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Comment by the_cramer | Hacker News Reader

I once had a chinese colleague who came to europe for a few years. She always thought we were lazy for working so short and every argument i brought up about mental health and work efficiency was met with a: "but it works for us".

What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

In the face of bankcruptcy or market pressure... managers tend to make irrational and/or unethical decisions. And they will find a way to circumvent the laws. I am also sure that chinese companies will find a way to circumvent the 996 ruling here.

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They've swallowed an ideological fallacy that simply working your pants off for long hours means you will win. The USSR had the same disease, if they just worked their people 20% harder than the west did then they would inevitably be more productive and economically 'win'. It's variation of the lump of labour fallacy.

Don't fall for it. It's thinking like this that leads to managers optimising for the wrong metrics. Hours worked is clearly the wrong metric. Companies don't exist to simply employ workers for long hours, and thinking that way leads you down the wrong path right from the start. You need to look at where the value actually comes from, and this is sometimes subtle and not at all obvious.

Here's a challenge. A taxi driver in London earns about 4x what a taxi driver in Beijing does, in objective international value terms. Why? What factors might lead to that difference? If your value system can't answer that question, then it's wrong. They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are doing is worth 4x as much, and there must be a reason.

> the work they are doing is worth 4x as much

This is a purchasing power parity argument; moving people around in London is "worth" more because they have more money, and money that is more valuable on the global exchange rate market.

You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money. Purchasing power is not something that manifests itself out of thin air, as well as exchange rates of money.

An economy in which the people have multiple times the purchasing power must do something right. And moving people in that economy around is more valuable than moving people elsewhere.

For instance, having a century headstart in industrialization and fast economic growth? It actually returns to a longer scale version of having accumulated wealth through working a long time...

Also taxi driving isn't exactly the most efficient of markets to compare value. London taxi drivers for example have a unique barrier to entry to become a taxi driver via an onerous road memorization test ("The Knowledge"), and that has nothing to do with the general British economy "doing something right."

What headstart? Africa existed when vikings were roaming the European waters.

The industrial revolution started in Britain.

Why didn't Africa start it a century before? Otherwise it sounds like "industrial revolution" was like a deity that chose to descend onto Brits.

I believe the comparison isn't adequate here since the British got massive advantages after WW2.

Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were economically smothered under a nationalisation programme that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness. At least we got the NHS (no small thing) and a passable social security system out of it. The economy we have today is the one Maggie re-engineered in the 1980s. Even the Blair government had the good sense to not dare touch it.

Britain subsequently benefited from transforming itself from an imperial power to a financial power. Good documentary on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uM2cdhfAGA

This is the reason that there's so many rich Russians knocking about e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/soccer/comments/p83ljc/offshore_adv...

They were a financial power long before. It kinda came with the territory, being a global empire.

They did well to hold on to it, though.

How can you look at the history of the British trade companies and not see how intertwined imperialism and what we today call 'finance' are?

> Britain came out of WW2 deeply fcuk'd. We'd lost the Empire, owed the US a crapton in loans, and then were economically smothered under a nationalisation programme that wiped out UK manufacturing competitiveness.

.. and on all those metrics China came out much worse (the civil war, no marshall plan, proxy war with the US, communism), as well as not having the massive advantage of having been an industrial power long before the war.

This article dates the takeoff to 1978 (Deng), which seems reasonable: https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/a...

Perhaps the question should be "at what date in the future do we expect the cost of a taxi in London and one in Beijing to equalize"?

Beijing? Maybe 2050, maybe sooner. 200 km away in countryside outside Beijing vs 200 km away countryside outside London? Probably much longer.

People underestimate just how bad Britain was financially after WW2. The one thing that hit home for me was Britain still had a good ration system in place until the early 1950’s (obviously fewer and few items as time went by).

Sorry, I was comparing that to the like China, India, and also many SEA countries. If you are comparing to the USA, everyone is deeply fooked.

It is more profitable, not more valuable in any usual sense of the word.

By the same token you could say that moving money for the mafia is more valuable than preventing violence and disease in poorer societies.

Profits are customers saying thank you for the value they are getting. So, London is a criminal enterprise that provides no real value, or is parasitic, or at least it's reasonable to compare it to one?

I suspect the root issue here is what we consider to be value, or what activities are valuable and how value is generated. The common critique of capitalism is based (often unknowingly) on the Marxist theory of value which sees the vast majority of economic activities as parasitic of value, particularly financial activities, and if that's the issue here sure I'm quite willing to debate on that.

> So, London is a criminal enterprise that provides no real value, or is parasitic, or at least it's reasonable to compare it to one?

