the world because their leaders tend to have the same
mistaken views of how to run their countries, leading to the
poverty there, while Western European leaders are better
informed or better advised, which explains their relative
success? While there are famous examples of leaders
adopting disastrous policies because they were mistaken
about those policies’ consequences, ignorance can explain
at best a small part of world inequality.
On the face of it, the sustained economic decline that
soon set in in Ghana after independence from Britain was
caused by ignorance. The British economist Tony Killick,
then working as an adviser for the government of Kwame
Nkrumah, recorded many of the problems in great detail.
Nkrumah’s policies focused on developing state industry,
which turned out to be very inefficient. Killick recalled:
The footwear factory … that would have
linked the meat factory in the North through
transportation of the hides to the South (for a
distance of over 500 miles) to a tannery (now
abandoned); the leather was to have been
backhauled to the footwear factory in
Kumasi, in the center of the country and
about 200 miles north of the tannery. Since
the major footwear market is in the Accra
metropolitan area, the shoes would then have
to