Why South America isn't like North America

[Music] ladies and gentlemen when I was 5 years old a mob attacked our family farm there was a footpath that led out to the hills behind and I can remember my mother taking me there by the hand and saying we're going to play a game if we have to come this way we must do it without making a sound my father at the time I remember was struck down by one of those diseases that chronically afflict northern European men in the tropics he was paper thin wearing a dressing jambe he was refusing to budge and I remember him loading his revolver while my mother was trying to persuade him to leave this was the Peru of general Velasco it turned out for the land invasion in our case was unsuccessful but the other farms in the valley were not so lucky there was a process of general nationalization and expropriation that unfolded across that country and as always happens when a government declares a program of land reform people started to take the law into their own hands and the police seeing which way the wind was blowing refused to intervene Velasco plunged Peru into a state of abject poverty from which it has only recently recovered that was quite an experience to go through age 5 but it was only much later that the most shocking thing of all shocked me it struck me which was that no one had been especially shocked it was taken for granted in Peru that the rule of law was contingent that property rights were insecure that constitutions came and went in fact I learned an hour or two ago from my fellow Peruvian Ian Vasquez that Latin America has produced 200 constitutions which is quite some going and puts it in a top league in the world now as I traveled back and forth between school in the UK and vacations in Lima I pondered more and more on the difference after all there was no geographical or historically obvious reason for this divergence the Americas had been settled around about the same time the early South American revolutionaries had in most cases copied versions of the US Constitution San martín and Bolivar and their collaborators broadly saw themselves as children of the Enlightenment as rational scientific people they were Freemasons in many cases the idea that they would have been conscripted by Hugo Chavez I think would have horrified them if they've been able to see into our time so what explains this divergence well let me put the question in a different way why has no Mexican politician ever had to propose building a wall to keep out all the gringos 160,000 more or less 160,000 mexicans every year settle legally in the united states by definition we can't count how many settle there illegally I rather agree those of you who were listening to Brian Kaplan earlier with what he said about the benefits of migration everyone who made that journey was fundamentally casting a vote for optimism and showing himself to be shrewd and confident about the future I wish we could find an answering optimism in North American politicians I long for the day when I can hear a current US politician repeat the sentiments that Ronald Reagan in that characteristically upbeat way he had used to express when he said every immigrant makes America more American but still let's ask the question why is the traffic of people overwhelmingly one way why is there such a large move of population from all over Central and South America to the US and Canada but so little in the other direction on one level of course the answer is obvious Americans take for granted things that are considered luxuries in many parts of Latin America things like reliable electricity supply decent health care system tarmacked rose uncorrupt judges regular elections the GDP in the United States is about six or seven times as much per head as in Mexico about ten times as much as in some of the poorer countries in this region but why do we have that discrepancy what's the underlying cause that produced that divergence is there some magical property in the air or the water or perhaps in the gene pool of the United States that has created this singular success and that isn't shared by the rest of the world I don't think we can seriously sustain that thesis in fact if you look at the populations immediately on either side of the border in Texas or in New Mexico or in Arizona you find that they are pretty much the same people breathing the same air watching the same TV eating the same food in fact in their book Why nations fail Robinson and Acemoglu begin with the the twin towns of Nogales Nogales Arizona and Nogales Mexico and they point out that the populations were sundered almost accidental either there was no ethnographic border there the people on either side of the frontier are eating the same delicious tacos and watching the same abominable telenovelas and yet the people in Arizona are substantially better off on every indicator life expectancy literacy infant mortality every indicator than their cousins on the other side what caused that discrepancy well I think the the first person to glimpse the answer was alexis de tocqueville 180 years ago and he put it down to what he called the ponder de power the punt on a part either the starting point he had a theory that in the wide-open spaces of the new world people would distill and intensify the tendencies that they brought with them from them other countries so as de Tocqueville saw it French America exaggerated the senior realism the obscurantism of bourbon France and Spanish America exaggerated the ramshackle corruption performance pay but English America as he always called it exaggerated the republicanism the libertarianism the Localism that was incipient in parliamentary England in fact although Tocqueville is always quoted as a witness of American exceptionalism he wrote a book about England as well he was married to an English woman he knew at the anglo-saxon world extremely well and he tended to think of it as a cultural continuum he saw the u.s. simply as a more potent distillation of what had come from