WILLisms.com: Quotational Therapy: Part 71 -- The Late Sir John Cowperthwaite

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Quotational Therapy: Part 71 -- The Late Sir John Cowperthwaite

John Cowperthwaite, On Free Market Policies-

In the long run, the aggregate of decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralised decisions of a government, and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.

Cowpertwaite shares credit for this legacy:

...in 1950 Hong Kong's citizens were 40 percent poorer on a per capita basis than the citizens of the oil rich African country of Gabon. By 1998, Hong Kong's residents were over four times richer than the Gabonese. In the long run, in other words, Hong Kong's free market policies proved more important than Gabon's natural riches or its more advanced starting position.

And this legacy:

...in 1960, the earliest date for which I have been able to get them, the average per capita income in Hong Kong was 28 percent of that in Great Britain; by 1996, it had risen to 137 percent of that in Britain. In short, from 1960 to 1996, Hong Kong’s per capita income rose from about one-quarter of Britain’s to more than a third larger than Britain’s. It’s easy to state these figures. It is more difficult to realize their significance. Compare Britain—the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the nineteenth-century economic superpower on whose empire the sun never set—with Hong Kong, a spit of land, overcrowded, with no resources except for a great harbor. Yet within four decades the residents of this spit of overcrowded land had achieved a level of income one-third higher than that enjoyed by the residents of its former mother country.

Policies matter. Ideas matter. Governance matters.

Quotational Therapy: Part 71 -- The Late Sir John Cowperthwaite

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