The Politically Incorrect Guide To Ending Poverty | Hacker News Reader

The Politically Incorrect Guide To Ending Poverty

theatlantic.com

67 pointsnochiel35 comments

One thing tacitly not mentioned in the article is the guns and the Navy of the British Empire that made the Hong Kong deal work.

If any country decides to cede sovereignty over some territory, they should agree that the guest power will asserts its sovereignty over it. And it has to be full way, without option to be undone after next coup, mood swing or populist elections. And that can be guaranteed only with implicit threat of violence from superior power.

Anyway the big problem these days is actually finding a progressive nation willing to commit to such threats.

Does anyone else find it rather ironic that an American economist is citing an example where a mini-state (Honk Kong) created as the results of a war fought by the UK to support drug dealing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars) is cited as a great example of how to run a country?

I don't find that ironic, because

a) We don't know this economists ideas about drug prohibition and the fact that he is American is quite irrelevant. Whoever asserts something, you can always find something to deem it 'ironic' or even 'hypocritical'. In the vast majority of cases, that does not detract in any way from their argument. That would require counterarguments.

b) Different times, different customs. It's anachronistic to use todays moral standards to argue that behavior back then was considered immoral back then.

Not at all. It doesn't matter how or why Hong Kong was became what it is. What does matter is that 50 years of British rule in a small piece of China had a stunning effect on China as a whole. It's a great example, not of how to run a country, but how to transform one.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1426429

Looks like 3 segments of the URL can be changed without causing a redirect.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/MichaelApproved/...

The page canonical meta tag shows the current article url http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-poli...

The previous article shows /2010/06 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/the-poli...

Maybe HN should use canonical meta tag instead of just url to check for duplicates?

This is a feature, not a bug. There are many great articles that 1. are very helpful to read again; 2. you missed the first time; 3. newcomers haven't even had a chance to miss yet. Especially for newcomers, considering the rate that HN grows (an endless summer). But even more importantly, there are some articles that represent what HN is all about. There's a limited supply of great articles. If they cannot be reposted, how can newcomers ever learn what great articles are?

Therefore, I suggest the opposite: automatic reposting - but only for those "great" articles, in the "HN library" (membership being defined by a special-case vote - i.e. vote for this article to be in the library). These would be reposted on a 6 month cycle, and include the old comments. Biannual resurrection. And to be marked as "library", so you can skip if you want.

But this won't happen, because the existing "bug" already does it (if people vote it up, it was a reasonable repost; the present repost checker act as a low barrier). And pg advocates iteration only for things needed.

You should visit a hacker news twitter feed: http://twitter.com/newsycombinator

It posts articles that make it into the top 5 of the site. Scroll through the past tweets to see what you've missed.

I dug through the guidelines and associated texts and couldn't find it, but I see it stated often enough that I don't mind sharing it:

_Resubmissions are allowed after a year or so._

[beyond paraphrasing, completely reconstituting the thought, still meaningful however.]

This solves all the problems in your first paragraph. Automatic re-posting is almost a guarantee if it's that good, so that's paragraph two handled.

Also worth reading a rebuttal: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/08/from-cr...

The word rebuttal could be misleading, Mencius is not against romers idea. If memory serves me right he thinks he doesn't go far enough and is annoyed with the intellectual dishonesty necessary (?) to sell this idea to the media/universities etc.

As an immigrant here in the United States, I feel like I must be totally out of touch. How is this politically incorrect?

I think the reason it's supposedly controversial is because it implies some sort of inferiority on the part of the government of the poor nation, that they're not "good enough" to manage their own affairs. Judging by the reception Romer is getting from some 3rd world country leaders, at least some don't see it this way.

Romer is pushing colonialism (minus the militarism and racism), but giving it a new name for the purpose of marketing. That's hardly a popular position.

OK,

We have many countries already competing on the world market by trying to offer little regulation and lots of flexibility for investors.

How's that been working?

Are Chinese workers going up towards American standards? Or are Americans moving towards Chinese standards?

If Africa could also compete here, would living standards going further down or further up?

What do you think?

it would not be too hard to find out for yourself; google china wages rising...

China has lifted 400 million people from poverty to lower middle class in 20-30 years. This is wealth creation on an unprecedented scale. And when I say unprecedented, I mean it in the literal, absolute sense.

The fact that many of them are working in unpleasant factories completely overshadows the fact that their parents were subsidence farmers and that their kids will have access to decent/good education and healthcare.

China isn't perfect, but the velocity of the development is central. Much of the western knee-jerk reaction to the conditions in China seems to work from the premise that eliminating poverty is only worthwhile if it can be done in a clean stroke with no unpleasant intermediate steps.

Anyone know how the teenagers studying under streetlamps charge their mobile phones?

This has been posted before. And no it wont end poverty, it is essentially a plan to sell licenses for private dictatorships.

Why not? GB's empire seems like mostly the same thing, and it arguably [1] resulted in a reduction of poverty.

[1] I'm not making a claim of fact here, just saying that there's an intelligent debate about the issue. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Raj#Economic_impact

I don't agree. There will always be debate, as there will always be some historian out protecting British Imperialism but I think and honest examination does not show that GB improved the lot of their imperial subjects except in some very specific and limited circumstances.

"The authors also compare the experiences of separate Pacific islands with eight different colonizers: the United States, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Japan, Germany, and France.* Their verdict is that the islands that are best off, in terms of income growth, are the ones that were colonized by the United States—as in Guam and Puerto Rico. Next best is time spent as a Dutch, British, or French colony. At the bottom are the countries colonized by the Spanish and especially the Portuguese." http://www.slate.com/id/2151852

In essence, it doesn't matter who colonized you. The states that were colonized the longest did the worst, in direct proportion to how long they were colonies.

any examples that prove this?

and doesn't all this depend on how what you consider a country? hasn't Wales been colonized by the English for a long time or does some geographic separation have to exist?

