John RapleyIN MY last two columns I wrote about development, gradually bringing the subject closer to home. I started with the international conditions, namely global inequality, which hinders the Third World's development, then moved on to national conditions, income inequality, that do the same. Today, I will wrap up the discussion by bringing it right into the home.
Some time ago, I was having a drink with a friend, a Chinese businessman here in Kingston. We were discussing the challenges facing the country when he asked me if I knew of any country which had developed successfully without a foundation in strong families. The question might have seemed an obvious rhetorical device, given the strong attachment to family among the Chinese and the point he had to make. But as I did a mental inventory, I found it hard to come up with a positive answer.
In recent years the question has been one to which economic historians have turned their attention. By and large, they have concluded that stable, strong families are an important prerequisite to economic and social development. In particular, they emphasise the importance of nuclear families. But whereas many people tend to treat nuclear and extended families as separate models, in fact the two often go together. Witness the Chinese practice of anchoring their nuclear families in extended networks, which can be open and reasonably inclusive.
The advantage of a strong and self-sufficient nucleus is that it tends to facilitate the all-important process of capital accumulation. When married couples are expected to be relatively independent, they tend to defer the onset of childbearing. Generally, this reduces family size, and provides for long periods when household wealth is accumulated. In the end, higher saving and smaller family size tends to raise the investment per head made in each child. Note that we are not talking about the accumulation of material things. The capital accumulated tends to be human capital: more invested by the future parents in their own education and health, and subsequently in that of their children.
Equally, some sociologists contend that the time invested in children by stable families creates another form of capital, which they call social capital. High degrees of interpersonal trust, found among people who have been given a strong basis of trust and stability during their upbringing, tends to reduce what economists call transaction costs. For instance, a businessperson need not invest heavily in security or contract enforcement if he or she is operating in a society in which employees, business partners, clients or simply the strangers encountered on the street can be trusted not to steal his or her money or goods.
Some historians trace the early development of European capitalism to the late Middle Ages, when the Pope declared that marriage had to be consensual. Parents then lost the right to determine who their children's spouses would be. Out of this there emerged, after many mutations, the basis of what would come to be known as the nuclear family. We in the Third World have tended to emphasise the role capital accumulation in the colonies played in the development of European capitalism. But colonialism was not a cause so much as a consequence of capitalism.
There is a case to be made that the process of accumulation began, nearly 1000 years ago, in the home.
Dysfunctional behaviour
If that is the case, what happens to economies when the family breaks down? It may be that richer societies have the accumulated capital to absorb the resultant shocks, at least for a time. But it is perhaps telling that the USA now has the lowest savings rate in its history. This situation cannot continue forever, and most American politicians now worry about the future of the family.
In poorer societies like our own, the added social cost of teaching and caring for essentially homeless children, not to mention the social cost of dysfunctional behaviour and lagging academic performance, may place a weighty shackle on our future growth. This problem may be both our simplest and most difficult to solve. Simple in that the solutions seem clear. But difficult in that the solutions require each of us to do our bit in rebuilding family life. And that, so far, has proved too much to ask for many of us.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
