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Comment by adwf | Hacker News Reader

I admit to not having done more than skim the abstract, but couldn't it be just as likely that authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease (and famine, etc.) through ineptitude?

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That’s seems especially reasonable to assume if we look at the divide between North Korea and South Korea, a division that has only existed since 1950. South Korea has had increasingly better governance and increasingly less parasites, in contrast to North Korea.

South Korea really took off after General Park Chung-hee seized power, he built the economy and modernized the country. One of the great success stories is the praziquantel story. Korea had a schistosomiasis problem; they developed a process to synthesize praziquantel cheaply (the original Bayer process was more complicated) as part of the eradication campaign. That was in the late 60s. The Park dictatorship was overthrown only in 1979.

And even up until 1972 the command economy in the north and the (more) liberalized economy in the south hadn't really diverged. NK's growth slowed as they lost the support of the USSR and went negative during the collapse. Not really what you'd expect if authoritarianism was the cause of economic collapse, but exactly what you'd expect if during that time, a hostile state ascended from superiority to supremacy.

It's absurd to view the Koreas in isolation since they were both extremely obviously the subjects of a proxy war in which one side lost decisively. The two countries' economies were driven by export and the US and USSR were by far their largest partners. That wasn't an accident.

It should probably be noted that the Park dictatorship was overthrown by another dictator, General Chun Doo-hwan, who's party controlled South Korea until 1988. So the demise of the Park regime was not the end of authoritarianism in South Korea.

I mean that's pretty clearly much more reasonable. It's even likely that unstable countries which don't foster services to fight disease are also more susceptible to authoritarian coups.

More to the point, I think framing it as "authoritarian governments cause the spread of disease" is misleading. The spread is not caused by accident or economic failure, it's caused by apathy (although obviously a failed state can't fight parasites). The reason hookworm is found in relatively wealthy southeast asian countries is the same as the reason it has been found in rural Alabama; the governments don't care about everyone. It's not accurate to call that authoritarianism and it's misleading to assume it's simply economic failure.

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