Sorry for my rant :(
I’m not perfect of course, so sometimes I do feel schadenfreude. But I never mistake it for a good thing, but rather a sign of my own imperfection.
[*edit] can someone downvoting explain what they disagree with here?
> in the real world is continents either being successful or failing
Hardly. Chile is quite successful while Argentina is kind of a mess and Bolivia is worse. Uruguay is doing well also. Brazil is doing reasonably well, all things considered too. Venezuela is an absolute mess.
Europe is a really mixed bag as well.
/me lifts hand and point finger to Botswanna.
There's plenty of factors that helped, I can think of a dozen right off the top of my head, but the one that made a crucial difference is in my opinion really the above.
Basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seretse_Khama#Presidency
South Africa also props Botswana up via a customs union.
https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...
Your numbers are not even close.
> In 2019, the GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) was $36,701 in Lithuania, $35,853 in Estonia and $30,830 in Latvia.
Source: https://wedc.org/export/market-intelligence/posts/strong-gro...
Botswana has a $7,347.55 GDP per capita according to Google (in 2021).
That's at least 75% lower than the worst Baltic nation, not "slightly below."
It's probably best compared to something like Qatar, where the hope is it'll be able to use the diamond wealth to found another industry.
But there is always willingness to blame everybody else.
Religion played a part. The best selling book after the printing press emerged was the Bible and majority of book sales revolved around religious texts. There was money to be made from this so it spread.
The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_literacy_campaign
Before the campaign, the rate of illiteracy among city dwellers was 11% compared to 41.7% in the countryside
Without universal literacy a country can't escape corruption, it is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to move to to the next stage. Not so long ago most everyone most everywhere was an illiterate peasant, the first places to grow out of that got first mover advantage.
Actually it is more like 18th century in Austria-Hungary where compulsory school attendance (6 years long - just read, write, count) was established in 1774 School Reform under Empress Maria Theresa and the elementary school as I know it was established by The Imperial Elementary School Act (Reichsvolksschulgesetz) of 1869 standardized compulsory schooling as a whole and increased compulsory schooling from six to eight years.
Which is very nice history lesson, but does not answer the question of "why did European rulers even bothered with compulsory education at all".
Botswana. If you want to count the island nations, Cape Verde, Seychelles as well too.
Edit: Removed the part describing Kagame as genocidal because I mixed up his identity. He's still corrupt and power-drunk though.
1- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
A couple of ultra-rich oil tycoons in an otherwise poor country will artificially increase the per capita figure.
A couple of ultra-rich people can't really move GDP per capita figures anywhere; that's not how averages work.
How many are, for example, the Saudi princes? Five thousand or so?
We can do a thought experiment -- let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million? No, because part of that $100 million is taking money away from other uses, e.g. someone with a fixed entertainment budget going to see her instead of doing something else. Only the resulting increase in overall income -- if any -- is the measure of how much Taylor adds to GDP.
GDP is the sum of total final production in an economy, and while a billionaire may play an important role in organizing production and encouraging more production to happen, it's usually the case that if they were never born or left, the economy would continue with other replacements for the billionaire's contribution. The replacements would be less efficient and so output would be a bit smaller. That difference is the contribution to GDP, not the billionaire's entire income.
And if you talk about Saudi oil princes, then they are not producing anything at all. Make those Oil princes disappear, and Saudi Arabia's GDP would be unchanged. Actually it would certainly increase, since imports subtract from GDP and those oil princes like to stash their wealth overseas and import luxury goods.
Bottom line, please don't confuse household income with national income, they are different beasts, and you cannot increase or decrease national income in a material way by adding or removing rich households to the country, anymore than you can make a business increase or decrease in revenue by paying the CEO more. Rather, CEOs of high revenue companies earn more, and those of lower revenue companies earn less. You can't just look at a company that is earning less revenue and say "Oh, just add a few thousand highly paid executives to the company, and the revenue will be way up".
