Dogged self-serving basic to corruption
In their expansive account of economic history, Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson provide a vivid glimpse of the cost of overweening power in Elizabeth I’s faintly menacing reaction to the resourcefulness of a man who must surely have counted as one of her most innovative subjects.
William Lee, home from Cambridge in 1583, was mulling over the queen’s injunction that all her people should wear knitted caps, when — watching his mother and sisters knitting away furiously — it struck him that a far more efficient way of making the mandatory caps would be to use not just two needles per thread, but many. So was born the idea of a revolutionary machine, the stocking frame.
By 1589, Lee’s machine made and proven, he gained an audience with Elizabeth. She was impressed, which I suppose is why she wouldn’t grant him a patent. “Thou aimest high, Master Lee,” she reportedly said. “Consider thou what the invention would do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.” (She and Ebrahim Patel would clearly get on.)
Typically for an enterprising spirit, Lee soldiered on. By 1598 his machine could knit stockings from silk and wool. But like Elizabeth, her successor, James I, refused Lee a patent. By the time the inventor died in Paris in about 1614, his business had come to nought.
The same was not true of his invention, later acknowledged as a factor in what was undoubtedly the most consequential revolution of all: the industrial one, which delivered the modern age.
Elizabethan England lies at an order of remoteness from contemporary SA that is perhaps difficult to bridge even in the imagination. Yet the rationale — and constant selfserving anxiety — of the powerful of those days is as familiar as yesterday, no less than the force of new ideas, freely acted on (or the cost of stunting them).
Before power shifted more assuredly away from the favoured, princely, authoritarian few, the limits on new ideas and the freedom to act on them often were as arbitrary as they were devastating, not just for the uncommonly resourceful and imaginative but for all of society. Exercising power in a doggedly self-interested way was, and still is, the essential ingredient of corruption.
Intriguingly, there is no dedicated entry for “corruption” in the index of Why Nations Fail, though of course the reader encounters its dynamics in every chapter, whether in the conduct of England’s monarchs or of the tacky embezzlers and abusive autocrats of our own time.
In this context, SA’s worst score yet in Transparency International’s corruption perceptions index — 41 out of a 100 in 2023, down from 43 in 2022 -— is a warning. As Corruption Watch points out, this finds SA “stumbling into the category of flawed democracies”.
Regrettably, this is not a surprise. As my colleague Hermann Pretorius has pointed out, the confluence of Transparency International’s corruption data with the IMF’s revision of SA’s projected 2024 growth rate “to 1% (from 1.8% last October) is a stark reminder that the basic tenets of progrowth policy are not being met”.
Acemoglu and Robinson remind us of the close association between political and economic institutions in writing that “inclusive economic institutions [a must for prosperity] will neither support nor be supported by extractive political ones [a hallmark of failure]”.
South Africans want the former, a virtuous meeting of growth and liberty. And let’s not tolerate being told that we’re aiming too high.