Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Possível ver seu principal quebra-mar de um avião a 6 mil metros de altitude, como um gancho que adentra o Pacífico a partir da costa desértica amarelo-acinzentada do Peru. Em novembro, se tudo ocorrer conforme os planos, o presidente chinês, Xi Jinping, inaugurará o vasto porto em Chancay, 70 quilômetros ao norte de Lima, no qual a empresa chinesa Cosco e sua parceira local investiram US$ 1,3 bilhão (R$ 7 bilhões) até aqui.
Chancay é um exemplo da pegada que a China imprimiu na América Latina neste século. O comércio bilateral cresceu de US$ 18 bilhões (R$ 98 bilhões) em 2002 para US$ 450 bilhões (R$ 2,4 trilhões) em 2022. Ainda que os Estados Unidos permaneçam o maior parceiro comercial da região como um todo, a China supera o Tio Sam atualmente na América do Sul em parcerias comerciais com Brasil, Chile, Peru e outros países.
A presença do gigante asiático não é apenas econômica. Seus embaixadores são profundamente versados a respeito da América Latina e falam bem espanhol e português. Sua equipe diplomática tem se expandido. Os EUA, em contraste, frequentemente deixam vagos postos de embaixadores em razão dos impasses políticos em Washington. Autoridades, jornalistas e acadêmicos locais ganham viagens gratuitas para a China. Durante a pandemia, Pequim enviou vacinas para a América Latina muito mais rapidamente que EUA e Europa.
Essa expansão apavora indivíduos como o senador republicano Marco Rubio, que integra a Comissão de Relações Exteriores. Ele afirma que os EUA "não podem permitir que o Partido Comunista Chinês expanda sua influência e absorva América Latina e Caribe em seu bloco políticoeconômico privado". A China está "quase na porta da nossa casa", afirmou a general Laura Richardson, chefe do Comando Sul dos EUA, anteriormente este ano.
A resposta na América Latina geralmente tem sido dar de ombros. Suas autoridades argumentam que, ao atuar como compradora, investidora e financiadora de estruturas necessárias, a China ocupou um vazio deixado pelo Ocidente. Ainda que tenham acordos de livre-comércio com 11 países latinoamericanos, os EUA não demonstram mais apetite por esse tipo de pacto.
MERCADO. O governo de centro-direita do Uruguai está negociando um acordo com a China após seus pedidos por um pacto com os EUA terem sido rejeitados. França e outros países estão bloqueando a ratificação do acordo comercial entre a União Europeia e o Mercosul (um bloco de cinco países que inclui Brasil e Argentina), cuja negociação tardou mais de 20 anos. EUA e Europa seguem sendo os maiores investidores estrangeiros na América Latina. Os EUA ainda dominam o comércio com o México, a América Central e a maioria dos países caribenhos. Mas conforme o papel da China enquanto parceira comercial e investidora cresce especialmente na América do Sul, os governos não querem ser forçados a escolher entre as duas maiores potências do mundo. "Nossa política é nos resguardar: tentar manter um equilíbrio", afirma um ministro de Relações Exteriores.
POLÍTICA EXTERNA. Alguns querem transformar esse resguardo em uma doutrina mais assertiva de política externa de "não alinhamento ativo", um termo cunhado pelo ex-embaixador chileno Jorge Heine, que em 2023 publicou um influente livro propagando a ideia.
O que remete ao Movimento Não Alinhado, fundado durante a Guerra Fria por líderes do Terceiro Mundo (como era chamado na época) como o indiano Jawaharlal Nehru e o indonésio Sukarno. Heine argumenta que a adoção de protecionismos por parte dos EUA sob Donald Trump (que continuaram sob Joe Biden) e a ascensão do grupo Brics, que inclui Brasil e China, representam uma virada irreversível na ordem mundial. O não alinhamento ativo, argumenta ele, "permite aos países aproximar-se de uma das grandes potências em relação a certos assuntos e da outra em um conjunto diferente de temas".
Isso encontra apelo especialmente entre a esquerda na América Latina, que há muito se exaspera com o que percebe como o imperialismo dos EUA na região (apesar de a política americana ter colocado foco no apoio à democracia desde os anos 80). Certamente cheira a hipocrisia quando autoridades de Washington pedem um banimento na América Latina à Huawei em razão do risco de a China espionar, que os americanos não corroboraram com evidências.
Era a própria Agência de Segurança Nacional dos EUA que, segundo revelou um delator em 2013, operava um programa de vigilância na América Latina interceptando comunicações da então presidente brasileira, Dilma Rousseff, e da Petrobras, a empresa de petróleo controlada pelo Estado. 'A América Latina preza o fato de a política externa chinesa não ser catequizadora', afirma Matias Spektor, da Fundação Getulio Vargas, uma universidade brasileira.
RISCOS. Mas ainda que se resguardar faça sentido para a América Latina, na prática, seus líderes com frequência parecem indiferentes em relação às possíveis consequências das decisões econômicas. 'A América Latina não está pensando a respeito do domínio da China na formulação a curto prazo de políticas, nem a longo prazo', afirma Margaret Myers, do Diálogo Interamericano, um Instituto de análise em Washington.
Isso certamente se aplica ao Peru, que, além de permitir à China construir o Porto de Chancay, deixou empresas estatais chinesas adquirirem o monopólio do fornecimento de eletricidade para a capital, Lima. A agência reguladora de competitividade aplicou condições mínimas em relação à compra de eletricidade de geradoras de energia associadas. Mas nenhuma entidade do governo considerou as implicações geopolíticas. A ameaça não é tanto a China ter o poder de apagar as luzes, mas Pequim ter adquirido uma ferramenta para aplicar uma pressão mais sutil. 'A China está tentando criar uma situação na qual molda o ambiente externo na América Latina de acordo com seus interesses', afirma Myers.
