BASSETERRE St. Kitts, November 9th, 2012 -- Greetings and salutations to all gathered here this evening. First, let me thank Governor Sir. Dwight Venner and the directorate of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, for affording me this opportunity to address this distinguished audience both in person and, I gather, via the digital media, on this issue that I have dubbed “Contesting Destinies in a W. Arthur Lewis framework.”
I wish, also, to recognize all of the other dignitaries, colleagues, friends and comrades in the academic and social space, and those whose spirits may be invoked this evening as I interrogate the concept of contesting destinies a la Arthur Lewis.
I was privileged to have met Sir Arthur via his writings long before I met him in person. My Ph.D. dissertation is based on his seminal article for which he obtained his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979. The article entitled “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour” published in the economic journal of the Manchester School articulated a specificity about the role of labour in countries such as ours in the Caribbean.
I used that concept to discuss the diffusion of nursing labour services from the Caribbean to Britain. My actual face to face meeting with Sir Arthur was at the Central Bank of Barbados on the 23rd of May, 1989, when the Caribbean Studies Association, of which I am a former President and founding Secretary-Treasurer, finally recognized Sir Arthur for his work. It was not the only honour in the Caribbean.
In 1980, the journal, Social and Economic Studies (Volume 29, number 4, December) put out a special edition in his honour in which a select group of Caribbean Social Scientists wrote papers to congratulate him and to dispel some of the myths and misunderstandings surrounding his theories. We were late in the day. But, as some people said then, it was better late than never.
Sir Arthur, in his acceptance speech at the CSA conference, said that the recognition reminded him of the situation where two people were married for many years and towards the end of their life, the husband remembered that he had not given his wife the ring. For 16th lectures before this one, Arthur’s ring of recognition was been put firmly on his finger by lecturers before me in this forum.
Tonight, as I did six years ago in St. Lucia at the Laureates lecture, I will once again polish the ring of recognition that is long overdue. In so doing I will construct a thesis wherein I will stipulate that W. Arthur Lewis was, contextually, born to contest destiny. And for that we, in this part of the world, should be absolutely proud.
Definitions
As I seek to interrogate the concept of contesting destinies in an Arthur Lewis framework, I wish first of all to lay bare the notion which undergirds my thrust. I speak of contest in the traditionally-styled approach. That is, an approach where there is a struggle for some levels of superiority between rivals, and or where there is a competition in which performance is appraised by a judge. This segues into a juridical space where contesting is captured in the leitmotif of Lewis in the sense that what we are about to depict is associated with the centrality of his work in terms of content and cogency. Thus contesting is to be seen against the backdrop of one’s defence against an adversarial claim, or one’s challenging a position associated with a given pronouncement.
The ideological context of contesting destiny positions our thoughts on the frontiers of the centre and the periphery, the pragmatic imperatives to which I was first introduced as a young 28-year-old lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, between 1973-1976, where there were Saturday mornings discussions in SR4 on the Plantation School of Economics and the New World School, and where there were post-discussions over libations at the bar at the Senior Common Room.
From a practical point of view the popularity of destiny emanated from the notion of ‘manifest destiny” developed by John O’Sullivan, an American columnist and editor. O’Sullivan coined the term manifest destiny in 1845 to promote the US annexation of Texas and the then Oregon countries. This manifest destiny was a seen as a ‘divine mandate” bequeath to some by Providence to spread a Jeffersonian style of democracy first in the USA and subsequently around the world.
In many respects, as Maria Clemencia Ramirez notes in her review of Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples by David Marbury-Lewis, Theodore Macdonald and Biorn Marbury-Lewis (eds.), manifest destiny was not associated with indigenous peoples, nor was it supposed to be linked to the work of our people. You see, destiny was anchored in the politics of expansionism. So, this evening I intend to show that using the subtlety of his training, and the canvas of contesting and destiny, Arthur Lewis was able to leave for us a cornucopia of ideas that cantered on industrial economics, a history of the world economy, since 1870, and development economics.
An Evolutionary Circle in Lewisian Space
Arthur Lewis’ contesting destinies started at seven years of age. At that time he had to stay home due to an ailment. George Lewis, his father, saw this not as a problem, but an opportunity to teach his son so that when he resumed his schooling, he would be at least up with the rest of his classmates. But, as destiny would have it, when Arthur returned to school, he discovered that his father had taught him about two years of work in three months. Thus it was his destiny to skip from grade four to grade six. Under normal circumstances such a skip would have made most youngsters excited.
