World on Fire’:Writer’s take on free market democracy

The World on Fire by Amy Chua. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU 

By Diana Ngila

In Summary

• The book is divided into three parts which are: the impact of economic globalisation, the political consequences of globalisation and ethno-nationalism in the West.

Amy Chua, a Chinese woman with roots in the Philippines, starts her book World on Fire with tragedy.

The loss of her wealthy aunt, her father’s twin sister, to her Filipino chauffeur. Reason: The indignity and hopelessness that comes with poverty.

Chua uses this “shameful” event as the genesis to her claim that “market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.”

By this the writer means Jews in post-communist Russia, white South Africans, the Kikuyu and Kalenjin in Kenya, Ibo in Nigeria and the Lebanese in Sierra Leone, to mention but a few examples, are the minorities that move and shake the markets in their specific countries or regions.

The reasons she gives for this are rooted mainly in cronyism, corrupt government and business practices mainly “laissez-faire policies” as well as colonialism. “Many market-dominant minorities are the descendants of former colonisers.

Thus the pervasive existence of market-dominant minorities throughout the developing world is one of colonialism’s most overlooked and most destructive legacies.”

Chua’s book reads like a lecture— she is a don at Yale Law School. Her style, simple yet complex, funny, but mostly serious, drips with historical accuracy and knowledge. She writes like someone used to entertaining all cultures.

The book is divided into three parts which are: the impact of economic globalisation, the political consequences of globalisation and ethno-nationalism in the West.

The straight-shooting Chua starts with this in the introduction: “That the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal, aggravation cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world.”

In short, democracy, and capitalism that come with it is not always the answer to every nation’s question. Although studies by the World Bank show that globalisation’s effects has produced benefits for both the rich and the poor, Chua states that “just as it is dangerous to view markets as the panacea for the world’s poverty and strife, it is also dangerous to see democracy as a panacea.

Markets and democracy may well offer the best long-run economic and political hope developing and post-Communist societies. In the short run, however, they are part of the problem.”

To Chua, the potent mix of poverty, ethnicity and lack of opportunity for the bottom billion should be cause for worry because the free markets we have in developing countries do not spread wealth equitably hence the rich get richer and poor get poorer.

Colonialism birthed a segment of educated and generally wealthier collaborators, who flourished and their children’s children continue to be the elites and ruling classes across the continent.

On Kenya, Chua looks into the country’s history and the relations between the races and the tribes to the economic growth including how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) led policies opened our market, leading to economic growth in subsequent years that benefited a slim segment of the population mainly because they were well connected.

Chua ends by saying the book is not about apportioning blame, but about the “unintended consequences” of the marriage between democracy and “laissez-fraire” capitalism. She reckons that what we are seeing in the world now is a mix of our collective histories, colonialism, corruption, divide and conquer policies as well as the powder keg of ethnicity. Chua is brilliant and unapologetic in her view of the world. From Brazil to China, Russia to Africa, World on Fire is set to light your mind with thoughts of our world as we know it and questions on our collective future.