A 400-year story of progress – How America became the world’s biggest economy
economist.com
economist.com
I guess this too would be an example of the 'banality of evil'.
(btw to get around the paywall just clink on 'web' to find it through google; it'll let you read it if google is the referrer)
Southern capitalism thus negated capitalism's mission: that society improves when parties can fulfill each other's desires efficiently if they each have something that the other desires. So Northern capitalism did tend towards greater capitalist prosperity, because it wasn't contradicting post-slavery capitalism like the South. That contradiction depends upon the Southerners not seeing blacks as anything but "technology", rather than economic agents.
But the result is that white refusal to cooperate with blacks hurts both blacks and whites: neither blacks improve their lot (no productivity), nor do whites improve theirs (forced to relinquish maximum efficiency and profit that would otherwise be allowed by allowing black employment) - simply because of racial stubbornness.
[0] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/storage/app/uploads/public/5...
And then being the ones to end it with the strongest display of force?
According to these numbers [1], the U.S. was the largest single country economy several years before 1914. And, if these numbers can be trusted, its growth trajectory would have sustained that position even without WWI.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of...
The present alignment of global economies has seen the US return to a normalized position in terms of both GDP and manufacturing share globally. The temporary artificial expansion after WW2 lasted for roughly 40 years. During that time, the US spent vast treasure protecting other nations, rather than annexing territory or attempting to conquer other nations and plunder their resources (eg: Western Europe, Germany, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan).
Basically, to summarize, in the time period between US independence and before the US became the dominant country in terms of economic power, there really weren't any major European wars for the US to be untouched by.
Using jingoism to spin this into some sort of exceptionalism celebrates the loot and plunder without a hint of self consciousness or remorse, and cements a barbaric ideology that fuels more indiscriminate global plunder in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
Ta for the heads up 8)
The Minoans
The minotaur was invented by the Greeks that were jealous of Minosse's SWAG :)
You sound defensive. Why should there need to be a sinless society before you'll entertain someone's thoughts on the relationship between your sins and your success.
What I object to is someone who's bitter because he's not American launching into an irrelevant tirade and acting like they are somehow better when 60 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. It's pretty dishonest and it shows some hate and/or immaturity when a bunch of people have upvoted said tirade because of their own biases.
75 years ago Europeans were exterminating each other. Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world.
75 years ago America entered World War 2 and helped defeat the Nazis. Today Nazis are openly marching in the streets and running over counterprotesters with cars, and the President suggests that "both sides" have "very fine people".
Perspective is a hell of a thing, isn't it?
I think it's delusional to believe that the prejudices that led to literal genocide in Europe within living memory (more recent than that even, see the Balkans) have faded more than the prejudices of slavery in the US which show up at events like Charlottesville. The hatred is alive and well in European societies like it is anywhere else. You're citing a single counterprotester getting run over (horrible, yes) when in the Ukraine there is an ongoing invasion and throughout Europe, Islamic terrorism (due to divided societies) will last for a generation.
Your perspective (which sees as a vice the suggestion that both sides of any conflict might have some realistic grievances) is a myopic, tribal one which too often parades around in places like HN and sees itself as diverse and open minded when it is anything but. You don't realize how: "Today, they are united and peaceful for the most part, and their union is one of the largest and most successful economies in the world." is just as applicable to the US and such an optimistic view of Europe is an incomplete portrayal. If that's not how you intend for it to come off, I apologize, but it has a very strong undercurrent of bias.
All I'm saying is Americans are humans, descendants of the same Europeans, Africans, Asians, and native Americans that came before them, so it's not shocking that we'd have the same flaws as every other society, and in fact, historically, the actions of the US have at times been no more or less deplorable or laudable than any other people.
Just because world history is symbolic, does not mean millions of people's duties do not depend upon which symbols are present.
It is fine to condemn it if you want, we definitely don't want to repeat it, but if you think any culture really has the moral high ground on this, you should look deeper.
god forbid people bring up hitler in a thread about history/world politics
In fact, let's just scrub history of any references to Germany so we can make internet threads marginally less annoying
There is a difference when drawing a comparison about something entirely unrelated, but when you're talking about topics involving wiping out a people, claiming Godwin's law is silly.
From Wikipedia;
Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes") have been made by the American lawyer, journalist, and author Glenn Greenwald.
In December 2015, Godwin commented on the Nazi and fascist comparisons being made by several articles on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, saying: "If you're thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician."
On August 13, 2017, Godwin made similar remarks on social networking websites Facebook and Twitter with respect to the two previous days' Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, endorsing and encouraging efforts to compare its alt-right organizers to Nazis.
The two perspectives aren't even very different.
The "world history is just how the circle of life turns round" stance is to the moral high ground stance what a sitcom with canned laughter is to a comedy without a laugh track: with the canned laugh track, you aren't even expected to bring the laughter. To forget your dilemmas, all that is expected of you is just to stare at the screen.
