First world prosperity

[Brad De Long]

>In this list, the inescapable fact that large majorities of first world
>populations enjoy a prosperous lifestyle is sometimes dismissed as the
>result of imperialist plunder and exploitation of the third world. This
>gives lefties a warm, fuzzy, self-righteous feeling, and it has great
>value for that reason alone.
>
>However, US imports of goods and services from the rest of the world
>amount to, what, 12% of national income. Most of this trade is with the
>first world. Since I am too lazy to go look up exact numbers, I'll say
>that imports in goods and services from the third world amount to 5% of
>national income.
>
>Doesn't this place a rough upper bound of 5% in the amount of US
>prosperity that can be explained away as imperialist plunder?
>
>Of course, this upper bound assumes that those nations get nothing in
>return for those goods and services they send our way. Now, a lot of our
>exports to the third world may be in the form of F-16 and financial
>consultants, but I am sure that a few Volvo trucks and Caterpillar
>excavators wind up there as well. So this 5% would be further reduced.
>
>Am I missing something?

No. You are not. You can argue that much of sixteenth-century Spanish, much
of seventeenth-century Dutch, some of eighteenth-century British, and some
of early nineteenth-century white southerner prosperity is based on
imperialist plunder.

But it's very, very, very difficult to make a serious argument that the
elimination of imperialism today would be noticed by first-world
consumers...

This is one reason to weep over what Immanuel Wallerstein has done to
American sociology over the past generation...

Brad DeLong

Professor J. Bradford De Long
Department of Economics, #3880
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027; (925) 283-2709 voice
(510) 642-6615; (925) 283-3897 fax