É o que, evidentemente, os EUA buscam faz tempo. Mas há muito mais consciência a respeito disso na América Latina e mais pensamento independente sobre como responder. 'Ninguém está pensando de maneira organizada a respeito do investimento chinês', afirma o ministro de Relações Exteriores. Não há nenhum escrutínio estratégico sobre investimentos estrangeiros, como ocorre na Europa e nos EUA.
DIFERENÇAS. Uma estatal chinesa tem uma relação claramente diferente com seu país do que, digamos, uma empresa privada europeia. Há uma escassez de especialistas em China na região, e Pequim está financiando o trabalho de vários dos poucos institutos de análise de política externa que existem.
A União Europeia e os EUA falam em investir mais na América Latina. Em uma cúpula, no ano passado, a UE prometeu investir mais de ? 45 bilhões (US$ 48 bilhões ou R$ 262 bilhões) na região até 2027, com foco em energia verde, digitalização e minérios críticos. Pouco depois, Biden recebeu líderes de dez países da América Latina e do Caribe no primeiro encontro de uma Parceria das Américas para a Prosperidade Econômica, apoiada principalmente por fundos do Banco Interamericano de Desenvolvimento.
Diplomatas latino-americanos afirmam que ambas as iniciativas não passam de dar novas roupagens a programas já existentes e que lhes falta conteúdo. Mais força deve vir da Lei das Américas, cujo projeto foi mandado para o Congresso dos EUA em março com apoio bipartidário. A legislação pretende oferecer benefícios comerciais, financiamentos para construção de infraestrutura e subsídios para investimento em deslocalização próxima para países da América Latina e do Caribe.
Se for aprovada, a lei americana poderá fazer pelo menos com que a China enfrente um pouco mais de competição na região. Mas para tirar o melhor proveito de seus vários pretendentes e ao mesmo tempo minimizar os riscos da dependência, a América Latina precisa de olhares mais aguçados.
TRADUÇÃO DE GUILHERME RUSSO
O 2024 THE ECONOMIST NEWSPAPER LIMITED. DIREITOS RESERVADOS. PUBLICADO SOB LICENÇA. O TEXTO ORIGINAL EM INGLÊS ESTÁ EM WWW.ECONOMIST.COM
A Segunda Guerra Mundial foi a mais devastadora de todas, em vítimas humanas e em destruição material. Praticamente toda a Europa central e oriental, com, poucas exceções, sofreu o peso dos exércitos inimigos, uma devastação raras vezes vista na história da humanidade em tal escala.
Mas, o tirano de Moscou também está devastando a Ucrânia, matando seu povo, sendo o responsável pela fuga de milhões de ucranianos de suas casas.
Quem vai pagar a destruição? A Rússia deveria ser obrigada a fazê-lo, mas será uma longa batalha jurídica. As reservas russas congeladas em cofres ocidentais não cobrirão todas as necessidades, e antes seria preciso calcular exatamente quanto a Rússia deve pagar.
Os poloneses afinaram uma metodologia para isso e seria o caso de os ucranianos se consultarem com essa organização citada na carta abaixo para começar a calcular a conta para os sucessores do Putin, ou seja, todo o povo russo.
Deve servir para outros conflitos igualmente, inclusive não apenas no plano das guerras desse tipo, mas em caso de criminalidade interna também.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS.: Grato a Fernando Werneck pelo envio da Economist.
Um número especial da Economist a um ano da guerra de agressão da Rússia contra a Ucrânia
Hello from London,
Do you remember where were you on February 24th last year? When, early on a gloomy, grey morning, Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into Ukraine, it was evident that history was being rewritten. What you are doing, however mundane, on first hearing news of such epochal events often sticks in the mind.
In London, it was a Thursday and like many of my colleagues I was busy putting the final touches to that week’s print edition of The Economist. Articles in almost every section needed revising and updating to take account of the new world disorder. The cover leader that appeared that week stands the test of time. But the question we put on the cover betrays how much the war that followed has defied expectations. “Where will he stop?” we asked of Mr Putin, hinting at the sense in many quarters that the invasion would be swift, successful and brutal.
In fact, as some maps we published on Friday show, Russia’s advance into Ukraine soon stalled, and has since been partially reversed. The dogged, pragmatic heroism of Ukraine’s soldiers and citizens and of their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has turned what Mr Putin must have hoped would be a repeat of the rapid annexation of Crimea in 2014 into a long war of attrition with no swift end in sight. In the process Ukraine itself has been transformed into a more unified, more Westward-leaning, more resilient democracy.
So the questions for now are no longer “Where will he stop?” but rather “When and how can he be beaten?” This week we will be publishing a series of in-depth articles on “a year of war” that explain how expectations have been so transformed, but also how what is at stake in the war has only grown in importance. As the first in the series argues, Ukraine’s fate will become a measure of the West’s self-belief and stature, and its ability to retain unity in the face of Mr Putin’s threats, blandishments and endless divide-and-rule chicanery. And to a certain extent, it will test the West’s industrial capacity, too, as it struggles to produce enough weaponry and ammunition to allow Ukraine to defend itself.