As a former Londoner, absolutely yes. London as a city is extremely parasitic, especially when it comes to time and standard of living. It does provide value when you're either so poor or find it so hard to get a job that working there provides you enough value, or you earn such "screw you" money that you can afford to live a comfortable life there. But for anyone outside of those groups, it's best avoided unless you're just visiting for the sights.

Moving money for ruthless violent people is profitable if done right, but value destroying for society.

Value, whether measured in safety, shelter, nourishment, entertainment, ownership, infrastructure, sense of belonging or whatever you wish, is best built when you can trust the people around you and thus focus your efforts on what is valuable rather than trying to prevent being hurt or robbed.

Note that above I didn’t count money as valuable, since it isn’t intrinsically.

It might be something to do with the centuries of colonialism where the natural resources, labour and human lives of entire countries was stolen for the economic benefit of the United Kingdom.

>You must ask yourself what is the reason that people in London have more money

As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it.

Before you all go clutching your pearls: it's beyond impractical to even suggest paying it back nor would I even want to think about that. Not an option. not suggesting it.

But don't pretend it's because you're special. You stole it. Just own it.

> As an African that's an easy answer. They stole it.

As another African, your logic and morality are a disgrace.

Why? I think there's a definite argument to be made that a large part of the West's foundation of economic power is rooted in a history of colonialism and global oppression.

> a large part

Yip, they sure stole a lot of stuff - as of course did the Mongols and the Aztecs who are now dirt poor. In addition, the Ventians and Swiss never colonised anyone and are/were dripping cash.

But your comment is already a lot more nuanced than the OP's lazy clichéd statements.

A hell of a lot of their wealth also came from, amongst other things:

- individual rights - e,g, Magna caerta - no theft involved

- invention of limited liability corporations

- cadastas and private property rights (no theft involved)

- common law based on precedent (no theft involved)

- investment in mechanised warfare (to keep what they made and stole, see Mongols above)

- etc. etc.

Once only has to compare Singapore (colonised by British and Japanese) with Ghana since independence in the 1960s. Singapore has no water, no resources, no power, is surrounded by hostile neighbours, but is absolutely loaded. Ghana is resource rich and dirt poor.

You can decide for yourself who implemented the list above and who did not. You can also guess who is going to keep digging the hole they are in.

But I guess in certain progressive circles, "they stole it" passes for a rigourous analysis. [ And they get the bonus of claiming the moral high ground of being the perpetual victim ].

The OP should read Hernando de Soto instead.

It has been noticed that resource rich countries in Africa actually do worse on average than those without. There's a lot of theories as to why: a common one is that it leads to brittle economies with all their eggs in one basket. If your country is rich in emeralds let's say, it doesn't take the entire countries population to mine enough to sell, so what does everyone else do when the whole economy is built around emerald mining? This leads to higher unemployment that's been seen in the mineral rich African states. It also means the economy is very sensitive to the market of the few goods they are rich in.

In essence: it is the effect of the entire European world coming in, taking whatever they want, and then absolutely ensuring that independence would be doomed to fail. These economies fail because they're not modern. If Europe wanted Africa to succeed post-colonialisn: it could have helped train people, build infrastructure, etc. Instead they secured rights for foreign companies to continue the work of imperialism even today.

Your great and nuanced answer is being downvoted. Shows how insane some of these bubbles are.

They can't face the facts and want to hide their ego behind simple cliche statements that don't capture even 1% of the reality of history.

As yet another African, the logic is pretty solid to me: the literal Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom have gems plundered from the colonies, most notable is the biggest gem of the entire collection: the diamond known as "The Star of Africa".

And how do the Crown Jewels give any level of wealth to the common person of the UK?

Do the Crown Jewels produce billions of dollars daily that gets handed out to each citizen?

Or was it actually the British creating ships, goods, establishing trading posts, furthering science and creating the newest machinery etc... that created their wealth? (And still creates it to this day)

Indeed.

And since we are on the topic of the South African 'Star of Africa', the astute investor should note that those muppets in South Africa are busy changing their constitution to allow the expropriation of private property from their own citizens (never mind evil foreigners) a) without compensation, and b) just for kicks - without recourse to the courts.

So I ask you: would you be happy if your pension administrator sold up in Switzerland and USA invested your retirement in South African farms and factories?

It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault.

This is how we in Africa roll.

Extreme inequality and polarization has consequences. The "rainbow nation" never came to be because wealthy South Africans do not see themselves as having the same destiny as their fellow citizens, and the poor have cottoned on.

> It will impoverish them further, and yet it will be someone else's fault.

I've noticed certain parallels between segments of South African and American society: people who feel they have been left behind by a wealthy elite that doesn't care about them, and are willing to burn everything to the ground and start anew. Cue a charismatic politician who radically panders to them (despite being part of the elite), the only differences are that South Africa has objectively worse inequality, and has a longer political cycle.

