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      January 26, 2006 

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      Freedom's Unsung Hero
      January 26, 2006; Page A10
      Hong Kong's prosperity since World War II is sometimes referred to as a 
      "miracle." But miracles require the intervention of a deity, whereas Hong 
      Kong's remarkable economic growth between 1945 and its handover to China 
      in 1997 owes a great deal to the nonintervention of a mortal man, John 
      James Cowperthwaite, who died over the weekend at the age of 90.
      Cowperthwaite arrived in Hong Kong in 1945 and served as Financial 
      Secretary of the then-British colony from 1961-1971. Perhaps more than any 
      other single figure, he was the architect and guardian of the greatest 
      natural experiment in free-market capitalism in the postwar world. It is 
      all the more remarkable that he kept the colonial government small and out 
      of the business of business at a time when socialism was ascendant in 
      Britain.
      In 1997, Milton Friedman noted that since 1945 Hong Kong's GDP per capita 
      had gone from a fraction to substantially more than that of Israel and 
      Britain, and had caught up with that of the U.S., even as the colony's 
      population increased tenfold. That astonishing performance became a policy 
      beacon first to the nearby small nations of Asia (the "tigers") and 
      eventually to Mainland China itself.
      One of the better known stories about the undeservedly obscure 
      Cowperthwaite was his refusal to collect economic statistics about Hong 
      Kong during his tenure as Financial Secretary, lest they produce an 
      impulse toward central planning among the bureaucrats. "I did very 
      little," Sir John once said. "All I did was to try to prevent some of the 
      things that might undo it." Other would-be central planners could learn a 
      lot from what John Cowperthwaite didn't do.
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