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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

I found a similar reality in other developing countries. 1 hour outside of Dubai you can find giant luxury apartment blocks & chalet communities with 50% occupancy of basically only foreigners. A nearby deserted mall that is stock full of the top brands of everything and anything at top-dollar (literally) but just outside the "locals" live in abject poverty and work in the 50C sun. I have also seen in it Uzbekistan where a newly invigorated government rushes to throw up skyscrapers and luxury apartment complexes that nobody can afford while the local populations still lives in soul-crushing conditions.

My theory is that many developing countries use the wrong metric to gauge their success, looking to count their skyscrapers or their advanced techno-cities but fail to see that the success of "developed" countries lies more in their justice and governance systems.

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    My theory is that many developing countries use 
    the wrong metric to gauge their success

More cynically these developments are probably a conduit for a lot of money getting into the pockets of corrupted public officials.

If you haven't already seen it, take a look at this video [0] showing a line of tank trucks filled with sewage, because Dubai built a lot more skyscrapers than their sewage system could handle.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1Hv8IHA3ig

In this case most of the 'locals' are foreign men brought to Dubai to work on the sites. They live in horrible accommodation further out into the desert and probably wouldn't even be let into the malls if they tried.

I can't find the link right now, but I think the right idea here is that the value of infrastructure is in its use. The more that the people building stuff are insulated from the needs of users, the less you should expect it to be useful.

Large corporations face exactly the same problem.

And in a nutshell this is why my beloved NYC's subway is such a disaster :(

>And in a nutshell this is why my beloved NYC's subway is such a disaster :(

It's not like the people building terrible systems don't know there is a disconnect with their users. They just don't care.

I know a guy who works for a similarly corrupt and incompetent rail system. They told him not to take the train to work because if he was late "I was on your train and it got delayed" was not a valid excuse for being late. Management knows the system sucks.

Indeed, probably the biggest advantage that our societies have to the rich elite of repressive countries is the justice and governance system.

The problem with being rich in one of those oppresive regimes is that you can get rich. But staying rich is much harder, because the moment you fall out of favor you will be disowned. This can change simply through a new clan taking over power and kicking out the old clan. In the capitalist west, this is much different.

I personally think the best place is where the intellectual elite chooses to live. E.g. in the early medieval ages, the church harassed a bunch of intellectuals for their "heathen" ideology (greek philosophy, sciences, etc). So they all moved to the middle east, causing a great period of prosperity. Socialism, similar thing here. Russia had so many great minds. Scientists, authors, poets. But many of them went to the west and are still doing it. Same for germany btw, here eastern Germany was a big hub of culture, e.g. Leipzig was renown for its books, but socialists harassed and hated every intellectual (even more than they harassed the general population), so many of them fled to the west, so many in fact that they had to build a wall to keep them in. The western part of germany greatly profited from this brain drain.

It's not dangerous to democracy if these autocrat regimes build luxury condos that nobody lives in. It's dangerous when they build luxury condos and the elite choses to live there. In our world which is so much dependent on science and engineering, they chose which country, which region inside a country, prospers and which doesn't, simply by chosing where they live.

>So they all moved to the middle east

This is an interesting historical claim. Which intellectuals are you thinking of that moved from Europe to the Middle East in the early Medieval period?

It's more accurate (somewhat) to say that a lot of intellectual activity moved. The issue is historiographically complex but the traditional view of early medieval Europe not doing a lot to advance human knowledge except in some specific (and not very abstract) fields is mostly true.

Yeah, but it's not really accurate to say that intellectual activity moved because the Church was systematically harassing philosophers.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/28/the-darkening-...

> Shenoute is now considered a saint in the Coptic church, but his piety manifested itself in a particularly ugly guise: he was part of a gang of thugs who would break into the houses of locals whose theological views they felt to be unsound, and smash up any property they objected to on religious grounds.

> Early in the book, she describes how she was brought up in her youth to think of late-antique and medieval Christians as enlightened curators of the classical heritage, diligently copying philosophical texts and poems throughout the ages so that they were saved from oblivion. Her views in this matter have evidently shifted somewhat over time. In this book, early Christians are much more likely to close down the academies, shut temples, loot and destroy artwork, forbid traditional practices and burn books. Rather than praising Christians for preserving slivers of classical wisdom, she argues, we should acknowledge how much was knowingly erased.

And quoting another article about the same book:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-ni...

> And so she opens her book with a potent description of black-robed zealots from 16 centuries ago taking iron bars to the beautiful statue of Athena in the sanctuary of Palmyra, located in modern-day Syria. Intellectuals in Antioch (in ancient Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as were the statues around them.

I personally find that it's very important to know the past, so that it won't be repeated in the future.

>Intellectuals in Antioch (in ancient Syria) were tortured and beheaded, as were the statues around them.

And you use this as an example of religious oppression in medieval Europe (?)

Here is a good critical review of the book you're citing:

https://historyforatheists.com/2017/11/review-catherine-nixe...

> a bunch of intellectuals for their "heathen" ideology (greek philosophy, sciences, etc). So they all moved [...]

I think the suggestion is that the ones who were persecuted moved, not all. Basically "the bunch".

Well yes, but I wonder who that is supposed to be, specifically.

I was also curious and looked it up:

Pagan philosophy was gradually supplanted by Christianity in the later years of the Empire, culminating in the closure of the Academy of Athens by Justinian I. Many Greek-speaking philosophers moved to the east, outside the borders of the Empire. Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism gained a stronghold in Persia, where they were a heavy influence on early Islamic philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_the_Roman_Empire

And a little more:

The last Scholarch of the Neoplatonic Academy was Damascius (d. 540). According to Agathias, its remaining members looked for protection under the rule of Sassanid king Khosrau I in his capital at Ctesiphon, carrying with them precious scrolls of literature and philosophy, and to a lesser degree of science. After a peace treaty between the Persian and the Byzantine empire in 532, their personal security (an early document in the history of freedom of religion) was guaranteed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_Academy#Neoplatonic_A...

http://www.bede.org.uk/justinian.htm

China is not a developing country. I don't know where you got that idea.

China is the second-largest economy.

That's because it's big not because it's developed.

Yes, it's the 2nd largest economy because it's got over a billion people. Per capita GDP is about 1/5 of the US. But that's not evenly split. Leave the east coast of china, and it gets poorer fast.

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