At end of David Landes epic “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” he asks the question “And what of the poor themselves?”
His response deserves reading as it is as relevant today for Europe as it has ever been.
“History tells us that the most successful cures probably come from within. Foreign aid can help, but like windfall tax, can also hurt. You can also discourage effort and plant a crippling sense of incapacity incapacity. As the African saying has it, ” The hand that receives is always under the one that gives.” No, what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patients, tenacity. To people haunted by misery and hunger, that may may add up to a selfish indifference. But at the bottom, no empowerment is so effective as self empowerment will stop
Some of this may sound like a collection of cliches-the sort of lessons one used to learn them the sort of lessons one used alone at home and in school when parents and teachers what they had a mission to rid and elevate the children. Today, condescend to such verities, dismiss them as platitudes. But why should wisdom be obsolete? To be sure, we’re living in desert age. We want things to be sweet; too many of us work to live in the to be happy. Nothing wrong with that; it just does not promote high productivity. You want high productivity? Then you should live to work and get happiness as a byproduct.
Not easy. The people who live to work a small the people who live to work very small unfortunately. But it is an elite open to new club, is, self-selected, the kind of people hooked send your pics attenuate the positive. In this world, the optimists have it, not because they are always right, because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is, correction, improvement, and success. The way the achievement achievement educated, Pope eyes open optimism pays; pessimism can only of the empty consolation of being right.
The one lesson that the mergers is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and a finance, the better to choose.
He ends from a quote from Deuteronomy 30:19 “I have set before the life-and-death, the blessing and curse; therefore choose life.”