Why Poor Countries Are Poor
reason.com
reason.com
I live in Romania ... and of course, we are doing a lot better than Cameroon, the country got accepted in EU, and the average salary is something like $25-$30 / day (and people with college degrees do better than that).
But the corruption has reached unimaginable levels ... and it's not just the government, it's everyone.
For example, we have a public health system, and while I paid something like $15000 last year in taxes (a big amount for us), my wife got pregnant, she's having problems ... and we've had to bribe a doctor to even speak to us, not to mention they demand big bribes for doing a clean caesarean section, and my wife needs it. The poor souls that don't have money for bribes simply get fucked.
And for anything you'd want to do, like buying/selling property or starting a company, getting permits ... the bureaucracy is so awful that the only sane way of doing it is (you guest it) by bribing.
> The roads, they have not been fixed for 19 years
Well ... in Romania roads get fixed every year ... badly, so every year new repairs are needed, with millions of euros going down the drain. And the companies doing the repairs ... get contracted by nepotism. I guess Cameroon got lots to learn from us about misusing funds :-)
Our elections are mostly for real ... but it really doesn't matter. It's the people ... although everyone is blaming the government, instead of looking in the mirror.
How is that not the government? If there weren't a public health system, there would be more doctors and they wouldn't be able to bribe you. You could just go to someone else.
It doesn't work like that, the system is more relaxed than in other countries ... you can go to any doctor you want.
Surely, competition seems like the answer, but there's something larger at play here ... I once heard of a woman in labor that lost her child because her doctor was out of town, and the others doctors from the hospital refused to intervene ... you see, they are very territorial. Of course, such tragedies don't happen so often, but they do happen.
And we've also got private health insurances and clinics (it's not like the government prohibits it) ... the problem is that those are only useful for your periodic consults ... but in case of an emergency, you want a good doctor not an incompetent one, and those tend to work in public hospitals.
No really, we have a mostly working democracy and capitalism ... not helping much ;)
In a few decades this will probably be formalized and down to a science, with advice etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_governance
But by that time, technical development will have created totally new sets of problems. :-)
Or you can stay with the public system, but in this case you will definitely encounter bribes. The cause is pretty simple: the salaries in public health are way lower then they should be. Most pacients understand that and view the bribes as a normal form of compensation.
The system is mixed in more ways than one. Many good doctors work both ways. They spend time in the public hospitals to gather pacients, which they then bring to their private clinic.
Also the numbers mentioned by the grandparent seem a bit large. I'd say the average daily income is below $15. AFAIK, a good birth in a private hospital is around $1500, so he probably should have gone this way from the beginning.
I understand that, but the way I view it ... it's not my fault they got into this. And while it's mostly a functional system (AFAIK, the US health system is horrible), it kind of bothers me that I pay lots of taxes without getting a return.
> AFAIK, a good birth in a private hospital is around $1500, so he probably should have gone this way from the beginning.
Well, my wife is having complications ... we first went to a private clinic, and the doctor consulting us just shook his head with no advice for us, other than "wait and see what happens" ... and in a private clinic, it's more like $2000 for a normal birth ... and I've heard of a case when the doctor demanded a bribe anyway.
So to get proper treatment in this case ... we've had to go to the hospital in Giulesti, which has some of the best doctors available.
Now, of course, the doctor we ended up with (Puia Sorin in case you are interested :)), which is renowned for "delivering babies" :) ... treats his patients equally, the only problem being that he's too busy to take on new patients (fortunately, there are still some decent people left).
Do you think it's helping against corruption or is any incentive now gone? Do you think it's getting better with rising income? (this was not meant against romanians it's just that EU institutions are pretty far away from EU projects and are usually terrible at detecting corruption)
If I lived anywhere else, I'd have the same opinion :)
> Do you think it's helping against corruption or is any incentive now gone?
Actually, it's helping, since we are monitored and we get warnings and sanctions now and then ... one of the main concerns being corruption. I don't think that the end-result can be predicted though, we'll see ... although since we entered the EU, I can see things improving.
Unfortunately with this economic crisis, we're back to square one.
> it's just that EU institutions are pretty far away from EU projects and are usually terrible at detecting corruption
My impression is that they are pretty good :-) ... I've heard of reports more accurate than what is published in our media.
Actually, that's more or less what's happening in the Baltic countries now. The economic crisis has hit hard there, and the government is taking rather drastic measures to handle it.
Sources: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/01/20/Corruption-biggest... and http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,4320882,00.html
Last couple of years I haven't followed the political life, so I don't really know where they're headed. I don't think it's gotten any much better, or that it will soon. But things should be viewed in context. We're a functioning and fast developing economy. We _are_ a functioning democracy - we have little to choose from, but we do choose our politicians. A past of communism left us well educated and disciplined - you won't find terrorists of civil wars here any time soon. The only bit of public violence we had in the past 20 years (the mineriads) were actually very organized political movements, and their time has passed. Overall we're a good addition to EU. Not to mention that the only other choice we'd have had was Russia, which would have been worse for both of us.
In my country (South Africa), 2/3rds of the population voted for a president who is known to be corrupt. He is on the verge of giving his friend (who organized him a bribe) a presidential pardon.
