power seemed likely to challenge our worldwide hegemony. I discussed that geopolitical watershed in a recent article.

• American Pravda: A Rising China Faces the West
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 19, 2024 • 9,600 Words

In that piece, I’d noted that according to the official economic statistics provided by the CIA World Factbook China’s real productive economy—perhaps the most reliable measure of global economic power—is already more than three times larger than that of the U.S. and also growing far more rapidly. Indeed, according to that important economic metric, China now easily outweighs the combined total of the entire American-led bloc—the United States, the rest of the Anglosphere, the European Union, and Japan—an astonishing achievement, and something completely contrary to what one might have expected from reading Why Nations Fail when it appeared in print.

Moreover, as I recently reread portions of their 2012 bestseller, I noticed that Acemoglu and Robinson argued that China’s great economic progress had almost entirely been based upon copying Western products. According to them, the Chinese were merely following in our technological wake, so they were unlikely to produce future innovations of their own, and would be doomed to second-rate status. For decades, this sort of comforting myth has been a staple of arrogant Americans regarding those countries that challenged our primacy, and it has certainly proven entirely false in the case of our Chinese competitor, which now leads the world in numerous important technologies, including batteries, electric vehicles, and quantum computing.

Those who loosely apply superlatives in order to attract undeserved attention should be criticized. But such statements are entirely warranted in the case of China’s economic and technological rise, which seems unprecedented in all of human history. One would think that economists such as Acemoglu and Robinson who failed to recognize the dramatic events unfolding before their very eyes would lose credibility with their peers, but apparently that has not been the case, at least with regard to those prestigious international bodies that are totally dominated by the West’s reigning neoliberal economic establishment.

Meanwhile, that same economic establishment has successfully sheltered its illusions within the propaganda-bubble created by its closely-allied Western media organs. Declining regimes such as that of the old Soviet Union often require their captive media outlets to hide embarrassing facts, and in the case of the West, that effort is made much easier because the global informational landscape has been totally dominated for generations by the Western media.

So anyone casually reading our elite or mainstream media outlets would get the distinct impression that China’s recent 5% real economic growth rate is far below the 1% or 2% enjoyed by the American-led bloc. But despite such concealment and obfuscation, in the real world, 5 is always larger than 1 or 2, and that difference is even starker in real per capita economic growth or if we restricted our focus to the productive sectors of the two economies.

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A year after I’d written my article sharply critiquing the thesis of Why Nations Fail, I noted that although so many present-day figures were still stubbornly denying the reality of China’s global rise, some of our leading public intellectuals of the early twentieth century had predicted that future event with remarkable prescience.

Although these developments might have shocked Westerners of the mid-20th Century—when China was best known for its terrible poverty and Maoist revolutionary fanaticism—they would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

Almost none of these global developments were predicted by America’s leading intellectuals of the 1960s or 1970s, and many of their successors have had just as much difficulty recognizing the dramatic sweep of events through which they are living. A perfect example of this strange myopia may be found in the writings of leading development economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose brief discussions of China’s rapid rise to world economic dominance seem to portray the phenomenon as a temporary illusion almost certainly soon to collapse because the institutional approach followed differs from the ultra-free-market neoliberalism that they recommend.[4] The large role that the government plays in guiding Chinese economic decisions dooms it to failure, despite all evidence to the contrary, while America’s heavily financialized economy must be successful, regardless of our high unemployment and low growth. According to Acemoglu and Robinson, nearly all international success or failure is determined by governmental institutions, and since China possesses the wrong ones, failure is certain, though there seems no sign of it.

Perhaps such academics will be proven correct, and China’s economic miracle will collapse into the debacle they predict. But if this does not occur, and the international trend lines of the past 35 years continue for another five or ten, we should consider turning for explanations to those long-forgotten thinkers who actually foretold these world developments that we are now experiencing, individuals such as Ross and Stoddard. The widespread devastation produced by the Japanese invasion, World War II, and the Chinese Civil War, followed by the economic calamity of Maoism, did delay the predicted rise of China by a generation or two, but except for such unforeseen events, their analysis of Chinese potential seems remarkably prescient. For example, Stoddard approvingly quotes the late Victorian predictions of Professor Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.[5]

The Chinese as a People Shaped by Their Society

Those last paragraphs came from my 2013 article which bore the descriptive but highly provocative title “How Social Darwinism Made Modern China.”

If unlike Acemoglu, Robinson, and their media allies, we admit that China’s economic and technological rise is both real and remarkable, it has obviously been a development of the greatest possible global importance, certainly one worthy of careful analysis and explanation, and my article attempted to do exactly that. I argued that the likely roots of China’s dramatic success were the sort of biological and evolutionary factors once commonly discussed by our leading thinkers of the past who had correctly predicted China’s global rise, but almost entirely banished from our dominant ideological framework of the post-World War II era.

The Wikipedia page for Why Nations Fail runs more than 6,000 words and describes in considerable detail the “institutional hypothesis” for economic success advocated by Acemoglu and Robinson, as well as the alternate frameworks developed by their academic rivals, who focused on a wide variety of different explanatory factors. But it contained no hint of the factors that I emphasized.

Some of the points I raised in my own article seemed very difficult to explain under any of these competing hypotheses.

The 2009 Program for International Student Assessment(PISA) tests placed gigantic Shanghai—a megalopolis of 15 million—at the absolute top of world student achievement.[1] PISA results from the rest of the country have been nearly as impressive, with the average scores of hundreds of millions of provincial Chinese—mostly from rural families with annual incomes below $2,000—matching or exceeding those of Europe’s most advanced and successful countries, such as Germany, France, and Switzerland, and ranking well above America’s results.[2]

These successes follow closely on the heels of a previous generation of similar economic and technological gains for several much smaller Chinese-ancestry countries in that same part of the world, such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, and the great academic and socioeconomic success of small Chinese-descended minority populations in predominantly white nations, including America, Canada, and Australia. The children of the Yellow Emperor seem destined to play an enormous role in Mankind’s future.

A major difficulty faced by most of these competing developmental theories of Chinese success is that they fail to explain why that success had occurred across such a wide variety of different governmental systems and geographical locations.

The likely roots of such widespread Chinese success have received little detailed exploration in today’s major Western media, which tends to shy away from considering the particular characteristics of ethnic groups or nationalities, as opposed to their institutional systems and forms of government. Yet although the latter obviously play a crucial role—Maoist China was far less economically successful than Dengist China—it is useful to note that the examples of Chinese success cited above range across a wide diversity of socioeconomic and political systems.