The global economy is still grappling with the effects of the war, with the West still trying to tamp down inflation as interest rates continue to climb. The rising costs of finance, energy and food have pushed some countries to the edge of bankruptcy. This will be in the news this week as finance ministers from members of the G20 gather in India, with the plight of heavily indebted countries high on the agenda. On this issue, as on so much else, America and China find themselves pulling in opposite directions. China is refusing to play by the old rules of international financial diplomacy. Sri Lanka, in urgent need of a bail-out, and deeply in hock to China, may test the willingness of the West and the IMF to go it alone—ie, to provide the money and restructure the debt without China’s taking part in the process.
What if Mao Zedong’s Communist Party had lost the Chinese civil war to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party?
WHEN the second world war ended, the 3.7m-strong army of China’s leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, was badly weakened by its fight with the Japanese and a Communist insurgency. But it still had the upper hand against the Communists: superior by far in numbers and equipment. As Soviet forces withdrew from Manchuria in the north-east, which they had taken from the Japanese, Chiang’s forces surged forward to regain the territory. Chinese Communists in the area, who had hitherto been backed by the Russians, were shattered by the onslaught.
But in 1946 the Americans, anxious to prevent an all-out civil war between Chiang and the Communists’ leader, Mao Zedong, persuaded Chiang to stop fighting. It was a moment that may have changed history: the few weeks’ hiatus enabled Mao to replenish his forces with Soviet aid. When the truce broke down, Chiang lost Manchuria and eventually the civil war. Americans—particularly right-wingers—kicked themselves about it for many years afterwards. What if Mao’s victory had been avoided?
China’s spectacular rise in the past three decades has helped the Communists parry suggestions that the country would have been better off without Mao. But it may well have been. Chiang’s army fled to the island of Taiwan, which prospered. Mao’s China suffered economic ruin before Deng Xiaoping eventually began to turn its fortunes around in the late 1970s. Had China’s economy grown at the same pace as Taiwan’s since 1950, its GDP would have been 42% bigger by 2010 than it actually was. In other words, it might have achieved its growth miracle plus another one about the size of France’s economy.
Chiang would have remained in charge of a corrupt, autocratic government with a brutal secret police. His Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT), would have faced discontent among the rural poor who formed the bulwark of Mao’s forces. However, Chiang’s brand of authoritarianism may have proved a softer one than Mao’s. There would have been no killings of millions of landlords purely on ideological grounds, and no Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, which caused a famine that killed tens of millions. Unlike Mao, he would not have wiped out private enterprise and forced peasants to surrender their land to “People’s Communes”, a policy that exacerbated the famine and that—though long since officially repudiated—still plagues the development of China’s countryside. Neither would Chiang have plunged China into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, during which millions more were killed or persecuted.
Under Chiang, China would not have had to wait 30 years before becoming part of the global economy. To be sure, Chiang would have tried to protect China’s markets from foreign competition, just as Taiwan and other Asian economies did during their periods of rapid take-off. But he would have been quicker to relax such restrictions. Taiwan was ready for membership of the World Trade Organisation long before China joined in 2001.
HAD CHINA’S ECONOMY GROWN AT THE SAME PACE AS TAIWAN’S SINCE 1950, ITS GDP WOULD HAVE BEEN 42% BIGGER BY 2010 THAN IT ACTUALLY WAS
Asia reimagined
The strategic map of Asia would have been very different had Chiang won the civil war. He would not have supported North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950. Without China’s backing, Kim Il Sung would probably not have got Stalin’s support for such a venture either. Chiang would not have had a Taiwan problem: Mao’s rebels never had a foothold there.
But Chiang was an ardent nationalist. His relationship with Japan would have been fraught. Millions of Chinese had been killed during Japan’s occupation of China, with the KMT rather than Mao’s forces suffering by far the worst casualties. Animosities between China and Japan, which Mao did not appear eager to play up, might have bedevilled east Asian security long before they did emerge in the 1990s as a source of regional tension. Chiang’s domination of Taiwan as well as the mainland would have given him control over the shipping lanes on which the economy of Japan depends. America’s restraining hand in the region may still have been needed.
The cold war might have turned hotter too. Chiang did not accept the Soviet Union’s control of Mongolia. Under Mao, brief battles broke out on the Chinese-Soviet border in the 1960s. They might have turned bigger and bloodier under Chiang. The Chinese public, indoctrinated by the KMT into a belief that Mongolia was China’s, might have clamoured for their government to assert the claim more forcefully once the Soviet threat was gone.
But China by then may have become a more politically liberal country. Moves towards democracy would have been slowed by fears of secessionism, especially in Tibet and other ethnic-minority regions (many Taiwanese would have been chafing at the KMT’s rule; they had begun to even before Chiang fled to the island). But a middle class would have grown far sooner than it has under the Communists.
Despite the autocratic rule of Chiang’s KMT, China would have remained an ally of America. Asia would therefore not be riven as it is today by a struggle for supremacy between America and China. Perhaps even Japan would be learning to live with its powerful, rich neighbour.
Much of the tension that now plagues Asia relates to the nature of China’s Communist Party. Neighbouring countries worry about the way the party behaves: secretively, high-handedly and sometimes (at home at any rate) brutally. But all of them fear what might happen were the party now to follow the KMT’s path and liberalise. The KMT was voted out of power in Taiwan in 2000, before returning in 2008. It is likely to be voted out again next year. Few in Asia believe that the Communist Party could ever accept the vagaries of democratic politics. Its eventual demise might well involve bloody tumult; a return, even, to the chaos of the 1940s. The rest of Asia would prefer the devil it knows.