I get that Nazism is a topic people tend to be skeptical of the possibility of using examples in discussions both honestly and seriously. Not only does it flare emotions, it also makes it more likely that discussion will just split around calling the opponent a Hitler-sympathizer/trying to distance oneself from the cultural taboo "evil is a subset of 'the set of Hitlers'" (which is not the same as "Hitler is a singleton subset of the set of evils".
The evergreen task is finding the deficiencies of historical signifiers we used to use, both the ones that brought the most prosperity, and the ones that brought the most ruin.
There was no comparison to Hitler
I always oppose their situation to Europe where many similarly large countries were shoulder to shoulder.
Uh they did.
"The Mughal Empire began a period of proto-industrialization, and Mughal India became the world's largest economic power, with 24.4% of world GDP, and the world leader in manufacturing, producing 25% of global industrial output up until the 18th century. The Mughal Empire is considered "India's last golden age" and one of the three Islamic Gunpowder Empires (along with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia)." [1]
Can't find a similar citation for China but before colonialism, India and China were the world's two largest economies. It's telling that European explorers were searching for a sea route to India and not the other way around. Europeans wanted silk and spices from India and China. But Europe had nothing India or China wanted. Or at least, knew they wanted. Arguably they could've used the superior maritime knowledge[2] and gun manufacturing techniques Europeans possessed.
I guess if there's anything that history teaches us, it's that attaining a lead is no guarantee of maintaining it.
There's a whole Wikipedia article exploring why these two nations fell behind the Western World in the 18th and 19th centuries. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Divergence#Possible_fact...) I'd argue that colonialism was certainly a major factor for India. Being treated for 150+ years as a source of cheap raw materials and captive market for exports will do terrible things to a country's industry and economy.
I don't know for certain, but I assume that the land was harder to make arable, the weather was less forgiving, the rainforests brought additional problems (like persistence of mosquitos and ticks). Plus South America didn't unify like the USA did, which might have presented an obstacle.
I think I once heard a statistic like at the height of slavery 50% of the USA's exports were cotton. The industrial revolution was a great driver of the demand for America's cotton.
"The American South is known for its long, hot summers, and rich soils in river valleys making it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton, with shipments from Houston, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports.
The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial Revolution which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product." [0]
It might be the case that this prosperity didn't happen in South America because they were not strategically fulfilling cotton demand of the industrial revolution. The reason that the conquistadors had started slaving was to fulfill a "gold revolution"; and they did at least gain prosperity in doing so. But the demand of the "gold revolution" for their monarchies was much smaller than the demand of the industrial revolution.
However, Egypt and India also had significant exports of cotton. The effect that did happen is that the Civil War led to great increases of prosperity due to cotton exports for those countries [0][1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton
[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war...
rich soils in river valleys
Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.
Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).
Argentina had a good run, but internal politics have shit the bed in that country for a good century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
It took a long time, and a lot of treaties and individual countries to act to abolish slavery.
(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.
Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.
> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]
But what is there even to conclude from this?
Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.
But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".
Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.
edit: forgot link
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...
That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.
While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place for decades after WWII.
One could easily fathom an alternate reality where the Third Reich didn't happen/didn't turn out as extreme and as a result, racial segregation and bigotry would still be a "global standard" because humanity didn't see the worst and most extreme outcomes of it.
Who knows, a couple of decades from now the US might serve as yet another negative example for one of humanities many follies.
These "values" existed all over the world back then, driven by a scientific movement we aptly named "scientific racism" these days. You know, a whole section of science busy trying to explain why some humans are just so much "better" than other humans based on their skin color, size of the head or other arbitrary physical attributes. This followed right on the tail of an era of colonialization which was also fueled by the racial stigma of "We gotta civilize those heathen savages by enslaving them and taking their lands".
It's exactly those values being so widespread and accepted which lead to the Nazis taking the "next step", which wasn't a really big one. The difference between treating a whole group of people as "lesser humans" by law, having them act as a slave class, and "exterminating" these very same people because there are supposedly too many of them, isn't that big of a difference.
The "values" behind these two approaches are exactly the same, labeling a whole group of people as "lesser humans", the difference was only a matter of execution in how to deal with those people. The US commercialized this behavior by using the slave force, putting a price on people like they are property. Similarly, forced labor drove large parts of the Third Reich's war machine and economic progress.
This might sound cold-hearted or like I'm trying to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, none of this is my intention, my intention merely to point out how whole nations can be hypocrites about their own moral position because they didn't kill disfranchised people on a supposedly "industrialized scale", but "only" on a commercialized one.
The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
Which was exactly my point, it was the de-facto standard for the longest time and one of the major factors for colonialization, that went on until the Third Reich and at that point, most of humanity decided: "Nope, don't want anything like that anymore".
That still didn't excuse the Third Reich or their crimes, it still serves as a "negative example" and will most likely do so for the foreseeable future. In that regard you are vastly underestimating the importance of the Nürnberg trials in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its influence on the world community.