For decades, Hong Kong enjoyed one of the most free-market, nearly anarcho-libertarian economic regimes; during that same period, Singapore was governed by the tight hand of Lee Kuan Yew and his socialistic People’s Action Party, which built a one-party state with a large degree of government guidance and control. Yet both these populations were overwhelmingly Chinese, and both experienced almost equally rapid economic development, moving in 50 years from total postwar destitution and teeming refugee slums to ranking among the wealthiest places on earth. And Taiwan, whose much larger Chinese-ancestry population pursued an intermediate development model, enjoyed similar economic success.

Despite a long legacy of racial discrimination and mistreatment, small Chinese communities in America also prospered and advanced, even as their numbers grew rapidly following passage of the 1965 Immigration Act. In recent years a remarkable fraction of America’s top students—whether judged by the objective winners’ circle of the Mathematics Olympiad and Intel Science competition or by the somewhat more subjective rates of admission to Ivy League colleges—have been of Chinese ancestry. The results are particularly striking when cast in quantitative terms: although just 1 percent of American high-school graduates each year have ethnic Chinese origins, surname analysis indicates that they currently include nearly 15 percent of the highest-achieving students, a performance ratio more than four times better than that of American Jews, the top-scoring white ancestry group.[3]

Chinese people seem to be doing extremely well all over the world, across a wide range of economic and cultural landscapes.

Unlike their present-day heirs, leading Western thinkers of the past usually explained Chinese success by the innate characteristics of the Chinese people, who had been shaped by their very difficult environment.

Western intellectual life a century ago was quite different from that of today, with contrary doctrines and taboos, and the spirit of that age certainly held sway over its leading figures. Racialism—the notion that different peoples tend to have different innate traits, as largely fashioned by their particular histories—was dominant then, so much so that the notion was almost universally held and applied, sometimes in rather crude fashion, to both European and non-European populations.

With regard to the Chinese, the widespread view was that many of their prominent characteristics had been shaped by thousands of years of history in a generally stable and organized society possessing central political administration, a situation almost unique among the peoples of the world. In effect, despite temporary periods of political fragmentation, East Asia’s own Roman Empire had never fallen, and a thousand-year interregnum of barbarism, economic collapse, and technological backwardness had been avoided.

On the less fortunate side, the enormous population growth of recent centuries had gradually caught up with and overtaken China’s exceptionally efficient agricultural system, reducing the lives of most Chinese to the brink of Malthusian starvation; and these pressures and constraints were believed to be reflected in the Chinese people. For example, Stoddard wrote:

Winnowed by ages of grim elimination in a land populated to the uttermost limits of subsistence, the Chinese race is selected as no other for survival under the fiercest conditions of economic stress. At home the average Chinese lives his whole life literally within a hand’s breadth of starvation. Accordingly, when removed to the easier environment of other lands, the Chinaman brings with him a working capacity which simply appalls his competitors.[6]

Stoddard backed these riveting phrases with a wide selection of detailed and descriptive quotations from prominent observers, both Western and Chinese. Although Ross was more cautiously empirical in his observations and less literary in his style, his analysis was quite similar, with his book on the Chinese containing over 40 pages describing the grim and gripping details of daily survival, provided under the evocative chapter-heading “The Struggle for Existence in China.�[7]

During the second half of the 20th century, ideological considerations largely eliminated from American public discourse the notion that many centuries of particular circumstances might leave an indelible imprint upon a people.

Chinese Meritocracy, Absence of Caste, and Malthusian Poverty

I went on to describe the unusual characteristics of traditional Chinese society, which differed dramatically from that of Europe or almost any other world civilization, and had also remained in place for some 1,500 years, acting as a powerful shaping force upon its people.

Chinese society is notable for its stability and longevity. From the gradual establishment of the bureaucratic imperial state based on mandarinate rule during the Sui (589–618) and T’ang (618–907) dynasties down to the Communist Revolution of 1948, a single set of social and economic relations appears to have maintained its grip on the country, evolving only slightly while dynastic successions and military conquests periodically transformed the governmental superstructure.

A central feature of this system was the replacement of the local rule of aristocratic elements by a class of official meritocrats, empowered by the central government and selected by competitive examination. In essence, China eliminated the role of hereditary feudal lords and the social structure they represented over 1,000 years before European countries did the same, substituting a system of legal equality for virtually the entire population beneath the reigning emperor and his family.

The social importance of competitive examinations was enormous, playing the same role in determining membership in the ruling elite that the aristocratic bloodlines of Europe’s nobility did until modern times, and this system embedded itself just as deeply in the popular culture. The great noble houses of France or Germany might trace their lineages back to ancestors elevated under Charlemagne or Barbarossa, with their heirs afterward rising and falling in standing and estates, while in China the proud family traditions would boast generations of top-scoring test-takers, along with the important government positions that they had received as a result. Whereas in Europe there existed fanciful stories of a heroic commoner youth doing some great deed for the king and consequently being elevated to a knighthood or higher, such tales were confined to fiction down to the French Revolution. But in China, even the greatest lineages of academic performers almost invariably had roots in the ordinary peasantry…

With Chinese civilization having spent most of the past 1,500 years allocating its positions of national power and influence by examination, there has sometimes been speculation that test-taking ability has become embedded in the Chinese people at the biological as well as cultural level. Yet although there might be an element of truth to this, it hardly seems likely to be significant. During the eras in question, China’s total population numbered far into the tens of millions, growing in unsteady fashion from perhaps 60 million before AD 900 to well over 400 million by 1850. But the number of Chinese passing the highest imperial exam and attaining the exalted rank of chin-shih during most of the past six centuries was often less than 100 per year, down from a high of over 200 under the Sung dynasty (960-1279), and even if we include the lesser rank of chu-jen, the national total of such degree-holders was probably just in the low tens of thousands,[12] a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the overall population—totally dwarfed by the numbers of Chinese making their living as artisans or merchants, let alone the overwhelming mass of the rural peasantry. The cultural impact of rule by a test-selected elite was enormous, but the direct genetic impact would have been negligible.

This same difficulty of relative proportions frustrates any attempt to apply in China an evolutionary model similar to the one that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have persuasively suggested for the evolution of high intelligence among the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe.[13] The latter group constituted a small, reproductively isolated population overwhelmingly concentrated in the sorts of business and financial activity that would have strongly favored more intelligent individuals, and one with insignificant gene-flow from the external population not undergoing such selective pressure. By contrast, there is no evidence that successful Chinese merchants or scholars were unwilling to take brides from the general population, and any reasonable rate of such intermarriage each generation would have totally swamped the genetic impact of mercantile or scholarly success. If we are hoping to find any rough parallel to the process that Clark hypothesizes for Britain, we must concentrate our attention on the life circumstances of China’s broad rural peasantry—well over 90 percent of the population during all these centuries—just as the aforementioned 19th-century observers had generally done.

