Strawmen, Development and Markets

Particularly relevant given the recent tragedy in Bangladesh, ASI's latest takedown of the book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism (Amazon) attacks the idea that it's capitalists who have claimed that the poor in developing countries "are not entrepreneurial":

Chang's claim is that we all get browbeaten into believing that poor countries are poor because the people there are not entrepreneurial. He does on to point out, quite rightly, that this is an absurd thing to believe. The poor everywhere are vastly more entrepreneurial than us bourgeois middle class types: they have to be in order to survive. This is as true of poor people in rich countries as it is in poor too. The ducking and diving that goes on to make a life on benefits more pleasant is entrepreneurialism in a raw form. All of which is why no one at all does go around claiming that the poverty of some countries is based upon a lack of that raw entrepreneurialism making that claim something of a strawman.

Chang is also quite right in pointing out that the reason why this greater extent of entrepreneurialism amongst the poverty stricken doesn't then go on to create great wealth is not because of some deficiency in the people themselves. Nor in their ability to do that ducking and diving. The lack is in the institutions in that society that allow the microbusiness to flower into the larger one. This is indeed quite true.