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Farrell meanders in We Like It So

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Published: 
Thursday, March 30, 2017

In the Preface to his new book, which is sub-titled “The Cultural Roots of Economic Underachievement in Trinidad and Tobago”, economist Terrence Farrell writes: “I would be both foolish and disingenuous to deny unconsciously harbouring certain prejudices and biases...I certainly do not pretend to wear the mask of the ‘objective’ academic.”

Having admitted his biases, Farrell apparently found it unnecessary to devote any effort to compensating for them. Thus, in making his argument he relies mostly on people within his own social circle, from his daughter to friends, a couple of historians, one local political scientist, and selected newspaper columnists, as well as anecdotes, sayings and memes. Farrell’s argument is thus one long opinion based on other people’s opinions.

The book is divided into four parts of 16 chapters, but none of the parts is titled. Part One deals with the history of T&T; Part Two examines factors contributing to economic underdevelopment, Part Three looks at the work environment; and Part Four presents Farrell’s recommendations.

Farrell asserts that “The cumulative effect of the stories, feedback and evidence will hopefully confirm my basic hypothesis that the people of T&T evince a set of cultural attributes that are not conducive to strong economic and material progress.” Yet, when confronted with data that contradicts his belief, such as surveys which show that Trinidadians value hard work, Farrell writes: “These anomalous or counter-intuitive results probably arise because people respond the way they think they are expected to respond.” In other words, instead of changing his opinion to fit the data, he adopts the easier route of rejecting any disconfirming evidence.

Moreover, Farrell writes that he is “an economist seeking to explore the cultural roots of the economic underachievement of Trinidad and Tobago”: yet he is apparently ignorant of Gary Becker, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in applying economic tools to hitherto unexplored areas such as family structure, racism and crime; or the economist and historian Thomas Sowell who has written many books of far more depth, range and rigour on this same topic; or the political scientist Bruce Bruno de Mesquita whose ideas are very relevant to Farrell’s argument about elites.

Worst of all, Farrell seems unaware of key local data on this topic. Although in the Acknowledgements he thanks 13 people for helping him with the book, none of them, not even the UWI sociologist, pointed him to the opinion polls conducted by Market Opinion and Research International between 2003 and 2009 nor the 2011 Norms and Values Survey conducted by the Ansa McAL Psychological Research Centre. Or, if they did, Farrell preferred to rely on commentary and literary fiction rather than hard data.

Even when Farrell uses empirical data, such as Lawrence E Harrison’s Culture Matters project or the World Values Survey, he either cherry-picks or misinterprets the research.

Thus, he glosses over findings which show that culturally Catholic countries are progress-resistant and more prone to corruption, while not one book by the director of the WVS, Ronald Inglehart, is listed in the bibliography.

Farrell’s trite conclusion is that T&T can become prosperous if leaders change themselves through “education, training, and leading by example.”

An economist would ask how such leaders could be incentivised to overcome their own self-interest: but the economics perspective forms no part of this meandering and tendentious book.

​Review by

KEVIN BALDEOSINGH.

Book info 

We Like It So?

Terrence Farrell.

Amazon Digital Services, 2017.

ASIN: B06X99DGJT; 216 pages.


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