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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

I've read essays about Paul Romer's views before. Of course regions are poor for reasons. Poverty is the outcome of the prevailing conditions, and changing those conditions is the obvious recipe for changing the result.

But the people who are ruling the poor nations have a vested interest in the status quo, which is why the region is poor, and those organizations that pour "aid" resources in without changing the cause of the poverty also have a vested interest in not solving the problems.

Unless this changes, theorizing about changes is fruitless. Until Paul Romer or someone else has the wherewithal to MAKE changes, it's all air.

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> But the people who are ruling the poor nations have a vested interest in the status quo, which is why the region is poor,

Not everywhere, and not in a perfectly unified way, which is why Romer got genuine interest in Madagascar and apparently has a couple of other possibilities on line. It only takes one place to get started.

Note that the article closes by talking about how Romer's bigger problem is finding rich countries willing to be sponsors of the charter cities. If what Romer wants is a new Hong Kong or Singapore, this does seem like a problem, at least if he's looking for sponsors among Western democracies.

I think it would be hilarious--and not entirely implausible--if nominally communist China ended up sponsoring Romer's first free-market-enterprise-zone charter city.

> Unless this changes, theorizing about changes is fruitless. Until Paul Romer or someone else has the wherewithal to MAKE changes, it's all air.

Persuasion, argument, and communicating a vision are ways to make changes, and they sometimes work.

I think it would be hilarious--and not entirely implausible--if nominally communist China ended up sponsoring Romer's first free-market-enterprise-zone charter city.

India and Brazil are also good candidates. They could try out such an experiment in their own borders.

True, and I hope they do. City states are my best hope for the future (politically). They've worked before, and I think conditions might be right for them to start working again.

My intuition is that it might be more politically possible for (say) India and Brazil to outmaneuver interest groups if they work outside the native country, even if they have otherwise reasonable locations inside their borders.

I suspect that New York City operates much like a city-state right now.

I never thought of that. I can see what you mean. I'll have to think about this some more. I'm not sure I'll like it.

I can see what you mean.

I've been thinking along these lines when a college friend of mine warned that the NYC legal system didn't necessarily respect habeas corpus

Likewise, wealthy nations also have vested interests in certain poor nations staying that way, since that arrangement yields very cheap labor, coltan, electronics recycling, diamonds, etc. Globalization has seen to it that poverty often doesn't exist in a vacuum any more.

Indeed, since the article already drops the term 'neo-colonial,' I don't see how the economic approach described should be considered anything but that. At least, it's a bit disingenuous to label this approach 'revolutionary.'

"Likewise, wealthy nations also have vested interests in certain poor nations staying that way."

No, they don't. Heard of China? Growth in China? That shit makes capitalists giddy. And when the guys at Goldman Sachs are happy, your political elite smiles too. Would they like 800 million africans to become another china? Yes, they would. Industrialization of a nation does not make it's raw materials more expensive. Africa's cheap labour is of little use to the west (or china) (extraction of raw materials is not labour intensive, africas commercial agriculture is underdeveloped). Growth in africa would not hurt the evil imperialists.

Considering the catastrophe* de-colonization in africa has been the smugness of those who dismiss all ideas carrying the faintest whiff of colonialism is nauseating.

*Africa is the only continent on earth were falling levels of gdp per capita has been the norm in several countries. THis picture becomes bleaker if you consider the fact that the increase in gdp per capita is from resource extraction that brings little benefits to the people. De-colonization was a disaster on the scale of maos great leap forward.

I will admit my inability to carry through with such a debate on an informed basis. This is my last response on this thread.

There are clearly contrasting points of view about the benefits colonization of Africa. Those POVs which I've found insightful, as opposed to dogmatic or culturally biased, point out the assumption that modernization should be desirable to lesser developed nations is only an assumption, and not always one shared mutually.

cf. http://www.africaeconomicanalysis.org/articles/gen/neocoloni...

On China, Martin Hart-Landsberg had a couple informative articles on Monthly Review. (I didn't know Lenovo came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.)

http://monthlyreview.org/100201hart-landsberg.php

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2005/mhlpb300705.html

I agree that China "makes capitalists giddy", even though it developed with intense government planning. The Communist Party controls the unions, which the Washington Post said that Wal-Mart loves, in contrast to its hatred of more democratic US unions. (I'm sure that more corporations than just Wal-Mart are so giddy.) Workers capture very little of the GDP, compared to China's wealthy elite, and have lost much of their social support. And GDP is itself an ideological measure for many reasons; for example, it doesn't track systematic costs (so people getting cancer from pollution raises GDP).

The US has been proven time and time again to only want countries to grow on the US' terms (China is the example of a country that was too big to control or stop).

You can look at Cambodia and Vietnam prior to the Vietnam war, and you can analyze the history of Central America to discover why all these places are basically third world still when they have had thriving economies at one time or another. The problem was they weren't thriving on the ideals of Capitalism, rather some of them adopted a socialist workers structure.

The issue is the structure of success and how it feeds into the powerful states and their corporations and not success itself. Success that is not wrapped by Capitalist values is very dangerous to the US, EU.

The reason everyone turned on Hugo Chavez after being a man named in Time's influential people list is that his socialist policies (especially the distribution of oil wealth away from large corporations) started being successful and other Southern American states were taking notice (combined with trade deals with China). Of course, since then he has been shown to be misguided in a number of things so I fear even mentioning him.

Have you ever considered the possibility that socialism just doesn't work? That always seems more plausible to me, in an Occam's Razor sort of way, than the conspiracy theory that the US prevents socialist states from succeeding.

If china was to big to stop, so was surely the soviet union. The soviet union had independence from the US, political elites in control who wanted to succeed and the opportunity to try out several "versions" of socialism. If socialism works, why did it not work for them? Where they too stupid or unorganized to copy the successful vietnamese or latin americans? I think not. (A general rule of politics and history: If the germans can't pull off a system of goverment/production, it can't be done.) Chavez is on an oil driven spending spree, it won't end well[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_disease

There may be some of this. But counterbalancing it is the desire for more consumers. Corporate interests will be more profitable in the long term by securing more customers than by maintaining cheap labor.

Technology will always provide cheaper manufacturing processes, and alternatives to raw material needs. But it doesn't provide for additional people demanding finished goods.

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