> The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.
Nuclear proliferation mostly impacts governments behavior imho you are overestimating its impact on social progress and people generally becoming more accepting.
Factors like globalization and the Internet play a way bigger role in facilitating understanding between different people, it's also helpful to have a generally accepted standard of "Universal human rights", applying to every human being regardless of ethnicity or nationality.
MAD, with it's attached red scare, only generated generations of paranoid and distrustful people whos paranoid fear rules most of their worldviews, in some cases to this day.
It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.
If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.
Sure. It's probably a human trait. But I'm not japanese or belgian or german so I wouldn't know.
But I'm responding to a comment which "excused" our sins and I'm an american so that's why I made the comment.
If it is a human trait, so be it. But the fact that you are pointing to the sins of others kinda proves my point doesn't it?
How on earth can you describe a landmass as stolen or a continent as usurped?
Do you stop at "first to call the area by its modern name" or do you go back through say first hominids?
Perhaps we should go back further, say "recognisable single cell organism"
They didn't kill first
There's some speculation of earlier migrations:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-evidence-hu...
In any case, humans had been living here for several thousand years before Columbus arrived 500 years ago. Is it so difficult to see a distinction between millions of people with hundreds of years of history and thousands of people arriving on ships?
(Estimates of the total population vary quite a lot; millions is quite a safe claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigeno... )
Pretty straight forward.
You can do what you like but the continental plate it was performed on wont give a fuck. You could even destroy that continental plate or even the whole shebang but it will still not give a fuck.
Landmasses and continents don't give a fuck - they really don't.
As for a “usurped continent”, the land was very sparsely populated by the natives compared to the people who came in, and disease cleared out more of them making a vast underpopulation. It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first. Also I would guess you are a liberal from your comments, and therefore likely support legalizing undocumented immigrants. According to your logic, undocumented immigrants are “usurping” America, which is quite unpopular among liberals today.
America committed plenty of evils, but that’s not what made America great. In addition to many bad things, the USA did a lot of things right. I believe the USA had a lot of benefits from geography, but the real thing that made the country great was recognizing the rights of the individual. It has been demonstrated over and over again that egalitarianism yields big dividends in groups. Because the USA had such an emphasis on equality (declaration of independence), innovation occurred on an incredible level. It took a long time for that equality to spread to blacks, but the very idea of even equality of whites was unheard of at the time of the USA founding.
Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
By that argument, it's just not right to say that multi-millionaires should control so much wealth just because they were born into privileged conditions. Wouldn't fairness require a forced redistribution of those resources?
There is a limit in either case. Nobody would say one person should be allowed to control all global wealth, or that one person should be assigned all of North America. It's just a matter how where you draw your line.
According to your logic integrating successfully into a different society and culture, is the same as arriving with superior weaponry and slaughtering the natives over 149 years. (1775-1924)
Your attempt at comparison and equivalence is pitiful and cruel.
- "collective pre-existing rights became held in abeyance because so many rightsholders died" -- This assumes the living natives were not the owners of what was still there, either because they were propertyless, or the dead rightsholders didn't have a way to transfer property rights - which they would necessarily, historically have had for rights to have been a pre-existing Native American cultural notion - at the very instant they met the explorers.
- "the natives didn't have a notion of property rights, but the explorers did. the explorers were able to respect property rights, so it was best and fair that they acquired as much as they could" -- If anything this suggests that the explorers had great disrespect or didn't even understand property themselves. It was peak hypocrisy to violate the Native American population's property rights -- that were still their rights even if they were unaware of them. You cannot steal something from someone else if you think they don't know it is theirs. I have a suspicion that this idea I keep hearing "natives didn't have the concept of property" is really just false and veiled racism.
- "even if natives did have property rights nevertheless the invading explorers had a different concept of property rights" -- yes, the explorers had the same idea of fair property rights as someone going into a convenience store and shouting "nobody move, this is a stickup!"
Property rights don't actually exist. The idea of property rights is a way nations like to explain the division of property they allocate to their citizens. In reality, there is very little earth that needs to be divided among all. A small group cannot claim an unfairly large portion, no matter how long they've lived there, nor what means they used to claim it.
I feel for you. Those evil slaves didn't work hard enough till their deaths to make their rightful masters win.
>>It’s just not right to say that so few people should get to control the entire continent just because they were there first.
This is so Winston Churchill'esque, dog in the manger analogy where there are some superior people who have rights to exterminate existing people, and those existing people are evil for even resisting.
>>Combine that with the fact that Europe was devastated by two world wars, it was inevitable that the USA should pull ahead.
The USA is the most successful imperialistic project executed by the western civilization ever. To separate the US from Europe is simply splitting hairs.
The same could have happened to the Indian subcontinent. But there were too many people to kill and the British got caught up in a few wars. Else Mr Churchill had pretty great genocidal plans. He even got along and executed a small project where he killed a few million people(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943).