What is shocking for me is not that the president is corrupt - but that he has the support of 66% of the population. The majority of the population approves of his corruption. Is there anything redeemable in a country if the majority thinks corruption is okay?
The biggest problem I think is a bit different. I'm very very scared by the politicization of public institutions. Top management is always chosen based on party, and automatically so is middle management. This breeds a brand of bureaucracy interesting more in politics than in getting things done, and the more it lasts the lower the mindset seeps.
> In our case all candidates are reasonably corrupt.
Our previous batch of rulers at least had the decency to try and hide their corruption. This president is pretty open about it.
> What we do know for sure is that he's a pretty good manager,
Our president not. He has grade 3 and is just seen as a populist.
> The biggest problem I think is a bit different. I'm very very scared by the politicization of public institutions. Top management is always chosen based on party, and automatically so is middle management. This breeds a brand of bureaucracy interesting more in politics than in getting things done, and the more it lasts the lower the mindset seeps.
This is extremely similar. In my country it is called “cadre deployment” and is an official position. The ruling party employ their members (cadres) at all public institutions to follow the ruling party’s will. This includes but is not limited to all branches of national, provincial and local government, including places such as hospitals and government owned companies (such as electricity utilities).
So, these people are employed on the basis of where they are in the ruling party – and not based on competence. They then also ensure that the whole institution is politicised.
---
There are two other things, which I do not know if it happens in Romania. The first is an extremely well politically connected oligarchy which are members of the ruling party. They get government contracts (and are favoured by government policy) while they give money to the ruling party and members. Does this happen there?
Another thing we have is the ruling party’s “investment arm” (Chancellor house) which holds stake in many tenders given by government. (The government therefore give tenders indirectly to the ruling party).
Well, on a more positive note about Romania ... my father was the general director of such an institution, and when he was removed from his position based on political reasons, he sued the ministry.
Such actions can be taken because as I said, almost everyone is more or less corrupt and can be caught with a hand in the cookie jar :) ... but in the case of my father (which is either clean or smart :)), he got justice and had to be reinstated.
He's now a senator working in 2 commissions ... and I'm really proud of him for having big balls :)
I live in Ecuador (South America). Our land is packed with high-quality oil, virtually unlimited food and impressive biodiversity (google "yasuni").
Although our country looks perfect, 15% of us live in extreme poverty (this means living out of less than 2 bucks a day). The other 60% is mid-low class with less than $1000 of annual income.
The only explanation I have is that our presidents had not been doing their homework. Corruption, organized crime, economic crime, you name it.
The law allows them to promise a lot of things during campaign although there is not a strong control, audit system in place.
Historically the congress majority is controlled by the president's party.
It gets very complicated if we keep looking into the problem. The conclusion is that we may be indeed partly guilty for it.
now seriously, at least here in Brazil, the trick is that vote is mandatory. So everyone must vote. and everyone ends up voting uninformed. so, the most money you put on the campaign the most votes you get.
And everyone is too busy getting to theirs lives to note that it's already institutionalized. My wife just returned from her driving license exam. the only people approved was the ones that gave the country-standard US$150 bribe to the examiner. She failed the 1st attempt, obviously. When you don't pay you pass on the 2nd or 3rd. which ends up being a little more then the bribe wasted on gov fees and a lot more hassle.
I don't even know what a solution could look like today?
There are natural barriers that prevent competent but distant nations from conquering dysfunctional ones. Colonialism was an attempt to ignore those, until people realized that it cost far more than it was worth to the colonizers.
I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines. It was hoped that Iraq would become a "beacon of democracy" in the Mideast. Then, all of its neighbors would either adopt Western institutions to maintain their relative positions, or they would be conquered by a U.S-supported Iraq.
Somebody forgot to factor in the effect of an 8000-mile supply line, or the reluctance of a people to give up deeply-entrenched customs.
And don't even get me start on Israel and the west bank.
Countries with a mix of a stable economy, advanced technology, and organized military regularly conquered their neighbors that didn't have those things. Countries with the tech/military but not the stable economy (USSR, for instance) could have a brief go at it, but inevitably came down upon themselves.
What sort of examples were you looking for? Nations with the combination advanced technology relative to their neighbors and a well organized military have done a lot of conquering throughout history, and those with stable economies held onto their new possessions. There's so many examples I wouldn't know where to start. Rome and all of its possessions would be a decent place, or one of the many functional or dysfunctional Russian Empires, or the Unification of Japan under the Oda, Toyotomi, and Tokugawa daimyos, or Manifest Destiny in the United States...
Those are just a few to come to mind with the economy/tech/military edges, but there's quite literally hundreds, from little tiny islands taking over other little tiny islands in Oceania to the various international powers/empires. Maybe the question is with the word competent? You do need a healthy economy, advanced technology, and stable military, which in turn requires some sort of decent courts, checks and balances on military rule, some science and production happening, and so on. Complicated question - could probably go on more if you clarified a bit.
Lithuania. Largest country in Europe in the 14th century. Lost large sections of its territory to Sweden and Russia in the late 1600s and 1700s.
