Raspberries are a petit-bourgeois crop, while wheat is a proletarian crop — or so says political scientist James C Scott in his remarkable 1998 book Seeing Like a State (UK) (US). That makes it sound as though Scott is musing on matters of taste. In fact, he’s highlighting the link between what we produce, and the political and economic structures that production makes possible. Wheat is a proletarian crop, says Scott, because it works well on industrial farms. Harvesting can be mechanised. Not so easy with raspberries, which are best cared for on a small farm. They are difficult to grow and pick on an industrial scale.
Such distinctions once mattered a great deal. We associate the invention of agriculture with the rise of ancient states but, as Scott points out in a forthcoming book, Against the Grain, much depends on the crop. Wheat is well-suited to supporting state armies and tax inspectors: it is harvested at a predictable time and can be stored — or confiscated. Cassava works differently. It can be left in the ground and dug up when needed. If some distant king wanted to tax the cassava crop, his armies would have had to find them and dig them up one by one. Agriculture made strong states possible, but it was always agriculture based on grain. “History records no cassava states,” he writes.
The technologies we use have always affected who gets what, from the invention of the plough to the creation of YouTube. Economists know this but our analytical tools are not well-suited to distinguishing wheat from raspberries or cassava. The brilliance of gross domestic product is the way it manages to measure all economic activity with the same yardstick — but that is also, of course, its weakness. Nevertheless, we try. Many researchers have examined whether countries with rich endowments of mineral resources — oil, copper, diamonds — tend to do better or worse as a result. The balance of opinion is that there’s a “resource curse”. Why?
Sometimes the problem is obvious enough — for example, natural resources sustained a quarter-century of civil war in Angola, where the government could fund itself with oil while the rebels mined and sold diamonds. Sometimes it’s more subtle: a country that exports a valuable commodity will experience a strengthening of its exchange rate. This makes it harder to sustain any sort of industry that isn’t connected to the commodity itself.
Still, we’ve lacked the statistical tools to paint a compelling picture of these issues, important though they seem to be. Now a new research paper from a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tries to explore how the mixture of products a country produces might influence a critical economic outcome: income inequality. The team includes César Hidalgo, author of Why Information Grows (UK) (US), about whose work I’ve written several times. Over the past few years, Hidalgo has been trying to map what he calls “economic complexity”, using statistical techniques from physics rather than economics.
Complexity isn’t straightforward to measure — is a million dollars of reinsurance more or less complex than a million dollars of liquefied natural gas or a million dollars of computer games? Hidalgo’s method looks at a country’s merchandise exports. Sophisticated economies tend to export many different products, including the most complex. Complex products tend to be exported only by a few economies.
In previous work, Hidalgo and colleagues have shown that economic complexity is correlated with wealth, but there are some economies that are spectacularly sophisticated but only modestly wealthy (South Korea is one) while other economies are very rich but not especially sophisticated (such as Qatar). This new analysis finds a relationship between inequality and lack of economic complexity.
Holding other things constant, the simplest economies tend to be the most unequal; the more sophisticated ones tend to be more equal. It’s raspberries and wheat all over again. Or, if you prefer, the difference between a business such as oil (which employs a few people at high wages), textile work (which generates lots of jobs, but at low wages) and making precision components (which requires many skilled and well-paid workers). The oil-based economy will tend to be the most unequal, while the precision-engineering economy will tend to be the most equal.
There are exceptions: Australia’s economy is surprisingly simple thanks to a dependence on natural resources, but not especially unequal. Mexico is an outlier in the other direction, with a sophisticated but unequal economy. This research answers some questions and raises others. There’s a large and unsatisfying literature on the relationship between inequality and growth. Are unequal societies dynamic and entrepreneurial or dysfunctional patron-client states? The MIT study suggests that what’s been missing from these questions is a measure of economic complexity.
And what about financial services? They seem both sophisticated and highly unequal — an exception to the rule? Hidalgo’s data are silent on the topic. But Hidalgo himself isn’t persuaded that banking is particularly complex.
“Most countries have financial services,” he tells me. “But few countries know how to design new microprocessors or new medicines.” By that measure, and others, he thinks financial services are cruder than we tend to think. Perhaps. If so, the City of London has more in common with the oilfields of the North Sea than we are inclined to admit.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times.
My book “Messy” is available online in the US and UK or in good bookshops everywhere.