Imagine the mayhem that might have been avoided had the Ottoman Empire been saved rather than sunk. Blame, among others, Winston Churchill
WHEN a Serb gunman shot an Austrian archduke in the summer of 1914, the nations of Europe tumbled into war with all the grace of bowling pins. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, whose ally Russia declared war on Austria, whose ally Germany declared war on Russia, whose allies France and Britain declared war on Germany and Austria. By early August the continent was in flames.
Much as it wobbled like the rest, however, one of those bowling pins could not make up its mind. Which way would Turkey fall? Should the fading Ottoman Empire join the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) or go with the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary)?
Turkey’s 500-year-old empire was shrinking. It had lost its territories in Africa, nearly all its Mediterranean islands and most of its Balkan lands as well as chunks of eastern Anatolia. It was debt-ridden, industrially backward and politically shaky.
Still, the sultan’s lands straddled two continents, controlling access to the Black Sea. His Arabian territories stretched beyond the holy cities of Islam to the mountains of Yemen and the Persian Gulf, where there were rumoured to lie vast caverns of the sticky black liquid soon to replace coal as the world’s chief source of power.
Confident of Turkey’s weakness, Britain, France and Russia could have clobbered the Ottomans and divided the spoils. Thankfully, wiser heads prevailed. At a secret conclave aboard a British dreadnought off the coast of Norway in late July, a far-sighted politician by the name of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, worked with French, Russian and Turkish diplomats to forge a treaty. The Turks drove a hard bargain for, as they coyly revealed, Germany too was proffering arms and gold in exchange for an alliance.
The deal that was reached proved immensely beneficial to all concerned. From France, Turkey received generous debt relief. Russia scrapped all claims to Ottoman territory, and made a limited goodwill withdrawal from parts of Anatolia. Churchill waived further payment on two warships that British shipyards were building for Turkey. And Turkey received assurances that its vulnerable extremities would not be attacked; for an empire that for a century had been preyed upon like a carcass this was a new lease of life.
The rewards to the Triple Entente were equally big. Granted exclusive access to the Black Sea, Russia’s allies could resupply the tsar’s armies when they faltered at the start of the war. With no need to defend its Turkish frontier, Russia moved thousands of crack troops from the Caucasus to shore up its front lines. Turkey signed separate agreements recognising British control of the Suez Canal, Aden and the Trucial sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, securing the sea lanes for Britain’s massive deployment of troops from the colonies to the Western Front. Turkey’s own army joined in a broad front against Austria-Hungary. Together, these Allied advantages are thought to have shortened the war by as much as a year; the Central Powers might not have sued for a truce as soon as America entered the war, but fought on instead.
Reprieved from collapse, the Ottoman Empire’s government pursued radical reforms. Challenged by growing nationalist tendencies from Arab, Armenian, Greek and Kurdish subjects, Sultan Mehmed V issued a historic firman or proclamation that recognised these as individual nations united under the Ottoman sovereign.
The sultan got to keep the title of caliph, commander of the Sunni Muslim faithful, which his ancestors had acquired four centuries earlier. This proved useful when the empire had to put down a rebellion of religious fanatics in central Arabia, led by a man called Ibn Saud who gained followers by claiming he would restore Islam to a purer state. But mostly the empire was seen as a tolerant place. When Nazi persecutions drove Jews from Europe in the 1930s, many took refuge there (as they had done when expelled from Spain in 1492), particularly in the province of Jerusalem.
If only
Needless to say, none of the above happened. Quite the opposite. Turkey aligned with Germany in the first world war, and the allies did attempt to invade and divide its empire. Churchill, instead of handing over the warships that ordinary Turks had paid for by subscription, had them seized for the British navy. In 1915 he ordered a catastrophic attack on Turkey; the landing at Gallipoli cost the allies 300,000 casualties. British campaigns against Turkey in Iraq and the Levant cost another million lives.
Turkey’s casualties mounted, by war’s end, to 3m-5m people, nearly a quarter of the Ottoman population. This included some 1.5m Armenians, slaughtered because Turkish officials believed they might become a fifth column for a hostile Russia. And when Britain and France grabbed the Ottomans’ Arab lands, their suppression of uprisings cost thousands more lives.
How much of today’s mayhem in the Middle East, from civil wars to terror in the name of Islam (and of restoring the caliphate) to the emergence of sectarian dictators such as Bashar al-Assad, not to mention of such a grudge-bearing Ottoman revivalist as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, might have been avoided, if only Churchill had embraced Johnny Turk instead of sinking him?
A ilustração desta matéria da Economist — montadoras americanas e chinesas destruindo suas concorrentes europeias —, na verdade um retrato da competição global entre impérios do passado, do presente e do futuro, dá uma ideia precisa sobre o embate geopolítico e geoeconômico da atualidade, o enfrentamento dos EUA contra a China — sim, importante sublinhar a UNILATERALIDADE da nova doutrina do containment — e simboliza todo o sentido da nova Guerra Fria Econômica.
Só tem um porém: a China já ganhou a contenda, simplesmente por ter a estratégia correta, por sinal, a mesma que levou a Grã-Bretanha à liderança da economia mundial no século XIX e, também, exatamente a mesma que garantiu a preeminência economica americana, e até sua supremacia militar, no decorrer do século XX.
Atualmente, todavia, G-B e EUA simplesmente desistiram de avançar, abandonaram a globalização e o livre comércio, levam um combate de retaguarda e seguem estratégias defensivas, o que significa que já perderam, o segundo a despeito da arrogância e da pretensão em responder pela ação do Estado a um complexo processo de modernização que na China é conduzido pelo Estado e pelo conjunto da população; no caso dos EUA, eles importam cérebros do resto do mundo, e podem, portanto, retardar o processo de esclerose, e mesmo manter-se por mais tempo na vanguarda de tecnologias inovadoras e descobertas científicas.
