Muito tempos antes que o World Economic Forum ou o Insead, ou a Heritage Foundation e o Fraser Institute, começassem a fazer os seus rankings e classificações de liberdade econômica, de competitividade, de bom ambiente para negócios, Milton Friedman já tinha detectado o sucesso que era e estava se tornando Hong Kong, um monte de pedras, algumas ilhas, que não tinham absolutamente nada em cima, a não ser uma boa localização no sul da China, perto do enclave português, bem mais antigo, que era Macau.
Pois bem: depois que a colônia inglesa (que tinha sido atribuída à Grã Bretanha por cem anos, de acordo com os tratados desiguais do século XIX) foi libertada da dominação japonesa ao final da Segunda Guerra -- um dos que ficaram presos ali foi o militar Charles Boxer, futuro historiador do império marítimo português -- sua renda per capita era menos da metade da renda per capita da metrópole. Bem antes da colônia ser devolvida à China, a renda já tinha ultrapassado a da metrópole, e atualmente é mais de 30% superior, e isso a despeito, desde os anos 1950 (pós-revolução comunista no continente), de um afluxo constante de refugiados e emigrados de várias partes da Ásia, buscando simplesmente liberdade para empreender, pessoas miseráveis, chegando sem qualquer pertence, muitas delas dormindo em cortiços na cidade (que ainda existem) ou em sampans no rio ou na sua embocadura. São essas pessoas miseráveis que criaram a riqueza de Hong Kong, como aliás dizia Adam Smith, seguida pelo administrador inglês da colônia, o homem que criou a sua prosperidade, e que é objeto desta biografia resenhada nesta matéria.
O que dizia Adam Smith, além da sua famosa frase sobre a "mão invisível", que muitos equivocadamente elevam à condição de teoria, quando é uma simpes imagem. Adam Smith disse o seguinte:
Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.
E não venham me dizer que esses princípios só se aplicam em situações especiais, em países pequenos, em cidades-Estado, como Cingapura e Hong-Kong, justamente.
Não: princípios de governo se aplicam em quaisquer circunstâncias, qualquer que seja o tamanho do país, por mais pobre que ele seja. O Brasil podia aprender com isso.
Elementar, não é?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 18 de agosto de 2017
The man behind the Hong Kong miracle
I have just finished reading Neil Monnery’s new book, Architect of Prosperity: Sir John Cowperthwaite and the Making of Hong Kong.
This fascinating account of the rise of Hong Kong as a global economic
powerhouse is well written and, as such, easy to read and understand.
I’m happy to recommend it wholeheartedly to CapX’s discerning
readership.
I first became interested in the story of
Hong Kong in the late 1990s. The emotional handover of the colony from
the United Kingdom to China, for example, is deeply impressed on my
memory. But also, as part of my doctoral research at the University of
St Andrews, I read a number of essays
about the rise of Hong Kong written by the Nobel Prize-winning
economist Milton Friedman. Friedman, an advocate of the free market and
small government, believed that individuals, when left unmolested, will
strive to improve their lives and those of their families. Prosperity
will follow.
His was similar to Adam Smith’s insight:
“Little else is requisite to carry a
state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but
peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the
rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All
governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into
another channel, or which endeavor to arrest the progress of society at a
particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged
to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
No country in modern history has come as close
to Smith’s ideal as Hong Kong. The territory that the British Foreign
Secretary Viscount Palmerston described as “a barren island with hardly a
house upon it” was once very poor. In the immediate aftermath of World
War II and Japanese occupation, its per capita income was about a third of that in the United Kingdom.
By the time British colonial rule ended,
Hong Kong was 10 per cent richer than the mother country. Last year, the
former colony was 37 per cent richer than the UK. It is, therefore,
apposite that the man credited with Hong Kong’s success should be a
Scottish civil servant, a University of St Andrews alumnus, and a
devotee of Adam Smith: Sir John Cowperthwaite.
As Monnery explains, Cowperthwaite was not
the first small government advocate to oversee the colony’s economy and
finances. A succession of colonial governors and their financial
secretaries ran a shoe string government. But, they did so out of
financial necessity, rather than deep ideological commitment to small
government.