When Churchill actively refused to allow food aid to come from external sources during the war, yes, he and his government bear an even greater portion of responsibility than the colonization of India, in the "you break it, you bought it" sense of responsibility, already merited. Similarly, Churchill's galloping racism and his government's nastiness spread similar misery elsewhere: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-finest...
And this is not a new happening for Britain, either; they did the same thing to the Irish during the famines. The Sultan of Turkey wanted to send ten times the money more money than the Queen of Great Britain and two ships of food; the British consul in Istanbul said that to send more aid than the Queen had herself allotted would be seen as diplomatically insulting. All the while, Irish shipments of food to England continued unabated.
I have had much hesitation in asking you to add to the great assistance you are giving us with shipping but a satisfactory situation in India is of such vital importance to the success of our joint plans against the Japanese that I am impelled to ask you to consider a special allocation of ships to carry wheat to India from Australia….We have the wheat (in Australia) but we lack the ships. I have resisted for some time the Viceroy’s request that I should ask you for your help, but… I am no longer justified in not asking for your help." -Churchill to FDR
War is hell. Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill. And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Source: https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/did-churchill-cause-t...
>>Thank goodness we had leaders like Churchill
Thank him for him for considering the entire Indian subcontinent as some kind of lesser people and race compared to whites? What exactly is the difference between this and the race superiority theories of Adolf Hitler?
>>And thank goodness the Allied forces won.
Oh please. Europe created an untenable political situation in Germany by imposing upon them harsh punishment in forms of war reparations of WW1. Then you create a vacuum for a dangerous political ideology to rise, and then try to stop their imperialistic ambitions.
Beyond all this, why does Churchill expect Indian people pay the price for whatever political blunders any party in Europe had committed.
The difference between Churchill and Hitler is that Churchill didn't slaughter millions of people and subvert half the globe to totalitarian dictatorship. That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
He did precisely that. Britain has inflicted more damage to humanity, with its imperialistic policies than even a fraction of Nazism did. Britain was for all practical purposes was a far more evil force than Nazism would have ever been.
>>That supplies and shipments are limited under dire circumstances should come as no surprise to any student of historical warfare.
It comes as a surprise to us because Britain invaded India, stole and plundered the country.
If you don't want people to call you bad names, stop doing bad things.
I would chose neither. Why are you assuming the Indian people chose a european power over them?
He did no such thing. He was simply protecting the United Kingdom from getting invaded by Germany. As far as political ideologies are concerned, Britain was no saint. They had their own 'We are superior to other races' projects going on in other parts of the globe.
>>you're going to blame him for a famine halfway around the globe?
Yes, because he was responsible for it.
The Civil War economically devastated and flattened the southern states. It's hard to see how the later wealth of the US economy was based on that.
That logic could still be applied today. Asia and Arica combined are over 5.5 billion people. I bet a lot of those people would be more than happy to emigrate to the US. Why should so few (merely 300-400 million Americans and Canadians) control entire continent just because they got there earlier?
It's what you do with the stuff that matters.
If what was done in the U.S. is plunder, then what is it that you say is happening in "the Middle East, Latin America and Africa"? Be consistent.
China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Stop making excuses.
Incidentally, Argentina is a hugely important case-study. It was never really plundered. Its history has tremendous parallels to the United States', oddly enough. It had a tremendous growth between the 1880s and the Great Depression, and grew to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world at the time of WWII. Yet somehow it has missed out on decades of growth potential, and is now full of shanty towns, with a huge proportion of the population in true poverty (not what we call poverty in the U.S.). HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?! There were no significant wars in Argentina since its peak. There has been no foreign power plunder in Argentina in that time. The make-up of the population didn't change much. So what happened?? Well, it's easy to see what happened there: bad ideas.
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
It's really isn't. "Colonial plunder" isn't a horde of soldiers rampaging through your country taking your gold and women. Colonial plunder is generations upon generations of domestic industry killed by high taxes to favor imports from the ruling country, turning peasants into serfs bonded to the land to pay taxes, exploiting and inflaming pre-existing class, caste, and religious differences time and time again to keep the people from uniting against the rulers. People (at large; there are outliers) stop getting an education or starting any business larger than a shop because what's the point? The financial system doesn't grow beyond small moneylenders. People become bitter and try to keep the little they have from their grasping neighbors, everyone fighting over the few crumbs the ruling country throws you. For hundreds of years.
> A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
> China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.
Incontestably true; India hasn't done as well as China. China still isn't quite a developed country yet and India is maybe 20 years behind China. I don't think it's a great shame to come second to China. Their political system has always optimized for getting things done no matter the cost. India went a different, maybe softer, way. Probably not even deliberately, I'll admit.
To this day it saddens me when middle-class, educated, relatively well-off Indians say things like "I wish we had a government like China's so our roads won't have potholes anymore".