You did not dispute the point I was making: that wealth was plundered. If the crown jewels do not (directly) benefit UK citizens, that doesn't mean other plundered wealth doesn't benefit the average citizen. For that, you can dig into the infrastructure, bequests, scholarships, to mention a few examples that were funded by plundering and exploiting colonies.

Ok, so can you show that directly plundered/stolen wealth actually helped much?

Setting up trading posts and controlling the beginnings of truly international trade over 200-300 years ago... I would think that would set a country up well moving forward, and somebody eventually had to do it. British were one of the first.

My wife is Chinese and she was taught in the 80s that the reason the UK is richer than China was that 100 earlier before we stole their best stuff.

Yes these thefts did happen, our big trading companies were basically organised piracy and extortion. There is an argument that we're still benefiting from investments in infrastructure and social development back then.

That's not why anyone in London today earns more for similar work than people in China or Africa though. You can't apply that argument to say Japan, South Korea or Taiwan for example, or to China today. 20 years ago the Chinese taxi driver would have earned 1/10th of the London taxi driver. Now it's 1/4. Britain burning down the Summer Palace in the 1860s is just not a factor in the reasons for why it used to be 1/10th in 2000 or is now 1/4.

It definitely is the reason why. Part of what sets compensation in London is the cost of real estate, and those prices have their origins in the stolen wealth.

To be fair, quite a lot of the London wealth more recently has been stolen by Russians, or is the rightful property of murderous feudal monarchs in the middle east. We're an equal opportunity laundry.

Property values have risen 30x in the last century in PPP terms. Colonialism might have had an impact on the starting value back then, but the other 97% of the current value was accumulated since then and came from somewhere else.

If you think the UK has an advanced economy due to 19th century colonialism you then need to explain the development of countries like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago. If you don't believe the UK did anything worthwhile in the last century to earn it's way and is free riding on the profits from stolen Zimbabwean tobacco from 1910, ok fine, now explain Japan.

> but the other 97% of the current value came from somewhere else.

It the value literally came from somewhere else (geographically), funneled through the financial district and spread to the local economy. London is the bay area, but for bankers.

The City of London has been laundering money for centuries. Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about, and the Square Mile doesn't ask too many questions about source of funds. Not too long ago, HSBC was slapped on the wrist for laundering cartel money.

"Lately, there's a lot of Russian/former soviet oligarch money sloshing about".

This keeps getting brought up but it's inconsequential at the scale of the total economy. As I pointed out elsewhere already on this thread, total Russian inward flows to this country accounts for about 1% of foreign investment. Now yes absolutely, foreign investment is a significant factor in the UK economy, about 20%. That makes a big difference, but Russian oligarch funds are not a significant part of that, they're just a politically and socially highly visible one that gets talked about a lot.

The reason London is a centre for laundering money is that it's a massive mainstream finance centre. So yes, you're on the right track, but you're obsessing over a small forest footpath and missing the mainstream economic motorway right next to it.

US FDI into the UK is more than 30x that from Russia. That from the EU is even bigger. This is the stuff that moves the needle.

> Japan went from feudal backwater to major global power in 80 years, and it completed that transformation 80 years ago

Japan achieved this by looking to countries like England as an example and becoming an imperialist and colonizing parts of Southeast Asia - kicking out some of the European countries who held those colonies in the process.

So yea they did the same thing to get wealthy - stealing resources.

Japanese expansionism was enabled by their industrialisation, not a cause of it. Yes they wanted access to resources, but it would have been dramatically cheaper to just buy them than incur the massive costs of conquest. They expanded because they thought that's what you do to succeed, but as the post war period has shown that's just not the case and never was. Anyway the war wiped them out, there's no way any benefits of their territorial expansionism before the war carried over into the post-war period.

Look at Germany, they never had any significant empire, but they still brought rest of Europe including the imperial powers to their knees in 1940. That conflict showed that the imperial mercantilism of the previous centuries just wasn't relevant anymore.

If imperialism was so great, there's no way Germany should have conceivably been able to roll over the imperial superpowers of France and Britain. The only thing that saved the UK was the English Channel. What mattered was industrialisation, along with economic and financial liberalisation. Every country that has done well in the last 100 years, except a few resource states like those in OPEC, has done so this way.

Sure, the UK has certainly not been free riding from its profits. But the UK wouldn't be nearly as rich as it is now without the initial investment that came from plundering colonies. Innovation doesn't come for free, wealth is needed to finance it. People say the physical resources that were stolen don't matter, but that's absolutely not true, they matter a lot, even to this day (see how the media is talking about the Taliban sitting on trillions of dollars of minerals in Afghanistan).

