Our sad rich Anglosphere

This past week, I (and presumably thousands of others) received an email from John Kelly, publisher of the UK’s Prospect magazine, alerting me to the fact that the magazine now maintains a weblog “so that readers, web visitors and writers can share and debate their opinions as to which direction the magazine should be going in, honing its core purpose.”

All right then, very well. It does strike me as a little backward, that is, starting a magazine and then stumbling toward a core purpose, but I’m being a little flip at the magazine’s expense—Prospect bills itself as an ‘independent’ magazine that aspires “To dig below the surface of everyday understanding, expose the roots of inspired thinking and stimulate intelligent debate for those who aspire to form opinions as opposed to accepting received dogma.” A little hackneyed, but it works.

Last Friday, as part of this ongoing ‘honing’ of ‘core purpose’, Mr. Kelly exercised himself over the very British quandary of whether or not the magazine is elite and/or elitist. Admittedly, I don’t find that line of inquiry very interesting—I’m not even sure what ‘elite’ means anymore—but a few intrepid commenters dutifully attempted to parse the language and offer up some advice.

That occasioned another post later in the week, in which yet another British preoccupation was mulled over: that of the ‘Anglosphere’. Being an American who mostly reads American journalists, I must say that the Anglosphere is not a very popular concept here in the States and is most often invoked (affectionately) by right-wing folks, such as those who write for The New Criterion, or occasionally, it is used disparagingly by the Left as a euphemism for those countries that practice ‘Anglo-Saxon economics’, which itself is a euphemism for capitalism. In this way, the term has become a kind of coded language, although a code that evokes two entirely different sets of feelings and thoughts in two entirely different sets of people.

On the aforementioned question of elitism, one fellow on the Prospect website thus commented:

I enjoy Prospect, I use it as an interesting centrist foil personally. It also gives me an insight into the current pre-occupations of the English “Elite.” In that sense it is also a nice piece of Anthropology.

The problem is that “Elite” debates in the world have tended to become dominated by the governance tropes of the Anglo-sphere. The “elite” educational establishments around the world subscribe to such a “liberal intelligentsia” type of view, which is reflected in international law in terms of the primacy of the individual, and the primacy of formal individual political rights over substantive rights, and collective rights.

Once you melt down the highfalutin language—such as ‘governance tropes’—it would seem that our commenter is merely asserting that the problem with the global elite is that they listen, almost exclusively, to what the Anglosphere says, and the Anglosphere is more or less given over to an idea of government predicated upon individual liberty and free markets. I won’t deign to get into a pissing contest over collectivism, socialism, or any other –ism, for I, too, ‘subscribe to such a liberal intelligentsia type of view’, though not unconditionally or without reflection; however, what I would like to examine—at least, at first—is whether the underlying assumption by the commenter correct? Is the Anglosphere more devoted to individual liberty and free markets than other cultural blocs around the world?

Last Tuesday, conservative policy group The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal released their 2007 Index of Economic Freedom, a survey of 165 countries around the world that attempts to measure each country’s overall economic freedom based on analyzing ten different groups of variables, or as the two Ph.D.s who explained the study’s methodology put it:

Economic freedom is that part of freedom that is concerned with the material autonomy of the individual in relation to the state and other organized groups. An individual is economically free who can fully control his or her labor and property. This economic component of human liberty is related to—and perhaps a necessary condition for—political freedom, but it is also valuable as an end in itself.

The authors of the Index perceive economic freedom as a positive concept, recognizing that its traditional definition as an absence of government coercion or constraint must also include a sense of liberty as distinct from anarchy. Governments are instituted to create basic protections against the ravages of nature, so that positive economic rights such as property and contract are given social as well as individual defense against the destructive tendencies of others. The definition of economic freedom therefore en-compasses all liberties and rights of production, distribution, or consumption of goods and services. The highest form of economic freedom provides an absolute right of property ownership, fully realized freedoms of movement for labor, capital, and goods, and an absolute absence of coercion or constraint of economic liberty beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself. In other words, individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, and that freedom is both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state.