All of the Native American nations that were swept aside by the United States. Much of that was because of disease, but a lot was also because the U.S. was better organized and could pick off individual tribes one-by-one.
Mongolia. Genghis Khan's empire, once one of the largest on earth. Great fighters, poor administrators. Eventually overshadowed by China.
Unfortunately, the government that developed was mostly a dictatorship, and as usual it was relatively short-lived once some key family members died off and left an opportunity for others to squabble.
The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.
Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.
"I should probably mention that much of the reasoning behind the Bush invasion of Iraq was along these lines."
This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?
Each of those had their own unique culture, their own identity, their own language, their own technology. Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not. Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes, while others had found territory to settle in and had no desire to expand, while still others were purely nomadic.
If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title. Doing so is a vestigial prejudice in our culture, and worst of all, it's completely destroying any chance we have of learning what they were actually like.
As to relative "competence" -- well, we've begun exploring space. So, I guess it all depends on what you consider to be important.
>Some were cruel to their captives and in times of war; others were not.
What bearing does this have on anything? Most of the bad things we hear about were learned from someone else (e.g. scalping from the French).
>Some wanted to expand their territory and conquer lands and other tribes,
There was in-fighting between certain groups, but obviously none had the same appetite we did.
>If you have any love at all for history, stop referring to all those pre-colonial nations under a single name and title.
You seem to have an axe to grind. In normal usage, one provides as much detail as is relevant. If I were talking about people of earth in relation to some other alien race I would most likely say "humans" unless there was a real reason to be more specific.
It's such a shame. Humans were so peaceful, so quaint. We could have learned so much from them, because all humans lived in great harmony with each-other and with their environment...
...Your reaction would be, "Well, that's about as much detail as is relevant, sure"?
Mine would be, "You're completely ignorant of human history, and that should change."
Scalping is a popular subject to bring up, because it's so simple, so easy to understand. It's not like all of the other varied forms of torture, which have to be described and require a certain amount of attention to discuss; instead, you just say, "...scalping...", and everybody goes, "Ohhhh yeah, that horrible thing that whites taught the innocent natives."
...but then, what were the French doing in South Dakota in 1350? [1]
Yes, I certainly do have an axe to grind, and it is this: history is rich, and amazing, and valuable, and I wish it to be taught and revered, and not swept under the Rug Of Oversimplification with statements like, "the Roman Empire was grand", and "native Americans were beautiful".
[1]: http://www.uiowa.edu/~anthro/paleopathology/crowcreek/vignet...
>...Your reaction would be, "Well, that's about as much detail as is relevant, sure"?
No. In that case, they are making a blanket statement that all humans were peaceful, etc. In this case I was suggestion that the native Americans who were here before us were not necessarily inferior or incompetent. I think that statement stands for most any specific native American group, if not all.
>Yes, I certainly do have an axe to grind, and it is this: history is rich, and amazing, and valuable, and I wish it to be taught and revered, and not swept under the Rug Of Oversimplification with statements like, "the Roman Empire was grand", and "native Americans were beautiful".
Fair enough, but comments get long enough on their own without having to completely qualify every part of every point ever made.
The fact of the matter is, for better or worse European and Asian cultures with the help at times from middle eastern cultures have bettered the human condition and history clearly supports that conclusion.
The grandparent post is right, society has congealed into functional and dysfunctional land masses. I would go so far as to state that it is a gradient, where land masses like the middle east are somewhere in between. Now we can stick our head and the sand and say it is not true and continue with the standard kumbaya, everybody is a winner, Disney movie observations, that it is not the case or we can accept that either culturally, geographically, racially, nutritionally or via some other unknown, there are regions that are prone to violence, rampant corruption, less innovation and political abuse / instability.
We will be none the better, until we come to that acceptance and formulate real solutions that address the real issue and not just band-aiding it with aid and dictator coddling. That just furthers the problem.
Amusing slip, but the sad thing is some people would agree with this statement.
History doesn't support my conclusion? We invaded some else's land and nearly wiped them out. Now what remains are spread out on reservations, little crops of land that had no value to us. You assertion that "Both where right and both were wrong" is nonsense. If some other country invaded the US today and started having that kind of "success" would you feel the same? American citizens would just be the losers in a bitter battle between two cultures? Somehow I don't think so.
>The grandparent post is right, society has congealed into functional and dysfunctional land masses.
No, you and the GGP both confuse what we have now for success. We don't have "functional and dysfunctional land masses", we have the land of the empires who were always conquering and the land of those who weren't as aggressive. As is usually the case; the first one to strike wins. That doesn't mean he is better or has more potential, just that he won. We can't know what would have happened otherwise. Perhaps we've ended up in the best situation we could have, or perhaps we could have reached a much higher level of enlightenment.
There is no way to know, but I find the framing of what happened as the best possible outcome (and by extension, everything that was done was correct) arrogant.
Wow, really? I though that new land was discovered and pilgrims from the English and dutch settled it, that there was a general cohabitation period and then the whites did not like the godless heathens and the godless heathens where stealing and raping women. So the whites decided to kill the infidels and the infidels decided to kill the whites. I don't remember where the Normandy style invasion happened perhaps you could point me to that in your revisionist history books? I suggest you go back and read some simple child history books like the story of Captain John Smith and how he was ambushed and almost executed. Or of the reason that the Dunmore's War was started.
