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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

I recently heard a quote: “These countries aren't underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

EDIT: Found the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m

You just need 1 or a few to reach "escape velocity", though.

Europe was ok-ish until ~1700, then Britain reached the Industrial Revolution, then everybody in about a 2000km radius suddenly leveled up. Kind of funny how geography and culture work.

Ah, the Anglo-centric (what's centrism taken to its extreme BTW?) view. As always, utterly divorced from actual facts on the ground on the Continent.

I'm not from an English speaking country and I'm actually from the "Continent".

yes, Europe had multiple colonies all over the world to extract raw material. Very easy to do that when you have a strong army. A monopoly on violence lead to that "development".

> Very easy to do that when you have a strong army

If it was so easy everyone would do it. It’s not like India wasn’t ruled by a series of colonizers long before the British.

But how do you get the strong army without being developed first?

(I agree that once you already have a strong army, you can leverage it to get even more advantages.)

Chicken and egg. The "monopoly on violence" requires technological "development".

You can only be overexploited if you are underdevelopped and vice versa.

It’s important which word you choose, since both words bring with them its own implied solution to the problem. If we call it “underdeveloped”, the implied solution is to foster development. If, on the other hand, we call it “overexploited”, well…

Then the only solution is for larger more powerful countries to voluntarily give up their way of life. In which case those countries will be in a tough spot for a very long time.

I would disagree because in my opinion it seems that there are some parts of the western developed world where levels of exploitation are increasing.

are they not both?

I fail to see how this argument helps the countries - or rather the people - in question, that is unless you subscribe to the Marxist idea (which probably applies to the lecturer, given he's apparently well-known for his Marxist writings) that the economy essentially is a zero-sum game, in which invariably somebody has to lose for somebody else to win.

In my opinion, that's just a defeatist view because it means poor people in underdeveloped countries will remain poor unless we somehow manage to entirely undo 500 years of colonial history.

Rather than dwell on the past, we should try and find ways to create a better future. Mind you, this doesn't mean forgetting about the past and the atrocities committed under colonialism or revising history accordingly, but rather have that past inform our actions today.

> Rather than dwell on the past, we should try and find ways to create a better future.

A bold prescription! You should be king of Africa.

Overexploitation is a very real dynamic in colonial and post-colonial countries. As shown by the resource curse (aka "Dutch Disease"), countries with the largest, most valuable natural resource endowments tend to be the ones where average folks are worst off.

Dutch disease is only one aspect of the resource curse and classical "Dutch disease" has little has little to do with overexploitation post colonial or otherwise -- I don't think many people were claiming that the Netherlands were being exploited in the 1960's. What it does mean though, is that a resource rich country may find is currency strong and any manufacturing or agriculture less competitive on world markets - again this has little to do with overexploitation.

Other aspects of the resource curse that are relevant to resource rich African nations are economies that fluctuate wildly with world commodity prices which lead to whipsaw effects and difficulties in planning and investment, a lower return to investments in human capital and natural resource development being more amenable to corrruption than other industries.

The resource curse also affects countries that weren't colonized such as Russia.

Norway was worried about this as well so that's why they created their sovereign wealth fund.

> Rather than dwell on the past, we should try and find ways to create a better future.

Of course. But the solution differs depending on whether the problem today is underdevelopment or overexploitation. Most current thinking seems to tend to try to fix the former problem, not the latter. But whatever they are doing, it does not seem to be helping; these countries have been “developing” for 50 years. You’d think if they were simply underdeveloped, they would have developed by now.

Easy trick they could do to develop quicker and lesser the level of curruption: give women more rights and power. Europe is certainly not hindering them

I have heard that Europe (and others) are promoting corruption by unholding regimes which are beneficial to businesses; the old “Banana republic” play. They might not invade to suppress communist revolutions quite as often these days, but it’s perfectly plausible that they undermine such anti-corruption efforts behind the scenes.

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