A fórmula da China é mais simples, aplicada ao conjunto da população: muito estudo, muito trabalho, muito investimento inovador e muita vontade dos chineses de ficarem tão ricos quanto americanos e europeus, o que vai exigir volumes imensos de commodities importadas e muita energia, sob todas as formas.
Eles o farão com grande sentimento nacionalista, evitando as grandes humilhações do passado, de ocidentais e japoneses, que submeteram o secular Império do Meio a uma submissão constrangedora para uma civilização que inventou tudo de útil que existe na humanidade, inclusive diversas vacinas experimentais. Os americanos e europeus estão focados unicamente em garantir os louros do passado, os chineses olham para a frente, o que é a melhor maneira de vencer.
Por isso, os americanos vão perder, a menos que abandonem a insanidade geopolitica da “armadilha de Tucídides” e a loucura militar e econômica da estratégia inaplicável de um novo Containment, contra um país que não pretende submeter o gigante ocidental, apenas inundá-lo com seus produtos e tecnologia. A moeda digital virá como reforço in due course.
O século XIX foi marcado pelo Grande Jogo entre a Grã-Bretanha e a Rússia expansionista na Ásia; o século XX pelo jogo decisivo entre os EUA e a União Sovietica pela dominação mundial. Não foram os EUA que ganharam, pois a URSS implodiu em sua própria ineficiência. O jogo agora é outro, mas os EUA insistem em jogar olhando para o passado, como esses generais de academia. Inventaram até um Tucídides prêt-à-porter: idiotas!
E o Brasil nisso tudo? O Brasil simplesmente não conta, ou interessa apenas como fornecedor de matérias básicas e um pouco de divertimento (futebol, música, turismo precário). Além da bossa nova, alguém pode citar alguma contribuição genial do Brasil para o estoque de conhecimento útil em favor da humanidade? Seria o “jeitinho”, aquele modo maroto de contornar a realidade, e que nunca contribuiu para consolidar entre nós o Estado democrático de Direito?
Estamos ficando para trás, não sem que eu aponte as razões do atraso e os caminhos da prosperidade: estabilidade macroeconômica, competição microeconômica, boa governança, alta qualidade do capital humano e abertura ao comércio internacional e aos investimentos estrangeiros. Nada menos do que tudo isso.
Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time. Yet, rare among such thinkers, Sowell manages never to provoke, in the reader, the feeling of being towered over. As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is “that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken.” From 1991 until 2016, his nationally syndicated column set the bar for clear writing, though the topics he covered were often complex. “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional infringement of their freedom of speech.” If academics birth needlessly complex prose, editors too often midwife it. An editor, Sowell once quipped, would probably have changed Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be, that is the question” to something awful, like “The issue is one of existence versus non-existence.”
Consider Sowell’s clear, brief explanation of the economic idea of “scarcity.” “What does ‘scarce’ mean?” he asks in his layman’s textbook, Basic Economics. “It means that what everybody wants adds up to more than there is.” Not only is pointless complexity absent from Sowell’s prose; so is the first-person perspective. The words “I” or “me” scarcely show up in his 30-odd books, but for his memoir, A Personal Odyssey.
To his critics, Sowell’s writing style is severe. But to his fan base—which includes figures as different as Steven Pinker and Kanye West—it’s a refreshing break from the self-absorbed drivel that frequently passes for cultural commentary nowadays. Pinker, a Harvard psychologist and leading public intellectual, named Sowell the most underrated writer in history. West, for his part, tweeted out a handful of Sowell quotes to millions of followers in 2018.
Sowell’s first piece of writing was published in 1950—a letter to the now-defunct Washington Star, urging the desegregation of the city’s public schools. The only hint during this period that he would someday be an economist was a budding interest in Karl Marx. For Sowell, Marx’s ideas “seemed to explain so much,” including his own “grim experience.” At the time, Sowell was a 20-year-old high school dropout, working as a clerk by day and taking classes by night—a situation that actually marked an improvement over his being unemployed and, for a time, homeless in his late teens.
Sowell’s experience had not always been so grim. Though his father died before he was born and his mother soon after, he nevertheless remembers his early childhood as a happy one. He was raised by his great-aunt in a house without electricity or hot water—typical for black North Carolinians in the 1930s. At the time, it never occurred to Sowell that they were poor; after all, they “had everything the people around [them] had.” Nor did he realize what it meant to be black in the era of Jim Crow. White people were “almost hypothetical” to him as a child. Indeed, it “came as a shock” to learn that most Americans were not black.
Sowell’s world expanded radically when his family moved to Harlem in 1939. It was the Harlem of James Baldwin (six years Sowell’s elder), and among its offerings were public libraries, which a nine-year-old Sowell gravitated to, and fistfights, which he had no choice but to engage in frequently. “At one point,” he recalls, “getting home for lunch safely became such an ordeal that a friend would lend me his jacket as a disguise, so that I could get away before anyone could spot me.”
Nor did his troubles end when he got home. With each passing year, his relationship with his great-aunt deteriorated, hitting a breaking point after he enrolled at Stuyvesant, New York City’s most prestigious public high school. An untimely illness, together with a heavy workload, conspired to make schoolwork unmanageable. Before long, Sowell was skipping class altogether, even as he and his adoptive mother engaged in internecine warfare: she threw his treasured art supplies away; he smashed her favorite vase; she called the police on trumped-up charges; he threatened to leave home.
