Stop your children going to school & Free Trade
by Benjamin on May 10, 2010
This is the analogy Ha-Joon Chang presents in his relatively new book, Bad Samaritans, to promote free trade and open competition for developing nations. I think it’s a nice one, so thought I would share it:
“I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs…
…Working might do Jin-Gyu’s character a world of good. Right now he lives in an economic bubble with no sense of the value of money. He has zero appreciation of the efforts his mother and I make on his behalf, subsidizing his idle existence and cocooning him from harsh reality. He is over-protected and needs to be exposed to competition, so that he can become a more productive person. Thinking about it, the more competition he is exposed to and the sooner this is done, the better it will be for his future development. It will whip him into a mentality that is ready for hard work. I should make him quit school and get a job. Perhaps I could move to a country where child labour is still tolerated, if not legal, to give him more choice in employment.”
I can hear you say I must be mad. Myopic. Cruel. You tell me that I need to protect and nurture the child. If I drive Jin-Gyu into the labour market at the age of six, he may become a savvy shoeshine boy or even a prosperous street hawker, but he will never become a brain surgeon or a nuclear physicist – that would require at least another dozen years of my protection and investment. You argue that, even from a purely materialistic viewpoint, I would be wiser to invest in my son’s education than gloat over the money I save by not sending him to school. After all, if I were right, Oliver Twist would have been better of pick-pocketing for Fagin, rather than being rescued by the misguided Good Samaritan Mr. Brownlow.” (Chang 2008: 65-6)
Therefore the Bad Samaritan in Chang’s title. He argues that free-trade policy-makers may mean well, through an incorrect understanding of their own history, but end up hurting developing countries through the policies they so assiduously pursue. Updating, and perhaps going further than his last book on the topic, Kicking away the Ladder (or “the purple one?” as a friend of mine put it yesterday), this books makes the argument in more detail that there is no reason for economists to recommend trade-liberalisation on the ground that it has always worked. In fact it looks as if most economic growth has coincided with periods of protectionism and infant industry protection. Everyone wants to be a brain surgeon it seems.
Tags: analogy, education, free trade, Globalization, Ha-Joon Chang