Absence of Caste and Fluidity of Class

In fact, although Western writers tended to focus on China’s horrific poverty above all else, traditional Chinese society actually possessed certain unusual or even unique characteristics that may help account for the shaping of the Chinese people. Perhaps the most important of these was the near total absence of social caste and the extreme fluidity of economic class.

Feudalism had ended in China a thousand years before the French Revolution, and nearly all Chinese stood equal before the law.[14] The “gentry�—those who had passed an official examination and received an academic degree—possessed certain privileges and the “mean people�—prostitutes, entertainers, slaves, and various other degraded social elements—suffered under legal discrimination. But both these strata were minute in size, with each usually amounting to less than 1 percent of the general population, while “the common people�—everyone else, including the peasantry—enjoyed complete legal equality.

However, such legal equality was totally divorced from economic equality, and extreme gradations of wealth and poverty were found in every corner of society, down to the smallest and most homogenous village. During most of the 20th century, the traditional Marxian class analysis of Chinese rural life divided the population according to graduated wealth and degree of “exploitative� income: landlords, who obtained most or all of their income from rent or hired labor; rich, middle, and poor peasants, grouped according to decreasing wealth and rental income and increasing tendency to hire out their own labor; and agricultural laborers, who owned negligible land and obtained nearly all their income from hiring themselves out to others.

In hard times, these variations in wealth might easily mean the difference between life and death, but everyone acknowledged that such distinctions were purely economic and subject to change: a landlord who lost his land would become a poor peasant; a poor peasant who came into wealth would be the equal of any landlord. During its political struggle, the Chinese Communist Party claimed that landlords and rich peasants constituted about 10 percent of the population and possessed 70–80 percent of the land, while poor peasants and hired laborers made up the overwhelming majority of the population and owned just 10–15 percent of the land. Neutral observers found these claims somewhat exaggerated for propagandistic purposes, but not all that far from the harsh reality.[15]

Complete legal equality and extreme economic inequality together fostered one of the most unrestrained free-market systems known to history, not only in China’s cities but much more importantly in its vast countryside, which contained nearly the entire population. Land, the primary form of wealth, was freely bought, sold, traded, rented out, sub-leased, or mortgaged as loan collateral. Money-lending and food-lending were widely practiced, especially during times of famine, with usurious rates of interest being the norm, often in excess of 10 percent per month compounded. In extreme cases, children or even wives might be sold for cash and food. Unless aided by relatives, peasants without land or money routinely starved to death. Meanwhile, the agricultural activity of more prosperous peasants was highly commercialized and entrepreneurial, with complex business arrangements often the norm.[16]

For centuries, a central fact of daily life in rural China had been the tremendous human density, as the Middle Kingdom’s population expanded from 65 million to 430 million during the five centuries before 1850,[17] eventually forcing nearly all land to be cultivated to maximum efficiency. Although Chinese society was almost entirely rural and agricultural, Shandong province in 1750 had well over twice the population density of the Netherlands, the most urbanized and densely populated part of Europe, while during the early years of the Industrial Revolution, England’s population density was only one-fifth that of Jiangsu province.[18]

Chinese agricultural methods had always been exceptionally efficient, but by the 19th century, the continuing growth of the Chinese population had finally caught and surpassed the absolute Malthusian carrying-capacity of the farming system under its existing technical and economic structure.[19] Population growth was largely held in check by mortality (including high infant mortality), decreased fertility due to malnutrition, disease, and periodic regional famines that killed an average of 5 percent of the population.[20] Even the Chinese language came to incorporate the centrality of food, with the traditional words of greeting being “Have you eaten?� and the common phrase denoting a wedding, funeral, or other important social occasion being “to eat good things.�[21]

The cultural and ideological constraints of Chinese society posed major obstacles to mitigating this never-ending human calamity. Although impoverished Europeans of this era, male and female alike, often married late or not at all, early marriage and family were central pillars of Chinese life, with the sage Mencius stating that to have no children was the worst of unfilial acts; indeed, marriage and anticipated children were the mark of adulthood. Furthermore, only male heirs could continue the family name and ensure that oneself and one’s ancestors would be paid the proper ritual respect, and multiple sons were required to protect against the vagaries of fate. On a more practical level, married daughters became part of their husband’s household, and only sons could ensure provision for one’s old age.

Nearly all peasant societies sanctify filial loyalty, marriage, family, and children, while elevating sons above daughters, but in traditional China these tendencies seem to have been especially strong, representing a central goal and focus of all daily life beyond bare survival. Given the terrible poverty, cruel choices were often made, and female infanticide, including through neglect, was the primary means of birth control among the poor, leading to a typical shortfall of 10–15 percent among women of marriageable age. Reproductive competition for those remaining women was therefore fierce, with virtually every woman marrying, generally by her late teens. The inevitable result was a large and steady natural increase in the total population, except when constrained by various forms of increased mortality.

Remarkable Upward Mobility But Relentless Downward Mobility

The vast majority of Chinese might be impoverished peasants, but for those with ability and luck, the possibilities of upward mobility were quite remarkable in what was an essentially classless society. The richer strata of each village possessed the wealth to give their most able children a classical education in hopes of preparing them for the series of official examinations. If the son of a rich peasant or petty landlord were sufficiently diligent and intellectually able, he might pass such an examination and obtain an official degree, opening enormous opportunities for political power and wealth.

For the Ming (1368–1644) and Ch’ing (1644–1911) dynasties, statistics exist on the social origins of the chin-shih class, the highest official rank, and these demonstrate a rate of upward mobility unmatched by almost any Western society, whether modern or premodern. Over 30 percent of such elite degree-holders came from commoner families that for three previous generations had produced no one of high official rank, and in the data from earlier centuries, this fraction of “new men� reached a high of 84 percent. Such numbers far exceed the equivalent figures for Cambridge University during all the centuries since its foundation, and would probably seem remarkable at America’s elite Ivy League colleges today or in the past. Meanwhile, downward social mobility was also common among even the highest families. As a summary statistic, across the six centuries of these two dynasties less than 6 percent of China’s ruling elites came from the ruling elites of the previous generation.[22]

The founding philosophical principle of the modern Western world has been the “Equality of Man,� while that of Confucianist China was the polar opposite belief in the inherent inequality of men. Yet in reality, the latter often seemed to fulfill better the ideological goals of the former. Frontier America might have had its mythos of presidents born in log-cabins, but for many centuries a substantial fraction of the Middle Kingdom’s ruling mandarins did indeed come from rural rice-paddies, a state of affairs that would have seemed almost unimaginable in any European country until the Age of Revolution, and even long afterward.

