Africans are mainly rich or poor, but not middle class
economist.com
economist.com
I'm South African and I generally agree with this assertion but poor is defined as something that is really non-existant in the U.S.
And minimum wage here, is really the bottom end of what would be considered middle class.
So the title is not very informative to someone not used to the context.
* I'm South African living in Houston, TX.
I am sorry, what is "here" then here?
> And minimum wage here, is really the bottom end of what would be considered middle class.
Should be:
> And minimum wage here, is really the bottom end of what would be considered middle class there.
So ~50% to ~95-99% income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_middle_class So, ~50k to ~170k. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States
Programmers generally qualify but a dental assistants @35k generally does not.
> And minimum wage here, is really the bottom end of what would be considered middle class.
Should be:
> And minimum wage here, is really the bottom end of what would be considered middle class there.
Anybody complaining it is 'too slow' is living in a dream world without realizing that moving classes takes generations of effort and enormous culture shifts. Something as simple from using a hole in the ground as a toilet to the huge infrastructure of piped plumbing from dams is an enormous change in culture. Take the monthly costs of such infrastructure which must be paid and enforced across a population that previously did not have those kinds of burdens for a quick spot check on culture.
This is wrong. I recommend reading Ha-Joon Chang,a wonderful heterodox economist who is fond of pointing out that his native South Korea went from the development status of Madagascar to one of the largest economies in the world in a scant 50 years. This doesn't take forever.
I think that people are prone to being frustrated and complaining about not seeing enough progress in a short subset of their own working life, which I assume was RyanZAG's point.
He once took me to a small museum where they had on display various "traditional" cooking and houseware items. Wood, stone, woven rice straw rope, a bit of metal here and there for blades and things that needed weight. I thought these were relics from maybe the 17th or 18th century (or earlier) since they were "traditional" -- and in truth lots of it looked like late Iron Age level technology. He said that he grew up with that stuff, cooking in handmade pots, wearing woven hay sandals and rough woven fabric clothes.
By the time my wife's generation was born, Korea's industrialization was well underway. It wasn't maybe "first world", but 20 years after a war which completely flattened the country, my wife was born into a world with running water, electricity, cars, schools, colleges, coffee shops, restaurants, telephones, high-rise apartment buildings, cheap and secure food...as a young girl she grew up on American schlock-80s imported TV like MacGuyver, A-Team and so on, they had regular video game arcades, home computers, boutique coffee shops, designer clothing, malls, department stores, a robust television, film and entertainment industry and so on. Her 80s childhood would have been not much different than a kid growing up in New York City. That's 30 years after the war.
Korea had joined the "developed" world when that first generation was young and had ascended to first-world before that generation was out of working years.
For example, China's development has involved considerable wealth inequality.
> https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/621684418558734337
> https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/654709684985688064
If inequality between nations drops, a measure of inequality on a world scale could drop while inequality within each particular nation increases. China or Africa's development means the average very poor person is closer to the average Westerner, dropping total inequality. But that doesn't stop recent models of development from involving considerable inequality and indeed a model of inequality (just as inequality has increased within the US). Moreover, it's the inequality within each area that one would expect to have the harmful or beneficial effects on democracy, civil society and so-forth.
Edit: Of course it is hard to reply to a link to a tweet of a bit map of a graph with resolution too poor to read the references of, hence my general comment.
> it's the inequality within each area that one would expect to have the harmful or beneficial effects on democracy, civil society and so-forth.
You seem to be implying that extreme poverty does not also cause adverse effects on democracy, civil society, and so forth. My guess is that having massive populations of people living at or below subsistence is also harmful to democracy and civil society. If you look at the kind of problems they have in relatively equal [1] Sudan (mass malnutrition, militias literally raping and pillaging) to relatively unequal [1] United States (police violence, poor health care provision), I hope we can acknowledge the problems in the US without denying that they are orders of magnitude less severe. The difference is in the amount of absolute extreme poverty, not the inequality.
BTW if you click on the images in the links you can access the high res versions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Give this house a fresh coat of paint, and it'd fit just fine as a home in a developed country: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/03/05/article-1255622-08...
I always find it interesting how the west so easily glosses over colonization, which is integral to all three of those other things.
The interesting thing though that they miss completely, is that in the last 10 years the percentage of people living middle class lives have nearly doubled in a lot of African countries, which is a huge achievement.
Don't whitewash history, the wars where generally smaller scale, but pre colonization there was plenty of war, famine, and poverty.
Can I suggest a few books for you to read?