A glance at the results would tend to suggest that, indeed, the so-called Anglosphere does achieve higher levels of economic freedom than the rest of the world. Interestingly, the two Asian countries that lead the rankings are both former British colonies that have long bought into the capitalist ethos. As for the remaining eight countries in the Index’s Top 10, six of the eight are in the Anglosphere. Of course, not all former UK colonies drank the kool-aid; South Africa (#52), Belize (#56), and India (#104) are a far reach from the top of the list, and then there’s woeful Zimbabwe, which placed 154th of the 157 ranked countries thanks to the depredations of Robert Mugabe.

If it is best, all things being equal, to live in societies where “individuals are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in any way they please, and that freedom is both protected by the state and unconstrained by the state,” then perhaps there might be a pretty good reason why those ‘governance tropes’ alluded to earlier are preferred by the global elite.

But to end the discussion here would be neither kind to the commenter above nor entirely truthful to the world as it is, for despite the freedom of the Anglosphere, collectivists do have some sound questions to raise (if not always sound answers). To understand what they are, one need look no further than the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page of last Tuesday, which announced the release of the Index. There we find Mary Anastasia O’Grady, co-editor of the 2007 Index, asserting the following:

As it has in past editions, the 2007 Index also looks at income levels around the globe and finds that economically free countries enjoy significantly greater prosperity than those burdened by heavy government intervention. The per capita GDP of the top quintile of countries, ranked according to economic freedom, is now almost $28,000 while the bottom quintile is less than $5,000.

Ms. O’Grady, addressing what may be perhaps an obvious objection, then turns her attention to income disparities, stating:

This year the Index again includes important essays on world economic trends. In a piece titled “Global Inequality Fades as the Global Economy Grows,” Columbia University professor of economics Xavier Sala-i-Martin destroys the myth that the income gap is widening. While it is true that some countries are being left behind, when population weights are factored into the equation, the evidence shows that “individual income inequality declined substantially during the past two decades. The main reason is that incomes of some of the world’s poorest and most populated countries (most notably China and India, but also many other countries in Asia) converged rapidly with the incomes of OECD citizens.” Of course both China (ranked 119) and India (104) have a long way to go toward economic freedom but both have made big gains in recent years. Mr. Sala-i-Martin finds that the inequality gap would be even narrower if not for the “dismal performance” of African countries.

One reason why left-leaning people get worked up into such paroxysms of rage when debating economic conservatives derives from the kind of bad-faith arguments exemplified by Ms. O’Grady’s editorial. When critics of capitalism talk about rich and poor, they rarely do so from a national perspective, i.e., the wealth of one country versus another; to the socialist, rich is rich and poor is poor, no matter their address. What does it matter if a country experiences 10% economic growth a year if the benefits accrue disproportionately to its wealthiest citizens? A country may post a decade’s worth of amazing GDP growth, but if it has the same number of people living beneath the poverty line, it hasn’t really achieved much, other than making the rich richer, and unfortunately, for too many countries around the world—particularly in Africa and Latin America—this is precisely the way the ball bounces.

In the so-called Anglosphere, the vast center of the political spectrum believes in the concept of economic growth as a ‘tide that lifts all boats.’ In other words, economic prosperity, while almost always benefiting the rich, does trickle down to the middle classes, and the attendant economic freedoms provide poorer people with the mobility to escape poverty and achieve a greater level of prosperity. While this is more or less true, it is also simplistic. Here in America, the blessed simplicities of so-called Anglo-Saxon economics do nothing to help one reconcile the ugliness inherent in the system, such as when a CEO picks up a $210 million dollar payday for being summarily fired, while older retirees have to fight tooth and claw in order to keep their pensions from being wiped out in bankruptcy court.

With freedom comes responsibility, and economic conservatives have always been very good about chatting up the one and forgetting the other. And let’s face it, it’s a major headache to contemplate how to balance economic freedom—which necessarily tends toward unequal results—with political freedom, which presupposes the perpetuity of equality. Maybe that’s why citizens of the so-called Anglosphere always rank toward the bottom of surveys measuring happiness, which may be the only surveys that matter.

Ah, but what is happiness? A divagation for another day, I’m afraid.