Such potential for elevation into the ruling Chinese elite was remarkable, but a far more important factor in the society was the open possibility of local economic advancement for the sufficiently enterprising and diligent rural peasant. Ironically enough, a perfect description of such upward mobility was provided by Communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, who recounted how his father had risen from being a landless poor peasant to rich peasant status…

Mao’s account gives no indication that he regarded his family’s rise as extraordinary in any way; his father had obviously done well, but there were probably many other families in Mao’s village that had similarly improved their lot during the course of a single generation. Such opportunities for rapid social mobility would have been almost impossible in any of the feudal or class-ridden societies of the same period, in Europe or most other parts of the world.

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However, the flip-side of possible peasant upward mobility was the far greater likelihood of downward mobility, which was enormous and probably represented the single most significant factor shaping the modern Chinese people. Each generation, a few who were lucky or able might rise, but a vast multitude always fell, and those families near the bottom simply disappeared from the world. Traditional rural China was a society faced with the reality of an enormous and inexorable downward mobility: for centuries, nearly all Chinese ended their lives much poorer than had their parents.

The strong case for such downward mobility was demonstrated a quarter century ago by historian Edwin E. Moise,[24] whose crucial article on the subject has received far less attention than it deserves, perhaps because the intellectual climate of the late 1970s prevented readers from drawing the obvious evolutionary implications.

In many respects, Moise’s demographic analysis of China eerily anticipated that of Clark for England, as he pointed out that only the wealthier families of a Chinese village could afford the costs associated with obtaining wives for their sons, with female infanticide and other factors regularly ensuring up to a 15 percent shortfall in the number of available women. Thus, the poorest village strata usually failed to reproduce at all, while poverty and malnourishment also tended to lower fertility and raise infant mortality as one moved downward along the economic gradient. At the same time, the wealthiest villagers sometimes could afford multiple wives or concubines and regularly produced much larger numbers of surviving offspring. Each generation, the poorest disappeared, the less affluent failed to replenish their numbers, and all those lower rungs on the economic ladder were filled by the downwardly mobile children of the fecund wealthy.

This fundamental reality of Chinese rural existence was certainly obvious to the peasants themselves and to outside observers, and there exists an enormous quantity of anecdotal evidence describing the situation, whether gathered by Moise or found elsewhere, as illustrated by a few examples…

Furthermore, the forces of downward mobility in rural Chinese society were greatly accentuated by fenjia, the traditional system of inheritance, which required equal division of property among all sons, in sharp contrast to the practice of primogeniture commonly found in European countries.

If most or all of a father’s property went to the eldest son, then the long-term survival of a reasonably affluent peasant family was assured unless the primary heir were a complete wastrel or encountered unusually bad fortune. But in China, cultural pressures forced a wealthy man to do his best to maximize the number of his surviving sons, and within the richer strata of a village it was not uncommon for a man to leave two, three, or even more male heirs, compelling each to begin his economic independence with merely a fraction of his father’s wealth. Unless they succeeded in substantially augmenting their inheritance, the sons of a particularly fecund rich landlord might be middle peasants—and his grandchildren, starving poor peasants.[29] Families whose elevated status derived from a single fortuitous circumstance or a transient trait not deeply rooted in their behavioral characteristics therefore enjoyed only fleeting economic success, and poverty eventually culled their descendants from the village.

The members of a successful family could maintain their economic position over time only if in each generation large amounts of additional wealth were extracted from their land and their neighbors through high intelligence, sharp business sense, hard work, and great diligence. The penalty for major business miscalculations or lack of sufficient effort was either personal or reproductive extinction. As American observer William Hinton graphically described:

Security, relative comfort, influence, position, and leisure [were] maintained amidst a sea of the most dismal and frightening poverty and hunger—a poverty and hunger which at all times threatened to engulf any family which relaxed its vigilance, took pity on its poor neighbors, failed to extract the last copper of rent and interest, or ceased for an instant the incessant accumulation of grain and money. Those who did not go up went down, and those who went down often went to their deaths or at least to the dissolution and dispersal of their families.[30]

However, under favorable circumstances, a family successful in business might expand its numbers from generation to generation until it gradually squeezed out all its less competitive neighbors, with its progeny eventually constituting nearly the entire population of a village. For example, a century after a couple of poor Yang brothers arrived in a region as farm laborers, their descendants had formed a clan of 80–90 families in one village and the entire population of a neighboring one.[31] In a Guangdong village, a merchant family named Huang arrived and bought land, growing in numbers and land ownership over the centuries until their descendants replaced most of the other families, which became poor and ultimately disappeared, while the Huangs eventually constituted 74 percent of the total local population, including a complete mix of the rich, middle, and poor.[32]

The Implications for the Chinese People and for American Ideology

In many respects, the Chinese society portrayed by our historical and sociological sources seems an almost perfect example of the sort of local environment that would be expected to produce a deep imprint upon the characteristics of its inhabitants. Even prior to the start of this harsh development process, China had spent thousands of years as one of the world’s most advanced economic and technological civilizations. The socioeconomic system established from the end of the sixth century A.D. onward then remained largely stable and unchanged for well over a millennium, with the sort of orderly and law-based society that benefited those who followed its rules and ruthlessly weeded out the troublemaker. During many of those centuries, the burden of overpopulation placed enormous economic pressure on each family to survive, while a powerful cultural tradition emphasized the production of surviving offspring, especially sons, as the greatest goal in life, even if that result might lead to the impoverishment of the next generation. Agricultural efficiency was remarkably high but required great effort and diligence, while the complexities of economic decision-making—how to manage land, crop selection, and investment decisions—were far greater than those faced by the simple peasant serf found in most other parts of the world, with the rewards for success and the penalties for failure being extreme. The sheer size and cultural unity of the Chinese population would have facilitated the rapid appearance and spread of useful innovations, including those at the purely biological level.[33]

It is important to recognize that although good business ability was critical for the long-term success of a line of Chinese peasants, the overall shaping constraints differed considerably from those that might have affected a mercantile caste such as the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe or the Parsis of India. These latter groups occupied highly specialized economic niches in which a keen head for figures or a ruthless business sense might have been all that was required for personal success and prosperity. But in the world of rural Chinese villages, even the wealthier elements usually spent the majority of the lives in backbreaking labor, working alongside their families and their hired men in the fields and rice paddies. Successful peasants might benefit from a good intellect, but they also required the propensity for hard manual toil, determination, diligence, and even such purely physical traits as resistance to injury and efficiency in food digestion. Given such multiple selective pressures and constraints, we would expect the shift in the prevalence of any single one of these traits to be far slower than if it alone determined success, and the many centuries of steady Chinese selection across the world’s largest population would have been required to produce any substantial result.[34]

The impact of such strong selective forces obviously manifests at multiple levels, with cultural software being far more flexible and responsive than any gradual shifts in innate tendencies, and distinguishing between evidence of these two mechanisms is hardly a trivial task. But it seems quite unlikely that the second, deeper sort of biological human change would not have occurred during a thousand years or more of these relentlessly shaping pressures, and simply to ignore or dismiss such an important possibility is unreasonable. Yet that seems to have been the dominant strain of Western intellectual belief for the last two or three generations.

