Economic Outlook

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

And then—suddenly and within the merest eyeblink of time as the planet measures its age—Europe was buried in an absolute avalanche of riches. In a twinkling, the land available to its people was increased five times over by the "discovery" of and claims made upon North America, South America, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and hundreds of islands in oceans hardly known before.

Thanks to the plundering of these new—to them—lands, the amount of gold and silver handled by the inhabitants of Europe was multiplied 15 times over. The grains, fibers, timber, furs, base metals, and many other material goods already known to Europeans poured down upon them in a stream hundreds of times larger than they had ever dared hope for. And exotic new foods and trade goods—such as chocolate, rubber, corn, pumpkins, quinine, tobacco, potatoes, buffalo robes, and kangaroo pelts—further surprised, delighted, and enriched them.

The boom was on! And it lasted—in round numbers—from approximately 1500 to 1950. Four hundred and fifty years. Four and a half centuries in which all the inhabitants of the Western world—and especially those of us lucky enough to live in one part or another of the Great Frontier itself-were caught up in this overpowering flash flood of new wealth and swept into a hitherto unknown appreciation of the individual, selfmotivation, capitalism, and democracy.

It's rather difficult, you know, to develop a work ethic when there's not enough work—or wages or even food—to go around. It's extremely easy, on the other hand, to "discover" the virtues of hard labor when—on every side—you see people getting rich exactly in proportion to the amount of time and energy they invest in claiming previously unclaimed land, furs, food, and seemingly limitless quantities of other real wealth.

Spread more land than can possibly be farmed, more gold than can be counted, more "work"-in the form of grabbing a share of an apparently endless bounty—before a group of people (any people, even the wretched serfs and debtors who were—in large measure—our ancestors) and you'll find that all our most cherished concepts—"freedom", "independence", "individualism", "self-reliance", "courage", "initiative", "invention", and "industry"—nearly discover themselves.

Ah! If only it could have gone on forever . . . instead of just long enough (450 years) to make us think that such a onetime explosion of windfall wealth is the natural way of the world. Which, of course, it is not. As Webb's book points out, the flood of "found" riches has now crested. The tidal wave which picked us up and washed us to our high-water mark—our elevated, in every sense of the word, "standard of living"—is receding.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print