You're not entirely wrong about the impact of plunder being many generations-long, because, for example, Paraguay's bad performance almost certainly goes back (at least in part) to the ruinous Triple Alliance War, way, way back in the 1870s (in that war Paraguay lost almost all its males aged 12-60). But it doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't always. If it had to be like that then Europe might never have risen again after WWI or WWII, yet there it is. South Korea wouldn't have risen after Japan's occupation of it. China wouldn't either after the Japanese war, or the Opium wars.
> > A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.
> As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?
Sure. I mentioned Argentina in another post, which grew fabulously fast between the 1880s and the Great Depression. China, of course, I mentioned above. Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Japan and Germany again, South Korea, China. I'm probably missing a few. Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
As for China, it's certainly on the cusp of first-world status. They have... a lot of bad ideas weighing them down though. The SOEs, for example, and the state-owned banks and their terrible lending practices, financial repression, unbelievable malinvestment following the 2008 crisis, unresponsive government, corruption, pollution, and so on. These bad ideas could easily sink China just as a very different set of bad ideas sank Argentina.
My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit. Peronism (Argentina) falls into the 'bad' category, while Maoism (China) falls into the 'terrible' category. Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either (please don't blame Belgium's genocides in Congo on capitalism; that's a very lame and boring argument).
To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed. The difference between Mao's and Xiaoping's China is so stark that it is impossible not to see it as the difference between awful ideas on one hand and at-least-OKish ideas on the other.
The Argentina/China examples cannot be explained otherwise than above, or at least I've not seen alternative explanations -- none! not even unbelievable ones, or at least I don't recall any. China is certainly a counter-example to the plunder-explains-it-all theory. Though I expect that you'll tell me that the plunder of China was minimal in proportion to its population (but recall that the famines of the Great Leap Forward were not minimal that way!). At the end of the day, good ideas can lift a nation from a poor history, or they can sink it from a great history -- this much should be clear, and if that's true, then plunder is no excuse, or not enough of an excuse anyways.
This debate about the impact of plunder reminds me too of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Prussia won that, and imposed what it thought would be crushing reparations on France, which it intended to use to improve the wealth of the German people. But it didn't work. France managed to borrow what it needed to pay those reparations, underwent very fast growth, and paid off its debt in just a few years, all the while Germany under-performed. One might call what Prussia did "plunder" (is it not?), yet it failed, just as the Versailles reparations in the other direction after WWI had the same exact effect, but reversed because the reparations direction reversed too. Plunder is not the explanation that you think it is -- it can be in specific cases, but may not even be a good rule of thumb.
Well they're not exactly poor either. They're still considered first-world, advanced nations. And they've had some "bad ideas" like, military rule, since the end of colonialism. Seems like their past plunder has insulated them somewhat from these missteps.
> Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina...Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).
Right but the thing all these countries have in common: they weren't under the colonial yoke during the Industrial Revolution like India was (Argentina attained independence in 1816, for example). India wasn't allowed to have an Industrial Revolution; it was suppressed by British tax and trade policies. Don't you think that's at least a partial explanation for why India's behind today?
Post WW2 Japan, Germany don't count: they still had most of their pre-war population and memory of being a prosperous society. South Korea benefited from generous US aid (and still does, in terms of military aid). The US was highly incentivized to help SK as much as possible because they feared it turning communist. India, at the time of Independence, hadn't been a prosperous nation for at least 200 years; the educated, skilled class was tiny.
> Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either
I'm with you all the way there. I never contested the benefits of capitalism for a country; it has a much better track record than Peronism or Maoism. The evidence shows it's been great for poverty reduction. But, and I keep coming back to this, India didn't have the opportunity to determine its own economic policy until only 70 years ago. And we ended up with a socialist for our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Arguably he earned the right to be the Prime Minister by being the most prominent freedom struggle leader after Mahatma Gandhi and he was accordingly popular, no matter his economic policies. You can't legislate for randomness like that.
> My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit.
To me it seems like there's two ways for good ideas to take hold: the people have the freedom to choose their leaders, can recognize good ideas and choose accordingly, or the government isn't democratic but the leadership is "enlightened" and focused on national development over personal enrichment (or at least makes development a priority).
In India's case it had a government focused on enriching Britain till 1947. Afterwards voters simply voted for the most popular guy (sort of like George Washington) who happened to be a socialist who espoused five-year plans and centrally-planned growth. Remember, at the time, those ideas hadn't been completely discredited. And this may be slightly controversial but, lacking any sort of democratic or political culture, and having a low level of education on average, voters may simply not have known "good" ideas from "bad". As a counterpoint, he US didn't initially have universal suffrage: only white property-owning males could vote. This, while unfair, ensured that voters were educated, somewhat prosperous, and invested in growth rather than populist handouts. Whereas by the time India attained independence, universal suffrage was expected of any democracy.
Also an important factor: the nation isn't acted upon by negative external forces. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala (to name just 3 South American underachievers) have suffered from foreign countries (I won't name which ones but it's easy to find on Wikipedia) financing military coups and assassinations against socialist leaders and socialist governments. You can argue all you want that a socialist government isn't good for growth but any democratically-elected government has more legitimacy than a military junta.