For example, if not for India, Britain would be absolutely destroyed after WW2 and would be far from their current position in the 21st century (assuming allies still somehow win, big if). India was Britain's cash cow and is the reason why it survived the war.

We did very well out of plundering colonies, yes, to our shame. I don't think it has any relevance to our economy now though. Compare us to Germany, Austria and Sweden. They never had significant empires. Do you think we would be massively poorer now compared to those countries if we hadn't had the Empire? Is the only reason we can compete with them now the fact that until the 1950s we had India?

Germany put the lie to imperial supremacy in 1940 when they comprehensively but-kicked France and Britain. They proved that industrialisation is what mattered and by then imperial mercantilism was a distraction. We were only saved by the English channel, and yes thanks to India. The fact we had India undoubtedly saved us, but in a last ditch final card up our sleeve that kept us in the game kind of way. Not in a trump card that meant Germany never had a chance from the start kind of way.

Industrialism originally developed through the profits of export goods, directed at the colonies.

By the 20th century, I think you could say colonialism didn't pay off. But it was also the seed capital for a lot of europe's industrialization. The same thing happened with Japan - their defeat of China in the Sino-Japanese war resulted in an indemnity that underwrote the Mejji restoration.

Most exports of industrial goods went to other developed countries. Also as I pointed out, many developed countries didn't have colonies at all to export to and did fine.

As for Japan, they did do well out of the war, but they were already rapidly industrialising at a much faster pace than their neighbours. That's why the won the war in the first place. The scale of the reparations might optimistically have paid for a few years of industrialisation and investment, but over the 4 decades between then and the next Sino-Japanese war that's basically a marginal difference. The second Sino-Japanese war merged right into WW2 so was too late to have any major effects on overall national development.

>That's why the won the war in the first place.

Not really. The japanese ships were, iirc, mostly built in britain and germany. Plus, the chinese had many more ships. I've read that corruption and morale were important factors, but I don't think relative levels of industrialization mattered that much. Bear in mind, Japan did not build things like engines domestically until the 20th century.

Further, the indemnity was nearly four times the annual national budget, and paid in pound sterling. That's more than a 'few years'. That's absolutely transformative. Not to mention the capture of chinese naval vessels, territorial concessions, etc.

> Most exports of industrial goods went to other developed countries.

Depends on the era. The basic point I'm making is that early industrialization, i.e. the wool trade, then the cotton trade, were generally export-driven, and export-driven to west africa. The cotton industry was also underwritten by colonialism insofar as it was predicated on slavery.

Pointing to countries that did not have direct roles in colonialism (although a surprising number of countries you wouldn't think of actually did - i.e. demmark in the slave trade) ignores the fact that colonialism basically amounted to a massive and sustained cash infusion into western europe. The spanish conquests of the new world, for example, brought so much gold and silver into europe they crashed the spanish economy, but I think it's obvious that this gold would have quickly escaped national borders and funded colonial and industrial ventures across western europe.

Yes japan had more modern ships and crews with the technical skills to crew them, and the infrastructure to deploy them effectively. They were very rapidly modernising in ways that China simply wasn't. Those reparations figures are wildly overestimated, the cost of the war to Japan was estimated at about half of the reparations for example.

Looking at Britain, most of the imperial revenue flowed to the gentrified classes and into their estates. The industrialisers were mainly middle class domestic manufacturers and it's the growing friction between these two sides of the economy that drove political conflict and reform in Britain.

Most of Europe had no third world empire. As I pointed out, Germany proved conclusively that Empire was irrelevant. Spain and Portugal had huge Empires and just fizzled out because they didn't industrialise. France also failed to capitalise on Empire in ways that mattered long term.

China also has industrialised rapidly over several decades, and their imperial assets in Tibet and Xinjiang played no significant role in this. What matters is policy and economic culture. This is what distinguishes say Israel from it's neighbours. They're similar sizes, similar resources but night and day in terms of development.

> Those reparations figures are wildly overestimated

I feel like I'm understating them. I'm getting my overview of the amounts from this paper[0], but in principle, even getting paid a part of the costs of a war is a very good deal, because that money usually goes entirely to your own economy (since they are supplying your military), you get essentially free training for your military, you get prestige, and you get the actual war aims (in this case, control over Korea, which is in itself lucrative).

If you consider another colonial war, the second opium war, the chinese government indemnity in this case didn't cover the costs of the expedition (iirc). However, it's still a really great deal, because you get access to the chinese market, which is worth a ton, and the state finances themselves aren't negatively impacted because the indemnity is enough to cover costs.

I think it's probably true that by the time Germany reunified, empires weren't always that worthwhile.