The conflict escalated until it reached the brink of actual violence. In his memoir, Sowell recounts the painful climax:
“How long is this gonna go on, Thomas?” she asked me one day.
“Until someone cracks,” I said. “And it won’t be me.”
She tried being sanctimonious as I walked away, but I turned on her.
“You lying hypocrite!” I said, and launched into a tongue-lashing that left nothing to the imagination.
Wild with anger, she grabbed a hammer and drew it back to throw it. I was too far away to take it away from her, so I said: “Throw it—but you had better not miss.”
Trembling with anger, more so than fear, she put the hammer down. Afterwards, she seemed to understand at last the reality of our relationship, that we were simply enemies living under the same roof.
Sowell soon got himself emancipated and found a shelter for homeless youth. “It was now very clear to me that there was only one person in the world I could depend on,” he realized. “Myself.” With little more than the clothes on his back, he began a long journey that would lead him to the Marines, the Ivy League, and, briefly, the White House, at the Department of Labor.
In another cultural milieu, Sowell’s life could be the raw material for a compelling biopic or documentary. Instead, his story languishes in relative obscurity. This is partly because Sowell, after years of being a Marxist, ended up somewhere between libertarian and conservative—an orientation decidedly unwelcome in Hollywood. But he also does not wear his life story on his sleeve, and much in our culture today values “lived experience” over logical argument. In her best-selling book, White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo advises that, when talking to black people about race, white people should avoid being silent or emotionally withdrawn—but also avoid arguing. (She considers the phrases “I disagree” and “You misunderstood me” to be off-limits, for example.) For whites, the only option left, apparently, is to agree enthusiastically with whatever a black person says. By contrast, Sowell insists that his work “stands or falls on its own merits or applicability” and is not “enhanced or reduced by [his] personal life.”
His rejection of “lived experience” as a substitute for evidence, however, should not be confused with the view that experiences do not matter. In fact, Sowell’s work at times does reflect episodes from his life—often painful ones. The most striking example concerns his son, John Sowell. John was born healthy and seemingly normal, but as time passed, it became clear that something was wrong. Well past the age when most kids begin speaking in full sentences, John would scarcely utter a word. To outsiders, and even to Sowell’s then-wife, it seemed a clear case of mental disability. Yet Sowell wasn’t convinced. Speech problems aside, John was unusually bright: he could pick child locks before he could walk, for instance. And he had a prodigious memory: he once knocked over a chessboard mid-game and put all the pieces back in their former places. Given these underlying signs of intelligence, his failure to grasp even the simplest words was all the more mystifying. Yet hope came when, around age four, John slowly started to speak, and final vindication came when he grew up to become a well-adjusted young man.
Decades later, after his son had graduated from Stanford, Sowell set out to explain the puzzle. The result: the first academic study ever to explore the phenomenon of late-talking children who are unusually bright but not autistic. Drawing on this original research, as well as anecdotes, data, and history, Sowell wrote two books: Late-Talking Children, in 1997; and The Einstein Syndrome,in 2001. The second—named after history’s most famous late talker—won praise from Steven Pinker as “an invaluable contribution to human knowledge.” But apart from child-psychology specialists like Pinker, and parents of late talkers, these books received little public notice. Yet they represent a remarkable achievement: in an era of high academic specialization, it’s vanishingly rare for a scholar to break new ground in a field in which he has no formal training.
Sowell’s books on economics, the field in which he is trained—he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1968—form the core of his achievement. Foremost among them is Knowledge and Decisions, first published in 1980. The book draws its inspiration from Friedrich Hayek’s classic 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The knowledge that concerned Hayek was not timeless, scientific knowledge of the sort discovered by Einstein, or the bureaucratic knowledge that a government agency gathers, but practical knowledge—the kind required, say, to run a deli on a particular street corner in a specific neighborhood or grow crops on a particular plot of land in a variable climate. Knowledge of this kind is both fleeting (what was true last week may not be true this week) and local (what is true on one street corner may not be true on the next). No single person can ever possess much of it.
If it were possible for the sum total of such knowledge, distributed among millions of different minds, to be collected and conveyed to a single mind in real time, then a central planner could direct the economy like a maestro conducts an orchestra. Of course, it’s not possible, but Hayek’s insight was that the price mechanism achieves the same result, anyway. If tin suddenly becomes scarcer—either because reserves have been destroyed or a new use for it has been discovered—no central planner is needed to get consumers to use less of the metal. People do not even need to know why tin has become scarcer. Armed with no information other than the increased price of tin, millions will reduce their use of it, as if directed by an omniscient force. Put another way, what would require an impossible amount of knowledge and conscious coordination in the absence of prices requires neither in their presence.
Where Hayek’s essay ends, Sowell’s magnum opus begins. As the title suggests, the book is not only about knowledge (in Hayek’s sense) but also about the decisions we make—in economics, politics, war, and much else—based on such knowledge. In a world where each person’s knowledge amounts to a speck in an ocean of ignorance, Sowell’s thesis holds that “the most fundamental decision is not what decision to make but who is to make it.” While decision makers may speak in terms of goals—ending poverty, reducing racism, spreading democracy, and so on—all they can actually do is to begin processes. Thus, when faced with the question, “Who gets to decide?,” we ought to answer not by reference to the superior goals or moral fiber of some institution or another but to the incentives and constraints facing different decision makers.