Sometimes the best means of recognizing one’s ideological blinders is to consider seriously the ideas and perspectives of alien minds that lack them, and in the case of Western society these happen to include most of our greatest intellectual figures from 80 or 90 years ago, now suddenly restored to availability by the magic of the Internet. Admittedly, in some respects these individuals were naïve in their thinking or treated various ideas in crude fashion, but in many more cases their analyses were remarkably acute and scientifically insightful, often functioning as an invaluable corrective to the assumed truths of the present. And in certain matters, notably predicting the economic trajectory of the world’s largest country, they seem to have anticipated developments that almost none of their successors of the past 50 years ever imagined. This should certainly give us pause.

• How Social Darwinism Made Modern China
  Ron Unz • The American Conservative • March 11, 2013 • 8,300 Words

When and Why China Fell Behind the West

Not the slightest hint of these simple but potentially important biological ideas appeared anywhere in the 500 pages of the Acemoglu/Robinson volume, nor in the associated 6,000 word Wikipedia article. And these distinguished authors were hardly alone in exhibiting this huge ideological blind spot.

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One of the glowing blurbs of their bestseller came from Prof. Ian Morris of Stanford University, who a couple of years earlier had published his own 2010 bestseller Why the West Rules—For Now. I remembered that book had been favorably discussed in my newspapers at the time it appeared, so when I’d noticed a copy at a local used book sale several months ago, I picked it up for $3 and read it a few weeks later.

That hefty volume ran well over 750 pages and compared and contrasted the historical growth and development of China with that of the West over the last few thousand years, a topic of great interest to me. The reviews and cover-blurbs seemed extremely positive, with the work ranked as a Best Book of the Year by the Economist, while the New York Times also gave it very high honors. I concurred with those appraisals, being quite impressed with the depth and quality of the author’s analysis, and it led me to read or reread quite a number of other books on closely-related subjects.

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Back in the late 1970s I’d first read The Pattern of the Chinese Past by economic historian Mark Elvin, a classic 1973 work published by Stanford University Press to glowing praise in the Economist and other publications. It was widely recognized that China had been far more advanced than the West during much of the last two thousand years just as Marco Polo had famously described in the late thirteenth century, but Elvin convincingly argued that this superiority had even extended into early modern times. I’d always considered the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 as major events of our own relatively recent past, yet there was strong evidence that even as the bewigged heirs to the Enlightenment were quoting John Locke and Adam Smith, in many respects the inwardly-looking society of China governed by its pig-tailed mandarins still remained wealthier and more advanced than that of Britain or our own.

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For centuries, leading Western thinkers down to Stoddard in the 1920s had freely admitted that the three great inventions separating their own more modern world from that of classical antiquity—the printing press, gunpowder, and the mariners’ compass—had all originated in China. Although those inventions—with paper often considered a fourth—were the most important, the total catalogue of Chinese technological innovations was absolutely enormous. Beginning in the 1930s, Joseph Needham, one of Britain’s most renowned scientists, became fascinated with China, and devoted most of the rest of his very long life to cataloguing its technological innovations in an enormously comprehensive series entitled Science and Civilization in China, consisting of more than two dozen volumes. Needham’s interesting personal story was told in The Man Who Loved China, a 2008 book by award-winning British journalist Simon Winchester.

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I doubt that anyone except academic specialists have ever tackled that mammoth product of Needham’s lifetime of effort, but fortunately Robert Temple produced The Genius of China in 1986, a popular one-volume distillation of that long series, with Needham himself providing the short introduction, and I read it last year. The work was heavily illustrated, almost resembling a coffee-table style book, but massively impressive in its content, covering numerous areas of science, technology, and engineering, all drawn from Needham’s great opus, which runs perhaps fifty times the length.

Glancing at the back cover reminded me of some of the highlights of Temple’s distillation. All our science textbooks mention that William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, but the Chinese had already developed a theory along similar lines more than 2,000 years earlier. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci had sketched out the idea of a parachute, but the Chinese had already invented one more than 1,500 years before that and were actually using it. Paper money was invented by the Chinese in the 9th century, but the resulting inflation and counterfeiting led them to abandon its use a couple of centuries later.

Given two millennia of major Chinese technological innovation, the important question was why China ultimately stalled and fell behind, with Elvin’s thesis being that it fell into what he called “a high-level equilibrium trap.” Chinese agriculture was enormously productive, far more so than that of Europe, and this advantage even continued into modern times, with Chinese farmers of the nineteenth century still producing three times as much food per acre of land as those of Britain, France, or other leading European states. But China’s population had grown so rapidly that on several occasions it reached the Malthusian limit of that huge agricultural output, with rural population densities that were far greater than those of even the most heavily urbanized European countries such as Holland. Therefore, with its population so high relative to its food production, the productive surplus available for investment let alone risky innovation had increasingly vanished. For similar reasons, the sort of labor-saving technologies that eventually led to Europe’s industrial revolution were economically non-viable in China, with factors such as these constituting the “trap” into which Chinese society had fallen.

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In 2000 Prof. Kenneth Pomeranz of UC Irvine published The Great Divergence, considerably extending and deepening Elvin’s analysis of China’s economic history and comparing it to that of the West. I first read that book almost a dozen years ago, finding it one of the most detailed and impressive works of economic history I’ve ever encountered, absolutely deserving of the glowing praise and multiple academic history prizes that it won, and it held up very well when I recently reread it.

In many respects, Pomeranz began his analysis where Elvin’s had left off more than a generation earlier, focusing upon the factors that may have forestalled an Industrial Revolution in China but allowed Britain to achieve such a breakthrough. He noted that China was roughly comparable to all of Europe in its geographical size and population, while large portions of Southern and Eastern Europe remained vast, under-developed territories, thereby driving down the continent-wide economic averages. Individual Chinese provinces were often similar to entire European countries in their size and population so under such an apples-to-apples comparison, China came off looking quite good, with its most economically advanced provinces such as those of the Yangzi Delta being just as productive as Britain had been on the eve of its own industrialization.

So the central focus of his book was actually the reverse of the more common one. Instead of asking why China failed to industrialize, Pomeranz raised the question of what factors had allowed Britain to avoid the same economic trap faced by the Middle Kingdom and successfully do so.

