The (True) Origin of Wealth: Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

Umair Haque is a critical writer and thinker.  He looks for answers to his questions about wealth and poverty in economics and economic theory and they fall short.  I encourage him to read postcolonial scholars like Walter Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano and others to get a perspective, coupled with deep histories, on colonization and decolonization.  Read in tandem with this piece by Tim Wise titled, "Western 'Superiority' is Killing us" where I specifically reference several of these postcolonial scholars’ writings.

-Angela Valenzuela

#GetWoke

The (True) Origin of Wealth

Why Some Societies Prosper — and Others Collapse (Like America)

by Umair Haque

There’s a question as old as economics itself: where does “wealth” really come from? Now, this question isn’t asked in the late-night infomercial sense. But in the genuine one: why are some countries rich, and others poor?

Nobody, really, has an answer to this question. There have been many answers proposed. Some — like Daron Acemoglu — say that wealth comes from institutions. Others, like the Chicago School, from freedom, or from its various branches, from property rights. Still others, like Schumpeter’s disciples, from “innovation” (whatever that even means anymore.

I was trained — maybe indoctrinated — in the arts of American economics. And for a long time, this question gnawed away at me. I couldn’t really accept any of the answers above. And worse, I couldn’t quite say why. They seemed lacking to me, in some basic human way, along some obvious and fatal dimension. Like the most straightforward thing in the world seemed to be missing from them.

Now, nobody in economics wants to engage with this question anymore much. Everybody’s picked a side — and if you ask it, you’ll basically get all the same old answers, just only more furiously, because that’s what happens when people bunker down in ideological foxholes. No thinking allowed — that’s modern economics’s credo. So the question — where does wealth really come from? — is still unanswered.

I began thinking about it, like I said, long ago. And after many years — go ahead and call me dumb, you’ll do it many times this essay, I almost guarantee you — it occurred to me that maybe the question itself was backwards.

Maybe the correct question isn’t: “where does wealth come from?”, but “where does poverty come from?”

Why did I think that? Well, because it was suspicious to me that economics started asking this question at the dawn of the colonial age. You see, for most of human history, nobody had ever asked the question “where does wealth come from?”, even though there were vast and glaring inequities in society, the Roman master reclining in his villa, fed by slaves.

I thought it was altogether too convenient that economics had suddenly started asking the question: “where does wealth come from?” at a precise and certain point in history. Not just any point — but the point when, well, the nations asking that question were busy enslaving and exploiting the world.

Yes, really. That’s not an overstatement. The Greeks and Romans had slaves, sure — but it was America (and Britain) who built an intercontinental slave trade, and chewed their way across the world like locusts. Roman and Greek slaves were debtors and prisoners of war, who could buy their way, often, into freedom — but American slaves, and European colonial subjects — they were different: they were subhuman. They were objects to be used and abused and discarded.

We did something truly horrific, my friends, the scale of which we have yet to grapple with. We constructed a world of predators and prey. We made ourselves the predators — and then invented science after science to justify it. There was a biology which said human beings are made of different nobilities, and evolve to different standards. There was a sociology that ascribed every kind of vice to that newfound biology’s defects.

And today I think that I rank economics in just that place: as a pseudoscience riddled through with the corrosion of supremacy. In just the same way we laugh today at a biology that said yesterday whites are genetically superior — so today we should begin laughing at an economics that asks the question: where does wealth come from?

After all, the answer is obvious. If by “wealth” we mean “the things and privileges and freedoms that American white people enjoyed”, then the origin of wealth couldn’t be more obvious. Slavery. Exploitation. Violence. Centuries of it.

Remember when I said the wrong question is “where does wealth come from?” and the right question is “why are some people poor?”

Is it just history’s biggest coincidence that the nations who were enslaved, exploited, and plundered for centuries are the ones who are still “poor” today? Is it just an even bigger coincidence that the pattern of their poverty follows the extent of their depredation and degradation — Africa mostly still savagely poor, which was brutally enslaved, Asia rising just a touch, which was allowed to live a little freer, and so on?

