Tyler Cowen's review of the documentary THE END OF POVERTY is fun, priceless, hopefully an important step forward in the coversation about global development in the public arena, and a piece that I suspect will be remembered for many years. Quoting heavily:
I can only report that The End of Poverty, narrated throughout by Martin Sheen, puts Ayn Rand back on the map as an accurate and indeed insightful cultural commentator. If you were to take the most overdone and most caricatured cocktail-party scenes from Atlas Shrugged, if you were to put the content of Rand’s “whiners” on the screen, mixed in with at least halfway competent production values, you would get something resembling The End of Poverty. If you ever thought that Rand’s nemeses were pure caricature, this film will show you that they are not....
In this movie, the causes of poverty are oppression and oppression alone. There is no recognition that poverty is the natural or default state of mankind and that a special set of conditions must come together for wealth to be produced. There is no discussion of what this formula for wealth might be. There is no recognition that the wealth of the West lies upon any foundations other than those of theft, exploitation and the oppression of literal or virtual colonies.
The history in this movie starts, not coincidentally one may assume, in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus in the New World. The phrase “natural economies” is used repeatedly to refer to the conduct of the since-despoiled noble savages, and we are told that the Europeans destroyed the natural economies of the countries they conquered. Never mentioned is the fact that these so-called natural economies were themselves based on prior conquest and oppression. ...
Most of all, the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation should be ashamed for having funded this movie. The Schalkenbach Foundation was set up in 1925 to promote the thinking of Henry George, best known as the author of Progress and Poverty and advocate of a tax on land. George was a flawed but brilliant and incisive thinker. He understood that wealth needs to be produced, and he also understood the strong case for free trade, most of all to protect the interests of labor. His 1886 book Protection or Free Trade remains perhaps the best-argued tract on free trade to this day; in that book George refutes exactly the arguments put forward by The End of Poverty. Has Diaz, Sheen, Portello or anyone working today at the Schalkenbach Foundation read it? One has to wonder if anyone who has read George could lend a hand to the production of the screed of mistruths and error that is The End of Poverty. I prefer to be subtler, but this movie does not allow it.
Kudos to the American Interest for publishing this (and a few other) great pieces.
And yes, I too was curious about the Schalkenbach Foundation. Calling them out was something of a surprise that certainly catches the attention of places like Kauffman where our support is rarely noticed so openly. I'll be curious to see if and how they reply.
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