Responsibility
“We need to reassert the notion that roles of authority are positions of responsibility rather than declarations of personal merit and routes to personal enrichment. That notion goes with old-fashioned concepts of social obligation and public service. An insistence that power is a duty, not a prize, is probably the most important reason why some countries in the world are rich and others poor.”
These three sentences were written by John Kay, a columnist in the financial times.
Has there ever been a truer paragraph?
I remember from my master’s degree learning about Korea – how they had astronomical tariffs – 9000% is what I remember – on luxury goods, and next to no tariffs on machinery. That meant that as generation of industrialists began to grow, they were forced (or rather, given strong incentives) to reinvest in ever more capital equipment. There were no Mercedes, no Rolexes, but lots of machine tools.
In Africa, however, too often political and other leaders use their time with access to power to extract, rather than invest. It’s a fascinating conundrum that we should be thinking more about.
I think that people are thinking about industrial policy quite a bit, e.g. http://econ.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTRESEARCH/EXTPROGRAMS/EXTMACROECO/0,,contentMDK:22310775~pagePK:64168182~piPK:64168060~theSitePK:477872,00.html
Getting a little off your core topic, but I wonder how much cultural and linguistic factors make the African situation different than the Korean one.
If I’m a Malawian with a high level of formal education and/or a lot of money, chances are I speak English fairly well, and could pack up and go to the UK easily enough. Thus if you deny me access to the luxuries I want, you might lose me entirely.
Thinking about Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s, the same probably wasn’t true. I have no numbers to back it up, but I would expect a lower percentage rich/educated Koreans were fluent in a second language during Korea’s development decades than is the case with Africans today. Thus Koreans maybe had more incentive to stay home, thus government could be more demanding of its citizens.
Certainly not the whole story, but maybe an interesting theory anyways…
Good post.