McCloskey on Cuba and education

I am reading a fascinating book that covers a wealth of economic history. It is a delightful book, very much in the tradition of Adam Smith. I want to share with you two paragraphs on Cuba, because of my interest in education in general, and that country in particular.

[E]ducation by itself does not yield much. Cubans nowadays go to school, as they did before the Revolution, if now strictly limited in what they are permitted to read …. Yet the Cubans at some points (Fidel repeatedly changed the laws) could not start a restaurant or take their farm produce to markets (Raul has somewhat relented), and so they remain to this day cripplingly poor, disabled from exercising bourgeois virtues–in sharp contrast to their cousins in Miami. Cuba’s income per head in 2001, despite all its alleged investment in human capital, was still about what it had been in 1958, while all around it since the Cuban Revolution income per head had almost doubled. In 2009 the country was malnourished. The cousins in Miami, by contrast, whether much educated or not, were doing a lot better, because they lived in a bourgeois society. And they could read what they wanted.

You will say if you are on the left, “But Cubans as you admit are educated and well cared for in their hospitals,” …. Yet so were they before 1958 well educated and well cared for, by the standards of the day. That’s why Cuba in 1958 was such a promising country, though ruled by a different gang of thugs from the present one. Yet after 1959 the Cubans fled from the workers’ paradise, just as the skilled are fleeing from Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua, to places where economic opportunities are better than at home. A democratic social scientist should be inclined to put weight on how people vote, with their feet, or their boats.

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 164-165.

This is the second volume of six that economic historian Deirdre McCloskey (born Donald McCloskey in 1942) is writing on The Bourgeois Era. The first volume was The Bourgeois Virtues (University of Chicago Press, 2007). The third is Bourgeois Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

When I finish this volume, I will read volume 1, then volume 3.

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