My friends, if you ask me to believe that is a coincidence, then you are also asking me to be a fool. It isn’t a coincidence that the rich world is the world that centuries of brutality made upon the poor world. Those two worlds are still vastly separate and vastly unequal because there is a relationship there.

They are poor because we are rich, and we are rich because they are poor.

You’d be correct to accuse me of “zero-sum thinking” right about now. But it isn’t really me you’re accusing. It’s the slavemasters, who were our forefathers in the rich West. They are the ones who thought that they could only really prosper if other limbs did all the work, and other bodies sweated. Not all of them thought that — but enough did. The zero-sum thinking isn’t mine. It’s history’s. And so like I said — to not see a rich world that was also a predatory one, and a poor world that was also a brutalized one by that very rich world is not to see the world at all, I think.

You’d also be correct to say something like: “but what about innovation! Science! Technology! These things have made us rich!!” Correct. But only in an incorrect way. Darwin discovered evolution precisely because Britain had a class of aristocrats who could think at leisure — but that was only really possible because there was an empire slaving away to make them tea and crumpets. Edison invented the lightbulb — but only because there was a whole economy of slaves behind him, picking that cotton, giving him the freedom to do a thing only a white man could, which was dedicate his life to something better than slavery.

Do you see what I mean? In economic jargon, slavery and exploitation were the “primary public good” that created “positive externalities”…for the true humans, for whites, for masters, to enjoy. The slaves and colonial subjects were the ones investing their labour and sweat, their broken bodies and minds, to ultimately create all those grand things the masters took for granted — whether tea and crumpets or debating halls to propound fine theories in.

Now, you might think: well, that only means we should enslave the world all over again. Science! Tech! Progress! But you are wrong.

I’ve told you a dismal story so far. It goes like this. Economics keeps asking what the origin of wealth is. And curiously, suspiciously, it began asking that question at just the time the societies asking it were getting rich by enslaving much of the world. Call it a psychological defense mechanism, call it a case of protesting too much…call it a case of not being able to see the obvious.

The rich world didn’t get rich through some kind of noble virtue — it grew wealthy by taking what was the poor world’s. Minerals and oil and dust and trees and gems. But not just that, and not really that. Labour. Lives. Possibilities.

You see, we will never know — never — how many Einsteins or Edisons or Salks there might have been among all those lives that were shattered and destroyed. Ever. We have no idea of the possibilities that were lost. They are uncountable and infinite. Who can say what that beautiful mind might have discovered — the one picking the tea? Who can say what that person might have created — the one bent over the mine? What about the one serving the tea, and hammering together the shackle for another slave?

We will never know. I feel a terrible grief when I write that sentence. Do you feel it, just a touch of it? A kind of sorrow as deep as an ocean and as wide as winter hits me, all at once. I feel like I’m drowning. Like I’m numb.

How could we have built a world like that? A world so ugly? So morally wrong? So stupid and foolish? Were our forefathers really such violent and disgusting people?

I’m sorry. Do you feel insulted? Forgive me, maybe. I still feel that grief of all those lost lives, all that possibility…gone.

But let me come back to the point. One way to think about the above is: the West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but at least we now have science and medicine and technology and whatnot.

But that is absolutely wrong. The correct question, if you understand all the above, is this.

The West got wealthy by enslaving the world, but if it hadn’t enslaved the world, what might have happened?

Well, for an example, for some insight, we can look at. modern Europe versus America. America didn’t invest in itself. It chose violence instead. It thought that if everyone just exploited everyone else enough, that somehow — don’t ask me how — it would prosper. Cruelty and greed would breed virtue and discipline and toughness.

But it was wrong. Everyone exploiting everyone else only led, in the end, to what America is now: a failed state and a collapsed society.

All that wealth created by centuries of slavery…where is it now? The average American dies in debt, literally. He never owns or saves or earns anything, in real net terms. So that wealth can’t be with him. That wealth is not anywhere, really — not even in the hands of the billionaires, who just own a tiny portion of the majority of what’s left of it. All that wealth created by centuries of exploitation…America squandered it. On toys and trinkets and wars. Hence, it ended up a failed state.

