We like it so?

With our hundred-year history of pulling oil and latterly, gas out of the ground, and 55 years of managing the same, what do we have to show for it? “I think most people, particularly people of my generation, have expressed the fairly strong view that we really have not done as well as we should have done, given the resources and the potential that we thought that we had,” Dr Terrence Farrell said as we discussed his latest book, We Like It So? Farrell’s generation saw the rise of TT colours over the Red House in 1962 as people in their teens and early 20s.

They made up that pioneering cadre of local professionals who ran our state enterprises, Parliament, Judiciary and Public Service as young adults returning from university in the 1970s. Farrell himself, an economist with legal training, went on to become a deputy director of the Central Bank and now chairs a Board that advises government on economic development.

He tends to be outspoken on policy issues, particularly forex distribution and diversification and has theorised for some time about the curious workings of this country that have led to this underachievement.

Many of these ideas come together in We Like It So? The seeds of the book he said, started with two opposing ideas in a strange juxtaposition often found in TT, the islands as paradise versus the islands as underperformers.

Farrell said explanations that people were wont to give, that Trinbagonians were lazy, incompetent or malicious were superficial, which is why underperformance required deeper examination, particularly as he, and other commentators note, nationals work happily and willingly in foreign countries and follow the rules of multi-nationals based here.

“I was particularly concerned about underperformance in the economic sphere.

I didn’t want to get too far out of my area of competence,” said Farrell, “So I focused on questions of how we work, how we innovate, how we invest.

Those were the questions I was trying to answer and those are economic questions. But the roots of those things are socio-cultural.

Which means you have to go back in history to understand where these things come from. Our values, our attitudes.” According to Farrell, we are following a script laid out 200 years ago, during our slavery, indentureship and colonial periods.

These events have shaped and help concretised our attitudes to authority, risk taking and innovation, decision making and even our very sense of self, all concepts he expands further in the book.

Ultimately, Farrell concludes that our lack of identity, or ambivalence about self, causes the poor leadership we see.

With that lack of confidence in self, comes the inability to make good decisions, or the ability to have faith in decisions that are made. And this, is when we actually decide to make them.

Farrell shows where Trinbagonians and West Indians on the whole, have eschewed data in favour of “voops, vaps and vi ki vai” in taking key policy decisions, leading to the underperformance we see in many spheres.

As a hierarchical society and a colony of exploitation, risk taking and innovation were not necessary and failure at either severely punished by a people who respected status above all else.

We Like It So? makes for compelling reading, particularly as one relates the historical antecedents Farrell raises to present day conditions in this country’s economy: its hostile labour-employer relationships, its continual false starts at diversification, the persistence of the import-distribution business model, for example.

Some of his solutions proposed at the end of the book definitely warrant further academic study, if not by himself, at least some enterprising department of the UWI or the UTT.

It is interesting, though, that Farrell complains at one point in We Like It So? that West Indians spend too much time researching into the beginning of a problem without providing the answers at end. He spends up to 95 per cent of the book developing his thesis and only the last few pages discussing his possible solutions. Again, he may be leaving this for development in another book, or for further academic study.

One idea mentioned in connection with another review of this book is also worthy of further inquiry. The reviewer, Raymond Ramcharitar, rejects Farrell’s suppositions, on the basis of bias toward a particular intellectual tradition that Ramcharitar believes was in large part contributory to the very issues the economist discusses in We Like It So?.

Ramcharitar postulates instead, that mass migration of TT’s best minds in the 60s and 70s is responsible for the underperformance we see today.

It would be elucidating to see what future study of both theories reveal, particularly the points of connection, if any, between the two.

We Like It So?, however, is important, because it attempts to examine what we are, how we came to be that way and how we can be better.

Anything that at least nudges us in the direction to think about our society, to talk and debate about it, is likely a step in the right direction.