I don't totally disagree with your culture idea. I just think there's nothing worse for a nation's political culture than being colonized, and it's also terrible for the economy, so it's unsurprising that almost every first world nation was either never colonized, or if it was, is currently ruled by a seceeding group of the colonizers themselves (e.g. the USA).

[0]: https://eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/3069...

Japan has a colonial history, for example it colonised Taiwan and Korea, ruled the Philippines at some point, etc...

All the countries doing well today either were historically imperial, ie., most of Europe, America, Japan, China, Russia, or were or are now connected to imperial countries as 'allies' like South Korea. Any remaining difference is explained by these imperial powers continuing to project power gained through violence by soft means: dominating culture and international trade. The calculus really is that simple.

The case of Britain vs China isn't a particularly interesting one in this dynamic: it's just the dynamic great powers have always had within their group. The older state has more momentum but is sunsetting. Their wealth still comes from the exact same place, they just haven't quite equalized yet.

Japan did have an empire for a few decades in the early 1900s but there's no way any benefits from that persisted into the post-war period. Anyway their industrialisation was a cause of their imperial success, knocking over their neighbours that had failed to develop, not a result of it.

I see you avoided mention of South Korea or Taiwan. Israel is another example. I'm actually pretty bullish on Iran if they could kick out the clerics, that country has massive potential.

I think it's fair to characterise China as an imperial power, but how much of their current economic power actually comes from controlling say Tibet or Xinjiang? Those are marginal backwaters. They get a bit of forced labour and cheap vegetables. Maybe some minerals, but nothing they couldn't have bought fairly cheaply from Australia.

Do you actually, genuinely think not having their peripheral controlled territories would have prevented China developing? Seriously?

Yeah, no.

Being essentially a colonial slave does not help at all increase labour productivity, nor valorizing labour. Having no ownership of the capital your labour is used into doesn't help.

From that on you can very easily get a 100 year setback economically. Then you have to play catch-up economically. That's where the social dysfunction, literal assasinations, and ethnic regimentation kick in :)

Sure it's not 100% about colonialism, but that's the deciding factor.

There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade. For example Finland. Historical injustices happened between all peoples, and Africans were not a special case, but have been made into a special case because of race relations being very poor primarily in the US.

Your bottom line might still be correct however, wealth is a measure of resources and resources are more or less distributed in a zero-sum game. Whenever someone won something, someone else lost something. The importance of the English Empire and their naval dominance isn't something to downplay, and something they indeed should "own", rather than dismiss.

>There are western countries that are wealthy despite little to no involvement in slave trade.

You're actually the first to mention the slave trade in the chain -- the discussion was just about wealth. Latin America is still also poor when compared to the "developed countries" at the top of the economic food chain, and their people weren't exported as slaves.

But the economic and political structures left by colonialism (both internal and international) meant that the people from these countries could never get out of that hole. Ultimately, people in Finland live much better than in Bolivia because there's a lot more money going around to build nice infrastructure, pay for teachers, quality goods, food, and so on, and where this money comes from can be traced all the way to colonialism.

Nokia couldn't have existed in Bolivia, even though the raw materials to make phones can be found there. It lacks absolutely everything else that is required to maintain a company like that: infrastructure, education, political stability. And the reason why this country lacks all of these things, is this "historical injustice". It's not only that the wealth was stolen, but also the capacity to create more wealth was stolen, not just the cobalt, but also the hypothetical industry that could have generated wealth for the people of the country.

How do you explain the existence of the Republic of Ireland then?

It was definitely colonised, lost all it's forests for the navies of the Empire, and yet is actually pretty rich today (although we still have a lot of post-colonial syndrome, to be fair).

It's in the EU? It has proximity to other rich countries? It wasn't left in nearly as bad state as ME/Africa/South Asia after decolonization? Want more? Just read a book or two.

Existence: local population determined enough to throw off centuries of oppression by far more powerful neighbor that said neighbor gave it up as a bad job (except for a few northern counties…)

Current wealth: English-speaking, ridiculously tax-incentivized corporate portal to Germany’s economic area

How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.

How did your African country get all this modern tech that you didn't work towards to invent? How are you using the internet? You must've stolen it.

Maybe some countries simply have a good flow of education --> production --> exchange high quality goods for currency.

> How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.

Unironically, yes this is how capitalism works. If you have resources, you leverage those resources to produce goods and services that increase your total wealth. If I were to walk into a bank and steal a couple million dollars, maybe I could leverage that money into a successful business. Maybe so successful that it produces inner-generational wealth, so that my great-great-grandchildren are on average more wealthy than they would have been otherwise. I may have "earned" this money with my hypothetical business skills, but it doesn't change the fact that I only had the opportunity because I stole the money.

So yeah, many enterprising individuals took land and resources (and plenty of slave labor) from the Americas/Africa/Asia for hundreds of years, and were able to leverage those resources into even more wealth, thus people in London have more money, thus taxi drivers make more money.