He argued that one of the most crucial was entirely contingent. Britain possessed large coal deposits that were relatively close to its main centers of population and industry, and thus could be cost-effectively drawn upon to provide the heating and energy production that otherwise would have required far greater use of firewood. He noted that the supply of the latter was quickly being exhausted as the local forests were denuded, and without such nearby coal reserves, the early stages of industrialization would have quickly become impossible. Meanwhile, China’s own large coal reserves were far distant from the country’s main centers of population and industry, and could not be cost-effectively exploited in a similar manner.

Another factor was even more interesting. During the couple of centuries prior to its industrialization, Britain had become Europe’s greatest colonial power, acquiring large land empires in North America and elsewhere, and it might have been more than purely coincidental that Britain subsequently led Europe’s industrialization drive. Pomeranz makes the important point that those colonies provided Britain with “ghost acres,” enormously raising the effective size of the land it could exploit for the production of food and crucial cash crops such as tobacco, sugar, and coffee. Those latter soon became valuable commodities, greatly desired by ordinary British workers, who were thereby brought into the cash economy as a result. If we considered Britain’s overall holdings, the large colonial lands under its control greatly reduced the average population density of the British Empire and also provided a ready market for the goods produced by the earliest stages of industrialization, thereby making that process much more economically viable. This is an interesting and rather more sophisticated version of the traditional leftist claim that Europe’s development heavily benefitted from its colonialism, and I think that Pomeranz makes a strong case.

Some of the statistics he cites are quite surprising and remarkable. For example, the sugar crops produced in Britain’s Caribbean plantation colonies were exceptionally cost-effective on an acreage basis, being an order-of-magnitude greater in their caloric content than the traditional crops grown in Britain, and by the late nineteenth century, an astonishing 20% of all the calories consumed by British workers came from sugar. Moreover, he argued that the widespread introduction of tobacco, coffee, and tea—so-called “drug crops”—was very useful in satiating, stimulating, and motivating the early industrial workforce whose daily routine was so different from what they or their ancestors had enjoyed as yeoman farmers working on their own land, suggesting that sugar and chocolate might also reasonably be placed in that same category. So without those British colonies and the unique crops they produced, the country’s industrialization drive might have been difficult and unlikely. I was deeply impressed by the exceptionally detailed nature of the author’s quantitative statistics regarding land-usage, patterns of consumption, and caloric content.

Under somewhat different historical circumstances, China could have similarly benefitted from these two crucial factors assisting early industrialization. A less inwardly-looking China could have colonized and exploited the nearby tropical lands of Southeast Asia such as Malaysia and Indonesia to produce the same plantation cash-crops as had the later British Empire. Even more obviously, in previous centuries the most densely-populated portions of China, ripe for early industrialization, were the provinces of the Northeast such as Henan, located close to the coal reserves that they could have utilized. But those provinces were devastated and largely depopulated by the Mongol conquest of the thirteenth century, and although they partially recovered, even as late as the eighteenth century they were still heavily overshadowed by provinces in the south such as Guangdong. Given China’s enormous number of technological innovations under the Song dynasty prior to 1300, its use of coal, and the location of its leading population centers, a Chinese industrial revolution in the 1100s might have been easier to imagine than one occurring during the six or seven hundred years that followed.

The Comparative Analysis of Ian Morris and His Ideological Blind Spots

Although the West had moved far ahead of China during the last couple of centuries, the Elvin and Pomeranz books as well as the extensive technological research by Needham had convinced me that this was merely a temporary historical anomaly, and that China had instead traditionally been in the lead. Yet interestingly enough, the 2010 work by Morris that originally prompted me to revisit the issue of Chinese development strongly argued that viewed over a much longer time horizon, this was not actually the case.

Morris argued that for many thousands of years the two most advanced poles of humanity had been our own civilization of the West and that of China, located at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, with each of these usually far ahead of development in the Indian subcontinent or in the New World societies of the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incans. However, he defined what he called “the West” in very broad terms, including not merely Europe but also the societies of the Mediterranean World such as Egypt and North Africa and even Mesopotamia and the rest of the Near East. This actually seemed quite reasonable since so much of European civilization had been based upon that of the Roman and Greek worlds, which were centered upon the Mediterranean, and those societies in turn traced their own roots to the earlier ones of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant. Partly for this reason, Morris sometimes favored the more neutral terms of “the Western core” and “the Eastern core” of the Eurasian landmass, with the latter heavily centered on China but also including Japan, Korea, and Indochina.

So just as the leading center of Chinese civilization gradually shifted over the many centuries from one part of its large territory to another, that of “the West” did the same, though obviously the linguistic and cultural gap between the early societies of Sumeria and Egypt and the later ones of Britain and Germany was far greater.

Under Morris’ expansive definition of “the West,” he made a strong case that for most of the last several thousand years, our own civilization—including the Near East—had actually been somewhat more advanced than China’s across a wide range of different metrics.

Take, for example, the simple matter of early domestication, the development of agriculture that raised mankind from its previous hunter-gatherer existence. This began around 9500 BC in the West and 7500 BC in the East, giving the former a civilizational lead of around 2,000 years.

The objective comparison of the relative development of different civilizations across a multi-thousand-year history is a difficult undertaking, but Morris proposed a set of simple, robust metrics that seemed quite plausible to me and could at least be roughly estimated. These included: (1) energy capture; (2) urbanization; (3) information processing; and (4) military power. All of these reflected technological development, with urbanism also being a good measure of organizational ability.

Adding together these metrics, he concluded that the West remained slightly but consistently ahead for many thousands of years until a century or so after the Fall of the Roman Empire, when the East moved into the lead for well over a millennium, while the West then regained its primacy soon after 1800.

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I found Morris’ comparative analysis of the developmental histories of China and the West interesting and worthwhile. But his book also inadvertently revealed some of the crucial aspects of current intellectual life and I considered these insights equally important.

A bold, provocative title is an excellent means of ensuring that a scholarly book will attract attention and get sales, and in our current era “Why the West Rules” certainly falls into that category, notwithstanding the affixed disclaimer of “For Now.” Moreover, that title was certainly accurate when the book appeared in 2010, and the author’s quantitative framework suggested that the West had remained noticeably ahead of China and the East for nearly all of the last 15,000 years, reinforcing the implications of that title.

But Morris was a long-time faculty member at Stanford University, an academic institution known as a hotbed of “politically correct” hostility to ideas perceived as Eurocentric, let alone carrying a hint of racialism. So there was an obvious risk that presenting his important conclusions in such packaging could lead to an ideological backlash, disrupting his quiet scholarly existence. Therefore, I was hardly surprised to notice that his 750 pages of text were heavily studded with repeated anti-racialist disclaimers found in at least a half-dozen different locations. The ones that jumped out at me began on pages 70, 117, 474, 559, 570, and 595 of my paperback edition.

