Aplastic surgeon of Chinese ancestry in Sydney, Australia, may not sound like an
average individual, but the moral of his story is all too common in countries around the world.
Born in Malaysia, this plastic surgeon was in one of many high-level positions
occupied by the Chinese minority and coveted by the Malay majority. Moreover, under the country’s
affirmative action policies, he understood that his days as a plastic surgeon were numbered. He
took it all without bitterness, offering to stay on to treat disfigured children and others until
a Malay plastic surgeon was available to replace him. But he missed the point. They wanted him
out of there, whether or not there was a Malay to replace him and whether or not disfigured people
had anyone else to turn to. The surgeon relocated to Australia, where he was apparently doing quite
well by the time I encountered him. The real victims of the Malaysian government’s policies
were still in Malaysia. This dog-in-the-manger approach is by no means peculiar to Malaysia.
Envy of others’ success and embarrassment at being visibly unable to match their performance
have been political driving forces behind many programs of preferences and quotas.
When Romania acquired additional territory from the defeated Central Powers after the
First World War, it also acquired universities which were culturally either German or Hungarian.
One of their top priorities was to get rid of the Germans and the Hungarians on the faculties
and transform the universities into Romanian bastions. At that point,
roughly three-quarters of all Romanians were still illiterate, so replacing these foreign professors
with Romanians of comparable caliber was very unlikely. But replacement was not the issue:
Getting rid of those who were better qualified was the issue. Despite all the zeal expended in
converting German and Hungarian universities in the new provinces of Bukovina and Transylvania
into Romanian universities, there was no urgency at all about creating a university in the province
of Bessarabia, where none existed. Moreover, when Hungarian students living in Romania began
going to Hungary to attend universities there, the Romanian government forbad them to do so.
What is involved is not just envy. It is the threat to one’s ego that is crucial in
promoting dog-in-the-manger policies. When Nigeria became an independent nation, back in the 1960s,
many of the educated, skilled, business and professional people in northern Nigeria
were from tribes in southern Nigeria. One of the top priorities of northern Nigerian politicians
was to get rid of such people. The hope was to replace them eventually with northern Nigerians.
But, in the meantime, the northern Nigerians wanted them out of there,
even if they had to hire Europeans to replace them or suffer a deterioration of the services
being performed by the southern Nigerians. Having Europeans in these occupations was
far less of a threat to the ego than having fellow Africans so dramatically outperforming the locals.
Such attitudes are not unknown in the United States, whether or not ethnic
or racial differences are involved. The same dog-in-the-manger can be found when the issue is
class. Liberals have never ceased denouncing Ronald Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” in the
early 1980s, despite the actual results, including a record-breaking period of economic expansion.
After the tax rate was cut on the highest income brackets (and on others), not only did the total
tax receipts rise but the percentage of those receipts paid by “the rich” also rose. Why then
were the liberals unhappy? Because those in the upper brackets paid these vastly greater taxes
out of rising incomes, while retaining a higher percentage of those incomes for themselves.
The dog-in-the-manger principle requires that the rich be made worse off. Any policy that fails
to do that has failed politically, regardless of what economic benefits it may bring to the society
as a whole. While such attitudes are sufficiently widespread around the world that they cannot
be attributed to a particular culture, neither are they inevitable. Very often,
the key ingredient in the rise of explosive resentments is the rise of an intelligentsia
preoccupied with invidious comparisons rather than general well-being. Ironically,
all too often the rich themselves have been the patrons of such intellectuals,
whether at the universities, the foundations or other institutions supported by their donations.