But to Arthur it meant that he was the youngster amidst a group of older students and this gave him an unusual sense of inferiority.
Life took another decisive twist at the age of seven. His father died then. The task of rearing five boys fell to his mother. Like the typical powerful Caribbean mother she disciplined with love, hard work, gentleness and ensured that her sons were imbued with an attitude that success was always to be the crowning glory of one’s endeavours.
Upon leaving school at age fourteen, Arthur worked as a clerk in the civil service but this was primarily because the governmental bureaucrats felt that he was too young to sit the examination for the one island government scholarship that the British so generously bestowed. The rest is history. Arthur passed the exam, but once again what he wanted to do and what others wanted for him were in a contesting fracas. He wanted to be an engineer and they, the bureaucracy, wanted him to be a lawyer or to be a medical doctor.
While these professions are admirable and honourable, those were not the fields that he wanted. When the powers that be permitted him to go to school, he went to the London School of Economics (the vaunted LSE) to do a Bachelor in Commerce degree. He contended that he had no idea what Economics was all about at that time. But by the time he had immersed himself in the discipline, the so-called the dismal science, he was to revolutionize the subject matter in a fashion, manner and texture that few have seen. You see, his insatiable appetite for knowledge enabled him to graduate with honours in 1937 at the age of 22.
From that time Arthur was on his way to craft some seminal foundation articles that would be the bedrock of development economics, as we know it. This, we contend, was his measure of contesting destinies. Some people had other ideas for him but all along he wanted to inspect and not expect. He opted for inquiry as opposed to a desultory existence. So with a first class honours degree in 1937, he was offered and he accepted an LSE scholarship to do a PhD.
The following year, 1938, he was given a one-year teaching appointment. This was an astounding event in the British academy. He moved through the ranks with what seems like the speed of light and in 1948, at age 33, Arthur Lewis was a full professor of Economics at Manchester University At the University of Manchester Sir Arthur spent nine productive but restless years, searching for something to do and seeking to make a grander contribution as his destiny was calling. Many West Indians in Green Heys and Moss Side, Manchester, persons with whom I spoke when I was doing my Ph.D. in England in 1973, knew of the then Arthur Lewis. They knew of him as the smart West Indian at the University.
The restless Sir Arthur had a greater calling. It came from afar. When Ghana attained independence from Britain in 1957, this Caribbean son of the soil, travelled to Mother Africa at the behest of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. It was Arthur who, as the UN Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister of Ghana, drafted Ghana’s first National Development or Strategic Plan, 1959-1963.
We know the other developments in Sir Arthur’s life. We know that he published a massive volume of articles between 1952 and 1957 after having published a book in 1949, Principles of Economic Planning on the issues of trade cycles. He was reluctant to be involved in this type of economics but Frederick Hayek, then Acting Chairman of the LSE Department of Economics persuaded him to do so. And we are the better for it. Sometimes no matter how we kick and scream what is to be will be.
Sir Arthur combined the academic and the practical world. He blazed a trail at the University of the West Indies, first in the Department of Economics and subsequently as Vice Chancellor. He set up the Caribbean Development Bank in 1971 and served as President. He was Chancellor of the University of Guyana. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth the Second, in 1963. And that same year he was appointed Professor of Public Administration and International Affairs at Princeton University, and subsequently appointed to the distinguished position as James Madison Professor of Political Economics. And the list goes on.
Changes and Destiny
As Arthur fought against the winds of change, destiny again overwhelmed him. From his earliest days he struggled with deconstructing the kernel of what were the determinants of “the relative prices of steel and coffee.” This notion could be seen as far removed as chalk is from cheese to a Caribbean economist. But you see, Arthur was not a Caribbean economist in the narrow, myopic sense of the word, he was an economist in its full panoply. Thus he realized that the notions of the British philosopher and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, about marginality utility were absolutely off base. It did not make sense, even though today we still undergird our microeconomics in a marginal utility foundation.
In a parallel fashion, another theorem was putting Sir Arthur through the wringers. This was the Heckscher-Ohlin theorem. The H-O model states that “a country will export goods that use its abundant factors intensively, and import goods that use its scarce factors intensively.” In the two factor case, “a capital abundant country will export the capital-intensive good, while the labour-abundant country will export the labour-intensive good.”
