The people who are much harder to persuade are the ideologues – those who believe in Bad Samaritan policies because they think those policies are ‘right’, not because they personally benefit from them much, if at all. As I said earlier, self-righteousness is often more stubborn than self-interest. But even here there is hope. Once accused of inconsistency, John Maynard Keynes famously responded: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do, sir?’Many, although, unfortunately, not all, of these ideologues are like Keynes. They can change, and have changed, their minds, if they are confronted with new turns in real world events and new arguments, provided that these are compelling enough to make them overcome their previous convictions. The Harvard economist Martin Feldstein is a good example. He was once the brains behind Reagan’s neo-liberal policies, but when the Asian crisis happened, his criticism of the IMF (cited in chapter 1) was more trenchant than those by some ‘left-wing’ commentators.
What should give us real hope is that the majority of Bad Samaritans are neither greedy nor bigoted. Most of us, including myself, do bad things not because we derive great material benefit from them or strongly believe in them, but because they are the easiest thing to do. Many Bad Samaritans go along with wrong policies for the simple reason that it’s easier to be a conformist. Why go around looking for ‘inconvenient truths’ when you can just accept what most politicians and newspapers say? Why bother to find out what is really going on in poor countries when you can easily blame it on corruption, laziness or the profligacy of their people? Why go out of your way to check up on your own country’s history when the ‘official’ version suggests that it has always been the home of all virtues? – free trade, creativity, democracy, prudence, you name it.
It is exactly because most Bad Samaritans are like this that I have hope. They are people who may be willing to change their ways, if they are given a more balanced picture, which I hope this book has provided. This is not just wishful thinking.There was a period, between the Marshall Plan (announced sixty years ago, in June 1947) and the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1970s, when the rich countries, led by the US, did not behave as Bad Samaritans, as I discussed in chapter 2.[11]
The fact that rich countries did not behave as Bad Samaritans on at least one occasion in the past gives us hope. The fact that that historical episode produced an excellent outcome economically – for the developing world has never done better, either before or since – gives us the moral duty to learn from that experience.
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 by Ha-Joon Chang
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Chang, Ha-Joon.
Bad samaritans : the myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism / Ha-Joon Chang.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Free trade. 2. Capitalism. I. Title.
HF1713.C5185 2008
382.71-dc22
2007022958
First published in the United Kingdom by Random House Business Books in 2007
First published in the United States by Bloomsbury Press in 2008
This e-book edition published in 2010
eISBN: 978-1-59691-399-8
www.bloomsburypress.com
11
Some people argue that this Good Samaritanism was partly motivated by the Cold War, which demanded that rich capitalist countries behave nicely to poor countries lest the latter should ‘go over to the other side’. But international competition has always been there. If the international competition for influence was the only thing that made the rich countries ‘do the right thing’ in the third quarter of the 20th century, why did the European empires not do the same in the 19th century when they were in even more fierce competition with each other?