Economic policy does matter

From The Times’ obituary for Kenneth Kaunda:

He might have stayed in power and departed at a time of his own choosing but for his Achilles’ heel, an ineptness in economic management, which blighted his country’s development. When he came to power in 1964 Zambia was among the more prosperous of Britain’s former colonies in Africa thanks to earnings from the Copperbelt in the north. Even greater wealth might have been harvested from the Zambian soil, which was and remains some of the finest farming land in Africa. But, like his friend Julius Nyerere, the president of Tanzania, Kaunda trusted to socialist agricultural policies with disastrous results, and when the copper price fell in the 1970s Zambia was precipitated into an economic decline from which it has never recovered.

To create food shortages in a land where you have to leap out of the way of a fallen seed’s zooming growth does require excessively bad policy.

In his early years in office, humanism could be equated with socialist policies; the copper mines were nationalised and agriculture put in the hands of peasant co-operatives and state farms. When the copper price fell and state agriculture became riddled with inefficiency and corruption,

We do like to remind that Tsarist Russia and today’s Russia - for all the faults in both polities - both were/are grain exporters. Soviet Russia, for all the science of the agricultural system, required grain imports.

We seem, as with the Washington Consensus, to have a little list of stupid things that should not be done to any economy. This being one of the pieces of evidence to show that at least a part of economics is in fact a science. Postulate an hypothesis - say, that socialism makes a place rich - and test that against the evidence. When it’s the universe disagreeing with the idea then it’s reality that wins, not the wishful thinking.

A useful lesson for the rest of us perhaps?