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Comment by dkarl | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like government in Cameroon is effectively organized crime, but I imagine most criminal organizations would run the country more efficiently and more profitably. Would the government do a better job if it stopped mimicking the institutions of high-functioning countries and was frankly exploitative?

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You'd think. But actual organized criminals like bootleggers are/were generally not terribly efficient either.

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.

You have to assume Cameroon has as many clever, ambitious sociopaths as any other country. Why aren't they providing basic services? The article explains why long-term investment doesn't take place, but it doesn't explain why simple for-profit services don't crop up in competition with the official ones. For instance, if it costs too much to get a contract enforced legally, then there is a market for enforcing contracts illegally. This is obviously bad news for the government officials profiting from the legal enforcement of contracts -- unless they are the ones running the illegal service, and they structure it as an inferior, low-end alternative to their legal service. (Corrupt government officials have an advantage over the mafia: corrupt government officials don't have to worry about getting shut down by the authorities. They just have to share the loot with their superiors.)

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?

All of that looks like a good investment if you have sufficient stability (including cooperation from fellow kleptocrats) to have a serious chance at harvesting what you sowed.

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.

"organized crime" pretty accurately describes other forms of government as well. Feudalism in medieval Europe, for example, was basically an extortion and protection racket.

On the other hand, just as it's not really paranoia when they're really out to get you, a protection racket is preferable to being overrun by hordes of Teutonic Nietzcheans. :) Having the same structure doesn't always mean being the same thing.

Except that in the case of the middle ages, if there weren't any bloodthirsty "nobles" to begin with, "protection" wouldn't be necessary in the first place, so to me at seems at least in part not just the same structure as a protection racket but the same substance as well.

There were the Germanic invaders at first, against whom the late-Roman landholders organized; then there were the Vikings, against whom the mixed late-Roman landholders and Germanic invaders organized; then there were the Muslims (who were a threat earlier than the Vikings, and stayed a threat later than them; remember what "reconquista" means, and what happened to Byzantium); then there were the Protestants, and/or the Catholics, and/or the French... and this is leaving out the alphabet soup of East European enemies like the Balts, the Slavs, the Bulgars, and the Magyars (and the Germans themselves were not part of the medieval world until the 8th century or so AD and the conquest of Germany west of the Elbe by Charlemagne).

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...)

I'm well aware of the things you describe :-)

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".

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