The primary assumption in this H-O model is that the two countries are identical, except for the difference in resource endowments. Suffice to say, Lewis dissed this notion because the idea of the countries having the same production functions did not make any sense to him, and in his example he recognized that coffee cannot be grown in most of the steel producing countries. He also challenged the neoclassical assumption underpinning real wages. As the intellectual struggle continued to envelope him, destiny blossomed like a lotus flower.
Now, the Heckscher-Ohlin model was a solidly developed general equilibrium mathematical model of international trade. It was developed by Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin at the Stockholm School of Economics. It was grounded on the David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. To Lewis, something was off target. So, as Lewis notes, in his Nobel Lecture, one day while he was walking down a road in Bangkok, Thailand, the solution to the problems came to him out of the blue. He decided to throw away the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of labour is fixed.
Essentially, he contended, “an unlimited supply of labour” will suppress wages thereby producing cheap coffee in the first instance and high profits in the second instance. In contesting the fundamentals of established neoclassical theories, Sir Arthur moved traditional economics to a new level of thinking. He was contesting and confronting change in the body economics.
In confronting change in the emerging body of Economics, Arthur Lewis contested destiny and securely established what has passed into the literature as the “Two-Tier Dual Sector Model.” Fundamentally the model stratifies a country’s economy in two broad sectors namely a traditional sector and a modern sector. The traditional sector is ensconced in a setting of high unemployment and low wages. The modern sector, on the other hand, is cocooned in a space where there is a grand accumulation of capital and or wealth. Now, you would see that this represents shades of the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s when our people went to England, Canada and the USA.
The low wages in the traditional sector tend to be propellants to force a movement of labour to the high capital sector in search of the streets paved with gold. The model pinpoints a clear fact. This dual economy, there could co-exist high capital rents and low wages. And furthermore, these conditions could exist in developing countries such as those in our part of the world, despite the rapid developments that may be in vogue.
Lewis also gave us another model which cantered on the “Trade Model Terms.” This is a scenario founded along the lines of the Two-Sector model but with a sectorial focus on the commercial links between developed and developing countries across the world. Comparative labour productivities were seen as the determinants of developments in the agricultural sectors. Specifically, the trading terms between rich and poor nations were decided in the ambit of the terms of trade.
Contested Modernity
One would have thought that Sir Arthur’s work at that point in time would have been sufficient to establish him among his peers and for his peers to accept path-breaking strides that he had made. But alas that was not to be. Thus in the halls of Mona, Jamaica, in the halls of St. Augustine, Trinidad, and elsewhere, there was endless debate about the relevance of Sir Arthurs’s work. Some focused on the notion that he was himself a classical/neoclassical economist and thus he could not de-link himself from the centrality of neoclassical theory.
Some contended that his implicit thesis of invitation to invest was vested in a garb like a Trojan horse. It held more dangers than the external armour radiated. The arguments against things Lewis seemed to centre on the notion that since his historical work was sourced in production, prices and trade between 1870 and 1914, the work could be challenged as to its relevance in a region where the centre and the periphery were of signal importance, and where persistency poverty, of the George Beckford fame, was the order of the day.
Paradoxically, while some of my colleagues sought to deconstruct Lewis’ work, or more so to destroy Lewis’ work, the country of Singapore adopted Lewis’ work and moved hell and the devil to demonstrate that there was substance to what he was saying and that indeed even though it was a small state that size was not a constraint to its survival and its economic self-sustaining path. Linked to the Singaporean thrust, is what is taking place today in the development of China.
June, this year, my family and I visited China. We toured and explored six of the largest provinces: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdhu and Chongqing. By the way, Chongqing is now essentially the new frontier of the electronics industry. Ask Apple. We went over to Hong Kong and Macao. I was using my Economist’s eyes to compare China with our part of the world. What was remarkable to me, as an Economist, is the fact that Arthur Lewis is now in China.
Today China, which was once cornered the market for its massive quantum of low-cost labourers is now firmly on the path to what is termed the Lewis Turning Point” or the “Lewisian Turning Point.” What is this Lewis Turing Point? The LTP is the juncture where unlimited supplies of labour in an economy no longer exist and where, as a result of the absorption of this labour in the modern sector, further capitalization begins to increase wages. Now China is still far away from its entire surplus labour being absorbed in the modern sectors.