The pilgrims "discovered" land people were already living in. Does it occur to you that the country you live in might wish to paint themselves to be victims (or even noble!) regardless of what really happened?
>the godless heathens where stealing and raping women
Good thing it's so black and white! It would be less convenient if awful things were happening from both sides. Then it wouldn't be so obvious which side was good and which side was evil.
The reason I being up the Mexicans is because we see this occurrence happen through history and it usually ends up in a violent confrontation that both parties excite. The Indians and white settlers are no exception to the same occurrences we see in modern history. If you think the Indians where sitting around baking bread and then all of the sudden for no reason whitey started killing them then you have a very warped sense of revisionist history.
Just read the story of Daniel Boone's son and how they butchered (and when I say butchered I mean butchered) him and it will give you some perspective as to why the pilgrims started to war with the Indians. I mean everyone wants to make whitey the baby killers and here we are with documented accounts of multiple occasions of Indians butchering men's entire families (even the little babies) as revenge and intimidation tactics.
I we did the same to some illegal Mexicans you could be sure that they would want revenge for such atrocities. And once a populist attitude of indiference ot another race or culture has set in it is verry hard to reverse course, whch eventual leads to the total destruction of one of the two cometing cultures.
Israel and the middle east is a good example of this unrepentant attitude. As ws Kosovo, this is history as usual so please don't try to rewrite it to fit you own world view. It is as it is, human nature is as it is and you just have to accept it, until you and others do you are doing everyone a disservice, as solutions need to be derived from real problems and not once idea of what the problem should have been. You are denying the Indians their history and their plight for survival by making them wimps that where just the victims.
But mostly, I'm interested in the facts of history, so I should point out that the "illegal" Mexicans are "discovering" land which used to be theirs in the first place. The current United States western and southwestern were already occupied by Mexico, up until the Mexican-American War, which ended with the United States forcibly buying the land from Mexico for a rather cheap sum.
It's also worth pointing out that the United States government probably already had an inkling of the natural value of California; the great California gold rush began less than a year later, and had that territory still been occupied by Mexico, it would have dramatically changed the balance of power in the Americas.
If one would not blame the Mexicans today for their peaceful search for a better life (which could latter turn violent on both sides), then why would they blame the pilgrims? Just because they are white?
When the story is told by someone whit a bent the white man had murderous intent from the second he set out from Europe and that is the furthest from the truth. The fact of the matter is that most where refugees and the impoverished looking for a better life, in a land that (to them) had a lot of vacant space.
My point is not that the Indians where the devil and that White man where saints, it has been that history is history and it has no room for revision and when you see someone taking different views for the same event with different parties being the actors, you can be sure that they have an agenda. A very popular one is the white man butchered the Indians and robbed them of their land. While also being a supporter of the Mexican migration.
The Mexicans may have not been the best example, as they would be an example of someone who has a more legitimate gripe about white Americans than the Indians.
Happiness is a funny thing, because it tends to depend more on relative status than on absolute standard of living. We can look back now and say those people were so primitive and boy am I glad I live today (well, except you ;-)), but that doesn't really the fact that we murdered a few million people who were probably quite happy with their life the way it was. It'd probably be morally unacceptable today, but it happened.
I'm not trying to make a moral judgment here. My comment is an argument based on facts - "this is what happened, this is how things tend to work extrapolating from what happened, and here is why it is still relevant today." If you want to make a morality play out of it, go for it - I don't exactly think that the native American genocide or Bush's justification for Iraq was a particularly nice thing to do either. But I think a debate on how things work is a bit more productive than a debate on how things should work.
"This statement seems extraordinarily naive to me. What is it based on?"
It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".
The parts of the Jesuit Relations dealing with the Jesuits' first missionary work among the Hurons relates how the Hurons weren't particularly interested in accepting or rejecting the Jesuits' religious message; what they were interested in was how to build French-style houses. The Cherokee tribe took this even further than the Hurons, developing a syllabic script, and assimilating completely to the norms of the American South (even to the point of owning African slaves, unfortunately).
Personally, my complaint about the wars with the American Indians is not that the United States all but annihilated deadly enemies like the Iroquois and the Sioux (although coexistence with them would have been better, and we're doing a little better that way at present); my objection is that the United States all but annihilated peoples like the Cherokee, who were better Europeans than most of the American frontiersmen who wanted them displaced. Like the American Indian casinos, I try to avoid twenty-dollar bills.
Don't get me wrong; I love my mac book pro, my smart phone, playing silly RPG games, watching movies and so on.
I'm simply not prepared to claim that having these things makes me superior to other ways of life. It's different, but it's hard to say superior when a pie chart of how my life is spent would be made up mostly of work and sleep.
>It's based largely on personal memory of a lot of the things said during the lead-up to the invasion. "Beacon of democracy" was used several times in his press releases to drum up support for the war. The "domino theory" of liberalization was discussed in my International Relations course. In both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, there were widespread discussions about how to "win the peace".