the British Isles he once wrote the American is the Englishman left to himself so what was it that those early settlers brought with them it's an apt question to ask in this quattro centenary of the Mayflower's voyage well there was certainly nothing in the wealth either of the the countries of origin or of the colonies that explains the disparity tocqueville's great English contemporary Lord Macaulay the Whig politician poet and historian said we can see no way in which the Castilian at the beginning of the 17th century was inferior to the Englishmen Spain was a wealthier more popular and more sorry more people more larger country and a a far more influential country in the wastes councils of the world and certainly if you look at the resources of North and South America North America is some way behind it wasn't long before the silver and gold of the new world was pressing the hulls of Spanish galleons deep into the waterline all the way until they got back to the old world in order to be predating on and pirated by English ships which no doubt Gabriele would regard as an act of shocking piracy but obviously we all reflect our national traditions I saw it as an active legitimate defense against a hostile power but the point was there was no equivalent source of ready wealth at that time in North America the settlers had brought with them between their ears a treasure that was more precious than all the silver in tasko or in potosi they had brought with them a way of ordering their affairs that was uniquely well-suited both to the settling of the new world and to the building of an open society in it in the first place government was decentralized Edmund Burke called it a policy of wise and salutary neglect at least until the 1760s England took really very little interest in what happened in North America people were free to elect their own mares and sheriffs and in time their own colonial legislatures to pass their own laws and to levy their own taxes it was a very different experience in Spanish America the crown saw this as a national enterprise in colonization and like all autocratic institutions it was jealous of its power as we saw when the the Jesuits were accused of building an empire within an empire and brutally repressed they'd been leading the missionary activity of course in the new world because in every authoritarian system power is jealous the settlers in Spanish America had tried by and large to replicate the vast estates of Esther Amador and Andalusia the places they'd largely come from they adapted a system of serfdom that had first been imposed on the Moors in the years immediately following the reconquest it was the system known as the encomienda and it basically divided the population into groups of people who were then obliged to give forced labor to their Spanish income and their own and that system was really the the basis of social organization for the bulk of the colonial period and we still have its legacy visible in parts of Latin America after a small disastrous attempt at communal ownership in new england very quickly people reverted to the idea of private land ownership in the names of individuals in Virginia from 1618 they introduced a system called the head right which said anyone any settler is given 50 acres plus another 50 for any family member he manages to attract and that model of dispersed individual land ownership basically set the template for what was to happen in the United States right up through to the homestead acts until the entire continent had been peopled now we should acknowledge that there was a huge price paid by the indigenous population looking back at the writings of the settlers at the time enlightened people by their the standard of their age it is shocking to see their indifference to the people that they were displacing nonetheless that system of land ownership lent itself to an open society in which property rights were secured in which in the absence of a strong arbitrary central power there was a rule of law where the individual could reasonably expect redress of grievances rather than having to lobby for political favors and that ultimately explains the divergence now here's the really important point it wasn't South America that was the accept here almost the whole of the world is organized on the basis of some kind of organized exploitation for the benefit of the elite that has been the usual form of social organization for our species for 10,000 years the outlier was the United States now why it became an outlier well Gabriela mentioned that I've written a book about it called inventing freedom a whole bunch of accidental factors went into it I could lecture for another hour and a half just on that but the point is Ernst Goellner the the sociologists and anthropologists put it brilliantly he said in the whole history of agricultural humanity this breakthrough happened only once this elevation of the rules above the rulers and of the individual above the collective a really exceptional system think about the what he meant by that only once in the history of the last ten thousand years ten thousand years ago one of our ancestors made the discovery that if you put a seed in the ground a plant will grow there right major change for the whole of Homo sapiens it takes about five minutes for somebody to make the next discovery which is that it is easier to steal your neighbors harvest than to spend all year growing your own crops and then because man is a rapacious and greedy creature it probably took about another ten minutes for the really nasty discovery which is that if you truly want to optimize the ratio of effort to outcome you should regularize that plunder through a system of tithes and tolls and taxes and thus was civilization born as a protection racket as a system of organized plunder and what sociology is called the stationary bandit the person who would move in and in exchange for a modicum of protection would run effectively a slave state and for ten thousand years the lot of our