Have you have ever wondered why the following paradox situations exist?:

1. Why poor nations who adopt low taxes, free trade, floating exchange rates, [reasonably] business friendly business evironments, and property rights seem to get nowhere?

2. Why when a myriad of economic, financial, taxation and educational incentives exist in a Country half the population still do not 'make it' and have virtually no net worth?

3. Why a country like Uganda is so poor despite all its resources, yet Switzerland (with none) is so rich?

4. Why a dustman winning the Lotto and playing the sharemarket will blow the lot in a few months, whereas someone such as myself with a similar windfall would generate a billion dollars in share trading profits within those few months?

5. Why the current tidalwave of foreclosures/mortgagee sales of houses in America is wiping out notable sportsmen, entertainers and gauche parvenu types?

...the answer just may be in what I have been saying for years, namely, that it is all in the breeding.

Gregory Clark, Professor of Economics at the University of California, has published a new book called Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World.

In the book he claims that that England got rich quick not by the Industrial Revolution in itself, but because of good breeding.

Clark dates (and I tend to disagree with this) the Industrial Revolution from 1800; and discusses how Britain 'got rich quick' due to new inventions, productivity, social mobility, free trade, property rights and so on; but argues that simply having such incentives and conditions is far from a guarantee of success in itself.

He points out that economic incentives in Medieval times were actually greater than in 1800 (he mentions 1% taxes, secure property rights, limited violence and social mobility) yet there was no increase in living standards or wealth as happened during the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent two centuries.

So what changed?

His answer is that in Medieval times rich people had more children than poor people, they lived longer and at death rich people were survived by more children than poor people, who often outlived their children who had died from disease or starvation.

This caused a kind of 'downward social mobility' as children of the rich took on occupations other than being an idle rich, due to the cost of maintaining a large family for the average rich chap...sons of rich merchants became traders, sons of skilled craftsmen became labourers and so on.

The children of the rich were already 'normal' with certain values, mores, education standards, good behaviour and other important qualities.
When everyone reached age 35 or so and only the children of the rich were left and all the poor people had died, the 'rich man's values' became the standard and got "passed on to up and coming poor people", so to speak.

As part of an evolutionary process the poor people started copying their 'betters' and embracing qualities they did not (and arguably today still do not) possess such as literacy, thrift, patience, ingenuity, enterprise, ambition and so forth.

Therefore by 1800 Britain had had values of poor people...indolence, ignorance, bad manners etc ...bred out of their nation which meant they were ripe to create and benefit from the Industrial Revolution.

There are those who fail to appreciate this fundamental point...that only by good breeding and adopting qualities of people better than oneself will success occur.

To use a modern day example mentioned above, Uganda is wasting its time because it has an ignorant population of poor people which all the minerals and oil in the World will never make up for; and I once heard Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, saying that Uganda would only be a rich successful country if they invited the British back to run the place, and it is quite true.

Switzerland, on the other hand, will always be rich and successful because they have a substantial population of affluent people, with generations of good breeding, generations of thrift, enterprise, lateral thinking, profitmaking experience behind them which simply gets passed on to each new generation.

Without good breeding and values underpining a nation success will simply not happen, and it saddens me that many libertarians persist with egalitarianism and a denying of reality on this point.