The American Revolution, with its emphasis on checks and balances, provides the classic example of Sowell’s thesis put into practice. Drawing on “knowledge derived from experience,” Sowell writes, the Founders assumed that humans are basically selfish and created a system of incentives and constraints that would impede selfish leaders from doing horrible things. By contrast, the French Revolution, based on “abstract speculation about the nature of man,” assumed the opposite—that man was perfectible and that government was the instrument of perfection. The very different consequences of these two revolutions, according to Sowell, were no accident.
The more common choice between decision makers pits the government against the market. Yet for Sowell, “the market” is “a misleading figure of speech.” Many “refer to ‘the market’ as if it were an institution parallel with, and alternative to, the government as an institution.” In reality, “the market” is not an institution; it is “nothing more than an option for each individual to choose among existing institutions, or to fashion new arrangements suited to his own situation and taste.” The need for housing, for example, “can be met by ‘the market’ in a thousand different ways chosen by each person—anything from living in a commune to buying a house, renting rooms, moving in with relatives, living in quarters provided by an employer, etc.” Market arrangements may differ, but what unites them—and separates them from government plans—is that those who make decisions experience both their costs and benefits. Their feedback mechanisms are therefore instantaneous.
“I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where the policies that are being advocated for blacks in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty,” Sowell observes. (CHUCK KENNEDY/KRT/NEWSCOM)
Though the connection is less obvious, Knowledge and Decisions reflects Sowell’s life as much as his books on late-talking children do. Like the American Founders, Sowell came to his view of government more through experience than through philosophy. In 1960, he worked as an economist with the Labor Department. His task was to study the sugar industry in Puerto Rico, where the department enforced a minimum-wage law. Upon discovering that unemployment was rising with each increase in the minimum wage, Sowell wondered whether the law was causing the rise—as standard economic theory would predict. His coworkers had a different take: unemployment was rising because a hurricane had destroyed crops. Eventually, Sowell came up with a way to decide between the competing theories: “What we need,” he told his coworkers excitedly, “are statistics on the amount of sugarcane standing in the field before the hurricanes came through Puerto Rico.” He was met with a “stunned silence,” and his idea was dismissed out of hand. After all, administering the minimum-wage law “employed a significant fraction of all the people who worked there.”
This was not an isolated experience. In 1959, Sowell was working as a clerk-typist for the U.S. Public Health Service in Washington. One day, a man had a heart attack just outside the building. He was taken inside and asked if he was a government employee. If he had been, he could have received treatment in the same building, immediately. But he was not—so he had to be sent to a hospital across town. It was rush hour, and by the time he got there, he was dead. Sowell captured the dark irony: “He died waiting for a doctor, in a building full of doctors.” As with the Labor Department, the problem was not the employees, who “were very nice,” he remembers; it was the “nature of a bureaucracy” itself, with its bad incentives and slow feedback mechanisms.
Dark irony (usually the result of some government program) is a frequent theme in Sowell’s work. One fact referenced in Basic Economics is typical: as part of an effort to support farmers during the Great Depression, the federal government bought 6 million hogs in 1933 and destroyed them—while millions of Americans were struggling to feed themselves. Modern bureaucracies, of course, can hardly escape ridicule. During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, common sense led many people to wear masks in public, since it was well known that the virus spread mainly through coughing. Yet for months, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control advised people not to wear masks—only reversing their advice after the pandemic had nearly reached its peak. Unlike a business owner confronting a market test, no one in these organizations will necessarily pay a price.
“A frequent theme in Sowell’s writing is what philosophers would call reversing the explanandum.”
AConflict of Visions (1987) represents Sowell’s best effort to put his ideas in dialogue with their opposite. He begins the book by observing a strange fact: people predictably line up on opposite sides of political issues that seemingly have nothing in common. For instance, knowing someone’s position on climate change somehow allows you to predict their views on taxing the rich, gun control, and abortion. It’s tempting to dismiss this as mere political tribalism. But Sowell contends that more is at work: that there are two fundamental ways of thinking about the social world, two sets of basic assumptions about human nature, and two conflicting “visions,” from which most political disagreements follow. He names these the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
The constrained vision underlies Knowledge and Decisions. It maintains that humans are inherently more flawed than perfectible, more ignorant than knowledgeable, and more prone to selfishness than altruism. Good institutions take the tragic facts of human nature as given and create incentive structures that, without requiring men and women to be saints or geniuses, still lead to socially desirable outcomes. A good example is the price mechanism as described by Hayek. Centralized power is treated with suspicion, as the humans who wield it will be self-interested, or worse. What’s more, in the constrained vision, traditions and social mores are trusted because they represent the accrued wisdom of untold generations.
As for the unconstrained vision, if humans are flawed, selfish, and ignorant, it is not due to the unchangeable facts of our nature but to the way that our society happens to be arranged. By reforming our economic system, our education system, our laws, and other institutions, it is possible to change the social world in fundamental ways—including those aspects of it purportedly fixed by human nature. Through enlightened public policy, often implemented by a central authority, evils once assumed as inevitable are revealed to be social constructs or products of outdated ideas. Traditions should receive no special reverence, in this vision, but live or die according to their rationality (or lack thereof), as judged by modern observers.
Afrequent theme in Sowell’s writing is what philosophers would call reversing the explanandum—the phenomenon to be explained. Take poverty. Many observe the enormous chasm between rich and poor nations and, understandably, wonder why poverty exists. But the real question, in the constrained vision, is why wealth exists. “Standards of living far below what we would consider to be poverty have been the norm for untold thousands of years. It is not the origins of poverty which need to be explained,” Sowell writes in his recent Wealth, Poverty and Politics. “What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living.” In personal matters, too, he is quick to notice a mistaken explanandum. “Age 86 is well past the usual retirement age,” he noted in the final installment of his column, “so the question is not why I am quitting, but why I kept at it so long.” One major difference between the two visions is where they locate the explanandum when viewing the social world. “While believers in the unconstrained vision seek the special causes of war, poverty, and crime,” Sowell writes in Conflict, “believers in the constrained vision seek the special causes of peace, wealth, or a law-abiding society.”