There's so many factors that can blunt the impact of good ideas or ensure they never take root.
> To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed.
And what I'm saying is history is far more random than that. What if Mao had been replaced by someone with even worse ideas? What if they'd gone to a liberal democracy immediately rather than a government laser-focused on development at the cost of everything else?
It's a remarkable achievement to maintain a united, democratic, mostly peaceful nation for 70 years straight (and counting). Most former colonies collapsed into destructive civil war, then military rule, within decades of independence. India has so far avoided that fate. Heck, most developed European countries have barely managed to avoid it in the past century.
India has as much (probably more than) linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious variety as the European continent, far lower levels of education, absurd amounts of competition for resources, education, and jobs due to population pressure. All of those things are potential triggers for conflict and civil war.
I can't comment about other countries that may or may not have lived up to their economic potential (Brazil, Argentina, Russia etc) because I know next to nothing about them. But India is doing terrifically well, considering the hand we were dealt.
The Dominions were built for settlement, so they were sustainable states. India and other Asian colonies already had their own very established cultures and civilizations, and hence fared much better.
Pretty remarkable India hasn't exploded into separatism due to resource pressure, but I don't know how sustainable that is given that the population is still increasing
And it's growing quite fast nowadays.
But in the time since independence it's hardly done very well at all -- certainly not in relation to its full potential!
Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.
Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.
I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.
I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.
Ideas matter.
Not exactly great examples. All three contain excellent natural resources, ports on major trading routes, that drive or drove their economy.
Lots of other countries have strategic trading locations: Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Argentina (well, not since the Panama canal, I guess), Egypt, Saudi, Iran, and so on.
Maybe, just maybe, ideas matter?
"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.
Not really, being the easternmost port on the Mediterranean and southernmost point of Asia are fairly special things. Add in the almost city-state nature of those examples, and they do noting to prove your point.
Slavery and a stolen continent are horrible, but they don't explain what happened economically.
The slaveowners made profits for nearly no work, and the banks made plenty of profit by giving out loans to the slaveowners to buy more slaves, too. It's hard to look for causality, but this seems like an obvious source of far-removed consolidation of capital that would last over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Washington#White_Ho...
A storm intervened on behalf of USA.
Sure, they burned the White House [battle won], but lost the war.
By the time the US became a country, the indigenous peoples had access to firearms, certainly every one the US Army would have been fighting. It's also worth pointing out that the US bordered an English colony to the north and a mestizo former Spanish colony to the south.
So, it's hard to really feel sorry for them, especially because Europeans put the land to much more productive use per acre than Native Americans did.
I don't think we'd likely have a single continent spanning country ran by the many different nations that were there before. It'd be much more likely that colonialism that divided Africa and South America would be passed around North America, and there wouldn't have been any country to balance the European powers that continually fought each other in the 20th century or for Russia, Japan and China in the second half of that century.
You can acknowledge the wrongs that America took, but you also have to accept that it's mostly been a force for good, even today.
Its convenient to dismiss, and over simplify this whole enterprise of making of America. I am amazed, and simply amazed by the American experiment and I am not even "technically" American.
Where's the lack of growth? GDP per capita went from $46,000x to $57,000x over those ten years and shows no sign of actually stopping, in contrast to most of its peers.
To put the growth in context, that $5 trillion is more than Russia, Germany, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Canada, Sweden, Finland, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Czech, Romania, Slovakia, New Zealand, South Africa - all added combined.
Edit: Based on this the US is not really outperforming: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-europe-outperf...
Spying on citizen and companies of competing countries, including allied countries and their leaders, is highly profitable
I'm sure mob profits all over the world sky rocketed during the crisis, should we ask them for advices?
We're in a brief moment where the internet exists, but has not yet disintermediated population centers.
Within 10 years there will be a new city born every week in the US with great jobs, great coffee, and "market housing" i.e. construction cost plus 50%. The property markets will collapse.
Along with this there will be a massive readjustment of wages in favor of workers. The average number of full time employees per corporation will go from 16 to 0.16. The Dow companies will lose 50% (only) of their market share over the subsequent 10 years to federated sole proprietorships and small partnerships, but the middle class will double in size, and population is still headed towards 10 billion, so big companies will grow in net revenue anyway.
From there you can start to see how we get to "everything owned"... 10 billion people and every one of them is extracting maximum utility from a couple acres (about the max area a single human can maximize utility of)... That's 20 billion acres of really "owned" property... Property you couldn't make an offer on without losing money.
We will get to "everything owned" in the U.S. but we're not close. It only looks like that from porches in boom cities.
Okay but who is going to pave it? Are self driving asphalt machines a thing yet?
In the end, would we all have been better sticking with the Native American way of life? Benjamin Franklin: “When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
Perhaps some kind of voluntary winding down is necessary. "It was good while it lasted. For some people."
