To the Editor:
Warmest thanks for publishing P. T. Bauer’s learned and lucid “Western Guilt and Third World Poverty” [January]. Perhaps not since Daniel P. Moynihan’s important essay the previous March [“The United States in Opposition”] on a related topic has a piece of magazine journalism carried so much raw truth, which term I intend in its older scholastic sense.
These are weird and frightening times. Some demon of self-loathing seems to have entered and possessed the soul of the West. Dark-skinned . . . children, either running with sores or supporting horribly distended bellies, stare out at us vacantly from (it seems like) every tenth page in both secular and religious publications and from countless TV documentaries. “You, you, you did this,” their ravaged faces tell us.
Sensible and intelligent persons, including the searingly honest and/or deeply religious, have long suspected themselves to be under assault by some massive lie or delusion here. But thanks to our general lack of detailed information concerning the laws and history of economic growth, we have tended to be helpless against the force of this simplistic message concerning capitalism’s natural evilness that Marxists and their uninformed or unstable collaborators in the media incessantly hammer at the public. Mr. Bauer, merely by clarifying things concerning extracted and earned incomes, has rendered fact-seekers a great service. In the course of his compendious essay, he does much more, ultimately supplying a firm footing from which we can take our real bearings.
Barbara Nauer
Southern Illinois University
Edwardsville, Illinois
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To the Editor:
P. T. Bauer’s article was for me, as a non-economist, a generally clear and convincing piece of reasoning. But not entirely. I find it difficult to understand how an essay dealing with Western guilt, the economics of colonialism, and large numbers of black countries could fail to discuss the matter of the slave trade. Had we the capacity to sort out causes of guilt with some finer degree of precision, my guess is that the background of slavery would loom much larger as an issue than would the fact that most of us eat too much in this country. . . .
Robert Perman
Bethesda, Maryland
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To the Editor:
P. T. Bauer’s article rightly points out that foreign investment is not a simple “zero-sum” game—one player profits through another’s losses—which is indeed comforting to citizens of capital-exporting nations.
But the central issue is ignored: bargains struck between unequals are unequal bargains. When a multinational corporation exports a dollar-a-day sweatshop abroad, or obtains a mining concession for a pittance, little or nothing trickles down to citizens of the host country, except for the few lucky natives who happen to be employed by the subsidiary.
Instead of digging into the many facets of exploitation versus development, Mr. Bauer reserves his academic broadsides for those who mistakenly regard colonialism as mainly “exploitative.” But the evidence he dredges up to support his case damages his position instead of strengthening it. For example, he repeatedly refers to African countries whose exports were increased through the efforts of European planters. Well, who owns the exports? Not the natives. . . . Worse still, Mr. Bauer’s attempts to prove the benefits of “colonialism” force his foot into his mouth. For instance, he observes: “Some of the richest countries were formerly colonies and even as colonies were already prosperous (North America, Australasia).” Yes, the colonialists did well, no doubt about it. But what happened to the Aborigines, the American Indians, the Bantu, the Congolese, and the native Asians?
If it were not for Mr. Bauer’s association with the London School of Economics, and his having written several books on Third World problems, I might let myself believe that his article is a deliberate whitewash—an informal, unofficial White Paper—for British colonialism and European colonialism in general. After all, he has chosen to ignore some rather seamy happenings, not the least of which was the Belgian solution to the Congolese population explosion: exterminating more than half the population. But I’d rather believe that Mr. Bauer leaned over backward in his attempt to quiet moral and ethical anxieties among Western liberals, stricken by the current “atonement” fad. . . .
Frank Walke
New York City
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P. T. Bauer writes:
I wish to thank Barbara Nauer for her thoughtful observations. Robert Perman has overlooked my brief discussion of the effects of the slave trade in which I explain why they are largely irrelevant to Third World poverty.
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[In the author’s note accompanying Mr. Bauer’s article, the title of one of his recent books was inadvertently omitted. It is Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics (Harvard, 1972).—Ed.]