Please don't be personally rude, even when someone else is ignorant.
That seems like a point the arguments for which would not stand well under scrutiny. Can you decompress your thoughts in this regard, because it seems like the obvious answer is "yes" (for starters)...
“That one can survey the length and breadth of sub-Sahara Africa and find not even one work of visual or written art worthy of the name” - David Hume, 18th century historian
The Arab world?
Somehow, I suspect you'd find a lot of inaccuracies in the writings of 1700s historians.
This particular one is demonstrably false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_literature#Precolonial...
> African masks were an influence on European Modernist art, which was inspired by their lack of concern for naturalistic depiction. Since the late 19th century there has been an increasing amount of African art in Western collections, the finest pieces of which are now prominently displayed.
Like any 18th century thinker, Hume had views that we would now regard as racist, but let's not pin things on the fellow that he didn't say.
Printing press was already invented in 1440 to print all the bibles necessary.
Uh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa#Indi...
At this stage in human development capital generation is pretty much completely agricultural, and thus the productivity of the land is the chief determinant of societal outcomes.
And Egypt never competed against Romans and Greeks to the north; at any point in history where the Romans and Greeks would have been relevant, Egypt was under Persian (Greek times) or Greek (Roman times) rule. Egypt competed with the Hittites, and with various Mesopotamian states -- although it was usually much bigger, richer, and stronger than the Mesopotamian states.
Really? "An african society is any society that grew in Africa, excluding the most technologically and economically developed ones, therefore African societies were undeveloped. This is true because technologically and economically advanced africans aren't africans in any sense a modern American would think of."
Last I heard, the Celts and Goths were barbarians during those times too. Those are true Europeans. Europe was undeveloped and backwards until the 10th century. Romans and Greeks were technologically and economically advanced but they live in a different climate, demographics, and cultural affinities across and extreme geographic barrier. It's the Goths and Celts who were really the forbears of today's Europeans. There must be something strange about Europeans that caused them to be backwards for so many centuries until the Romans civilised them, compared to, say Chinese, or Egyptians, who've developed advanced societies since before 1000BC.
Ridiculously biased, don't you think?
Africa north of the Sahara is part of the Mediterranean world. It shares population, culture, and trade with that world. It shares very little with black Africa.
Africa south of the Sahara is something completely different. If you say "Africa" today, that's what people will think of.
Black Egyptians. http://www.crystalinks.com/egyptfarming3.jpg
If you say "Africa" today, that's what people will think of.
Yeah, but our point of discussion is Africa in 1000BC. Plenty of black people there in those times.
And lastly, not only blacks can be African.
https://www.quora.com/Racial-and-Ethnic-Groups/Do-white-peop...
And according to a mainstream theory of human migration, and your perspective that people who live in Africa but descended from Phoenicians aren't "African", we're all Africans, because we are all African colonists of the entire world.
What's a little bizarre is how a relatively poor, thinly-peopled section of western Europe managed to attain such an outsized portion of power on the world stage in the first place. I've read any number of different theories on how and why this occurred, but I haven't yet pieced them together into something that really hangs together. Nevertheless, it happened...
With regards to Carthage, power was almost entirely concentrated in the hands of the ex-Phoenician elites, so its not inaccurate to consider them a colonial Mediterranean culture, not appreciably different in kind from Syracuse, Massalia (Marseilles), or the Chersonese. It might be a stretch, but there could be some comparisons made between Carthaginian control of Iberia and Numidia with the British Raj.
Egypt is attached by all geographic, economic and cultural ties to the Middle East and Mediterranean, and always has been, aside from technically residing in the continent of Africa.
Central Africa[3] => East Africa => Egypt => Syria & Lebanon, Levant => North Africa.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Semitic_language#/media/...
Britain and Germany achieved outsized power as a poor people in Europe, but you forget Spanish already built a empire spanning between two continents in the 1500's. Before Spain (and the Ottomans), Mongolia was the dominant power, with China and Rome before that. I'm sure you know the Romans came from a small village. China too was borne of two small tribes[4]. Before Rome, it was Greece, and before Greece, it was Cathage, before Carthage, it was Egypt. It goes on and on, and on and on, and everyone has had or will have their turn in being a dominant power of the world[5].
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Emperor#Early_years
[5] Fate of Empire - Sir John Grubb http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...
In terms of ocean going navigation they where significantly behind Europe starting around 1400. Of note, they sent few trade ships to Europe compared to European trading with China.
Europe had significantly more mathematical innovation.