And is colonization of Korea during ww2 less destructive than the British colonization of Hong Kong? Or does the colonizer matter?

From the article you seem to be replying to: "Feyrer and Sacedote's key findings are that the longer one of the islands spent as a colony, the higher its present-day living standards and the lower its infant mortality rate. Each additional century of European colonization is associated with a 40 percent boost in income today and a reduction in infant mortality of 2.6 deaths per 1,000 births." and then goes on to discuss other alternate hypothesis and explain why they don't make sense.

Since you've simply flat-out contradicted a research paper with nothing more than assertion, I find it unlikely your upvotes represent anything more than a set of people who found their preconceptions tickled by your post. Do you have any sort of actual other study to back you point up, or are you just stating your own biases?

(I don't feel much like I have a horse in the "colonization is evil" fight, since I think anyone still personally offended by events from over, say, 150 years ago already has problems I can't solve. But the question of why cultures succeed and fail is one of the most pressing questions the human race faces and having it muddied up by stupid political games is costing lives.)

Not really arguing with you. But for a lot of countries, the colonial experience is a lot more recent than that. More to the order of 50-60 years than 150. This does mean that a generation of people who lived under colonial rule are still alive in these countries.

That is probably true, but I think saying one country is a better colonizer than another country is not saying that much, especially if that other country is spain.

A reduction of poverty is not the same thing as the elimination of poverty (and the debate re: the British Raj specifically seems to be more about whether it was disastrous or merely more or less a continuation of the Mughal era status quo, hardly an endorsement). India is much, much better off today than they would have been had colonialism continued. One of India's biggest and most successful economic transformations was in ending the Zamindars (landlords that were effectively feudal lords), that almost certainly wouldn't have happened under the Raj. Not to mention the severe down sides to exporting massive amounts of money overseas due to taxation and the innumerable issues related to being a second class citizen in your own homeland.

India is much, much better off today than they would have been had colonialism continued.

How do you know what the condition of India would have been under British rule?

Was there a sharp upward trend in India's gdp/growth rates/etc after Britain left? Or did the 10 post-british years have higher growth rates than the last 10 british years? I'm genuinely curious.

From a Buddhist perspective economic growth is an evil. I suspect that Hindus (Ghandi definitely) would speak similarly. Certainly if it increases meat consumption it would be an evil to many Hindus.

Using our societal mores to judge the benefit of our occupation is precisely the sort of paternalistic jingoism that makes colonialism such an unmistakable evil.

Certainly Brahmins would say that. Who is threatened more by the rise of an independently wealthy merchant/middle class than those who owe their position to an accident of birth?

Ghandi did more to defeat the caste system than the British Empire ever did. The British Empire was quite content to be the Brahmins to the Brahmins.

On the contrary, Ghandi was an advocate of the "varna" system, which was about fewer, even more rigid castes. He strongly believed that one's caste should be determined by birth, and he opposed marriage between members of different castes.

To Western eyes Indians are one race, but what Ghandi stood for was apartheid * 10.

As for what the British did in India, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sati_(practice)#British_and_oth...

I said he did more. His views are irrelevant. Obviously in principle the British paid lip service to a caste-free society, but in practice they were the authors of apartheid.

Also when you look at his views closely, especially after 1925 or so, he moves into a position very similar to that which you will see of modern Christian theology, where you hear much talk of the importance of personal choice. So people should follow a caste and so on, but that's not the place of the government to enforce. That's a much more moderate and workable position than abolition, and much easier to implement. Absolutes do little good when aiming for radical societal reinvention.

Even Sati was pushed out bit by bit, by various reformers. But again, from a vegetarian Hindu perspective large-scale livestock slaughter is a similar if not worse evil than Sati, and unless you can provide a proof that animals don't have souls, your rationalism has no place in that discussion. You might as well commend the Communist party for bringing about gender equality as a counter argument to someone railing against the gulags. All it shows is that we always have some places where we cannot accept cultural relativism.

Capitalism is the antidote for poverty. This is proven by the simple example of any poor person- whether US born, india born, chinese born, etc, who starts a business-- any business-- and grows it to the point that they leave enough money for their kids to be lazy and non-productive. The kids might not be reared right, but they are no longer in poverty.

The opponent of capitalism is also the cause of poverty. The opponent of capitalism is collectivism. Or put another way, government. Any entity that takes by force (eg: taxes, regulations, bribes, etc.) naturally pushes out businesses that take by free trade (eg: sales, barter, etc.)

The more you have of one the less you have of the other. Notice how there were many postal services in the US and they were growing and competing and bettering themselvs until the US government decided to give itself a monopoly on first class mail delivery. As a result we no longer have a vibrant postal industry, and instead have the very poor US postal service. Why did the government give itself a monopoly? To be able to censor political tracts being sent thru the mail.

How many of you knew that? I'd bet most of you believe the US government provides mail because it wouldn't be economical otherwise. Ignoring for the fact that taking money by force doesn't change whether something is "economical" or not, note that the pony express survived and thrived in a time when people were much poorer and much further apart-- transportation wise-- than they are now.

So, obviously the fallacy that "without government who would deliver the mail?" is nonsense. We have an example in mail, but it applies to everything else- justice, roads, and soon, heatlthcare.

Remember when you didn't have to be politically connected to get treated for cancer? Good times.

Whatever method of organization, city-states, charter-cities, seasteads, a great frontier like the US was-- the essential quality is how much regulation and how much government there was, vs, how much capitalism is allowed to take hold.

Russia, China and India are all examples of way too much government, and all three have resulted in a great flourishing-- not without problems or corruption, but a benefit on the balance-- with the removal of this draconian level of control.

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