I’d like to make this a reality.
Or more succinctly, in my future people don’t have to work.
By finding "someone else" to treat like a tool (a robot) you are not only solving the wrong problem, you are keeping yourself stuck in the mindset that allows the problem to persist.
Furthermore I have no qualms against treating machinery as a tool. There is no exploration of intelligent beings when you take advantage of the output of a tool. I want to end exploitation of living things.
ps: where was that Franklin quote from ?
It's a good question whether civilisation will be here in 400 years, but humanity will be.
Pigs.
We might be tough, but we also will need to develop radically new survival skills in a short amount of time. Remember there will be less food, clean water ad more natural disasters to work with etc. So surviving in the "new" world will be more difficult.
The Cretaceous was a thing. The atmosphere had about as much CO2 as it could hold. There were lots of animals. We're headed back to it.
Will there be Eastern Brown Pecker Grouse habitat? No. Will there be coral reefs? Lol no. Will most of the pages of National Geographic be unrecognizable by the naturalists of the future? Yup.
But life will continue. All we're doing is robbing future generations of the myriad beautiful and delicate old growth ecologies that we were taught about in school. We can go snorkeling in them, or hiking in them. They'll just watch 1080p videos of them on their AR glasses.
We're headed back to the Cretaceous. We're going to take the biodiversity of the planet down two orders of magnitude. Maybe four.
That's all.
If we coders get our act together we'll get a decentralized anarchist bioremediation movement going which will rehome millions of acres of biome to Cretaceous-friendly locations, we'll limit the biodiversity loss to that 100x range. 10x if I'm feeling optimistic and smoking really good weed.
I think we can do it!
Extinction scale events have been "a thing" in Earth's history for as long as Earth's been around [0], as you note we are very likely in the middle of another one right now [1]
The big difference this time being: Previous ones most certainly had not been man-made, this one has a very high chance of being man-made. Who's to say humanity is incapable of damaging Earths biosphere beyond a point where it can recover? If we can manage to fill the oceans with more plastic than fish by 2050, then I'm certain we can manage to do quite a bit of damage to this planet as a whole [2].
A while ago I read a paper reasoning something like that might be the explanation for the Fermi paradox; extraterrestrial civilizations getting so advanced that they destroy the biosphere of their own planet, beyond repair, but not advanced enough to escape said destroyed planet. Sadly I can't find it anymore.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#List_of_extin...
[1] http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/degradation_and_destr...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/01/2...
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journa...
Clearly, I haven't been paying the amount of attention I ought. Is this the present level of orthodoxy I need to subscribe to, in order not to be deemed a climate denier? (Or is it "sceptic" these days?).
Today though, you can see countries like Germany take the lead with their better protections for inventors and better incentives and protections for the employees.
machinery, iron and steel, cotton, lumber. that's how it became the world's economy. ww1 and ww2 is how it became the world's military power. the military industrial complex is how it maintained both of these positions.
manufacturing, construction and population is how china overtook them. america should be pushing open borders, tax relief on families with multiple children, ban on abortion, if it even wants to compete for the 21st century. a ussr type dissolution and depressing collapse is sure to come when their inevitable debt burden default happens by the 2040s or 2050s. the only question is, will this occur before or after the eurozone currency implosion and german re-armament.
[]https://web.archive.org/web/20081230063039/http://faculty.wc...
That's the US. A game of Civ on easy mode.
Is it just garden variety anti-Americanism, or is it based on something else? You also see the form "American means anyone from both continents," which is off in exactly the same way.
All of these things are pretty major additions to why the US is such an economic powerhouse today.
Edit: wow, I've really touched a nerve with this one. Enough to get some revenge downmodding on past comments of mine. Wow.
But pretty much all nations and cultures have spread by one group dominating other groups and taking their land. That's a given. What happens after the land is taken and the nation established is more important, which is what this book seems to address.
The US has huge material advantages over other nations, but it has also fostered a powerful innovative culture that is just as important to it's success.
Yes, but this is why I said the things I mentioned were 'pretty major additions', not 'the only reasons'. The Louisiana Purchase is routinely ignored in things like this, for example - with no Purchase, there's no Mexican-American war, no Texas or California, no Great Plains, no Mississippi trade, and France as a (friendly) neighbour.
No mention of an incredibly wealthy continent, both in mineral and agricultural terms
Compare to Brazil, which is a tropical country choked with rainforest. There's a reason why industrial powerhouses develop in temperate zones, and not in tropical ones. Or look along the Andes, where there are a lot of minerals, but there's pretty hostile geography.
What mineral industries do you see as being far easier in SA than NA in your period? What are the mineral industries that you see SA as squandering?
Don't forget either that west-coast minerals were a very long way away from advanced markets (also going via the hostile Straits of Magellan), and additionally could never benefit from the tradewinds that assisted the 'triangle trade'. Any commerce-based society there would have massive limitations.
Edit: damn, hit a painful nerve here apparently.
