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6:43Son las ideas. Son las instituciones. Esto debe ser verdad porque lo
dijo un escocs. Y creo que soy el nico escocs aqu en el TED de
Edimburgo. As que permtanme explicarles que el hombre ms
inteligente de todos los tiempos fue un escocs. Fue Adam Smith, no Billy
Connolly, no Sean Connery,aunque l es muy inteligente en
verdad. (Risas) Smith -y quisiera que fueran y se inclinaran ante su
estatua en la Royal Mile; es una estatua maravillosa... Smith, en su libro
"La riqueza de las naciones"publicado en 1776... fue el evento ms
importante que ocurri ese ao... (Risas) Pueden apostarlo. Hubo una
pequea dificultad local en algunas de nuestras colonias menores, pero...
7:33(Risas)
7:58Pero Uds saben, esta es una audiencia TED, y si sigo hablando sobre
instituciones, Uds se van a dormir.As que traducir esto en un lenguaje
que puedan comprender. Llammosle "aplicaciones asesinas".Quiero
explicarles que existen seis aplicaciones asesinas que separan a
Occidente del resto del mundo.Y son muy parecidas a las aplicaciones de
sus mviles, en el sentido de que parecen muy sencillas. Son como
iconos; slo hay que hacer clic. Pero detrs de ese icono, existe un
cdigo complejo. Es lo mismo con las instituciones. Son seis y creo que
explican la Gran Divergencia. Una, competencia. Dos, revolucin
cientfica. Tres, derechos de propiedad. Cuatro, medicina moderna. Cinco,
sociedad de consumo. Y seis, tica de trabajo. Pueden jugar y tratar de
pensar en alguna que se me haya olvidado, o tratar de resumirlas en solo
cuatro aplicaciones, pero perdern.
8:54(Risas)
12:21Finalmente, la tica del trabajo. Max Weber pens que era algo
peculiarmente protestante. Y se equivocaba. Cualquier cultura puede
tener tica del trabajo si las instituciones estn ah para crear un
incentivo al trabajo. Sabemos esto porque hoy la tica del trabajo no es
un fenmeno protestante, un fenmeno occidental. De hecho, Occidente
ha perdido su tica del trabajo. Actualmente, el coreano promedio trabaja
mil horas ms al ao que el alemn promedio; mil horas. Y esto es
parte de un fenmeno realmente extraordinario, que es el final de la Gran
Divergencia.
14:29As que quiero terminar con tres preguntas para los futuros miles de
millones, justo antes del 2016,cuando Estados Unidos pierda su
lugar como economa nmero uno ante China. La primera es: se pueden
borrar estas aplicaciones, y acaso estamos en el proceso de hacerlo en
el mundo occidental? La segunda pregunta es: importa la secuencia de
descarga? Y... podra frica tener la secuencia equivocada? Una
consecuencia obvia de la historia de la economa moderna es que es muy
difcil la transicin a la democracia antes de que se hayan
establecido derechos de propiedad privada seguros.Advertencia: eso
podra no funcionar. Y tercero: podra tener xito China sin la aplicacin
asesina nmero tres? Esa es la que John Locke sistematiz cuando dijo
que la libertad tena raz en los derechos de propiedad privada y la
proteccin de la ley. Esta es la base para el modelo occidental del
gobierno representativo. Ahora esta imagen muestra la demolicin del
estudio del artista chino Ai Weiwei en Shanghai a principios de este
ao. l est nuevamente libre, habiendo sido detenido, como saben,
durante algn tiempo. Pero no creo que su estudio haya sido
reconstruido.
17:44Muchas gracias.
17:46(Aplausos)
20:06(Aplausos)
0:11Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about past and future billions. We
know that about 106 billion peoplehave ever lived. And we know that
most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived
in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor did
not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the
195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. We know that most of
that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is
currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North
Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population
today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth.
1:21Economic historians call this "The Great Divergence." And this slide
here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer
you. It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic
product, so average income. One, the red line, is the ratio of British to
Indian per capita income.And the blue line is the ratio of American to
Chinese. And this chart goes back to 1500. And you can see here that
there's an exponential Great Divergence. They start off pretty close
together. In fact, in 1500,the average Chinese was richer than the average
North American. When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart
ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average
Indian. And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. It's based
on purchasing power parity. The average Americanis nearly 20 times
richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s.
2:33So why? This wasn't just an economic story. If you take the 10
countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were
really quite tiny five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of
its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10
countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires 58
percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its
population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global
economic output. And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the
imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions.
