(^252) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
ernment wooed foreigners, paying them to set up factories or to settle
and work in Russia. Individual landowners allowed enterprising serfs to
engage in trade and industry in return for money dues. The result was
a spotty, stunted industrialization.
Nor did Russian enterprises operate in the same world as those of
western Europe. They sold to the national market, exported little or
nothing. They were simply not competitive—not then, not later—es
pecially not during the Soviet years. The only sales of manufactures
outside the USSR went to satellite countries and dependencies in the
Third World. Meanwhile the production data piled up, and many be
lieved. Are you going to trust the numbers or the lying evidence? The
statisticians would have come far closer to the truth had they deflated
output for true market price and quality.
Poorer and more backward than Russia were the Balkan lands, most
of them suffering under the inefficient Ottoman yoke, the tyranny of
a society more primitive than theirs. Long quiescent, they caught the
nationalist virus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and got
tangled in an endless struggle for freedom, first with the Turks and
then with other Balkan nationalities. This could be a noble cause, but
because identity rested on uncompromising religion, it easily conduced
to hatred and unreason. Not good for business or development.
These were societies that did not generate enterprise from within.
Trade and money were for Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Germans. These
outsiders were not popular—not only because they got rich by buying
and selling (so, not by hard work) and did so at the expense of peas
ants and landowners, but also because they were different in manners,
dress, appearance, religion. (The outsiders returned the scorn, in
spades.) When independence and modern politics came to the Balkans,
the natives did their best to drive out the strangers, that is, to expel the
most active elements in the economy. And they succeeded, in the face
of the outsiders' natural reluctance to leave. (These inhospitable and
hostile places offered so many chances to make money.)
The Balkans remain poor today. In the absence of metics, they war
on one another and blame their misery on exploitation by richer
economies in western Europe. It feels better that way.
Leftist political economists and economic historians like such expla
nations. They think in terms of core and periphery: the rich center vs.
the surrounding dependencies. But that is not the relevant metaphor
or image: Europe's development gradient ran from west to east and
north to south, from educated to illiterate populations, from repre
sentative to despotic institutions, from equality to hierarchy, and so on.
nora
(Nora)
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