Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws, customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor.

I'm sure the people of these nations would love to watch their culture be erased as they become an underclass in the territory of a powerful nation. Just ask the Native Americans!

When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told. They won’t show up for work reliably on time, have many problematic superstitions, hate direct orders, won’t accept tasks and roles that that deviate from their non-work relative status with co-workers, and won’t accept being told to do tasks differently than they had done them before, especially when new ways seem harder.

"Many problematic superstitions?" What? Who is this guy even talking about? This sounds like a caricature, not an actual description of reality.

The farming mode required humans to swallow many changes that didn’t feel nice or natural to foragers. While foragers are fiercely egalitarian, farmers are dominated by kings and generals, and have unequal property and classes. Farmers work more hours at less mentally challenging tasks, and get less variety via travel. Huge new cultural pressures, such as religions with moralizing gods, were needed to turn foragers into farmers.

Again, how does he know this? Is he just making up stories, or is this based on some sort of evidence?

A couple comments; first, you have clearly never tried to manage a third-world work force/team. A single example came to mind quickly for me; a hotel I frequented in Mozambique had a serious problem with feral cats. Like 50 of them. They would come right up to your table, jump on it while you were elsewhere, and lick the butter of your plate.

I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously.

It took a couple of months to get an exterminator in willing to deal with them; cats = black magic = no employees (relatively well educated and very well paid for the town) were willing to deal with them.

The fact that you're writing this post in English significantly bolsters the point the author made about acculturation. You live in a world in which the English essentially won the culture war, and imposed their culture on a vast swath of the globe. (Check out this fine map of places England has not invaded for some perspective: http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-wh...)

While it might be controversial to say that English culture generates on average more wealth than some other cultures, I think it would be reasonably easy to demonstrate that something about the English acculturation of colonies left them better off financially than other European and Asian colonizers.

And, by better off, I mean vastly better off. Compare Nigeria (British, $3k+ per person GDP) to CAR (French, $350 per person GDP). I'm not cherry picking, either. America to Mexico. We live in a world shaped by the Brits.

To your point, financial well-being isn't anything like the only measure. At least in America, part of what made growth easy was whole-sale genocide. Places with more balanced colonization plans got much more strung out violence and economic difficulty. I would argue due to culture conflicts, at least in part.

I don't think the author is disputing this in the essay, though. He is instead saying that more individualistic cultures who will not engage with Western school systems hurt their economic outcomes, for a variety of reasons.

> I'm not cherry picking

Did you just compare an oil rich country ( Nigeria ) against a land locked central African nation to prove your point ?

I can compare India ( per capita $6,209 ) which was invaded by the British, has official Language as English and copied most of it's political system from Britain, to Mongolia ( per capita $11,024 ) which was never invaded by British ( Mongolia has a fair amount of mineral reserves ).

The comparison of the US to Mexico is just as ridiculous as the comparison of Nigeria to CAR.

In the US, the European settlers killed all of the natives and took the land over for themselves. In the northern states, the economy was a mix of small farms and industrial production. In the southern states, the economy was plantation-based, built on slave labor of imported Africans. In both North and South, most of the accumulated wealth stayed local, though the two regions ended up with radically different social structures and a substantially different level of per capita wealth.

In Latin America, by contrast, there were only a few settlers who set themselves up as elite rulers of the natives, who they subjugated and robbed, but left alive (excepting the large proportion who died of disease or were killed in armed rebellions). All of the wealth created by indigenous Latin Americans was systematically stolen and given over to the colonial Spanish authorities, and much of it was shipped back to Spain.

Later on, the US was able to build a strong federal government with a diverse power base. In Mexico, by contrast, since independence the government has been relatively weak with looser control over the country, and power has been much more concentrated, with less power equality.

You can’t just chalk this up to “English” vs. “Spanish” culture. What Spain did in Latin America is much more similar to what the British did in India or southern Africa (or Ireland for that matter), with analogous though not precisely identical historical outcomes. There are lots of other geographical, logistic, geopolitical, etc. differences between all of these places, so colonial strategy alone isn’t any kind of complete model.

That map is a funny curiosity, but it doesn't really show the territories that the Brits invaded, it actually shows the countries with whom the Brits have been at war with at some point in time. Just take the huge territory of Russia; when did the Brits "invade" Russia? Is all that pink justified by the Crimean War? ;)

No, it depends on the institutions setup by the invaders. In the US, the British never managed to setup an exploitative set of systems, designed to funnel money to corrupt individuals.

In the third world, they did. Those systems are what drive poverty.

Quite a few places would have been better off without the fucking over by the Europeans, and infinitely better off if given a large capital infusion without conditions (see the Marshall plan and the reconstruction of Japan).

The wholesale destruction of life and property in Europe in WW1 and WW2 had huge benefits to people living there now (due to the wholesale rebuilding of social infrastructure).

> I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously.

Sure about that? I wouldn't want 50 harmless cats exterminated just because they bother the uptight guests of the hotel occasionally. I live in a country were stray cats are everywhere, and they routinely come in my apartment too. No problem, I enjoy it and have had they chance to raise many kittens as well.

Cats have very interesting parasites.

Full disclaimer: I took a young feral cat into my custody once (after it appeared behind my window on the second floor), but it is still worth mentioning.

Just as an example of a superstition, take the "Virgin Cleansing Myth". It's a myth existing all over the world, by especially prevalent in Africa, that having sex with a virgin will cleanse you of diseases, especially nowadays HIV. [1]

This is believed by some to be one of the reasons why HIV, and rape, is so prevalent in South Africa - people with HIV will often rape virgins to cure themselves, thus also spreading the disease.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_cleansing_myth

Of course, worldwide people are susceptible to superstition, and if you want to talk about harmful superstitions that affect HIV transmission then look no further than policy pushed throughout Africa by US Christian right-wingers. The excellent documentary "God Loves Uganda" discusses how the most recent Bush administration threatened to withhold foreign aid from Uganda and other countries if they distributed birth control or didn't adhere to abstinence-only education.

Here in Cambodia expats constantly gripe about lazy native people, considering them stupid for not wanting to embrace every facet of Western culture. A common example that I've seen repeated in books and internet forums alike is that Cambodians won't adopt Western farming practices (like showering plants in pesticides) and so they must be just backwards and ignorant. Never is it considered that the native people, who have lived here for generations, might have different priorites or know something that a rich asshole from the West, who's been here 6 months, does not.

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