The problem with this is that WW2 wiped us out financially, and then post-war nationalisation wiped us out economically. ww1 had done a pretty good job on us as well, as did the depression between the wars.

The value of the UK economy, since around 1930, has increased in PPP terms by about 90%. So there's a reasonable argument the value in 1930 was partly down to imperialism, although I think industrialisation was a much bigger factor. Still, the 90% of our economic value we accrued since then certainly didn't come from colonialism, so where did it come from?

Look at Japan, yes it had an empire for a few decades before WW2, but that was mainly a result of industrialisation that had already happened, not a cause of it. Look at what's happened in China since it opened up and liberalised it's economy. At least they finally, finally figured this out.

>How did they "steal" it? Like they came and stole your gold 200 years ago and now they're rich forever? lol.

Explains how a small island in north Europe with a weak military and flagging economy is on the UN security council.

200-300 years of bankrupting countries like India. But they say all is fair in war. So it is what it is.

You mean they stole gold and cadmium? There are three uses of raw minerals: as jewelry, as something to exchange for goods, and as a component of high tech. For most of the Africa, minerals are jewelry at most and to get goods, you need an advanced nation to produce these goods for you. The phone you're using to post these comments has trace amounts of gold and cobalt, probably sourced in Africa, but the rest - the Internet in particular - wasnt created in Africa. And by using goods produced in Europe/America/China, you become complicit in this arrangement.

If Europeans were to argue about theft and slavery between themselves we would have endless wars and constant World War scenarios. Europe, since Ancient Greek time, was at war with itself literally all the time. I believe not a single day has passed in the history of Europe were there wasnt war waged up until modern times. Slavery and war treasures were omnipresent. its just the name of the game.

Bad argument, not even comparable. Colonization of Africa, Asia and Americas was orders of magnitude worse, and more importantly, incredibly recent. Which is why the lingering effects are still there.

Well of course there are lingering effects. Sure. They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today.

If Europe was able to develop off the back of exploiting African resources, how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources? What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire? There are plenty of them.

> They're just not having macroscopic economic impact today.

Nope. Sorry, you can't whitewash the facts so easily, us from the former colonies won't let you!

https://voxeu.org/article/economic-impact-colonialism

> If this is right, then a third of income inequality in the world today can be explained by the varying impact of European colonialism on different societies. A big deal.

> how come in the several generations since, Africa hasn't been able to develop off the back of African resources

Who says it hasn't? I invite you to look at graphs at https://gapminder.org/tools. You must avoid the natural binary thinking tendency, there is a whole spectrum between "developing" and "developed". Don't forget that factors like geographical/religious/linguistic etc affect speed of development. Why are black people in the US still not doing well, despite living in the richest country in the world? It is hard to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty.

> What about all the developed countries that never had any significant empire

Hmm, sneaky attempt at changing goal posts - I never said colonization was necessary for development!

They had a ~200 year headstart and furthermore, they helped establish the current systems worldwide.

Uh, rampant theft? Colonialism? Why are so many other countries historical artifacts located in London, again?

Careful now - why does a cosmetic surgeon in London s exclusive Harley Street earn £1,000,000 while a doctor restoring sight and correcting cleft palate and fistula in Africa earns 5% as much? Do you think their work is worth less?

Of course there are different forms of value that are not fungible. Moral or human value as independent of financial value.

The point I'm making is that the £1m came from somewhere. Now yes sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy. We're talking about the economy in general and what makes on economy more valuable than another one in economic terms.

> sometimes it came from a Mafia sex slave operation or whatever, but those are minuscule edge cases on the scale of say the UK economy

A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, after a while the money laundering starts to add up: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/uk-losing-fight-money-l...

The UK economy offers a unique mix of commercial fairness and predictability, achieved by a comparatively incorruptible commercial court system, with disinterest in where the money actually comes from provided it isn't UK crime.

Whereas in China, for good and ill, billionaires are not above the state and can get clobbered when they become politically inconvenient. Such as Jack Ma.

(A question nobody is asking in this thread: what's the relative price of a taxi in, say, Lowestoft? What does that say about the regime there?)

Stuff like that sucks, absolutely, but again it's not a huge factor to the UK economically. That money passed through, it didn't land in the UK. The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions. Total Russian investment into the UK is only about 1% of all foreign investment, which itself is 20% of GDP. So 0.2% of our economy is linked to Russia at all.

> The impact on us economically was probably in the 10s of millions

That's less than Roman Abramovich paid for one Chelsea player. There's probably been more than £10m of donations to the Tory party alone from oligarchs. Try again with a more realistic figure.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/sep/21/tory-donors...