The country still continues to support a massively dense population on a base that is poorly endowed. Except for the fact that China has 96 per cent of the world’s rare earth minerals such as magnesium, cerium oxide, silicon, bismuth and so on, which are used in cell phones, florescent bulbs, and hybrid cars, to name a few, China still is now in the space of the Lewis Turning Point. Will it continue to be in this phase?
Robert L. Tignor, Professor of modern and contemporary history at Princeton University, the University where Sir Arthur was Professor of Economics for many years, contends, according to Bloomberg News, that “Arthur would have been really pleased to see that his theories have been proven to be pretty valid when it comes to countries like China.” Robert Tignor (2005) wrote the outstanding book on Sir Arthur entitled W. Arthur Lewis and the Birth of Development Economics, Princeton University Press.
Economists, with whom I spoke at an Asian Business Conference in Hong King, on my June trip, noted that if China’s momentum continues as it is now, there may be a post-Lewis Turning Point. In that case the magnitude of global manufacturing activities in China may seek other unlimited labour surplus centres like India and Vietnam. The fact is that idea is far away. Centrally, however, the Lewis ideas have some specificity for us in the region. And whether we are at the Lewis Turning Point or the post-Lewis, we in the region did not adopt Lewis’s key pointers.
So why did Lewis destiny permitted him to successfully contest ideas in countries like Singapore and China and not fruitfully in the Caribbean? For one, Singapore is not the Caribbean. Singapore is a southeastern Asian city state of 63 islands. In some respects it is just like the Caribbean. The country is highly urbanized and religion and discipline play central roles. Some people contend that discipline plays the greatest role.
China, for its part, now emphasizes state capitalism. This may sound like an oxymoronic term, but all of the factories that we visited were run by the state. It is what we used to call a mixed economy in early economic classes, but with a bias towards the state. I want to argue that Arthur Lewis was very clear in his many points of contentions about how his theories would work. Whether he was arguing our case before a British Commission or making the case that the British did not know what they were doing in the Caribbean as far as management was concerned, he was very clear and succinct. For us in the Caribbean and for the developing countries around the world, the contest was one of essential planning.
In his excellent volume entitled Development Planning: The Essential of Economic Policy (1966:7), Lewis stated:
“The secret of successful planning lies more in sensible politics and good public administration.”
One need not repeat this dictum. It is not true that in Singapore and China that there were always sensible politics and good public administration. But the point could be made that there was a sufficient quantum of both of those traits that the two countries in question enabled one to state that a Lewis destiny was amply contested and favourably resolved in Singapore and China when we in this part of the world cavalierly and blissfully put Arthur on the shelf, if we ever read him with any sense of urgency.
As I noted elsewhere (Jones-Hendrickson, “Unlocking the Potential within an Arthur Lewis Perspective, January 27, 2006):
Our world today whether we see ourselves as people in the Caribbean, or families in the Diaspora, is a world where we cannot be cavorting in blissful ignorance of what is around us and about what we need to do. The world is moving at a dizzying pace. We cannot say, stop the world, we want to get off. As much as we may not like all of the parametric shifts that are taking place in the world, we have to be engaged. As we stand on the “hot tin roof of development” we have to catapult ourselves to new levels of thinking, we have to work outside the box. (At times we have to operate as if there are no boxes to box us in).
Our years of innocence are now gone. We have to be bold and audacious in what we do and what we want to do. As we seek to unlock our potential for ourselves, our children and our region, we have to take the Sir Sridath Ramphal, et al., dictum: This must be a Time for Action (1993). Our capacity to go forward, to unlock the additional potential in us must depend on the ability of our leaders to deliver a style of living that is in sync with the aspirations of our people. In other words, our economic destiny must be metered according to sensible politics and good public administration.
Kenneth Hall and Denis Benn said that we in the Caribbean all are Contending with Destiny (2000). While there is substance to their point of view, we who called this part of the world our home by birth or choice, must not merely contend. We cannot afford to be content with what is given to us and what is before us. We have to contest things and determine our destiny in the frame of reference that Arthur Lewis intended for us to see and appreciate in the theoretical essence of his works.
As I said in the same paper, (Jones-Hendrickson, 2006):
Whatever destiny we want, whatever outlook in which we intend to engage, whatever idyllic beauty we wish to have in our part of the world, we have to be patently alert to the fact that any development in our region, going forward, will be a development with pain. In the past, events happened and we assumed that they happened by chance.