In the first of these, Morris took the bull by the horns, declaring that during “the heyday of so-called scientific racism in the 1930s, some physical anthropologists insisted that modern Chinese people were more primitive than Europeans” because the former had erectoid ancestors—“primitive ape-men”—rather than “the more advanced Neanderthals” who gave rise to Europeans. Morris devoted almost ten pages to debunking this multiregionalist scientific hypothesis, concluding that “Racist theories grounding Western rule in biology have no basis in fact.” He declared that “for more than a hundred years” the notion that Europeans had always been “culturally superior to Easterners” had become a widespread belief, “confidently asserted,” and he heavily refuted this claim.

A few dozen pages later, Morris explained that although some might believe that “the first Westerners…developed agriculture thousands of years before anyone else in the world because they were smarter” such “racist theories” were “almost certainly wrong.” He drew upon the contrary geographical analysis of Jared Diamond’s influential book Guns, Germs, and Steel to refute that belief.

Much later, he criticized many great European thinkers for similar sentiments. He noted that Carl Linnaenus, the eighteenth century founding father of genetics, regarded the Chinese as “a different type of human” and philosopher David Hume believed that “only the white race was capable of real civilization.” These erroneous beliefs had long continued:

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries plenty of Westerners thought biology was the whole answer to why the West rules. The white European race, they insisted, had evolved further than anyone else. They were mistaken…The genetic differences between modern humans in different parts of the world are trivial…Very few scholars nowadays propagate racist theories that Westerners are genetically superior to everyone else…Everything suggests that wherever we look, people—in large groups—are all much the same.

Although these false Eurocentric racialist beliefs gradually softened over time into “culturalism,” as such they even persisted into the mid-twentieth century:

As recently as the 1960s some Western sociologists argued that Eastern culture—in particular, Confucianism—had prevented those who were steeped in it from developing the entrepreneurial spirit of competition and innovation essential for economic success.

Morris included many pages of source notes in his text. But none of these were provided for his repeated assertions of this widespread but false Eurocentric racialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, suggesting that the author regarded these facts as so widely known and accepted as to not require any documentation. Morris named no specific individuals who advocated those ideas and while I don’t doubt that some such references do exist, I suspect that Morris would be very surprised to discover that the views of Chinese racial inferiority were far less influential and universally held than he seemed to assume.

Morris was born in early 1960, so he began college during the late 1970s, long after any explicit racialism had been totally banished from the academic community. But I’m sure he still personally encountered the residue of its “culturalist” echo that he also harshly condemned, which falsely predicted that East Asian societies would fail to advance economically. Given that the strongly anti-racist proponents of that prediction had proved to be so spectacularly wrong, it was only natural that he would have assumed their explicitly racialist intellectual predecessors from a generation or two earlier would have been even more convinced that China and the rest of the East could never match the West economically. Yet as I have demonstrated above, that assumption was utterly and absolutely false, and Morris presumably only held it because he had never actually encountered the works of any of those earlier thinkers.

Morris’ bestseller was widely and favorably reviewed, and not a single one of those distinguished modern scholars noticed that his description of the ideological climate of three or four generations was entirely upside-down and backwards. This further reinforces the conclusion that all those earlier American thinkers had been so completely purged from our modern intellectual life that their works have been almost totally forgotten.

Yet if Stoddard, Ross, and other figures of their era had been correct about China’s global future while most of their fervently anti-racist successors were completely mistaken, perhaps Morris and other modern scholars should explore those earlier thinkers to see what nuggets of insight they might provide.

Resurrecting the Lost Wisdom of the Early Twentieth Century

These days Stoddard and Ross have been almost entirely eliminated from our academic awareness, with the former surviving merely as a much-demonized racist cartoon villain often given a sentence or two in our basic textbooks and the latter nearly forgotten. But a century ago, they were among our most highly-regarded and influential public intellectuals, and their views carried a great deal of weight. Several years ago, I published a very lengthy review of this intellectual history of the last one hundred years, and in it each of those figures was worthy of considerable discussion.

Indeed, I doubt that Stoddard himself would have disputed any attempt to label him as a “White Supremacist.� After all, his most famous and influential work bore the full title “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,� and that 1921 bestseller focused upon the emerging challenges that peoples of white European origin faced in maintaining their global control in the aftermath of the terribly destructive First World War.

But although that term would probably apply to Stoddard, the marginalizing implications it carries in today’s society would be extremely misleading since his beliefs were so widely shared by much of America’s political and intellectual elite. He himself came from a prestigious New England family, and after earning his doctorate in history at Harvard, his series of successful books quickly established him as one of our country’s most influential writers and public intellectuals, winning him regular invitations to lecture at our nation’s military academy and with his articles frequently gracing the pages of our most prestigious national publications…

Many of Stoddard’s books focused upon sharp racialist issues, and these might seem extremely jarring to a modern readership. But other works fell outside that area, and they effectively demonstrated the remarkable quality and objectivity of one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers of that era.

For example, just prior to our own 1917 entry into the First World War, he had published Present-Day Europe, providing a detailed description of the political and social situation in all of the contending European states, including their historical roots. I happened to read the book about a decade ago, and found it the best summary treatment of that subject I had ever encountered…

World War I and its immediate aftermath saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate by Ataturk’s secular regime, and the widespread rise of left-wing militant atheism inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. As a natural consequence, nearly all Western thinkers dismissed the power of Islam as a spent force and a fading relic of the past, while Stoddard was almost alone in presciently suggesting its possible worldwide revival in The New World of Islam, published in 1922…

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But Stoddard’s best-known work certainly remains The Rising Tide of Color, published 100 years ago, which launched his influential career. About a decade ago, I finally got around to reading it, and was greatly surprised that a book so heavily demonized in every description I had encountered actually came across as so level-headed and innocuous. Although most of the leading political figures of that time proclaimed permanent white rule of the world, Stoddard strongly argued that this situation was temporary, soon to evaporate under the pressure of rising non-white nationalism, economic development, and population growth. These rising tides of the peoples of Asia and the Middle East made their eventual independence almost inevitable, and the European powers should therefore voluntarily relinquish their vast colonial empires rather than earn future bitterness by stubbornly seeking to retain them. A “White Supremacist� might certainly advance such arguments, but only one of far greater sophistication than is today implied by that popular media slur.

I recently reread Stoddard’s volume and was even more impressed the second time through. In many respects, his sweeping panorama of the future geopolitical landscape brings to mind The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1997 by renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, which then became a huge national bestseller and cultural-touchstone in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Yet although Huntington’s text is just two decades old and Stoddard’s has reached its first century, I think it is the former that actually now seems much more dated and less applicable to the current alignment of the world and the challenges faced by white European populations.

