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Comment by mrjangles | Hacker News Reader

The history part of that book was really good, but when he starts talking about economics it quickly becomes clear he is confused about even the most simple concepts. He tries to critique economics without knowing anything about economics.

What one really gets from this book is an understanding of where the human 'crabs in bucket' attitude comes from and how it is deep within our natural instincts. Having spent a lot of time in 3rd world countries, I can say that his description of debt and how things work through guilt and people manipulating each other is exactly how things still work. He actually treats it like it is a good thing though, but once you see it for yourself it is clear that this is has a lot to do with why these places are still poor. Breaking free from that, and inventing objective measures of credit and laws for proper debt accounting and repayment, has a lot to do with why we are so happy and rich in the modern world, I think.

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>He actually treats it like it is a good thing though, but once you see it for yourself it is clear that this is has a lot to do with why these places are still poor

Really? It's that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them that are the reason they are poor? Fascinating.

But they were poor and the colonists were rich before they ever came into contact.

Gonna need a source on this one.

Europe built stuff like this long before colonization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Cathedral

In Europe such constructions happened in many places, no other part of the world built similar things. No, not even Asia, Europe were ahead of them at this point.

The ancient mosques? The pyramids of Egypt? The pyramids of South America? The Aztecs built their capital on a lake. The Taj Mahal, Kailasa Temple, any of the temples in ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia, and countless other monuments built all over the world (not super familiar with the far east)?

This is the peak of eurocentrism and ignorance of the rest of the world. You honestly believe on Europe was building giant monuments?

Sometimes true, and sometimes not. The Incas and the Aztec were rich.

Weird how the people in the imperial core never want to admit its not their economics or their political model that made them rich in the first place. It was the over exploitation of the rest of the world once the imperialist countries got the overhand. They made the number 1 and number 2 economy for most of history become backwaters.

Funny thing is where I'm from the Netherlands we even called it our golden century and still people can't connect the dots between our economic wealth and the plundering of the world. But I have already seen the break down of our institutions from 2008 till now, the shock of 2008 was so big that the dividend from western exploitation is not enough anymore to cover up bad leadership.

As long as there is generational poverty people from the imperial core will also carry generational guilt. The wrongs need to be corrected before westerners can talk about how to run things properly. But I don't see that happening until the western imperial empire breaks up into many pieces.

Yes, strange indeed that those imperialist Swiss, Norwegians, Danish, Japanese, South Koreans, and Canadians never want to admit that it's their imperialist ventures that made them rich. I wonder why?

Japan was an imperialist state, they abused China horribly for example. But yeah not all rich countries were imperialist. And arguably Japan didn't got rich from being imperialist, they got rich after they got bombed to hell and rebuilt without any extra territories.

There was a little incident where they got nuked back to the stone age since then.

Two cities were nuked of the how many that got firebombed to ashes. It certainly helped that Japan was already a industrialized country when ww2 happened. So the institutional knowledge was already there in Japan to rebuild and do it fast.

The Nordic countries also have the blood of imperialism on their hands. While most of that history is not mentioned by mainstream media and removed from peoples thought, because they were smaller players in the imperialist game and peaked in the 18th century. Canada went from a couple of outpost to a continental size country, going as far as killing and raping indigenous children and burying them in their school gardens..

South Korea is a vassal of the US and were allowed to develop, a strong south Korea can be used against China when the need arises. If the US wants they can pretty much decapitate Samsung and succeed like the US tried with Huawei but seems to failing. Japan was the scourge of Asia in the 20th century, my Chinese great grand father got stabbed by them during their imperial rampage through South east Asia. Its a known fact the imperialist colonizer try to sweet talk their regime like bringing civilization, human rights(woke imperialism) and now they will most likely use the climate(green imperialism) to cover for their crimes.

https://nordics.info/show/artikel/the-colonialism-of-denmark...

Cathedrals were built as the same time as mud huts and before "colonization" was even a word.

That's not strictly true, unless you redefine "cathedrals" to include pre-christian temples.

From [0]:

apoikia - 'a settlement far from home, a colony'

[..] a Greek community regarded as distinct from the kind of trading‐post conventionally known as an emporion. In effect, an apoikia may be defined as a polis established abroad by a polis [..] at home: the official processes required the appointment of a leader/founder [..] The colonizing movement was in progress between c.734 and 580 BCE

The ancient Greeks already had different words for trading posts (ἐμποριον, empire), cities (πολις, polity), and colonies. The term ἀποικια seems to refer exclusively to settlements that were subservient to the polis back home. It stands to reason that the Greek colonization was based more on mutually beneficial trade than military oppression, but the concept of overseas territorial control is arguably older than Christianity.

[0] https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20...

I'm sure you are aware, but theory you are repeating is due to Lenin which he invented as a means to explain why capitalism was working so well and wasn't collapsing like Marx had claimed it would. There has never been even the slightest shred of evidence for it and every bit of historical evidence shows pretty clearly that wealth transfer has always gone the other way - from first world to third world - with a few famous exception such as Belgium.

Really gonna need a source on that claim.

I've never seen a source that disagrees. Even the sources that talk about how the British drained India of it's resources will eventually admit (in small print somewhere hidden at the back) that "Sure, there was a huge one way flux of capital from Britain to India, and sure it cost Britain a fortune, but in the end they actually robbed India because they implemented a free market system rather than a protectionist socialist system". That is literally the only argument that exists, that by implementing a free trade, free market system, they took advantage of India.

As long as there is generational poverty people from the imperial core will also carry generational guilt.

No, I'm sorry. We spent centuries battling with the church over guilt-driven power structures (the original sin theory), and I'm not going to accept a new yoke. Do better than trying to guilt-shame your fellow people into submission.

You'll have to explain Ireland, Finland and South Korea.

> Really? It's that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them that are the reason they are poor?

Yes. It is really that and not the imperialist systems that have oppressed and colonized them.

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