I would recommend to you the BBC film "The power of nightmares". I do believe actual terrorists are responsible for 9/11, but I think nearly everything else we've seen or heard (Al Quieda and so on) is very much exaggerated or lied about (I don't buy this "we need a beacon of freedom" at all). As far as I can tell, the biggest thing that has actually happened from the Iraq war is a lot of tax payer money being transfered into the pockets of companies owned by people in Bush's staff.
I make a claim about what the Bush administration's rationale for going to war was, not whether I believe that rationale is justified. To my knowledge, it's a factual and at least partially correct claim.
That's not the problem. Britain ruled Egypt for many decades using only 5,000 soldiers and actually turned a profit. Egypt at the time had 9 million people. Back in 1900, logistics were even more difficult, and Britain's technological edge was actually much less.
The core problem is the the U.S. cultural DNA is anti-imperialist. No one in state department or DOD has actually read the memoirs from the British empire about how they did it. Nor is the U.S. willing to use imperialist tactics. For instance, if you're doing imperialism you need to have a native army reporting directly to the ruling officer class. Instead, the U.S. is trying to police every street with American soldiers. Second, instead of encouraging political parties and democracy, an imperialist needs to prevent them. Political parties incite people to action by blaming other ethnic groups for problems, and they spend all their time worrying about grabbing their peace of the pie. It's very easy for political parties to turn into actual gangs. Third, you cannot be afraid to issue the entire population ID cards, have curfews, checkpoints, population control, etc, until the region is pacified.
Do the above three things, and imperialism is easy. You can do it with 5,000 troops and turn a profit. But do it American style, where you are doing imperialism without admitting it, and you get disaster.
Here's one way to look at it: very, very smart criminals should do much less damage to their victims than they seem to, just for reasons of self-interest. This is primarily because the first world has made it more individually profitable for very, very smart criminals to go legit, either in business or politics. This leaves actual visible criminal activity to those not smart enough, or not disciplined enough, to take that route.
Don't shake your head at how awful it is when a high-up executive at a major corporation turns out to be a complete sociopath. Marvel that society has gotten so much good out of that clever, ambitious sociopath. And be glad that crime is emphatically not as good a career path for him.
The article also doesn't explain why government officials, even corrupt ones, fail to make cheap investments that pay off over a few years. For instance, a kleptocrat should want a reliable supply of clean water to ensure that the farmers are healthy enough to plant and harvest crops, so he can steal the profits. If an epidemic means the crops rot in the fields, that's money out of his pocket. Money is readily converted to power, via bribes, weapons, or propaganda. Losing money means losing power. Why wouldn't a kleptocrat spend money on sanitation, especially if that means getting good marks from foreign governments and NGOs and qualifying for more aid?
It's probably simply too unstable to do so right now, and a lot of that comes from the top.
And that would be a lot of the difference between Cameroon and a poor-ish but more culturally Western country.
This is not to imply that the nobility always _did_ oppose the enemies who they should have been opposing; but it's not at all the case that had there been no feudal militaries, medieval Europe would have been a peaceful place.
(I acknowledge that this is a very late post, and I apologize for that; but it's a common mistake to imagine that medieval European history occurred in a vacuum. The primary culprit here is the, ah, _insular_ way that English-speaking schools teach medieval history...)
And I was specifically talking about the Western European nobility between, say, 1000 - 1300 AD, a period when there were no outsiders invading Western Europe and it was the nobility itself that posed the greatest threat to the lives of "commoners".
I do, by the way, take issue with your description of the Muslims as a threat - that was true only between around 650 - 750 or so, until Charles Martel stopped their expansion at the battle of Poitiers, and it was true again for Romanians and Hungarians in the sixteenth century when the Turkish empire started to expand westward, but between those times (a period commonly known as "The Middle Ages" ;-) ) it was Western Europeans that were threatening muslims by travelling to Palestine in a misguided attempt to "liberate" the "Holy Land" from the "Infidel".
An early example of an anti-corruption measure would be the Magna Carta, which established limits on what an English monarch could do to his subjects. Anglo / American history is essentially one long struggle against corruption. It eventually manifested itself in the form of a government that by definition serves it's people rather than a group of subjects who serve a monarch. Hundreds of years of war, revolution, writings, beheadings and torture eventually eroded the power of government to where it is today. There are very few shortcuts around that. In order to stop corruption people need to be willing to risk their lives, freedom or well being.
There is quite an interesting argument claiming that the German Kaiserreich (1871-1914) served its people better than the modern federal republic of Germany.
It cites a lot of statistics showing how the public sector swelled in the federal republic compared to the Kaiserreich. (Prussia made up the vast majority of the Reich.) Alas, it seems to be only available offline and in German.
Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article's, but goes in exactly the same direction. He emphasizes the importance of frontiers and warfare -- the civilizational counterpart to Darwinian selection pressure, and a reminder that there are worse enemies than one's neighbor and higher causes than one's checkbook -- for asabiya development and, thus, the cohesion of societies. All this is borne out with some very impressive styles of measurement; he's the founder of a new discipline called "cliodynamics," taking its approaches from ecological population modeling.
