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Comment by fsloth | Hacker News Reader

This is extremely disrespectful of the economic savvy and work ethic of South Korean people.

Korean state had an extremely focused industrial policy to improve the added value created by the country's economic output.

The thing that needs critique here is that free trade would be somehow always beneficial. South Koreans state aggressively supported those industries it wanted to uplift.

Countries do rise up from third world countries to advanced industries. It just does not happen very often - sadly.

Another example of a country that rose from total poverty to industrialized advanced economy is my home country Finland which was in the 18th century dirt poor, started to industrialize, and only after second world war started to get some resemblance of wealth. However, the long history of poverty is still reflected to this day in lack of capital (are there other reasons for lack of capital I'm not sure).

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Your implication is that Ghana failed where South Korea succeeded because they didn't work hard enough.

Of course people in South Korea worked hard to get where they are. So did people in Ghana. But in South Korea, the US protected them and funded them. Meanwhile in Ghana, the US stripped them of their wealth.

How well off do you think South Korea would be if the US didn't intervene in the Korean War?

   > Of course people in South Korea worked hard to get where they are. So did people in Ghana.

By what measure did Ghana work as hard as South Korea did? Is that just an assumption?

Yes, similar to the assumption that the differences between North and South Korea can't be put down to "lazy people" and "hard working people" being magically seperated on opposite sides of the border.

Think reaaaaaaaal hard about who you're calling lazy and what might be influincing your opinion there.

Think reaaaaaaaal hard about why you filled in your own blanks and called them lazy..

If you're going to defend calling an entire African country lazy, maybe this is for you

https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/essays/vcu.h...

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Lazy-Black-stereotyp...

Could you quote where I called them lazy? Or perhaps you're responding to the wrong user?

The alternative is that you're being intentionally dishonest, I would hope that's not the case though.

seems im responding to the wrong user, my apologies.

the person who made the claim was thorougly roasted and edited their comment but you can ctrl + f 'ghana' and see the downstream context.

> Yes, similar to the assumption that the differences between North and South Korea can't be put down to "lazy people" and "hard working people" being magically seperated on opposite sides of the border.

> Your implication is that Ghana failed where South Korea succeeded because they didn't work hard enough.

US military intervention and economic uplifting are partly two different things.

I would limit this discussion to "how can a once poor country become an industrialized economy".

Since not all countries do this, the question is incredibly interesting. Perhaps I were too harsh but "US helped them" is not a satisfactory answer.

The fact that north korea is poor and south korea is not, is an interesting part of this puzzle as rare empirical sample of an area with roughly equivalent starting position well into modern history, and it should not be explained away by "because US duh".

I found "Why Nations Fail" an extremely interesting book pondering the puzzle of apparent differences in economic outcomes between countries and warmly suggest it to anyone interested in the topic. It's not really about state failure but about the bigger picture of what makes some states successfull (using the metrics of the author of course).

"Why Nations Fail" comes from the Jared Diamond school of "My Model Fits My Data So It's Causal". It's a series of just-so stories, which discounts outliers (ex: Singapore, India, China). They take the scientific method (find examples to disprove your hypothesis) and invert it (find examples that match your hypothesis), which does nothing except provide people with the feeling of confidence that they've finally come across the Truth.

Yes, but like Guns, germs and steel it contains data even though the model is flawed, so is an interesting read in any case :)

I think the key point of the book is that unless there is a massive transfer of people from place to place the power of historical institutions can carry over generations and generations.

Is quality of institutions the one truth to explain it all? No, but I find it pretty hard to argue against that it is a relevant factor in historical evolution of polities regarding their quality of administration and general expectations of life outcomes of their populations.

My intent was not to sell the book as "the one truth", sorry.

But we're not talking about long lived, historic institutions; we're talking about South Korea, a republic formed out of the ashes of Japan's colonial project, and Ghana, a new country formed from the rapid retreat of Britain from its colonial empire.

You can talk about the legacy of the colonial institutions in the respective countries, but that has little to do with how hard South Korea worked in the 1950s, and more to do with how Japan and England administered their colonies, and how the transition from colony to state happened.

They're interesting books for sure, I remember enjoying reading them. But they're very selective in the facts they tell and how they tell them, and so they're almost worse than fiction in that respect.

Perhaps I should have not used the term "working hard".

I agree with what you wrote in general.

Why I find other explanations more worthwhile - which you opened up above - than "US helped them" is that is quite critical for countries to be able to advance economically. Based on several examples I don't think it can be explained simply by having a wealthy external sponsor. Hence it would be more important to focus on the things that made this thing happen, in order to understand if something could be replicated.

As an example of potentially replicable factors, for instance land reform seems to be a thing that has been at the roots of economic advancement of several countries. (Finland, South Korea). Of course, it can be screwed up as well (Zimbabwe).

I agree books that try to simplify things are dangerous, but really entertaining when they structure their thesis around solid facts. I don't think anyone has "the final truth" so an author that has at least tried to put forward an explicit thesis is always a worthwhile read - a clearly stated thesis is something the reader is then able to clearly refuse.

As for South Korea, did you look into the impact of US economic aid as well as industrial advisors, and compare it to the economic drag that the US induced via the collection of loan payments on Ghana?

https://www.kdevelopedia.org/Development-Overview/official-a...

>US helped them

IMO more accurate to insinuate whether countries succeed or fail to develop is ultimately at the discretion of the (wealthy) hegemon. Especially more so in recent history with the viability of export led growth models and US / western bloc constituting huge % of global GDP, who can choose who to "uplift" via absorbing exports. Which is zero sum process, since demand is still finite, ergo Hegemon + co's policies / cooperation / coercion / indifference picks winners and losers, frequently explicitly via trade agreements / sanctions.

Also The moat and wall around modern tech is so high that industrializing / modernizing / moving up value chain can only be expediently done with active facilitation from other advanced economies. Even primary resource states that on paper should be able to extractive their way to wealth (not equality) still depends on increasingly advanced tech (and now increasingly export restricted) to even get goods to market in first place.

SK / NKR good example. NKR initially more developed than SKR via USSR until US with more resources and consumption seriously invested in SKR while absorbing their industrial policies' surplus. Meanwhile US kept NKR down via sanctions. Even post Korean war, NKR had fairly competent residual industrial prowess. Once country has the industrial institutional memory, it's able to quickly rebuild base to technically flourish but they still need permission to grow unhindered. Most of destroyed european powers postwar got back on feet with push from Marshall plan. Except NKR got pushed down.

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