Economic Freedom (Property Rights) has worked where ever they have been tried. It is not tied to any particular ethnic group. Two hundred years ago people would have said the Japanese are incapable of being civilized – it was genetic. However, we have had many experiments on point. For instance, north and South Korea, Hong Kong vs. mainland China, East vs. West Germany, Estonia, Latvia and Finland before and after the fall of the USSR. American blacks had a lower divorce rate, lower out of wedlock birth rate, lower unemployment rate, and faster income growth than whites in the 1950s. After the civil rights legislation and Great Society programs, unemployment, out of wedlock births, and divorce rate all skyrocketed and the income gap between white and black grew. (Don’t believe me look up Thomas Sowell). Below are a number of sites that show that economic prosperity is not linked to genetics, but the polices a country follows. Countries have changed their policies for better and worse, so this is not determined by genetics.

Economic Freedom vs. Life Expectancy: http://mjperry.blogspot.mx/2011/07/econo...

Extensive set of charts including economic freedom vs. income/GDP then shows that everything positive in the world is correlated with increasing income/GPD: http://filipspagnoli.wordpress.com/stats...

Heritage Foundation Economic Freedom:
http://benparizek.com/notebook/economic_...

Transparency vs. Economic Freedom: http://www.google.com/imgres?q=economic+...

Gapminder Chart income per capita vs. life expectancy: http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMo...


Raising a Country’s Level of Technology is the Only Way to Increase Real Per Capita Income

Robert Solow received the Nobel prize in economics for showing this from an econometric point of view. However, it also makes sense logically. You cannot be more productive using the same tools, skills, techniques as you have always used.

There are two ways to increase a people’s level of technology: 1) Buy the technology from other people, or 2) invent new technologies.

Before property rights for inventions the rate at which new inventions were discovered was determined primarily by the number of people in a region. The first countries to escape the Malthusian Trap were England and the United States, which were leaders in property rights for inventions (patents). Note that Europe had dabbled with patent systems since the fifteen century where three of the Italian City States had patent systems. Venice’s system was very modern and Venice was one of the wealthiest places in the world at the time.

Loas, Cambodia, etc. only need to have a stable government that protects property rights to develop economically. The people are responding rationally to the system in which they live, they are not stupid (they may not be brilliant). Russia exported wheat before the communist took over in 1917, but had to import wheat thereafter. Did the farmers suddenly become stupider or were they responding to the system they lived in?

This article explains that property rights for invention are essential to escaping the Malthusian Trap. http://hallingblog.com/source-of-economi...

An interesting book on point is The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention http://www.amazon.com/Most-Powerful-Idea....

US Manufacturing Dying
The US has a thriving manufacturing sector. That is not why the US is declining economically. The US is declining because we are the least economically free
http://www.wisegeek.com/is-us-manufactur...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larahoffmans...