On the other hand, before we embrace war as the road to prosperity, we need to remember what commentors here observed -- that most civilizations wage war lawlessly, to the point of torture and genocide; so some sort of authority to control the intensity and severity of warfare would be a good idea. I don't think the United Nations will cut it; but Chesterton thought that the Pope would have, had the medieval project been taken to its conclusion...
Irrelevant because that wasn't the assumption.
There's a reason why "he meant well" is an insult....
A rational exploiter might try to revenue maximize. Someone trying to do good/to be fair/to "encourage good behavior" is likely to do economically stupid things.
The first govt of independent Cameroon presumably inherited reasonable infrastructure, law and order, functioning courts etc. (maybe. I dont know much about Cameroon) That first government, having inherited all of this stuff they didn't organize and having zero previous experience with running a country, may well rest on its laurels and assume that this stuff just happens and requires little or no effort to maintain/enhance. If they're really (un)lucky they may well inherent a well functioning society that also produces abundant tax revenue which is surely more than is really required so no one will miss a bit...
It would only be years later that it would become apparent that effective courts, safe streets etc do in fact require organized effort applied in specific ways. And that all of that tax revenue was needed.
The argument is basically racist, they don't know what's good for them, let's show them. It ignores that the western world has a 300 years development advantage concerning democratic institutions and the economy.
or just read this article again and consider how close it is to living under foreign rule - colonialism replaced whatever working, local solutions existed with a system that meant that the logical thing to do was screw over others. colonialism and dictators are very similar.
you can argue that things only collapsed terribly when the colonists left, but that ignores the fact that it would have been so much better if they had never been there...
This reminds me of how in the UK parliament the political parties bicker about who's fault something is. Most of the ex-colonies have been autonomous more than long enough to establish their own stable governance if the combined will of the people were for it.
Umm no. That depends on defining "better off" as "ruled by invaders from another country but with some economic or social benefits(probably)".
Just try offering colonial rule to former colonies, who have experience of being "better off". People might joke about that, but an independent country's citizens would fight to the death against any attempt at colonization. Which means they do think they are better off without colonial rule. Unless you think millions of people don't know what is "better off" for them, your notion is hard to sustain logically.
Unless you want to volunteer to be colonized by China (say)? They seem to be good at economic development, which seems to be your metric for "better off".
The other thing I find interesting is that we seem to be left with no options for solving the problems of these struggling post-colonial nations. Some certainly prospered economically after the ruling colonial powers left. Some suffered immensely. If one accepts that institutional order is a prerequisite for economic prosperity, then one might conclude that an outside power should take over and institute order, but the obvious moral problems prevents this. Not to mention the historically supported unlikelihood that the country would actually benefit. The only solution appears to be institutional order that grows organically from within the country. Outside aid doesn't seem to help much. This leaves very few options for the Haiti's and the Camaroon's of the world.
It's a great introductory economics book for the layman.
http://blogs.ft.com/undercover/
I still believe Freakonomics to be a better read :) but the Undercover Economist book was pretty good too (I read it because I was looking for similar style books)
How does the government keep from eating itself in corruption? We assume this government has reached a steady state by taking only half but not all. However, as the article cites the more corruption you do the more your supporters will do, and the only way to stay in power is to let your supporters be corrupt. Since you're not really building any value, or letting value take root it seems like a prolonged history of this will eventually eat itself without fresh infusions of capital from outside parties. The article hints at this, but it's hard to control it because your supporters are doing it too and might not realize you can't take too much. Plus when outside markets go down I doubt corruption wants to take less in those times. It seems like it will lead to eventual erosion because rebuilding value when markets come back are less likely to happen.
No, really, the author is saying nothing. Wealth is just one part of a society. Effective government is another part. They are both effects of other causes. And they themselves feed back. It's not hard to point out the essentially gangster-like attributes of almost any government. The USA seizes its citizens' property and kills people all across the world. Oddly, since it steals so much more from a wealthier population, the theft isn't as painful. It requires infrastructure to efficiently transfer taxes up and back down to government parasites, rather than have the parasites take it by hand, as in Cameroon. So people rarely think of the USA as a gangster demanding protection money.
This guy is just another reductionist sociologist trying to come up with that one...one...one...reason why an extremely complicated situation is perpetually botched.
He didn't strike me that way (I read the whole book, not just this chapter on Cameroon). Granted, the answer to "why are countries poor?" can never be one thing.
I think his point wasn't so much that the government was stealing but that the government created a system that reduced people's incentives to be productive.
Good point. So who is this guy? His name is Tim Harford, and according to the book jacket of The Undercover Economist:
"Tim Harford writes the Financial Times Magazine "Dear Economist" column, in which he draws upon the latest economic theories to provide tongue-in-cheek answers to readers' personal dilemmas. He also works at the World Bank, where he is the lead writer for the Chief Economist of the International Finance Corporation. Formerly an economics editorial writer at the Financial Times, Harford has served as both an economist for a major oil company and an economics tutor at Oxford University. He lives in Washington DC."
So I think it's fair to call him an economist and a writer.
