Road to Riches or The Wealth of Man [Paperback]

 

 

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This book presents a balanced and penetrating analysis of the ups and downs of wealth development in the world since man left the stage of hunter-gatherer. Some points become very clear. Whether a country or region is poor or rich does not depend on its people but on the quality of government. People everywhere and for the last 6000 years have proven that given the right political conditions they will develop wealth. For enduring wealth leader succession is critical. Many countries started their declines because the ruler appointed an incompetent successor, a family member or friend. The only system that appears to be able to cope with this is a democracy. Sooner or later in a hereditary or dictatorial system a person is appointed that turns out to be a disaster. Peter Jay presents his Waltz theory. Step 1 is that a social or technical development initiates wealth creation. In step 2 predators try to get hold of the wealth. In step 3 a structural social solution is found that protects the wealth. Where are we in 2000? Peter Jay has some concerns. One is the increasing gap between rich and poor, which in the past always has led to war. Two. Even though the population is peaking around 2050 the earth may not be able to cope with all the waste (including carbon dioxide) we then produce. Three. Nobody at the level of the world is in charge and empowered to solve the problems. The book contains many statistics about population growth and decline in various parts of the world. This information is very illuminating. It is a pity that it is not presented in table format. When trying to construct such a table I found several inconsistencies between chapters. But that is just a small point. A very worthwhile book for economists and non-economists.

Peter Jay summarises the aim of this book modestly, and rather disingenuously, at the start of his last chapter as `written by a layman for laymen'. In fact he is a professional economist of high repute and academic attainment who has earned his crust not in the groves of academe but mainly in the jungles of journalism. The book was written as he also prepared a TV series by the same title, but this is a genuine book and not a script. However the impression he is trying to create is the right one - this is not a treatise but an attempt to explain, in layman's terms, nothing less than the history of humankind from an economic perspective.

I seem to sense that the author is more on his home ground when he reaches the modern world starting with Adam Smith, David Hume, Malthus and Ricardo, and going on to the era since their time. However I don't doubt for an instant that he has good academic backing for his early foray into prehistory and anthropology. What I value this book for is the sense it conveys of a firm grasp of the subject-matter and the feeling of rationality about the analysis that we are offered. The tone is urbane and not disputatious - the writing of a gentleman - and viewpoints that Jay finds unconvincing are at least treated with civility. By family tradition his politics are Labour, but while both he and I think of economics as a political subject by its very nature, this is no kind of party political tract or anything resembling one. It would be unjust to pigeonhole Jay's viewpoint in any crude sense, which is why I shall not call it Keynesian. Nevertheless it is not only his detached intellectual analysis but his political values that keep him out of sympathy with the kind of economic aspirations and standards currently fashionable in Washington, where he was once the British ambassador.

There are 10 chapters, 9 of them historical or prehistorical and finally his own prognostications. He commits himself in these less firmly than some comment I have read might suggest, and this final chapter reads to me more like a man assessing odds and hedging his bet. He sees how the formidable mind of Keynes was nevertheless the creature of Keynes's background and milieu, and he harks back to Darwin and Adam Smith by way of correctives. Indeed the early sages are never long absent from his narrative, and above all he invokes repeatedly a 3-step sequence of action reaction and outcome in political economics that he calls the waltz motif. I found the later chapters more gripping than any novel, as Jay discusses the industrial revolution, the 19th century in its successive phases, the period up to 1913, WWI and the dreadful Treaty of Versailles, the inter-war years, WWII, the Marshall Plan and the cold war, the collapse of communism and recent developments. The economic perspective, as presented by such a presenter, sometimes sheds new light that is downright startling (in this author's unhistrionic way) as in his commentary on Stalin's change of mind over the Marshall Plan. Outright humour is infrequent, but some understated moments are worth looking out for, and I treasure the wry touch as he works through the supposed causes of the industrial revolution, quoting some other source to the effect that certain historians boil these down so far as almost to suggest that nothing caused it. That might have entertained David Hume.

As well as the main chronological narrative Jay explores economic history along a national axis, focusing on China, India, the Soviet Union and its outcome, Europe, America and the incoherent residuum that goes by the name of the third world. History is not my own strong point (lots of things are not my strong point) but my grasp has improved in recent years and I still got some major surprises from what Jay told me. Above all this is a work for thinking people and reasonable people. Jay is not without firm viewpoints, but they are always rational and never dogmatic. Above all it is a work for the general reader who may commonly find economics dry or unintelligible or both. The book is recent enough for the author to dip his toe in the contentious issue of environmental degradation, and I found his economist's analysis of the prospect of global warming fascinating when analysed from the point of view of energy resources and output. The author comes across as outstandingly agreeable in temperament, and I don't know whether it is part of his contribution to resource conservation that in the numerous pictures in which he appears he seems only to own one shirt.

Interesting, illuminating, thoughtful and thought-inspiring - an item of high value in every proper sense.

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