Dean LeBaron, international financier and venture capitalist, famously quoted previously on this blog saying: “Let me share with you something a Chinese official told me, semi-seriously, I think, while I was there: ‘By the year 2050, the average Chinese family will have an American houseboy!’” is now blogging over at the Leadership Blog in addition to offering video commentary on his own website . Mr. LeBaron posits in a recent blog post that:

A political scientist, Adam Przeworski of New York University, studied 139 countries over four decades and concluded that a democratic government was almost four times as vulnerable to being overthrown by a dictatorship if its per-capita income was falling than it would be if incomes were rising.

“That relationship [is] strong, unbelievably strong,” Przeworski says. He reasons that as people prosper, they have too much to lose to risk challenging their government, whatever the provocation. They tell themselves, “We have our homes, our cars, and our TVs. There is too much at stake to go into the streets and build barricades.”

Similarly, wealthy people have a vested interest in free trade and world prosperity, and are likely to oppose international conflicts that might disrupt commerce. And sure enough, Gartzke's research for the Fraser Index of Economic Freedom of the World found that nations with a low score for economic freedom are 14 times more likely to engage in conflicts than countries with a high score.

How then does one explain the anomaly in this line of reasoning? Isn’t America the most prosperous nation on Earth? If the reasoning holds, how do we explain the anomaly of George Bush’s Iraq adventure? How also do we explain the anomaly of Japan and Germany in the middle of the twentieth century? Weren’t both of these nations enjoying a larger relative prosperity than many of their neighbors? While I agree with LeBaron that it isn't democracy that brings peace, I have great trouble reconciling that many of the world’s most prosperous nations also often engage in or encourage conflict. Always outside of their borders of course, at least in the beginning. Is it the nature of man that he will inevitably revert back to his inherent animal instincts?

Posted by Buck Batard at July 25, 2006 10:39 AM

Email this entry to:


Your email address:


Message (optional):