Culturally it's hard to quantify, but while China had long had a printing press there alphabet made mass production of books significantly harder. So, by the 1600's Europe had far more books.
Things like nutrition and lifestyle are extremely hard to quantify. But, militarily Europe had significantly more advanced fortifications circa 1500's.
There is very little that China would, or ever did, want to import from Europe. This was a major historical problem for Western traders in the China market - outside of bullion, and furs, to some extent, they had a real hard time finding products that they could successfully trade.
It's not as though China was bereft of the capabilities of fielding a large, powerful fleet - the Zheng He expeditions in the Ming dynasty were quite impressive, even if the accounts are somewhat exaggerated, and some of the biggest naval battles in history have been fought on Chinese lakes and rivers. But historically, the government was always facing serious threats from the interior of Asia, whereas coastal threats were generally little more than pirates. This has some knock-on effects - less incentive to study astronomy and geometry, when you aren't using them to sail ships around the world, different approaches to fortification - the Great Wall was more of a Ming thing, whereas the Qing, as an outsider foreign dynasty, tended towards assimilation of Mongols and other dangerous nomads into the ruling elite and the banners instead.
[1] http://www.csun.edu/~jaa7021/hist531/Goldstone%20-%20Efflore...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heshen#Fall_of_Heshen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianlong_Emperor#Later_years
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894...
[4] http://www.ibtimes.com.au/us-attacks-against-isis-ineffectiv...
[5] http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/614284/Video-Russia-bomb...
The Taiping Rebellion can't be discounted when looking at the inability of the Qing Empire to cope with Western gunboat diplomacy. Wikipedia lists it as possibly the third most bloody war in the history of mankind[1], and besides dragging on for fourteen years and devastating some of the most productive areas of China, the government nearly fell, and increasingly impoverished and ineffective Manchu banner military forces were phased out and replaced with more regional, semi-private local forces, outside the traditional chain of command, raised and led by men like Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhan and Zou Zongtang. While these initial commanders were more or less loyal to the Qing government, it arguably started the slide towards warlordism.
Chinese soldiers and chinese equipment, though outdated by the standards of the time, are perfectly capable of defeating European military, on the off chance when they were sufficiently organised[2][3]. The heroes of the late Qing Empire shone, because around them, their colleagues lie low in the depths of corruption and incompetence. It's like a game of Starcraft, even with a bigger army, and bigger economy, an inexperienced player making a couple of mistakes will lose the game quite easily to a more experienced one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion#Affectness_o...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Taku_Forts_(1859)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cầu_Giấy_(Paper_Brid...
For historical interest, during the high point of the Ming empire, junks achieved in battle, decisive victories over Portguese caravels armed with cannons[3][4].
Fortifications where generally less useful as you could just send your Army around them. Or as was often the case give up and join the 'winner'. But, again this attitude significantly harmed advancement.
Eastern armor also lagged behind. 'Proofing' armor in the west and tameshi gusoku in the east allows for direct comparison.
Something as 'simple' as Algebra was clearly useful, but again imported.
Photography demonstrated China's lagging in terms of chemistry.
That said, China did have an clear advantage in luxury goods. But calling it superior is objectively false, at best it was different.
PS: Not to mention the Industrial revolution started in ~1760.
Even France, Germany, and England were outside the Eurasian core, exhibiting lags in technological diffusion (although decreasing over time) until almost the eve of Early Modern. It's only in the Early Modern that European countries (and by the end of the Early Modern, this is mostly focused more on England, France, and Germany than Spain, Italy, or the Balkans) began to match and pull ahead of the rest of the Eurasian core.
If we accept that Homo Sapiens expanded out of Africa, into the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and then across the Bering land bridge into North America, and eventually down into South America, that is all a series of colonization events. As is Polynesian expansion throughout the South Pacific. As is the series of invasions that rocked the Mediterranean world around 1200 BCE, or the expansions of the Celtic culture in Iron Age Europe, or the Classic Greek diaspora, or the migrations of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, Lombards, and others in that era. The colonization of the Yangtze valley and Guangdong by the northern Han Chinese culture. The Slavic migrations into eastern Europe and the Balkans. The migrations of the Turks, Muslim Arabs, and Mongols. The Romans who colonized Celtic Britain, who were colonized by the Saxons, Angles and Jutes, who were colonized by Danes and other Norse, who were colonized by the Franco-Normans. The Irish colonized Scotland, and were in turn colonized in a series of waves by England.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, you have the Bantu expansion[1], which displaced or assimilated other pre-existing cultures.