While Stoddard was considered a strong conservative in his day, whose ideas deeply resonated among our dominant East Coast elites, Ross was a leading Progressive thinker, always regarded as very much on the Left, as I explained to a journalist who had met me for lunch in Palo Alto.

In my conversation with that national journalist, one of the major examples I cited was that of E.A. Ross, a leading intellectual figure of the early decades of the twentieth century but now largely forgotten except when portrayed as a racist cartoon villain by ignorant present-day academics. Last year, I noted such crude treatment by Holocaust historian Joseph W. Bendersky in his book documenting and condemning the views of America’s Anglo-Saxon elites from a century ago:

Although I would not question the accuracy of Bendersky’s exhaustive archival research, he seems considerably less sure-footed regarding American intellectual history and sometimes allows his personal sentiments to lead him into severe error. For example, his first chapter devotes a couple of pages to E.A. Ross, citing some of his unflattering descriptions of Jews and Jewish behavior, and suggesting he was a fanatic anti-Semite, who dreaded “the coming catastrophe of an America overrun by racially inferior people.�

But Ross was actually one of our greatest early sociologists, and his 26 page discussion of Jewish immigrants published in 1913 was scrupulously fair-minded and even-handed, describing both positive and negative characteristics, following similar chapters on Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic newcomers. And although Bendersky routinely denounces his own ideological villains as “Social Darwinists,� the source he actually cites regarding Ross correctly identified the scholar as one of America’s leading critics of Social Darwinism. Indeed, Ross’s stature in left-wing circles was so great that he was selected as a member of the Dewey Commission, organized to independently adjudicate the angry conflicting accusations of Stalinists and Trotskyites. And in 1936, a Jewish leftist fulsomely praised Ross’s long and distinguished scholarly career in the pages of The New Masses, the weekly periodical of the American Communist Party, only regretting that Ross had never been willing to embrace Marxism.

Ross was quite plain-spoken in his views, and his long career was bracketed by his leading national role in major free speech issues. As a young academic, he had been fired by Stanford University for his political beliefs, a celebrated incident that led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors, while he ended his life serving for a decade as national chairman of the ACLU.

In 1915 Ross published South of Panama, describing the backwardness and misery he had encountered in so many of the societies of Latin America during his half year of travels and investigation across that region. Although the bulk of the text was descriptive and empirical, at one point he pondered the underlying nature of those problems, wondering whether the causes were primarily cultural, due to the widespread poverty and lack of education, or instead a result of the innate inferiority of the local population, emphasizing that the answer to this crucial question would have an enormous impact upon the continent’s future developmental trajectory.

After even-handedly mentioning some of the limited evidence supporting each of these two conflicting theories, he ultimately leaned towards the environmental side, criticizing heredity as “a cheap offhand explanationâ€� of human characteristics that actually often change over time. Today such a discussion would be utterly unimaginable within the confines of our respectable academic or media worlds, and for opposite reasons would also be extremely rare among committed racialists…

Although Ross was uncertain about the natural abilities of South America’s mostly Mestizo population, a six month research trip to China a few years earlier had left him no doubt abut the potential of the Chinese, despite their immense existing poverty. As he recounted in his book:

To forty-three men who, as educators, missionaries and diplomats, have had good opportunity to learn the “feel� of the Chinese mind, I put the question, “Do you find the intellectual capacity of the yellow race equal to that of the white race?� All but five answered “Yes,� and one sinologue of varied experience as missionary, university president and legation adviser left me gasping with the statement, “Most of us who have spent twenty-five years or more out here come to feel that the yellow race is the normal human type, while the white race is a ‘sport.’�

• White Racialism in America, Then and Now
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 5, 2020 • 24,900 Words

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Nearly all the dozen or more books that I recently read about China and Chinese society were written by Westerners and all were published in the West. The importance of that topic is obvious given that China’s real productive economy is already several times larger than that of America and it easily exceeds the combined total for the entire Western world, while still growing much more rapidly.

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Although those books provided a wide range of different perspectives, some more important or persuasive than others, not a single one of them dared consider the innate characteristics of the Chinese people as shaped by their thousands of years of settled history, a rather telling omission. Suppose that all our books on professional basketball carefully explored every aspect of the game and its leading players while always omitting any indication that height was an important factor in their success.

E.A. Ross wrote on that same topic more than a century ago and he lacked access to any of our modern databases or other scholarly aids. Yet although the analysis in his short book was mostly based upon just a few months of travel around that country, I think it provided some important insights lacking in any of these much more weighty recent volumes.

• The Changing Chinese
  The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China
  E.A. Ross • 1911 • 61,000 Words

Ross’s books on other topics were equally insightful, as were those of his close contemporary Lothrop Stoddard:

• The Old World in the New
  The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People
  E.A. Ross • 1914 • 59,000 Words
• South of Panama
  E.A. Ross • 1917 • 71,000 Words
• Present-Day Europe
  Its National States of Mind
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1917 • 74,000 Words
• The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1920 • 78,000 Words
• The New World of Islam
  Lothrop Stoddard • 1922 • 95,000 Words

All of these works were produced more than a century ago and much of their intellectual framework may seem strange and alien to current Western minds. But many of these ideas are still accepted as commonplaces everywhere else in today’s world, and they were equally accepted in the West until three generations ago. My 2013 article analyzing the forces that had shaped the Chinese people closed with a couple of paragraphs discussing these implications:

Consider also the ironic case of Bruce Lahn, a brilliant Chinese-born genetics researcher at the University of Chicago. In an interview a few years ago, he casually mentioned his speculation that the socially conformist tendencies of most Chinese people might be due to the fact that for the past 2,000 years the Chinese government had regularly eliminated its more rebellious subjects, a suggestion that would surely be regarded as totally obvious and innocuous everywhere in the world except in the West of the past half century or so. Not long before that interview, Lahn had achieved great scientific acclaim for his breakthrough discoveries on the possible genetic origins of human civilization, but this research eventually provoked such heated controversy that he was dissuaded from continuing it.[35]…

During the Cold War, the enormous governmental investments of the Soviet regime in many fields produced nothing, since they were based on a model of reality that was both unquestionable and also false. The growing divergence between that ideological model and the real world eventually doomed the USSR, whose vast and permanent bulk blew away in a sudden gust of wind two decades ago. American leaders should take care that they do not stubbornly adhere to scientifically false doctrines that will lead our own country to risk a similar fate.

Related Reading:

• Bibliography
• China’s Rise, America’s Fall
• American Pravda: A Rising China Faces the West
• China, America, and the Economist
• How Social Darwinism Made Modern China
• White Racialism in America, Then and Now