Whether people are united by navigable waterways or cut off by rugged mountains or other geographical barriers has enormous cultural as well as economic and political significance.
The hubris of imagining that one can judge merit, as distinguished from judging behavior and performance, can be seen in attempts of educators to grade students according to how well they used their own ability, rather than how well they performed relative to some fixed standard or to other students.
Eventually, this black leadership pressured and negotiated independence for Nigeria, beginning in 1960.
Britain was overtaken not only in gross output but also in output per worker. It lost its lead in technological innovation.
Outside the world of education, few would be confident, or even comfortable, claiming that it is a lack of self-esteem which leads to felonies or its presence which leads to Nobel Prizes. Yet American schools are permeated with the idea that selfesteem precedes performance, rather than vice-versa. The very idea that self-esteem is something earned, rather than being a pre-packaged handout from the school system, seems not to occur to many educators.
Britain’s earlier development of strong and widespread labor unions, which were able to restrict the application of new technology, both directly and by appropriating a sufficient share of technology’s economic benefits to reduce the incentives for further technological investment.
Economics and politics confront the same fundamental problem: What everyone wants adds up to more than there is. Market economies deal with this problem by confronting individuals with the costs of producing what they want, and letting those individuals make their own trade-offs when presented with prices that convey those costs. That leads to self-rationing, in the light of each individual’s own circumstances and preferences.
Access” is one of the great dishonest words of our times. I have had as much access to a career in professional basketball as Michael Jordan had. He just happened to play the game a lot better. Indeed, practically everybody has played the game a lot better than I did.
Perhaps an even more remarkable contribution of Britain to the growth of freedom in the world was its leading role in the destruction of the international slave trade, and then of slavery itself.
It would be hard to find anywhere in history a record of any other country going to such efforts, for so long, in a cause from which it could gain so little and lose so much.
One third of all Scots in the mid-nineteenth century moved from one county to another.
After the American civil war, the U. S. Navy also joined the anti-slave patrols in the Atlantic.
Geography is not egalitarian.
The world dominance of Great Britain enabled it to impose its anti-slavery edicts on many other sovereign nations.
While those with the tragic vision may see social issues in terms of making the best choice among limited and often unpalatable alternatives, those with the vision of the anointed tend to see these same issues in terms of what should be done to make things right in the cosmic scheme of things.
Perhaps the most detrimental consequences of the implicit assumption of zero-sum transactions have been in poor countries that have kept out foreign trade and foreign investments, in order to avoid being “exploited.
China and India have been striking examples of poor countries whose abandonment of severe international trade and investment restrictions led to dramatic increases in their economic growth rates, which in turn led to tens of millions of their citizens rising out of poverty.
How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?
Banning the institution of slavery itself long remained only a distant hope in much of Africa and the Middle East, even after it was a reality in the Western Hemisphere.
Eventually, however, the fact that many once-poor places like Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore achieved prosperity through freer international trade and investment became so blatant and so widely known that, by the end of the twentieth century, the governments of many other countries began abandoning their zero-sum view of economic transactions.