This does occasionally happen, and by choosing your definition of "elite" carefully enough you can make it happen in more cases, but it is generally not the case. Poor countries generally have much greater inequality than wealthy countries, with the result that elites in poor countries (say, top 1%, 5%, or 10% by either net worth or income) are often wealthier than elites in richer countries.
> let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million?
Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost". Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it. If she spends it all immediately on domestic products and services, then yes, she does increase GDP by her earnings, because her spending replaces the forgone spending you correctly identify on the part of her fans. Similarly if she lends it to businesses who use it to buy domestic products and services, or if she buys their stock from them or from other shareholders who then go on to use it in the same way. So-called "entertainers" tend to be quite spendthrift, and those from the US mostly spend their money in the US.
To some degree Ms. Swift is an exception on this count, known for her wise investing, estimates are that she's grown her net worth to only US$450 million over her 18-year music career, despite currently earning US$150 million per year from her work; as a very rough approximation that means she's spent the first 15 of her 18 years of showbiz earnings already, and most of her savings are probably also in US stock markets and money markets.
This is false, and massively so. Look here: https://ceoworld.biz/2020/02/07/how-much-the-top-1-of-worlds...
The relationship between Gini and GDP is complex and the correlations are small. The top 1% of poor countries like Haiti or Bangladesh are not richer than the top 1% of the US, they are much poorer, because even if the lorenz curve is such that 1% of the population get 40% of the income in one place and 30% in another -- which is a huge change -- it does not change the fact that one of these has a GDP of $800 per capita, and the other of $70,0000. This is really just math and an understanding of the definitions, plus a rough understanding of the possible differences in Lorenz curves (hint: in poor countries, there just isn't that much of a surplus for the wealthy to accumulate and Lorenz curves don't vary that much).
> Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost".
Also false. Gross Domestic Output is usually 150% of Gross Domestic product, and then market income varies much more because NIPA (National Income Product Accounts) throws away spending on purchase and sale of assets, nor does it care about moving money around, but it tries to focus purely on net addition of domestic production, with appropriate netting for intermediate inputs. Here are the definitions - https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook. National income and product accounts can be a little confusing, but it's not too hard and you do need to know what GDP is before getting into discussions about it.
Here is a brief summary: GDP is production of final goods services in a region. If an island that produces fish has 1000 billionaires move to it. Then the GDP of the island only increases by the number of extra fish that are produced to feed the billionaires when they live there. Once you understand this point, and stop thinking that the billionaires are somehow adding to the island's GDP with their billions, then you will have an idea of what GDP actually is, and then you will have a better intuition for the methods of measuring a billionaire's contribution to GDP. But it does take some study because GDP, as an economic concept, tries to measure actual production of final output, and is not a measure of market income at all.
> Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it.
Yes, because I do not double count. You can measure final output by looking at what everyone earns from producing goods with appropriate netting, or you can measure final output by looking at what people spend on the purchase of other's production, again with appropriate netting, but it is really double counting to do both at the same time. We are talking about how much Taylor Swift produces. Her purchase of other people's production doesn't get added to her own production. That is their production and they deserve the credit for doing it, whether that is equipment for recording studios, marketing people, construction workers maintaining venues, all those others involved in the music business who also contribute to GDP, not just Taylor Swift. And if she retired, they would work for someone else, continuing to produce. Similarly, when Taylor buys someone else's production, that does not add to her own production, it is the production of whoever produced that good. If Taylor likes fine cuisine, then cooks are the ones adding to GDP when she buys their food. GDP is a measure of production in an economy. We can change this and look at GDI, and try to measure income -- what people spend on production. In that case, we would only look at Taylor's spending, and we wouldn't look at her earnings at all. But what you want to avoid is doing both.
Nigeria's is 225 M.
That's the denominator difference.
