Of all the courses I taught during my career as an academic, the one I taught the most times was a course I taught for the Simon Fraser University School of International Studies on the history of the world economy. The course sought to, among other things, show my students just how long there had been something to which we might reasonably refer as “the world economy.” My course narrative began in about 800 BCE, based on a concept called the “Axial Age,” as theorized by German philosopher Karl Jaspers when the more developed areas of the Eastern Hemisphere underwent similar shifts in religious and philosophical thinking, which became more universalist in character.
Increasing claims of philosophical universality, I argued, followed rather than preceding, significant increases in travel, trade and exchange and the gradual emergence of an economy encompassing the majority of the world’s population. The economy that emerged between 800 and 200 BCE was roughly T-shaped, stretching from the Cornwall Peninsula of Great Britain in the northwest to the mouth of the Zambezi River in present-day Mozambique in the south to Japan in the northeast. While the Americas, Australia and West Africa remained outside the system, the economy that gave us Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Judaism, etc. was large and diverse enough to be meaningfully understood as the “world economy,” as distinct from the global economy that arose during the Age of Sail/Age of European Supremacy between the voyages sponsored by Henry the Navigator and Captain James Cook’s expeditions 1421-1777.
Lacking the maritime technology to affordably move staple goods in large quantities, trade in the original world economy primarily comprised three classes of good: weapons, slaves and luxury goods. While there existed some high-utility luxury goods, in the form of spices, trade in most luxury goods was largely powered by cultural and ecological differences. Cloves, cinnamon and sugarcane, for instance, could not be grown in more temperate, northern climes and so they could fetch high prices in those regions. But some luxury items, like gold, pearls and gems, simply meant more in some places than others based on purely cultural factors. The best luxury goods checked both boxes; Europeans had hunted their elephants and great cats to extinction but retained a cultural memory of those beasts and a hunger for pelts and tusks.
This meant that, while there was a world economy, the fundamental wealth on which societies were based was largely immune to interregional trade and exchange. And that wealth was in the form of food crops and livestock and the surplus that could be extracted therefrom. The riches and places were based around the floodplains of the great rivers of the civilized world, the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, Tigris-Euphrates and, especially, the Nile.
And it was in one of the great universalist thinkers of the period that we see the beginnings of profound and powerful thinking about political economy. I am referring, here, not to Aristotle but to Lao Tsu, founder of Taoism and author of the Tao Te Ching. Lao Tsu’s fundamental insight, and one with which I agree was this: the best way to discover a rich place is to look for a concentrated population of poor and oppressed people. His argument was that societies that are closer to subsistence cannot produce the surplus necessary to finance their oppression, that oppression requires a non-productive class of oppressors to work as soldiers, overseers, managers, courtiers, etc.
When the world is with the Tao,
Carriages are used to transport manure;
When the world is without the Tao,
Armed chariots are lined up near the city gates.
- Tao 46
Unlike other Chinese philosophers, Lao Tsu opposed the very existence of China precisely because it could only exist by extracting the surplus needed to maintain the armed forces required to keep the empire in place. He preferred, instead, that we live in “small countries.”
A small nation has a small population,
Yet even without state-of-the-art instruments to work with,
People would rather sacrifice themselves than migrate away.
Even though there are vessels and vehicles for travel,
None takes the opportunity;
Even though there are national guards,
They are not lined up for inspection;
People revert to simple means of measure with straps and knots.
Indulge their desires and aspirations,
Adorn their attires and outfits,
Secure their place and quarters,
Console their beliefs and customs.
Then even if the neighboring nation is within sight,
And the crowing and barking can be heard,
People retire of old age without longing to give service to the other.
- Tao 80
While I am not dogmatic or simplistic when it comes to Taoist political economy, I am certain of this: we need to take a perspective more informed by Taoism when facing the fundamental questions of our age when it comes to questions of political economy as it pertains to two of the animating political passions of my whole life: environmental conservation and alleviating poverty.
There are a lot of intellectually unserious memes out there these days about billionaires, especially the world’s richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. These memes propound the view that if these men just gave all their money to the right charities it would “world hunger” or “end poverty,” or some other economic shift that could, overnight, reverse the trend towards wealth concentration and polarization that has steadily accelerated over the past fifty years.
Now don’t get me wrong: the existence and power of these billionaires is an indictment our tax systems, our antitrust anti-monopoly laws, our protections against foreign control of our economies, etc. But that does not make it true that poverty can be simplistically solved by seizing an individual’s wealth, all other things being equal.
My views on the need for a more Taoist economic approach for tackling poverty shifted profoundly as a result not of joining the Conservative Party of BC in 2022 but of the year I spent living in Dar Es Salaam 2023-24.
Dar is the largest city on the East African coast. It is also one of the poorest. And it is also the de facto capital of one of the poorest East African states; the per capita income of Kenyans, for instance, is double that of Tanzanians. I did not live in a wealthy neighbourhood but instead in a lower middle class area that was beginning to gentrify. But, as a curious man who enjoyed the gratuitous mini-cab rides I could afford there and who sought to stay fit in a climate ill suited for cardio, I walked and rode all over Dar, through rich neighbourhoods and poor ones, through informal favela-like communities on the outskirts. I also visited towns tourists rarely do, Kilwa Masoko, Ikwiriri, Bagamoyo and Kilwa Kisiwani.