As Financial Secretaries, Geoffrey Fellows
(1945-1951) and Arthur Clarke (1951-1961) established a regime of low
taxes and budgetary surpluses, and free flow of good and capital. To
those foundations, Cowperthwaite (1961-1971) added not only the vigour
of his convictions, but also a handpicked successor, Philip Haddon-Cave
(1971-1981). By the time Haddon-Cave departed, the success of Hong
Kong’s experiment with small government was undeniable not only to the
British, but also to the Chinese. Margaret Thatcher embarked on her
journey to dismantle British socialism in 1979, while Deng Xiaoping
started undoing the damage caused by Chinese communism in 1978.
And that brings me to the most important
reason why Cowperthwaite, rather than Fellows and Clarke, deserve to be
credited with the rise of Hong Kong. Basically, he was the right man at
the right place in the right time – the 1960s. It was all well and good
to run a small government when the colony was still poor. By the 1960s,
however, the colony was prospering and demands for higher government
spending (as a proportion of GDP) were increasing. As an aside, the
government’s nominal spending increased each year in tandem with
economic growth. To make matters much worse, socialism, be it in its
Soviet form (i.e., central planning) or in its more benign British form
(state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy) was
ascendant.
In fact, just before departing from Hong
Kong, Clarke appears to have had a sudden crisis of confidence in the
colony’s economic model, noting:
“We have, I think, come to a turning
point in our financial history … There seem to be two courses we can
follow. We can carry on as we are doing … Or we can do something to plan
our economy … Which course should we adopt?”
Mercifully, Cowperthwaite was able to articulate the reasons for staying the course. In his early budget debates, he noted:
“I now come to the more general and
far-reaching suggestion made by Mr Barton and Mr Knowles, that is, the
need to plan our economic future and in particular, the desirability of a
five-year plan. I would like to say a few words about some of the
principles involved in the question of planning the overall economic
development of the colony.
“I must, I am afraid, begin by
expressing my deep-seated dislike and distrust of anything of this sort
in Hong Kong. Official opposition to overall economic planning and
planning controls has been characterised in a recent editorial as ‘Papa
knows best.’ But it is precisely because Papa does not know best that I
believe that Government should not presume to tell any businessman or
industrialist what he should or should not do, far less what he may or
may not do; and no matter how it may be dressed up that is what planning
is.”
And:
“An economy can be planned, I will
not say how effectively, when there unused resources and a finite,
captive, domestic market, that is, when there is a possibility of
control of both production and consumption, of both supply and demand.
These are not our circumstances; control of these factors lies outside
our borders. For us a multiplicity of individual decisions by
businessmen and industrialists will still, I am convinced, produce a
better and wiser result than a single decision by a Government or by a
board with its inevitably limited knowledge of the myriad factors
involved, and its inflexibility.
“Over a wide field of our economy it
is still the better course to rely on the nineteenth century’s ‘hidden
hand’ than to thrust clumsy bureaucratic fingers into its sensitive
mechanism. In particular, we cannot afford to damage its mainspring,
freedom of competitive enterprise.”
It is not clear whether Cowperthwaite ever read Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay,
“The Use of Knowledge in Society”, which posits that allocation “of
scarce resources requires knowledge dispersed among many people, with no
individual or group of experts capable of acquiring it all”, or whether
he came to the same conclusions as the Austrian Nobel Prize-winning
economist on his own. But, even if he were consciously or
sub-consciously influenced by Hayek, it speaks much of Cowperthwaite
“the thinker” that he took Hayek’s insights to heart, unlike so many
decision-makers around the world, who succumbed to the Siren calls of
socialism.
And so it was with considerable amazement
that, towards the end of my first year at St Andrews, I discovered
Cowperthwaite and I were neighbours. His house on 25 South Street was a
few hundred feet away from Deans Court, the University’s post-graduate
student residence. I immediately wrote to him and he responded, asking
me to come for tea. I spent a wonderful afternoon in his presence and
kept in touch with him during my remaining time at St Andrews.
Last time I saw him, he came to the launch of the libertarian student magazine Catallaxy,
which my friend, Alex Singleton, and I wrote together. As he took his
leave, I saw him walk down Market Street and got a distinct feeling that
it would be for the last time.
Shortly after I graduated and moved to Washington. A new life and new
job took precedence and St Andrews slowly receded down memory lane.
Neil Monnery’s book made those wonderful
memories come alive again. His work has immortalised a man to whom so
many owe so much. Architect of Prosperity is an economic and
intellectual history. Above all, it is a tribute to a principled,
self-effacing, consequential and deeply moral man. Monnery deserves our
gratitude for writing it.