species was oppression and serfdom and misery and slavery every single of you in this room is descended from slaves and from slave owners the institution was universal it was practiced on every continent think of human history for a moment and you see that it can't be otherwise it was simply a question of how far back you want to go for most of those ten thousand years what we call history was really the history of the top 1% of the top 1% for everybody else it was a life of back-breaking toil from dawn to dusk in the field until the breakthrough Qing Dynasty owners miracle and what was it based on well I can best answer that question by recounting a little story about Stanley Baldwin who was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from most of the interwar period a very pragmatic anti-intellectual conservative we all know the type in politics and he was asked towards the end of his life he was asked were you influenced by any theory or any philosopher and rather to the astonishment of his interview because Baldwin was not the kind of guy who read books he said yes I actually I was I was very influenced as a young man by the teachings of Sir Henry Maine the Victorian anthropologist and jurist and it was through reading and studying the works of Maine that I finally came to see that all human history is a move from status to contract and then he paused frowning and said oh was it the other way around it's a it's a cute story because it it shows that even the most brilliant ideas become worn through overuse become over familiar but just stop for a second and ponder those three words status to contract that up until then on every continent in every archipelago human relations had been mediated by birth by caste by tradition and the breakthrough was simply allowing two individuals to make free-standing agreements with each other without meaning to us permission of the king or the bishop or anybody else and have those agreements arbitrated by a neutral magistrate seat that's it grant that and everything else follows now think about the problems that exist in those latin american states that have not developed a fully developed a fully functioning rule of law we heard last night about the the philanthropic ogre in agra philanthropical the basic problem is that if you're in a country where you can't reasonably expect to put a dispute with your neighbor before a court and rely on an impartial judge to give you redress of grievance if instead you're in a place where you phone your friend who knows a general or a minister then no one has incentives to invest no one has incentives to trade and all growth is limited by the failure of having secured property rights well let me put that another way around the central fact of all our lives the thing that elevated our species to an unprecedented level of wealth was the Industrial Revolution suddenly at some moment in the 18th century all of these guys in the West Midlands of England suddenly started inventing things you know Arkwright and what and bolton does anyone really think that all these geniuses just happened to be born at the same time in the same place right through some kind of coincidental cluster of course not and how many Arkwright's and what and bolton's and Watts had lived and died as field hands in the centuries leading up to that moment what had changed is that there was a system of secure intellectual property a system of secured patients that allowed them to make the investments and if you have that almost everything else will follow the individualism the liberty and the security that comes from an open society so what can we conclude going back to why there is a border one way but not the other what can we conclude about the likelihood of future approximation or divergence if people are not if you like condemned by some determinism of genetics or geography if it's simply a question of getting the right institutions then we could I think reasonably hopefully say well that's a very good idea that's very good encouraging optimistic story because it means that if you replicate the institutional model you can get the same happy outcome anywhere else and certainly the imposition of common law devolved more organizations of government the security of property and of a legal system has worked where it has been transplanted right those values are why Bermuda is not Haiti those values of why Hong Kong is not China why Singapore is not Indonesia why Israel isn't Syria there is no geographical determinism about it so is it the case that if qua Tamala or Mexico or my nation Peru were to adopt the same legal institutions and the mores that go with it that over time they would enjoy the same benefits that Americans take for granted well to some extent it isn't to some extent of course that's been happening it's a natural thing for all libertarians to be pessimistic especially about their own country I've noticed every conference I've gone to even the people who come from Singapore and Hong Kong and moaning about how big the government is and how intrusive the state is you hear it all at all but if you actually lived in my country you'd see what a terrible no no you're from Switzerland you really don't have a problem people would gladly swap their problems for yours right it's things are better than they were in most places but just think about the reverse let me leave you with a rather eerie thought if the United States is the outlier isn't very equally a danger of a reversion to the mean think of the the third law of thermodynamics right things tend back to the basic in tropic State that they began from a liberal society an open society a society based on the primacy of the individual is deeply unnatural it is an unnatural construct that has to be maintained against the entropic pressures trying to drag it back to reversion right and what I mean by that is it doesn't come naturally to any of us human beings evolved in tribes and in kin groups we think collectively we have left to ourselves rather scary