It depends where the money landed, that's where the big fees would be made, but just shuffling it around, I'd be very surprised if it was more than that.

Look, you can bring up minuscule footnotes in Appendix F of what matters to the UK economy as much as you like. Yes these things suck. No they are not even remotely consequential to why a taxi driver in London, or Londoners in general earn what they do or how a modern economy functions.

The more time you spend obsessing over incidental edge cases, because they are things you can get enraged about and get a good adrenalin buzz over, the longer you will be mind blastingly uninformed about how the word really works.

People do spend millions of dollars to make themselves feel better, if they have the capability. That shouldn’t be surprising in the modern world.

Assuming it’s not illegal money and no coercion was involved, then by definition the customers must have believed that the cosmetic operations were worth it, at least at the point of purchase. Since cosmetic surgery is much less burdened by regulation, externalities, and so on, I would say the prices charged are reasonably close to the market clearing price.

The surgeons in Africa may or may not be subject to greater distortions depending on the local market.

Though I imagine cosmetic surgeons specifically in Africa are paid about the same relative to their skill level, staffing level, and facilities?

I'm not surprised, just amazed people would say it's "(more) valuable" and the UK must be "doing something right" without a second thought as to whether they're confusing financial value with moral value, or whether the transfer of money really represents a transfer of value.

Spare me the Econ 101, Harley Street is a status symbol, the doctors there are not more highly paid because they're objectively safer or more skilled.

I guess we could call Africa's history of conflict, exploitation and colonialism, and usurious loans from the World Bank to leaders who aren't interested in their citizens' welfare, a distortion of the local market.

It's a matter of risk that I'm paying for to avoid, not absolute quality. I would not wager my life on a random doctor in Africa even while 90% of doctors there might be more skilled than in London. I'm paying to eliminate the risk of encountering the worst 10%. In that light, yes I would personally expect the doctors in London to be able to avoid the worst outcomes better on average. Whether that's warranted is another discussion.

This goes for loads of stuff. I would wager a $30 meal to be fresher than a $5 meal on average. I'm not saying there aren't any $5 meals that are fresher than some $30 meals, but just that the $30 has a lot lower chance to make me sick.

I think you're confusing a sometimes reasonable heuristic (you can get what you pay for), with some kind of underlying or real value.

You were the one who wrote in a monetary figure, thus implying some monetary value to the “worth”. If you want to consider solely moral value, without any monetary component, then that obviously has different implications.

Starting a comment with "careful now" is extremely condescending and disrespectful. Please stop.

They earn 4x more because the world is not truly flat, and there are artificial/natural barriers which hamper competition such as; movement of humans, scarcity of taxi medallions along with fixed pricing, input costs of a taxi ride (cost of living, gasoline + subsidies/taxes), labor laws etc.

USSR was never efficient. People literally did not care about their jobs. Especially after stalinism ended, many did the absolute minimum. Since everything was state owned it was owned by nobody - so nobody cared about maintenance, workers often stole from their companies, did not show to work because they stood in queues..

They had sayings like: "doesnt matter if you lie or stand,you will get 3 thousand at the end" (what meant that there were no rewards for those who worked harder).

There could have been some islands of efficiency (perhaps in closed cities where workers could get accused of being spies if they didnt try hard enough) but for generic workers efficiency did not matter.

And I dont even write about inefficiencies of central planned system itself, where rewards did not come from market forces + falsified statistics on top, so nobody even knew the truth.

Even the communists knew that their system is inefficient, which you can see in many places. For example in "aquarium" novel by Suvorov one of the spies talks how they run out of meat and bread, but the system got so inefficient that it run out of people to murder.

USSR didnt work people harder. Political prisoners yes, but the normal people were incredibly ineffective. Even films made during communism laughed at that.

Sounds a lot like many very large multinationals to me. People don't get fired because managers don't want to expose themselves to the possible legal ramifications, so they just move them to a place where they can cause as little damage as possible.

It's a very apt comparison to large multinationals, but this one had hundreds of millions of "employees". So you can imagine how little people cared about their jobs.

Baumol's cost disease : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

> They do quite legitimately earn 4x as much because the work they are doing is worth 4x as much

A London taxi driver is not paid more because his work is somehow more valuable than a Beijing taxi driver's, it's just because everything in London is expensive. That's just basic economics. Read an economics book.

How did everything in London get so expensive? Read a history book about the last few centuries.

Seems like you're just some typical western chauvinist with no real argument.

>What i did not understand back then is the absolute replaceability of personel in the chinese market. You work long and hard or tomorrow someone else does it.

That's rapidly changing as the birthrate is falling and the population is ageing. https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2020/

Is the birthrate still falling now that the “one child” policy is no more?