We can use science, mathematics, and statistics to test hypothesis
You can't, though. It's really hard to make the world a laboratory, though it does sometimes happen by accident. The differences between N and S Korea, E and W Germany, China and Taiwan, I think, settled the question of Communism vs. Capitalism. But good luck in getting the grant money to set up such an experiment. I've pointed out that the USA itself is really a quite corrupt, thieving, murderous entity, but this hasn't really mattered that much. Another example? Nazi Germany. They had a ridiculous war economy, they sent all their young men to butcher people, they imprisoned millions of citizens and foreigners, they had brutal police and internal security, etc, etc. All the worst possible things. Worse than Cameroon could possibly aspire to. And yet the country was prosperous almost to the end of the regime. And this was coming off the heels of the worst historical instances of hyperinflation, depression, and world war. All of which were also caused by politicians.
That's a lot of bad government but it ultimately didn't matter at all.
I agree completely. The sort of thing we're discussing isn't amenable to repeatable, controlled experiments. And it's very complex.
For example, if India is poor and backward, then I am responsible for contributing to its poverty and backwardness, and so are all other Indians.
Maybe everybody could do something to change things, but it certainly isn't obvious WHAT to do. Therefore I can't blame people, if they don't know any better.
This sounds to me as patronizing. I refuse to think that Cameroonians "don't know any better".
I was not really speaking for Cameroon anyway. My main target was India, where you'll see the most demeaning, wretched kind of poverties. I am responsible for it, and if I choose not to do anything about it, then it's my deliberate choice. That's all I am saying.
> for example not everybody has the skills to become elected as president to be able to change the laws
We are not all born with the tools required for the things we need done. We acquire them over time.
Waiting for a messiah to materialize is what I'd call the Kalki-complex. Kalkis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalki) are myths. If there's to be change, it must come from us. And that sense of responsibility is what would inspire each of us to strive to be mini-Kalkis, and with any luck, some of us might even become major-Kalkis.
What could you do about it? Granted, you could somehow dedicate your life to trying to end it. But even then, you'd need a starting point. Suppose you are extremely poor, how to you start? If you have to spend 20 hours/day to find food, you don't have time to practice becoming a good speaker to rouse the masses.
I don't mean it as patronizing, quite the opposite. I think it is patronizing to say it is the people's own fault for not doing anything about it.
If you were a Cameronian, what would you do? If you chose to work against poverty in India, what would you do?
I wouldn't know what to do as a Cameronian. As the article says, if you try to start a business to improve economics and infrastructure, thieves will take it apart. If you go into politics to try to change the situation, I suppose you will be murdered or something like that. If you start a revolution, there will be lots of bloodshed. I don't see an easy solution.
:-)
See, my version of your question is: What would Gandhi (or Nehru, Bose, Azad, Bhagat, Savarkar, et. al.) do?
I don't have an answer to that right now, I am afraid.
Probably everybody could do fasting (although even that might require a certain amount of dediction). But to come of with the psychological strength and dedication would be another matter.
Maybe for everybody there is a path of possible actions that would lead him to become like Ghandhi. But that is what I was saying: it certainly isn't obvious what actions that would be. Therefore I think a certain amount of luck is involved.
If you don't have an answer to my question, then why do you disagree with me? How is the poverty in India your fault? I suppose you could at least decide to study and try to find an answer, but there is no guarantee that you would find one.
http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-Walter-Ro...
It is worth looking at Deng Xiaoping's early rural reforms in China, to see an example that lifted the most people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time.
I can summarize it with the biblical saying: don't give a man fish, teach a man how to fish.
China's record illustrates a few things: a) a society where there is some order and stability, so people can focus on development. Way too many poor countries, including the poorest parts of India, have little or no stability on the ground. You have to be able to make a plan, and have a reasonable assurance that the overall environment around you is stable enough to execute the plan. This Deng provided.
b) Remove barriers to rural entrepreneurship, particularly light industry - shoes, textiles, everyday low tech household goods and the like. It should be possible for these ventures to be funded - they need fairly small amounts of capital, but the system has to be in place to provide access to that capital, and conversely, provide reasonable security to that capital. This is why order and stability matters - both sides on the capital equation have to be able to make a plan with some assurance.
c) Build roads in the countryside, so the rural entrepreneurs have market access, so they can get a higher price by selling to nearby urban areas (i.e they can get better terms of trade in exchange for other urban-made goods - this lifts both sides).
That is it. Note that I did not say anything about literacy, healthcare and so on. All of those things are important, but getting the first steps I listed above right would unleash a wave of human energy that would lift incomes on a massive scale. Even the poorest, most illiterate villages in India have a labor force that can produce these light goods for their own consumption, and have enough talent to organize that production - that is the crucial part to remember. They can lift consumption only if they lift production.
Step back and think about this: what is poverty? At its rawest level, it is a) not enough food b) not enough simple material goods. Unleashing rural entrepreneurship allows a) more food to be grown b) allows that same population to produce the simple material goods that vastly improve the human condition. I am not talking here about iPhones here, I am talking about the shirt on your back, shoes, toothbrush and the like. Once people take that first step on the ladder, they move up pretty fast.
Fortunately, where our company is (in India) and our current position (doing well) allows us to experiment. But there is that crucial first step, stability and order, we cannot provide, which means we can only go where there is stability and order, which obtains relatively more in Southern India than in the North, though (or should I say "as a result") Northern states are poorer.