For the tired old '28 countries vs 1 country', America its states and the EU its countries are very comparable in economic size.
Yes, the EU, or otherwise known as that giant land mass consisting of 28 different countries with unique economies.
Ironically, trying to treat each member state as some homogeneous member is what is leading to the fracturing and growing nationalism. UK won't be the last to try and break off.
EU member states have only been able to unilaterally leave the EU since the Treaty of Lisbon came into force in December 2009. Prior to that, there was no legal provision for a member state to leave without a treaty amendment. So the situations between the EU and the US are not as dissimilar as you suggest.
States can leave the US with the consent of Congress.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/is-secession...
But, I don't think we can definitely say that a constitutional amendment is necessary. Suppose that a state requested to secede, and the request for secession was approved by both popular vote and by the state legislature; and that Congress then passed ordinary legislation approving the secession. Would the Supreme Court rule that legislation unconstitutional? I don't think anyone can really predict how the Supreme Court would act, but I don't think it is certain that they would rule it unconstitutional. But if it is possible that they might not rule it unconstitutional, it is possible that secession with Congressional consent is constitutional. Certainly it would be easy for the Supreme Court to distinguish this scenario from the Civil War scenario of attempted secession against the will of Congress, if a majority on the Supreme Court felt so inclined. If the majority of Congress, and the President, was in favour of permitting the attempt at secession, the Supreme Court might not be inclined to overrule them.
What counts is not what the document literally says, what counts is how it is interpreted in practice. And when dealing with hypotheticals, no one can really know how it will be interpreted in practice unless and until that hypothetical becomes an actuality.
No, they can't. The Constitution only provides for rules on forming new states and forming states from parts of other states. There is no text on what happen should a state decide it wants to live. In the Civil War, some states argued that the Constitution was a voluntary compact of sovereign states, such that a state could unilaterally leave if it so desired (no need to get consent of Congress). SCOTUS later held that these declarations of secession never held validity.
The UK voted to break off. France came dangerously close to heading down that path with Le Pen. Greece's government might not want to, but the people would be on board for the same. Potentially Germany when they get tired of carrying the rest of the EU (especially after UK) on it's back can all leave whenever they want -- they just need to vote on it.
However, If California, for example, tries to succeed, it would be illegal.
If California, for example, tries to succeed, it would be illegal
The EU as a singular entity can do relatively little with its members' wealth, which is why measures of that wealth aren't very meaningful.
It's like saying that Asia has the biggest economy in the world. Well yeah, but large chunks of that economy are segregated from one another along national boundaries.
Except with a customs union, shared currency and free movement.
Also, it seems there is a notable body of work out detailing the shortcomings of the US economy. At least in the US, it is thoroughly documented.
Maybe, because the general consensus is that the US is doing so poorly, this piece meant as a simple reminder to Americans that we are not completely doomed.
One might argue the country distinction is a bit arbitrary and look for regions with the highest per capita GDP.
It looks like Washington, D.C., USA dominates that list. Then the Eastern Province in Saudi Arabia, then the Canton of Zurich.[0]
That top 20 contains 7 US regions ("political subdivisions"). Also in the top 20: Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, and France for the EU. Schengen members Norway and Switzerland would bring it up to seven. I don't know if we're comparing "Europe" or pretending that Norway and Switzerland are radically distinct from the rest of Europe by historical accident. Yet if we go that far then maybe Canada earns a point to the US.
Another odd thing, DC's incredibly high per capita GDP is odd, the area doesn't feel particularly rich. Home prices reflect it, I guess. But many places in California seem nicer. Hell, many places in Ohio seem nicer. I have a sneaking suspicion the numbers are skewed by lobbyists or businesses supporting government that don't impact the local area as directly. Or commuters who really live (and spend) in other areas. It's like saying Delaware is full of companies. Well, on paper, yeah... but it's not some bustling Trantor where corporate skyscrapers block out the sun.
Maybe we should be comparing median regions? Or judge governments by how well off their worst regions are? Would you rather visit the rural south or in the Balkans? Where would you rather live for a year or two?
I'm skeptical about comparing such sprawling areas, I'm not sure it tells us much about the world.
On the other hand I'm not going to be offended if someone refers to a region as the wealthiest in the world as a rhetorical device, they were just endorsing an economic history about the US, they're going to say it's important, which seems at the very least worth granting for the sake of argument.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_country_subdivisions_b...
IMF US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2
World Bank US 18.6 EU 16.4 China 11.2
UN US 18.0 EU 16.8 China 11.2
All figures nominal GDP, US$, trillions, 2016, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
__
Things are a bit different when switching to PPP though.
IMF (2017) China 23.2 EU 20.9 US 19.4
World Bank (2016) China 21.4 EU 19.7 US 18.6
CIA (2016) China 21.1 EU 20.0 US 18.6
All figures nominal GDP, US$, trillions, per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)
China: 1.4 billion
EU: 743 million
US: 323 million