Kids are too expensive: there Is no welfare, highest taxes of the world and wages are "depressed" to keep competivity combinerà with real estate kegabubble and education really expensive from infancy

Why would it come back? I don’t think any research has ever shown that working those kind of hours in “knowledge work” is sustainable or conducive to high productivity long-term.

I expect the “replaceability” that you mention isn’t just “work long and hard or somebody else will”, but also “work long and hard, because you can be easily replaced as soon as you have a breakdown”…

There's a documentary that shows exactly this phenomenon, American Factory.

> i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive"

I'm a bit more optimistic. In a culture where productivity is not the be-all and end-all, staying competitive at the cost one's whole life, will not take roots. I think that productivity also has different dimensions, which helps.

What europeans like me who want to try something else do is simple: we emigrate to China and see how it is.

We dont all need to all do the same thing, and the biggest fallacy of all is that we re in competition with each other. We trade more or less efficiently but since doors are always half open, heh, just jump if you want.

Can even change with age.

> simple: we emigrate to China

Let us know how simple this works out in practice.

It wasn't especially difficult pre-COVID. I know a few people from the UK and Bulgaria who have done so.

Yes. And I know some who returned around 2018ish because the oppression was growing a lot.

Unless You go here with investiment Money Is difficult to get permits

I am an American but I completely resonate with Confucian values when it comes to work and learning.

The most insulting thing to me would be to be called lazy. I can see as a society with that many people though this would naturally go too far.

In the West, we are not lazy but delusional as a society. We are the boxing champion that has quit hard training because they think they can't be beat. This is pretty natural after being the champ for so long. We don't need to train, we can just party and still win. That works until the younger talented hungry competitor comes along and you get knocked out. A tale as old as boxing, a tale as old as human history.

Did you just call Rocky IV "a tale as old as human history?"

Well, to be generous, Gilgamesh did suffer from a boredom so severe that his own people begged the gods to bring him an equal. After Enkidu showed up, he spent more time adventuring and fighting mythical creatures, instead of wrestling the townsfolk and enjoying the perks of prima nocta.

History has shown us that as societies get richer / more productive people work less. Here is a graph of this in the US:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2e/US...

This makes sense. As people get richer, they use some of their wealth to "purchase" more leisure time. There is no reason to think this won't happen in China, just like it has happened in other places.

I think your fear is unfounded.

> History has shown us that as societies get richer / more productive people work less.

For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power, and then ultimately try to be worshiped as gods until the masses push back enough, and then become content with simply having absolute earthly power.

Maybe this trend is over, but given the amount of effort into putting out "God Emperor" memes in the US, my guess is that some people are at least willing to still try at it.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

I've got my finger on the pulse of spicy memes, and I've never seen a God Emperor one. Is this some kind of Trumpist thing?

For most of history, when a society gets richer, the rich enslave more people and consolidate power

This is not true. The enormous rise in wealth of the world in the 20th/21st centuries has coincided with large increases in personal freedoms as well.

At any rate, I'm not sure a graph from the US starting at 1950 is sufficient for establishing historical trends.

The trend is consistent with other datasets:

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

Who's to say the causation behind this correlation doesn't go the other way? Some people take more free time, think of more efficient ways of working, and get richer. That in turn encourages others to emulate them.

I'm skeptical that decline is caused by increasing wealth rather than by demographic changes like women entering the workforce and a larger portion of the population being retirement-aged.

It's an instance of Prisoner's dilemma.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

Just because you want to and have the resources to replace anyone anytime, doesn't mean you can actually do that.

In complex codebases (i.e. pretty much anything except "we're managing a Shopify store" (and probably even then)) you're lucky to be able to onboard someone in a few months, forget about days!

Honestly, I kind of feel the same way. I'm an American living in Europe and it's frustrating for me at times dealing with people who don't want to work.

I don't think the Chinese model of work until you drop dead is good but maybe something in the middle?

> I'm an American living in Europe and it's frustrating for me at times dealing with people who don't want to work.

I haven't seen what you experienced nearly as bad, but I think a much larger challenge is dealing with people who are content to repeatedly exercise substantially the same skillsets each year, every year. Even after I take to the trouble to mentor them with identifying what they desire for their career, aligning to their revealed preferences of what user stories they opt to deliver in team scrums, writing up suggested "getting started" lesson plans, pointing out appropriately small, simple improvements in the code base they can apply their new skills towards, and arranging for free access to one of the big technical training sites. You can lead a horse...

> Not only is this a big reason of the economical prowess of china in my opinion, i fear that this work-ethic will come back sooner or later to europe to "stay competitive".

We rather will introduce tariffs to fight against price dumping. We have the mechanism for that and politicians are slowly waking up and realizing that China is an enemy that must be fought.

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