I want to put that in a way you really understand.

It went in a circle. Americans arrived on the shores of a Promised Land, poor and desperate. They enslaved whom they couldn’t exterminate. They grew rich on the labour of others they considered subhumans. But where did it all end up? Nowhere — because today, the average American…dies broke.

Do you see the terrible irony? Ah, but do you see the terrible lesson? The horrific truth? All that savagery, brutality, the hatred and suffering of slavery…was for nothing. Americans didn’t end up rich. They only ended up poor. Precisely because the ghosts of the enslaved haunt them to this very day, ripping old wounds open, whispering — “which subhumans will you hurt today?”

The lesson — which economics doesn’t seem able to see, much less learn — couldn’t be clearer.

Wealth earned through violence and exploitation doesn’t endure and last. But see the paradox: the origin of wealth is exploitation and violence — but only of a certain kind of wealth. A thin kind, let us say. One as costly as it is heavy to carry.

And now let’s look at Europe. There are those who’ll say: Europe had colonies too! They are right. But after the war, whatever wealth Europe had was literally ashes and dust. Europe began with nothing. Literally nothing. A little investment from America, to be sure — but all those centuries of slavery and exploitation were wiped out by the war. It’s nations weren’t wealthy anymore — they were now poor, devastated, and ruined.

And yet in one human lifetime, Europe rose from ashes to enjoy the world’s highest living standards. Without, crucially, this time, violence and exploitation and slavery. For the first time in history. Do you see how momentous and beautiful that is?

The true secret of wealth revealed itself, at last. At least to those with eyes to see.

Europe’s secret wasn’t America’s initial pool of investment. It could easily have squandered that, too.

Europe’s secret was simply…people investing in each other. Modern European societies were the first ones in human history, ever, anywhere, anytime, to guarantee people healthcare, retirement, transport, media, income, savings, shelter, food, safety, even dignity…as basic human rights.

Nobody in history had ever attempted that. American economists, by the way, laughed and that it was all going to be a a miserable failure.

Now, European leaders did all that for a strange reason. Not to get rich — but to have peace. The idea was simply that desperate people won’t turn on one another — because a hungry person will do anything to fill their childs’ belly. Americans laughed at that idea — they championed exploiting and abusing each other, the ghost of the slavemaster haunting them.

Which idea won? Exploitation, or investment?

The answer should be obvious — though it’s probably not. Europe has had something like one of history’s great miracles. Rising from the ashes to achieve history’s highest living standards ever, period…in one human lifetime. Without slavery and violence and exploitation at some kind of horrific, mass scale.

Nobody in human history ever did that. Because nobody in human history ever believed such a thing was possible. Certainly not Americans — who still don’t, even if they don’t know they don’t.

The miracle was that the most improbable thing of all turned out to be the origin of wealth. For millennia, violent men had said exploitation and enslavement were the origin of wealth. The world believed them. Bitterly, ironically, even the very societies who followed that principle then turned right around and asked, as if dumbfounded — “what’s the origin of wealth?” — while they were busy building history’s greatest slave-empires. But the true secret of wealth was revealed in the aftermath of a great war, by a desperate and broken and impoverished people, who’d spent so long killing each other, there was nothing left to destroy. There was no one left to kill. There was nothing left to kill each other for.

The only thing left was to invest in each other, to nourish each other, to grant one another inalienable and intrinsic worth, that none could ever take away. And just a few decades of that made Europe rich — while America plunged into poverty.

The lesson, to me, couldn’t shine any clearer. The origin of wealth was slavery, exploitation, hate, violence. But the origin of poverty, disgrace, and collapse was, too. The origin of truer wealth — that lasted, endured, mattered, which was made of happiness, meaning, trust, truth, peace, courage, gentleness — was people, standing beside one another, on the long, twisting, difficult road through the desert, back home. I wonder, some days, when the grief of all those lives lost pours through me, how long it will take the world to see it.

Umair Haque
February 2020