These days, the stories are coming out that there are people around the world who set out to destroy, derail and delude us. John Perkins (2004) in his very provocatively titled book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, outlines in graphic details how some of the people who we thought were our friends, callously and calculatingly set out to undermine our economies and our leaders and our societies.
The established New York Times dubbed Perkins’ work “cloak and dagger atmospherics.” Even if his revelations were marginally true, it would suggest that economic models and suggestions of the type that Sir Arthur suggested for our countries and regions may not work because there are forces external to us who are determined that our countries should not work. To me, if I know where I am going, and others do not know, they have a problem, not me.
Thus, to me, there are more fundamental metrics in Sir Arthur’s work than the manufactured rift between what he thought and what others thought he said. Mirrors of illusion were sometimes used to assess his work. His work had practical implications for us then, and could be practical and pragmatic in their implementations today in the Caribbean. And arising out of his work one could ably contend that even if there are Economic Hit Men geared to derail our economic endeavours, we have to at all times to operate on the playing field of permanent interests, and not permanent friends.
Many of the voices that contested Sir Arthur’s work on Caribbean economics, especially the work devoted to the industrialization of the Caribbean seem to suggest that Sir Arthur merely wanted to have foreign capitalists come to the Caribbean and industrialize our area. This could be the farthest from the truth. No such thing. Such a proposition has no merit.
Lewis’ “The Industrialization of the British West Indies,” Caribbean Economic Review, volume 2, May, 1950, was offered at a time when our Caribbean countries were still British outposts. Britain’s view was that we would be hewers of wood and drawers of water. The overlords in that country were not in favour of any industrialization in the colonies. The British Empire was so demarcated that the
colonies were to supply the raw materials, the sugar, the cotton, the cocoa, and the rest, and Britain was to do the manufacturing. So, for instance, sugar would have been shipped from St. Kitts, cocoa from Ghana, and Cadbury would make the chocolate in Britain. In this sense Britain was severely restricting any domestic manufacturing in the Caribbean colonies.
We get a clear view from the West Indies Royal Commission Report (Moyne Report), Cmd. 6607, HMSO, 1945. The Report has entered the literature as the Moyne Commission. The report stated:
Lacking mineral resources, it is hardly to be expected that small communities, living in considerable isolation from the outside world, and with climates and traditions that are perhaps uncongenial to regular industrial life, would have developed manufacturing industries on an important scale. (Moyne Report, 1938:14).
Lewis contested this notion of the Colonial office and for some strange reasons, some of his colleagues in the region and elsewhere misunderstood his point of contention. He argued that while the Caribbean may be constrained in terms of the quantum of mineral resources, the region still had an asset in terms of the large supply of labour.
Thus the region could specialize in producing labour-intensive goods and, if the increases in wages could be monitored, that is implicitly linked to productivity, the output of the added labour intensive industries may outcompete, and in some respects, may put the centre countries on the sidelines. Thus, Sir Arthur’s contestation was that the Caribbean had, of necessity, to industrialize to absorb the unlimited supplies of labour.
This view was turned and twisted about whether Sir Arthur was scoping his thesis in the framework of a closed economic system and if he took the open economic system of the region into consideration. Lewis was mindful of demonstrating that while growth in the developing world was linked to growth in the developed world, the link between the two worlds was not inevitable. In other words, as we say in Statistics, because there is a correlation of two variables, it does not mean one causes the other.
Correlation does not imply causation. It was his view that the developing countries or the LDCs as he termed them demonstrated that it is within their capacity to grow at rates that may match developed countries. In fact he noted that between 1873 and 1913, “the LDCs …demonstrated their capacity to increase their total output at six per cent per annum, and (went on) to adopt six per cent as the minimum average target for LDCs as a whole.” (Arthur Lewis, “The Slowing Down of the Engine of Growth,” Lecture of Sir Arthur Lewis in the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1979, p.1). See also a detailed citation at http://www.webcitation.org/mainframe.php). In essence,
Lewis contended, “the LDCs have demonstrated beyond doubt their capacity to use physical and human resources productively.” (Lewis, 1979, p.2).
Furthermore, Lewis noted that his contestations were cantered not on whether the LDCS can become competitive, but rather whether the issues of pricing and foreign exchange can effectuate mechanisms in a market clearing system. Put another way, he argued, if as we have right now in Europe and the USA, where the MDCs are in serious trouble, will the “LDCs…persist in rapid growth despite the slowdown of the MDCs?” (Lewis, 1979, p.11).