notions of when it is right to brutalize or oppress others think about the history of the human race for a moment and that becomes indubitable so the reason that we've been able in parts of the world to carve out this space where you have limited government accountable politicians secure property rights uncensored newspapers regular elections all the rest of it is because people have been educated taught a series of values that don't come naturally in particular we've been taught the difficult and unnatural but important I'd here that someone we don't like might still have something useful to say empiricism rationalism the whole basis of the Enlightenment depends on constant education and this is why the two organizations represented here at this conference are so critically important because if the role of our education system was to create and make possible in enlightenment society to teach people the primacy of free will and individual thought to teach people status rather than contract to teach people that we're not all defined by physiognomy or birth or accident of of caste but they were all responsible for our actions ask yourself is that what people are still being taught right when I look at what's happening particularly in universities throughout the West but I think it's now happening in secondary schools as well it's very difficult to avoid the rather scary conclusion then instead of teaching their counter-cyclical notion that the individual matters more than the collective and that we are all responsible for ourselves people are being taught the procyclical notion the notion that appeals to our Paleolithic DNA that says actually no you are defined by accident of birth the single most important thing about you is your race or your gender or your sexual preference collectivism has made a terrifying comeback in the form of identity politics a lot of the academics who uphold that way of looking at the world call themselves post modernists post-modernism meaning effectively that they think that the truth is a product of power structures rather than being some fixed external gauge but I think a more accurate way of describing their philosophy is pre modernism it's a reversion to the pre enlightenment idea of tribalism and if you're looking for a short explanation of why politics around the world has become so polarized and angry look no further than our basic tribal instincts we're obeying the promptings buried deep in our genome that worked very well on the savannahs of Pleistocene Africa but perhaps not so well today and in an age when universities are expanding when a higher and higher proportion of the population is being subjected to this indoctrination and when the indoctrination is becoming more and more intense we need an antidote we need someone to tell the truth and there are two ways it seems to me that you could do that one is the UFM route you create your own universities you create places where there is genuine heterodoxy not universities that just teach right-wing ideas but universities that teach people the importance of the scientific method the importance of reason the primacy of logic and the sanctity of the dividual I'd love to see many more you FM's in many more countries but as your founder understood it's a long-term project it takes a while to build up a corpus of graduates who can make a big impact which brings me to the second organization another way in short cutting the foundation of a whole new University important though that is is to try and reach some of the people who are currently being subjected to indoctrination in all of the other universes and show them that there is another way of looking at the world and this is where reason excels both in its messaging and in its presentation ways of reaching a generation raised with screens and short attention spans let me just finish by saying from the bottom of my heart thank you to all of those of you involved either with UFM or with reason for fighting this most important of battles it's no exaggeration to say that you are defending the liberal order you are defending what we understand by Western civilization and that is a battle that is never going to be definitively one because everyone coming new to the argument is gonna come from the other side Hana Arab had a nice phrase she said every generation Western civilization is invaded by barbarians we call them children and of course think about it right you and I came into the world pretty much with the same mental makeup as our ancestors would have done 50,000 or 100,000 years ago the reason we don't live the way they did is because of things we have learned because we've been acculturated habituated to think in a particular way and because we're able to benefit from this extraordinary world where there is specialization exchange and the ability to draw on the knowledge of others all of that feels unnatural because it is unnatural on a deep genetic level we are still roaming in Africa and the world of skyscrapers and super abundance is utterly alien to us and in every generation people protest against it feels wrong it feels alienating there's got to be more to life than all of these material concerns surely it matters much more to be spiritual Lord or to be brave or to be self-sacrificing you know we don't want to live purely defined by material prosperity that was the motivation of the the romantics of the existentialists of revolutionary socialism of fascism of every anti modern Creed and it will keep coming back because it is the anguished cry of your inner caveman unable to come to terms with the extraordinary good fortune of being born in a world like this so you FM and reason please keep alive the work keep intact that extraordinary and precious heritage that we have been privileged to be asked to and ensure that we pass it on securely to our children you [Music]

Channel: DanHannan

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Length: 30min 3sec (1803 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020