Deng's China is the existence proof that it can be done.
The search for cheap labor moves on to another poor country, and the newly rich country is an economic benefit to all as a trading partner.
It's kinda like "X is 8 times less expensive than Y", which I assume means X = 1/8 x X, but to me would make more sense as X = Y - 8Y = -7Y...
Proper English, as I understand it, would be to say "they were 1/8 as rich" or "they have only 12% as much wealth", but that is much less dramatic.
(by this measure, Cameroon is 24 times as poor as the US, perhaps not what the article was going for)
Not all poor countries are poor in the same way. Although there are clear correlations between crime and poverty -- and corruption -- there are also countries like Thailand, which are poor but with relatively little crime or corruption.
So, let's say culture is one factor. If you reduce the education of the people down to what can be passed by word of mouth from one generation to the next, then if that culture's "story" is largely one of war or self-interest, then it's more likely to be reinforced by the next generation. On the other hand, if a culture's history includes a somewhat recent spell of relative peace -- even under a dictatorship -- then it's more likely that the next generation will work towards establishing stability.
Resources is certainly another factor. It is simply impossible for a country to make roads, high technology, and infrastructure materialize from nothing. It must have natural resources available, either to directly build infrastructure or to trade with other countries for raw materials.
Education is another factor -- or, maybe more specifically, the value of education. This is one of the things that concerns me about anti-intellectualism in the U.S.; when education becomes devalued, citizens lose the perspective of history, the opportunity to learn from other countries' mistakes, and the notions of what might be possible in the future.
Poverty and corruption are self-reinforcing, too. You can see this even in the poorer communities in "wealthy" countries: homes that are in disrepair, common spaces that are mismanaged and poorly kept. I'm sometimes tempted to wonder why people in those communities don't spend a few dollars on paint, or a few hours here and there working on a few repairs, and bring their community out of poverty. Then, I remember how I felt when I was poor: exhausted. There is a tremendous spiritual toll taken by abject poverty; it defeats you the moment you wake up. Your day will likely be a struggle, and if it isn't, then it becomes a rare and valuable rest day. It's a difficult catch-22 to understand if you haven't been in such a situation, but if you're constantly struggling to survive, the last thing you want to do is spend effort to improve your situation.
Cameroon at this point isn't likely to change soon, because its poverty and corruption has become cultural. Changing its situation will probably require first a massive sea-change in the government; the death of the current ruler and replacement by someone less politically savvy, or less self-interested. Or, direct intervention by other governments.
Then, it will take time. Someone will have to find the energy to build infrastructure while the rest of the citizens learn what it can be like not to struggle every day.
As for public spaces, having lived in a student hall puts things into perspective. It is VERY demotivating to repeatedly clean up other people's dirt, if they don't care.
I once visited a home for asylum seekers and was a bit shocked about the dirt (for example in the kitchen). But there were lots of different nationalities there, who might not even understand each other. When I moved in the student hall and saw that even people with equal backgrounds have problems to cooperate, I understood why the conditions for asylum seekers were so poor...
Likewise for run down neighbourhoods: what is the point in replacing your windows, if other people will just smash them again within days? Besides I suspect the worse it gets the more people think about moving away rather than improving things. Once you have decided you want to move away eventually, you are even less likely to invest into improving things.
the article was tl;dr. did they at least cite mancur olsen for the stationary bandit hypothesis? AFAIK it originated in his book the rise and decline of nations:
http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Decline-Nations-Stagflation-Rigid...
It will be much easier to understand what happen in Cameroon, if you imagine similar system you can understand.
Imagine, you have group of web-servers. You hire administrator to administrate your dedicated servers in dedicated data centre. He changed all locks, root passwords, identity information, and then installed his own servers in addition to your own. The only right you have now is to pay bills. His servers produces too much load on your system, his incompetent administration causes outages, so your own income is suffers down. There is no "provider" to complain to.
What you can do in that situation?
a) Pay more to administrator, so he will take some courses and will provide more competent service in future;
b) register new web-domain, create new, separate, data centre, hire new administrator;
c) hire a gang to kill old administrator, blow up doors, reformat hard drives, hire new administrator.
If Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Markov, Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Arnold, Gromov, Perelman have / had spoiled genes, then I wish such "spoiled genes" were more common in the West.
The article is actually quite interesting in that it examines the motives a dictator has to foster stability and financial growth (so that there is more to plunder). But to achieve this growth the dictator needs help from the army or the police (any group of men with guns will do) and that comes in the form of letting them indulge in their own corruption. This leads to a national death spiral as the only way to get support for your corruptive endeavors is to let your subordinates pillage their subordinates. It is a toxic trifecta of mistrust/corruption/lack of institutions which leaves the country entirely dysfunctional.
It's a fascinating article. You should read it.
A politician can win the support of the people, including the armed enforcers, by other means than threat of death. If it were possible to have a political group that, I don't know, laid out a plan for the countries future and won support that way. Then, winning support of thugs with guns, by allowing them to plunder, in order to subdue your population by force wouldn't be necessary. Then you could start to rebuild the pride and position of your country and its people and those people could work together to help build a nation.
Pipe dreams I suppose.