that policy-makers could compare the strength and reliability of the link
between various policy factors and economic growth, was overly simplistic.
For example, the finding that girls’ education offers a high return offers no
guidance as to how policy-makers can actually improve primary education.
Should policy emphasize private or public education? Comprehensive or
selective education? A centralized or community-based education system?
Education in philosophy or engineering? How should teachers be trained or
incentivized? Should schools receive fixed grants from the government or
should pupils be given vouchers to spend in the school of their choice? A final
question arising from such statistical work is: why, then, do so many countries
suffer from extended spells of stagnation? Rather than suffer years of declin-
ing per capita GDP after the early 1980s countries in Sub-Saharan Africa
should have conducted some statistical tests then promoted those policies
offering the biggest impact on growth. There are more than fifty countries in
Sub-Saharan Africa. We would have expected a few to measure and implement
growth-promoting policies,and others to learn from and follow those pioneers.
William Darity and the deeper determinants of growth
The second approach to studying economic growth is the ‘deeper determi-
nants’ method, which has mostly, though not entirely, exchanged the maths and
statistics for detailed historical case studies,drawing on lessons and ideas from
various academic disciplines. On my bookshelves I can see examples from
nutrition, biology, sociology, geography, ecology, climatology and theology.
One very influential example is Jared Diamond’s (1998) Guns,Germs and
Steel:A Short History of Everybody for the last 13,000 Years. So diverse were
the ideas that Diamond drew upon to explain historical growth and contempo-
rary inequality that one reviewer suspected the author’s name of actually being
‘the pseudonym for a committee of experts’.
In his 1992 article ‘A Model of “Original Sin”: Rise of the West and Lag of
the Rest’,William Darity discusses how enslaving Africans in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries for transportation to the Americas had a negative
long-term impact on growth (and development) in Africa and a long-term posi-
tive impact in the now developed world. Drivers of economic growth in Europe
resulting from the slave trade included, according to Darity, the growth of ports
in Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux; the acquisition of private fortunes that
stimulated consumer demand; the growth of the textile industry to produce the
goods necessary to exchange for slaves in Africa; shipbuilding in Bristol;
firearms in Birmingham; and the raw sugarcane produced by slaves in the West
Indies and processed into sugar by industry in England. Slavery, he argued,
initiated a commercial and industrial dynamic that stimulated long-term
economic growth in Europe. In Sub-Saharan Africa the most lucrative activity
in the eighteenth century was ‘for those with the power to enslave ... to procure
human exports for the slave trade’. Profits were made in conquest and destruc-
tion, not in expanding production, acquiring new technologies or improving
skills and education. This difference, argues Darity, began the process of
Introduction 9