It's a source of raw materials for powers outside of your continent, who pour money and arms into the hands of the cliques most willing and able to get those materials out of the country at the lowest price.
Any hint that a resource-cursed country wants to reign in its elites, regulate its environment or labor, or negotiate better prices is replied to with a torrent of funds directed to the people most willing to murder the reformers.
I think it's hard to build institutions, credibility and trust in a society.
I am not sure after covid and the war in Tigray how it's doing at the moment
No African country has ever done a "Japan" and come even close to catching up with the West. Hell, I don't think any has even been able to catch up with middle income countries. I am starting to doubt it can even be done.
Botswana - 12 Rwanda - 10 Ethiopia - 8.6 Kenya - 7.2 Burkina Faso - 6.9 Benin - 6.5 Zimbabwe - 6.3 South Sudan - 5.3 Uganda - 5.0 South Africa - 4.9
Compare: Japan - 1.6 USA - 5.6 Germany - 2.8 Korea - 4.0 Norway - 3.9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...
The key question is: just how much of that nominal growth ended up back at the population, and how much ended up in anonymous Swiss accounts or shell companies belonging to autocrats and their families/friends?
when i grew up it was rare to see a homeless person, now there are tent camps all across the city. and i live in a red state where almost every local and state wide office is run by republicans.
There Are No Successful Black Nations | And the indignity and helplessness of blacks in America won’t end until we have a first-world African nation to lift up our people. <https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_ar...>
My prefered theory is that human capital stays valuable even through crisis and that it pays of to be the direct cold conflict zone for two super powers, who then prop you up.
Japan is also example for itself. They voluntarily isolated themselves for centuries and fell back in everything. They were shocked when Americans forced them to trade in steam ships. But instead of finding excuses and blaming Americans for waking them up, they started Meiji restoration.
It's simply not the same thing.
Sure, China was forced to humiliating concession by the European.
But it's not the same. The borders of countries in Africa were drawn by Europeans.
For hundreds of years large parts of the continent was dominated by European colonialism.
If trade rights and relatively minor land concessions were considered humiliating by the Chinese... Just imagine
Reality is that no African majority country has ever been able to reach even middle income status. I suspect culture is the issue personally but until that fundamental fact changes all the people setting the bar at "Africa should develop" are making an assumption with no basis in reality.
The comparison is absurd.
It sounds like you even agree on this, Africa has never been a place with any degree of modern state capacity. It isn't surprising that it is still failing to achieve this.
Everyone in this thread is dancing around an extremely obvious but also extremely taboo point.
The PAP government loves to play the “we built this from nothing” story, and while they did do an amazing job of developing the country, they started on 2nd base.
This whole thread is making me feel like I'm in an alternative reality...
The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.
And of course, in the best traditions, divisions were sown where one set of Native people were marked as better than another set, in a move that takes many generations to heal.
My country (Ireland) was colonised, we lost half our population to famine and emigration. We, almost, lost our language, out culture. We still have sectarian conflict. We didn't have one quarter the shit that was done to many parts of Africa. And, without Europe's money, we would still be a state completely dependent on our former colonisers.
Healing will take time, but to not mention the damage done, and still being done there is nonsense.
The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
Our species is a violent one. The same can be said of other continents. Africa had the same problems long before America was hardly even a thing.
You could just as easily give counter examples of say gunboat diplomacy cracking open Japan and hurling it out of stasis and into modernity.
> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!
You are not doing the people you purport sympathy for any favors with such an attitude.
Trains need to run, electric grids need to work. The observation on competency in no way implies endorsement of the previous government.
People are objectively worse off now, believe it or not (look into it before arguing), while you get to moralize from far away. Nobody is arguing for a return to the previous regime obviously.
What you're doing simply isn't helpful.
I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with reading comprehension, but if you're suggesting that I'm an Apartheid apologist for trying to explain how things got the way they are and how it's completely on-brand mismanagement from the ANC government, you've got completely the wrong guy.