Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ChrisMarshallNY

> which is one of the poorest in Western Europe

It is so weird to read this, when Portugal used to be a major colonial power.

Times, they have a-changed...

View on HN

"Poorest in Western Europe" is like being the ugliest person in a beauty pageant. It's not a poor country

For comparison, Portugal's GPD per capita (~$25k) is lower than that of the lowest state in the US (~$35k)

China's per capita GDP is ~$12k.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/248063/per-capita-us-rea...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

On the China comparison, the per Capita income in Beijing (province, pop 22M) is $28k and in Shanghai (province, pop 28M) is $27k.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrati...

I don’t think it’s fair to compare a country to cities. Lisbon GDP/capita is almost $40k.

And to clarify, Beijing and Shanghai are not provinces, they are cities. They are two of the four mainland Chinese cities “promoted” to the province level politically, but they are cities. Basically it would be as if Washington DC was a state. The other two cities like this are Chongqing and Tianjin.

Portugal was one of the poorest nations in the world in the early 20th century. A poor, backwards region in a more prosperous country was called “The Portugal of <country name>.”

Portugal got out of its funk when a vaguely fascist dictator took over. Salazar.

He sacrificed prosperity and liberty to achieve stability, which was a good deal because Portugal didn’t have much prosperity or liberty.

The last of Portugals overseas (non-Atlantic) territory’s was ceded to China in 2000.

It’s been a long, strange trip for Portugal, but they haven’t been a wealthy empire since they gifted Mumbai to the British.

"ceded to China" is a strange way to phrase that Macao was returned to China after colonizing it

The Portuguese owned it for what, 500 years? At what point does something become someone else's? Modern China was created through invasion and bloodshed by various political groups just like every single country in the world.

I have often wondered about the answer to that. Especially when people start raising the idea of returning things to the historical owners.

I wonder the same. There doesn't seem to be as much controversy in areas where a historical owner ceded the land through a 'fairer' conflict (by that I mean each side had resources and technology that was comparable).

Perhaps there's a sense that land claimed through overwhelming advantage was not a fair fight and thus any gains should be returned?

I believe that’s how people perceive it. The imbalance of power and the sense of injustice. But a lot of times those people conquered by the more powerful group just committed an atrocity to get that land. But it was more evenly matched? It’s bizarre.

History is a series of brutal, often genocidal, wars.

All of them sucked, for someone or another, but ended up making us who we are, today, for better or worse.

In the US, we celebrate the War of Independence (American Revolution), where we threw off the yoke of British tyranny.

But there are some black folks, and native Americans, that maybe didn't get too much benefit from the war.

The Romans probably did more for diversifying the genetics and cultures of Europe and Western Asia, than anyone, from their brutality. The Chinese feudal system was so vicious, that it made the European one look like a day at Disneyland, but they also developed some important technological advancements.

The Aztecs and Incas were ... not exactly gentle ... to their neighbors, but established some pretty significant civilizations (that the Spanish then took apart). They didn't even have horses.

We have flamenco music, because the Moors conquered Spain.

... and so on ...

I'm really hoping that we may finally be seeing an end to one nation just reaching out and grabbing another one. Ukraine may be the last gasp of that. It may not be the end, however, of nations splitting into smaller ones.

If you go that route, there's a few colonized area within China itself, Macao has been longer ruled by the Portuguese than Tibet has been ruled by China

China’s right to Tibet hinges on it being conquered by the Mongolians.

By that logic their claim could extend all the way to Turkey.

"Returned to China" is a strange way to phrase that Macau was given to a country that it was never a part of, that didn't exist at the time.

In the sense that it was returned to the rightful heir. China is the successor nation to the Chinese Empire

Taiwan would like a word.

Yes, either of them would be fine.

Well, it depends what you mean by “China” doesn’t it? The People’s Republic of China isn’t the same thing as the Ming Dynasty. There’s no law of nature that dictates that a government in Beijing must also govern Macau, which is pretty far away. (Beijing to Macau is farther than Portugal to Amsterdam.)

Portugal started to collapse, slowly, after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and it's just been one setback after another since.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake

That's a form of the resource curse. Portuguese economy relied heavily on exploiting the colonies. They then used the wealth they acquired to purchase foreign goods. Their domestic economy didn't develop properly, as exploitation and trade were more lucrative. That became a major issue once industrialization moved the focus of economy away from primary production.

Something similar also happened to Spain.

Indeed. And now they have a new resource curse - tourism. Like mining, tourism benefits wealth holders (hotel owners etc) much more than wealth creators (the people cooking the food, making the beds). Not many jobs in the tourism sector are high skilled / high paid, and too much of it crowds everything else out.

that's the first time I've ever heard labor being referred to as 'wealth creators'. that's a term usually applied to capital.

I'm sure 'Big Capital' would want you to think that!

But more seriously, (good) human activity creates wealth - wealth being 'a better world' or 'nice things' or 'human happiness' or 'peace' or 'more toys' or the many other ways of understanding it.

Capital is an agglomeration of wealth employed to create more wealth - however without human activity and human direction it can do nothing, instead it amplifies such activity and direction. Furthermore, as society moves to post-industrialisation, the most important wealth creation will require much less capital investment, and much more human effectiveness.

In a capitalist society, wealth holders are trusted to direct capital more nimbly and effectively (for ~50% of the economy in modern economies) than the state. As such, they can be understood as creating wealth too. However, it is a simple matter for them to delegate to wealth managers, while creaming off an over-sized share of the proceeds. The trick then is to replace wealth holders with commonly beneficial capital ownership vehicles - i.e. pensions and sovereign wealth funds, while keeping a lid on the wilder excesses of the appointed wealth managers.

Yes, it seems like only yesterday that it was 1821 and Brazil was in the grip of Portugese control...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com