This is the crux of the problem. He was not saying that the LDCs will be always completely dependent on the MDCs. “If the (economies are) still dependent (on the MDCs), the balance of payments will pull (them) down; but if (the economies have) attained self-sustaining growth, the weakness in the foreign exchanges (will launch) a drive to export to other LDCS, and the weakness in the balance of payments (will) then only (be) transitional.”
Semantics or Metrics? Some Concluding Thoughts
As we conclude this interrogation of the notion of contesting destinies in a W. Arthur Lewis Framework, the question may be raised if we are merely engaging in semantics or are we scaffolding the elements of what is possible as an economic blue print based on the works of Sir Arthur Lewis? Clearly the issue of Lewis in China raises a serious issue as far as industrialization by invitation is concerned.
The metrics is, today in China, according to Martin Jacques, in When China Rules the World, (Penguin Books, 2009: 182), “Foreign firms are presently responsible for up to 60 per cent of all Chinese exports, and dominate high-tech exports with a share of 85 per cent.” George J. Gilboy terms this the “The Myth behind China’s Miracle,” Foreign Affairs, July/August, 2004, pp.4-5. Whether it is perceived as myth or reality, Lewis’ models seem to be working pretty well in China. So the unlimited supplies of labour thesis could work and is working. It is not semantics. It is metrics.
It was patently clear to Lewis what was needed in our part of the world, and in countries circumstanced as ours. In Some Aspects of Economic Development (1971: ix), which was Lewis’ 1968 Aggrey-Fraser-Guggisberg Memorial lectures delivered at the University of Ghana, he stated:
“It…has become clear that success (in our part of the world, I added) depends on partnership between government and people. It is the people who invest in learning, in trying out new crops or techniques, and in the physical plant or effort which will increase industrial and agricultural production.
They do this wherever incentives are present, and fail to do it where governments bind economic activities in chains. The government for its part must levy taxes and raise funds abroad, to provide infrastructure, to help finance investment in agriculture and housing, and to do some pioneering in manufacturing. It gives a lead to private activity, but must find the right balance between leading and restraining.
Therein rests the essence of Sir Arthur’s contestations. From the very beginnings of his life, he sought balance but he sought balance with a vision that the reality of where we want to go and where we must go as a people and a region will change as the dynamics of things change. It is not by accident that he entitled his pamphlet “The Agony of the Eight” in speaking about the OECS region. It was not “The Ecstasy of the Eight.”
He recognized that change was inevitable. The only constant in life is change. Clearly these are the metrics of which we now speak. But I wish to add that in this contesting of the destinies within the Lewis framework we have to come to the concrete specificities as to where we want to go as a region and as a people. The policy implications deriving from Lewis are markers.
The reality is discipline must undergird all that we do. And that discipline must be intrinsic to the affairs of the state and to the affairs of the private sector. The state cannot be seen as an artificial construct divorced from the systemic nature of the economy and operating in a minimalist space. As we have argued elsewhere, both systems have to in a matrix of understanding if we are to imaging what we want, and develop the image of where we wish to go.
The most remarkable feature about this notion contesting destiny in a W. Arthur Lewis Framework is his response to the criticisms of his work. Some people would have bobbed and weaved and run for cover. Sir Arthur never did that. Instead, he seem to have adopted the dictum of Bertram Russell, the famed British philosopher who is reputed to have said that “The degree of one’s emotions varies inversely with one’s knowledge of the facts---
The less you know the hotter you get.”
Anyone who intends to contest destiny must know that you cannot live in a world where you are not blasted for what you or for what may have be ascribed to you. We all have to throw a few elbows as we storm space of making change, but at the same time as we battle, we are steeling ourselves in the furnace of longevity. Sir W. Arthur Lewis, in contesting destinies in his work, and in having destiny contested him, was forged in a fiery furnace that will continue to shine an eternal flame in Caribbean Economics and Development.
And even though we may not want to play that hand that was delivered to us, fate and faith will force to play the hand and move in the direction that destiny dictates. In so doing we all who for whatever reason are tasked with leadership, or have leadership thrust upon us must see it as our destiny and evince a sense of collective social responsibility. Sir Arthur’s life could have position him about the mundane, but destiny sequenced him as an agent of change, and for that we are all eternally grateful.
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