The greatest thing about technology is that it will ultimately enable superabundance. We have a duty to leverage technology for the greater good of humanity & civilization.
We already live in a world of superabundance. It's just not spread evenly.
It's depressing reading willfully oblivious stuff like this when the planet is being ravaged. It is a zero sum game.
We have entire countries stuck in poverty selling their resources (human and natural alike) for a pittance like indentured servants and we have individuals hoarding and amassing more wealth and riches than they could spend or use in a thousand lifetimes.
We also have a global economic system that by necessity wastes these precious resources in products that get shredded without being used, food that gets destroyed without being eaten and machines that are being run without getting to fulfill their purpose.
So on the one hand we have wasteful overproduction for the rich (relatively - which, globally speaking, includes everyone on HN) and on the other we have a handful of the extremely rich (the fraction of a permille of the globally richest people) wasting the equivalent of dozens of poverty lifetimes worth of resources on their fancies. This seems like an easy problem to solve but we need the extreme poverty to maintain the narrative that enables the extremely rich to exist.
In other words, no matter how much we expand the "abundance" we also need to maintain the scarcity because the differential is what enables our economic system and those benefitting from it the most. Those who have the most also have the most to lose from the elimination of scarcity.
I live in a third-world country (Nigeria) and every part of the economy that doesn't work is because of compassionate, self-anointed do-gooders like you trying to plan the economy.
The only parts of the economy that work are the chaotic parts that the government has left alone to be developed by the greedy 'individuals hoarding and amassing more wealth and riches than they could spend or use in a thousand lifetimes.'
Even when the West sends foreign aid, it is diverted to politicians and used to equip armies that oppress the local populations, while countries like China that have left the market run its course have jumped from having a billion poor to lifting 600 million out of poverty.
Leave the market alone, keep your compassion - nobody needs it. The amoral market is the only way out of poverty.
> Even when the West sends foreign aid, it is diverted to politicians
The function of a system is what it does. Do you think "the West" is just extremely foolish and doesn't know where that money goes, or do you think there might be a benefit to "the West" when those politicians become dependent on this money?
> while countries like China that have left the market run its course
China has been extremely protectionist and very tightly controls what foreign companies and investors can do in its market. It only started applying for World Bank loans in the late 80s and even then only for very targeted investment programs. Why do you think that is?
It's more complicated and nasty than that.
Markets are much more efficient than central planning. Outside of perhaps North Korea, nations mix them to varying degrees and ways.
The Chinese government permits markets up to a certain size, and then it begins taking over the large players via things like replacing leadership, buying off leaders, absorbing leaders, threatening leaders with "re-education", things like that. The companies then engage in markets internationally but are heavily managed internally by the government.
Just look what happened to Jack Ma.
So China is using these international markets to bring in tons of money and has brought generations out of poverty.
BUT
We shouldn't ignore the One Child Policy that lasted for decades. We also shouldn't ignore than Deng Xiaoping's market reforms came _after_ Mao killed 10s of millions of people pushing his Communist utopia. We shouldn't ignore that the Chinese population was deliberately restricted so there would be fewer Chinese to divide the prosperity among.
It's complicated and nasty.
I'm less familiar with the Chinese government's involvement in African nations, but the bit I've gathered is this: they are the dealer at the casino, they always have the advantage, even if you're winning individually, the casino is raping everyone else.
Yes, nations should be wary of foreign aid from The West. Nations should also be wary of investment from China. Neither are looking out for the people of the nations they claim to be helping.
All the problems you pointed out are not market inefficiencies but government bureaucrats interfering with the market mechanism using their monopoly of violence.
Secondly, killing several 10s of millions of people doesn't transform into economic gains; I can give you a list of several African countries that have lost proportional numbers of their population without any commensurate economic growth.
You don't lift an agrarian economy into the first world by killing of peasants.
Foreign aid: I approach foreign aid with a libertarian lens - if Chinese (or whatever nationality) companies are investing in Africa with their private capital, that's perfect. If a state is doing it, the resources will be poorly allocated and will go into a dictator's pocket.
I think it's a mistake to label China "communist" just because that's what its ruling party calls itself (after all we don't call North Korea "democratic" either) but it's also important to keep in mind that capitalism in China very explicitly exists only under the watchful eye of the state and the state has intervened rather drastically in the past. It's a stretch to compare it to comparatively free market economies.
> I approach foreign aid with a libertarian lens - if Chinese (or whatever nationality) companies are investing in Africa with their private capital, that's perfect. If a state is doing it, the resources will be poorly allocated and will go into a dictator's pocket.
That's not a libertarian lens, that's just assuming a difference where one doesn't exist. If Chinese companies invest in Africa, they do so to further political goals of China (i.e. the "Chinese economy"). If the US invests in Africa, it is doing so to further economic goals of US companies (i.e. the "US economy"). If a state does it, it just comes with more moral pretense and the people deciding where the money should go are usually only paid by corporations, not working for them directly.
The function of a state is to advance the interests of its economy and that is defined by its businesses, not its citizens. The well-being of its citizens is the presumed and stated ulterior motive but as history has demonstrated time and again, when it comes to sacrificing citizens or the economy, states generally favor the economy. In other words: in free market economies, politicians are the middlemen of corporations. The only difference in China is that those corporations are in turn under the direct control of the Party (i.e. Bezos is more influential to the US than Biden but Xi Jinping is more influential to China than Zhong Shanshan).
Efficient use of resources is also a big problem. Resources wasted in every society to some degree but knowing/seeing how they were wasted on a scale in USSR left a very strong impression. And this waste was not about equal access (though it was not equal too) but about incentives and caring (or rather not caring about anything you don't own and people owned almost nothing).