Sowell’s great contribution to the study of racial inequality was to reverse the explanandum that has dominated mainstream thought for over a century. Intellectuals have generally assumed that in a fair society, composed of groups with equal inborn potential, we should see racially equal outcomes in wealth, occupational status, incarceration, and much else. That racial disparity is pervasive is seen either as proof that racial groups are not born with equal potential or that we don’t live in a fair society. The first position predominated among “progressive” intellectuals in the early twentieth century, who blamed racial disparity on genetic differences and prescribed eugenics as a cure. The second has dominated the academy since the 1960s and is now orthodoxy on the political Left. Democrats as moderate as Joe Biden have charged that America is “institutionally racist,” and when asked to prove it, the reply almost always points to statistical disparities between whites and blacks in wealth, incarceration, health, and in other areas. The suppressed premise—that statistical equality would be the norm, absent racism—is rarely stated openly or challenged.
In a dozen books, Sowell has challenged that premise more persuasively than anyone. One way he pressure-tests this assumption is by finding conditions in which we know, with near-certainty, that racial bias does not exist, and then seeing if outcomes are, in fact, equal. For example, between white Americans of French descent and white Americans of Russian descent, it’s safe to assume that neither group suffers more bias than the other—if for no other reason than that they’re hard to tell apart. Nevertheless, the French descendants earn only 70 cents for every dollar earned by the Russian-Americans. Why such a large gap? Sowell’s basic insight is that the question is posed backward. Why would we think that two ethnic groups with different histories, demographics, social patterns, and cultural values would nevertheless achieve identical results?
Sowell notes, too, the cases of a minority group with no political power nevertheless outperforming the dominant majority oppressing them. His favorite example was the successful Chinese minority in Southeast Asia. But he also has written about the Jews in Europe, the Igbos in Nigeria, the Germans in South America, the Lebanese in West Africa, and the Indians in East Africa. Perhaps the most striking American example is the Japanese. The Japanese peasant farmers who arrived on America’s western coast in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced laws barring them from landownership until 1952, in addition to suffering internment during World War II. Nevertheless, by 1960 they were outearning white Americans.
The phrase “the myth of the model minority” gets repeated so often that we mistake it for an explanation. It’s not a myth that some American minorities have higher incomes, better test scores, and lower incarceration rates than white Americans. And the most common explanation for this—that such groups come from the highly educated upper crusts of their original homelands—both explains too little and concedes too much. First, it doesn’t explain the rise of groups such as the Japanese; nor does it explain the eventual success of the Jewish migrants who left Europe around the turn of the century and settled on New York’s Lower East Side. Second, the argument implicitly concedes a part of what it seeks to refute: that the main determinants of economic success are education and skills—“human capital,” as economists call it.
One can object that the experience of black Americans is unique, and therefore incomparable with that of any other group. No other ethnic group in America was enslaved, disenfranchised, lynched, segregated, denied access to credit, mass-incarcerated, and so on. This is true enough—but only if our analysis is limited to America. What is so valuable about Sowell’s perspective is precisely its international scope. In three thick volumes published in the 1990s—Conquests and Cultures, Migrations and Cultures, and Race and Culture—he examined the role that cultural difference has played throughout world history. Sowell documents the fact that slavery, America’s “original sin,” has existed on every inhabited continent since the dawn of civilization. Without going back more than a few centuries, every race has been either slaves or enslavers—often both at once. Preferential policies provide another example. What we Americans euphemistically call “affirmative action” has existed longer in India than in America. Malaysia, Sri Lanka, China, and Nigeria have all had it, too.
How does all this apply to America? On William F. Buckley’s Firing Line, Sowell summed it up in a sentence: “I haven’t been able to find a single country in the world where the policies that are being advocated for blacks in the United States have lifted any people out of poverty.” Maybe American race relations are so unique that all historical and international comparisons are useless. But it’s far more likely that we have something important to learn from patterns that have held true around the world and throughout history.
Like others with similar views on race, Sowell has encountered countless smears, though the usual avenues of attack—accusations of racism, privilege, and all the rest—have not been available. Someone should have told Aidan Byrne, who reviewed one of Sowell’s books for the London School of Economics blog. Doubtless convinced that he was delivering a devastating blow, Byrne quipped: “easy for a rich white man to say.” It’s hard not to laugh at this hapless reviewer’s expense, but many mainstream commentators differ from Byrne only in that they usually remember to check Google Images before launching their ad hominems. The prevailing notion today is that your skin color, your chromosomes, your sexual orientation, and other markers of identity determine how you think. And it is generally those who see themselves as the most freethinking—“woke,” while the rest of us are asleep—who apply the strictest and most backward formulas.
To such people, the existence of a man like Thomas Sowell will always be a puzzle. He will always remain, in their minds, a phenomenon to be explained. But the question is not why a man who lived Sowell’s life came to hold the views that he did. The question is why one would expect a mind so brilliant to submit itself to received opinion of any kind.
Coleman Hughes is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. His writing has appeared in Quillette, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and TheSpectator.
Top Photo: After years of being a Marxist, Thomas Sowell (shown in 1981) ended up somewhere between libertarian and conservative. (TAYLOR /AP PHOTO)
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