And in all that time, in all that travel I did not see one person sleeping rough or one person obviously unhinged from drink or drug to the point of being out of contact with reality. I saw disabled people whose physical disabilities could have been treated better in a Canadian hospital who obviously couldn’t obtain proper medical treatment when they needed it. I saw people clearly malnourished and underfed. And I saw people sleeping in shacks, stores and their vehicles. Most people in Tanzania are poor, damn poor, but not, “poor in spirit.” Until recently, we understood that simple material deprivation was insufficient to destroy a resilient person’s sense of pride, dignity, responsibility or hope. Something else has to go wrong for people to be sleeping rough, wild in the street, half-clothed in urine-soaked garments. Just Lao Tsu argued that wealth, at the level of a nation, creates oppression, I am coming to suspect that, at least in Anglo America, wealth is also creating poverty of spirit.
In contrast, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside has the highest concentration, per square foot, of wealth anywhere in British Columbia. It rains millions of dollars from the sky every day and has now for generation. Fifty years ago, the DTES was known as Skid Row and its main population were single, retired or semi-retired bush workers, most, very heavy drinkers, who lived in cheap residential hotels or small, shabby apartments and got into knife fights with upsetting frequency.
But beginning in the 1970s with the creation of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association (DERA), first charity money, then municipal government money, then, in the 1980s, money from senior governments began funding pilot programs, specialized interventions and local subsidies to the area. Services for certain groups also began being concentrated there, namely addicts and indigenous people.
Indigenous people, because they comprise a much larger portion of the rural proletariat than they do of other groups in Canadian society, are, naturally, over-represented among bush workers and therefore already comprised a significant chunk of DTES residents. But as Blairite Austerity took hold in the 1990s, a new logic drove the demographic remaking of the neighbourhood. An ever-increasing number of charities and non-profits joined DERA in the neighbourhood as lucrative government contracts rolled out for QuaNGOs to provide an ever increasing diversity of government services, a large proportion of them experimental or pilot programs that existed nowhere but the DTES for decades: a supervised injection site, supportive housing and a host of others.
And, as these services agglomerated, it just made sense to place services targeted at drug users and indigenous people in the neighbourhood. It was the unavailability of services anywhere else in BC that drove an increasing rate of migration into an increasingly racialized, increasingly addicted population. As specialized services for addiction, madness and poverty accumulated, as more government partnerships rolled out, as the province deinstitutionalized the mentally ill from provincial facilities and placed them in the care of QuaNGOs, the DTES became a centre of racial oppression, despair, addiction and madness.
Soon we were searching the hinterland for traumatized indigenous people for the state to send to Main and Hastings for treatment, the way the Aztecs levied sacrifice victims from the margins of their empire to sacrifice on the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in the name of their bloodthirsty religion.
The concentrations of poverty Aristotle, Lao Tsu and the other great economists of the ancient world saw in the deltas of the Nile, Indus, Ganges and Yangtze were made possible by the vast agricultural surplus which empires could use to pay men with swords and spears to take even more from the peasants and make them eat less, toil harder and have less control over their lives and those of the people they loved. Were he here today, Lao Tsu would recognize the social workers, the nurses, the bureaucrats, the commissars, the “community organizers” and “stakeholder advocates” as just another army of oppressors and looters, using the wealth, the surplus raining down on them to design and administer new kinds of misery and despair.
Am I suggesting that these people are uniformly or even mostly evil or ill-intentioned? Of course not. Like many of the soldiers for the Emperor, for Pharaoh, for the Brahmins, for the Mandarins, many are motivated by a deep altruism, a desire to help and a noble sense of mission, to defend the people, glorify the empire, make a great god-fearing civilization. But such true believers are also more likely to join, en masse, simplistic moralistic religions, bow down before idols and imagine themselves to have a special divine mission that transcends the simple morality of those in whose suffering they are implicated. The Pharaoh’s soldiers’ main work and stated purpose was not the immiseration of the fellahin but their protection from the Assyrians and the Persians. That is why Lao Tsu proposed eschewing surplus: only by having nothing to steal could looters and raiders be truly kept at bay. “Not collecting treasures prevents stealing,” he reminds us.
It is not just on an environmental front that we need to listen to Lao Tsu and keep our used car instead of buying an EV, keep our incandescent lights to heat our homes while we light them in the winter, to engage in an eco-politics of choosing to buy nothing over buying “green tech.” We need to understand that there is no way around the human race actually learning to restrain itself, to do less, to collect less, to enjoy our neighbours more and our AI server farms less. Because, ultimately, any energy efficiency technology that reduces demand just creates space for more private jets, more coal-fired server farms, more swimming pools in luxury homes.
The principle of less not more, the embrace of sufficiency and forbearance—these will not just get us out of our ecological tailspin but our civilization’s mad plunge into oppression, suffering, madness and poverty, a plunge we have taken precisely because we have never been so rich.