3:24Now you can't just blame this on imperialism though many people
have tried to do so for two reasons. One, empire was the least original
thing that the West did after 1500. Everybody did empire.They beat
preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. So it
really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great
Divergence. In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence
reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after
decolonization. This is not a new question.
4:38That's a great question. And you know what, it was also being asked
at roughly the same time by the Resterners by the people in the rest of
the world like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who
introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire who said in
a book published in 1731, "Why do Christian nations which were so weak
in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many
lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman
armies?" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that
question, which was correct. He said it was "because they have laws and
rules invented by reason." It's not geography.
6:43It's the ideas. It's the institutions. This must be true because a
Scotsman said it. And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh
TED. So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a
Scotsman. He was Adam Smith not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery
though he is very smart indeed. (Laughter) Smith and I want you to
go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful
statue Smith, in the "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776 that's the
most important thing that happened that year ... (Laughter) You
bet. There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but ...
7:33(Laughter)
7:35"China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago
acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the
nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much
inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil,
climate, and situation might admit of." That is so right and so cool. And
he said it such a long time ago.
7:58But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about
institutions, you're going to turn off. So I'm going to translate this into
language that you can understand. Let's call them the killer apps. I want
to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart
from the rest. And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the
sense that they look quite simple. They're just icons; you click on
them.But behind the icon, there's complex code. It's the same with
institutions. There are six which I think explain the Great
Divergence. One, competition. Two, the scientific revolution. Three,
property rights.Four, modern medicine. Five, the consumer society. And
six, the work ethic. You can play a game and try and think of one I've
missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose.
8:54(Laughter)
8:56Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the
work of many economic historians in the process. Competition
means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in
1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between
corporations as well as sovereigns. The ancestor of the modern
corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th
century. Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one
monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any
ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three
days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of
characters and very complex Confucian essay writing.
9:38The scientific revolution was different from the science that had
been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most
important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men
control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. Example:
Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to
ballistics. Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. Think of
what that means. That really was a killer
application. (Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution
anywhere else. The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but
there's no scientific revolution there. In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's
observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the
mind of God.
10:27Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of
law based on private property rights.That's what makes the
difference between North America and South America. You could turn up
in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, "I'll work for
nothing for five years. You just have to feed me." But at the end of it,
you've got a hundred acres of land. That's the land grant on the bottom
half of the slide. That's not possible in Latin America where land is held
onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. And you can see
here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between
North and South. Most people in rural North America owned some land by
1900. Hardly anyone in South America did. That's another killer app.
11:45The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution
to have a point. You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. You've
all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it.That's
the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even
technological change itself.Japan was the first non-Western society to
embrace it. The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma
Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. Very few
Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road.
12:21Finally, the work ethic. Max Weber thought that was peculiarly
Protestant. He was wrong. Any culture can get the work ethic if the
institutions are there to create the incentive to work. We know
this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western
phenomenon. In fact, the West has lost its work ethic.Today, the average
Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German
a thousand.And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and
that is the end of the Great Divergence.
14:29So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just
ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one
economy to China. The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in
the process of doing so in the Western world? The second question
is, does the sequencing of the download matter? And could Africa get
that sequencing wrong? One obvious implication of modern economic
history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've
established secure private property rights. Warning: that may not
work. And third, can China do without killer app number three? That's the
one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted
in private property rights and the protection of law. That's the basis for
the Western model of representative government. Now this picture shows
the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier
this year. He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for
some time. But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt.
18:11Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other
region of the world that's booming,which is Latin America. What's your
view on that?
18:24Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the
East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South
America. I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South
America part of the West?" He was an expert in Latin American
history. He said, "I don't know; I'll have to think about that." That tells you
something really important. I think if you look at what is happening in
Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that
led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a
very bright future indeed. So my story really is as much about that
convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia.
19:02BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are
not really paying attention to these trends. Mostly they're worried about
each other. The Americans think that the European model is going to
crumble tomorrow. The Europeans think that the American budget is
going to explode tomorrow. And that's all we seem to be caring about
recently.
19:22NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right
now both sides of the Atlantic is essentially the same thing taking
different forms in terms of political culture. And it's a crisis that has its
structural facet it's partly to do with demographics. But it's also, of
course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive
leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. That crisis, which has
been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an
epiphenomenon. The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic
phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half
a millennium of Western ascendancy. I think that's its real importance.
20:04BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.)
20:06(Applause)