Why some nations become wealthy while others remain stuck in poverty
kurzweilai.net
kurzweilai.net
"by the late 1700s, England had embarked on the largest sustained period of economic growth since the Neolithic age"
Right, and many countries in the world still try to resurrect themselves from that "economic growth" (hint: it was based on pirating their national and human resources). The other "thriving" European countries followed suit (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa).
After less than six decades since the abolition of explicit colonialism, it's still quite early to say why some countries recovered quickly while others didn't.
While I'm a great believer in democracy, I think we should be aware that a lot of these approaches are nothing but self serving democratic propaganda (propaganda, not science).
The authors were also involved in an earlier, quite influential, paper that showed a statistical correlation between European settlement and post-colonial institution quality (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930). Their causal hypothesis (which is harder to prove) is that colonized countries with extensive European settlement were forced to set up institutions that were less extractive (since they politically had to serve at least these settlers, who demanded things like basic infrastructure) than those that had only a small group of administrators living there and no settlement, which were run completely on a basis of extracting wealth for the remote power.
And why was England capable of pillaging whole continents? It's not like it was significantly larger, and it's not like they could do that in Europe (they tried that with the French for centuries).
European countries were already superior, at least in the sense of more military capable, than their African counterparts. There was nothing stopping African rulers from doing the reverse and subduing Europe. If anything, they had more time.
I actually think most of the crazier sounding stuff in videos you see on the internet is more or less correct (not 100% but a lot of it). I think reality is a lot crazier than fiction.
So, although I used to be completely left-leaning and liberal, now I buy most of it to a certain degree, not just the crazy left stuff -- from the singularity stuff, the zeitgeist stuff, but also a lot of that stuff Alex Jones says (I shouldn't admit that, and I am not sure about a lot of it, for instance I don't think that there are too many vaccines involved in population control, but I can't eliminate the possibility).
What I have learned from the "batshit insane conspiracy theorists", well, a lot of it might be crazy. But I do know that they are right about some things -- governments aren't good to the people, and the United States is no exception, and the crap they tell us about world events on TV is just lies.
Empires didn't just happen for the whole of recorded history and then just suddenly stop around the time that moving pictures came out. I really believe that the American dominance should truly be considered an extension of the British Empire and in many ways has been and continues to be even more brutal and oppressive.
The world bank and the like do exercise economic warfare. The second and third world are exploited and repressed.
You don't have to be crazy to consider things from this point of view. All you have to do is stop subjecting yourself to STOPTHINK. In other words, just realize that "oh, that sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory" is not a reason to put your fingers in your ears.
I think that this trust of authority and faith in the worldview presented by authority is a general characteristic of social groups of all sizes. In some ways it is a great failure, as in these cases. In other ways it is necessary, since a group without a common belief system probably couldn't function.
Maybe group membership and belief systems are somewhat directly connected.
But please give counter examples?
Also, democracies are increasing in number, so there should be less wars -- the democratic peace theory seems to have good statistical support (see Wikipedia).
So, the wars get smaller but have bigger impact.
The US for example has killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan (bad). But you don't have to look back very far at all in time to see the Russians and even the British taking a much more brutal approach.
I guess generally I agree with you that the US acts in ways that are contrary to its stated principles, but I do have some optimism that each world empire does seem to get progressively "kinder".
The difference seems to be that democracies are nicer when the voters at home care (which is more and more common) -- and/or if it doesn't cost lots of money to be nice. For no other reason that it is in the democracies' own interest if other countries start to work better (everyone loves a richer customer).
It is getting better generally, but disgusting regimes the western world is dependent on, like Saudi Arabia, can still literally get away with murder.
This is the best reference I have on the subject of the article, btw.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are...
To counter my own argument, I'd like to say that if ww2 continued, nuclear bombing would NOT have become standard US war policy. However, seen in continuity with the fire bombings of Tokyo, Dresden & etc - I might be over-optimistic.
[1] The Mongol's, and many, many other armies at various points in time including many historical European forces.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S21tC-JxWXA
The debate over this is almost endless, though, and I doubt we can settle it.
In my opinion, the US is historically one of the most destructive "empires", in that it unlike a true empire, it takes very little responsibility for the nations it interferes in. It just takes what it needs and moves on. It doesn't even bother to properly conquer a place, just a long as resistance is sufficiently broken for the US to do it's business. It's more like a swarm of heavily armed locusts than an empire.
With true colonial style empire building comes responsibility. Many former colonial nations are still dealing with that responsibility. Post WW2 US just aggressively raids and meddles, but takes very little responsibility for the people and societies outside its own borders. To call it an empire is an insult to empires.
This is a ridiculous point. You do realize that the allies (not just the US) were fighting the 'Empire of Japan' that was running rampant throughout China and SE Asia, raping and pillaging along the way?
To use no other term, Japan was lucky to be nuked because they weren't going to stop. They were going to fight to the last, and let me tell you (as the husband of someone who's grandfather fought on Leyte and Okinawa), the Japanese were brutal and vicious. Millions of Japanese civilians would've been killed trying to land and take the Japanese mainland. The Japanese were so adamant about fighting that it took a second bomb to change their minds.
If you said the fire bombing of Tokyo or Dresden, then I wouldn't have responded. Those were retaliatory in nature - a punishment that affected civilians more than soldiers (specifically Dresden).
The only possible example - if even that - he could use in his argument could be the divergence of North and South America. There are no other regions in the world which weren't already poor because of a myriad of other reasons, where he can say "Oh look, they were doing good, but then turned to repression and declined."
Back to Americas, he argues it can't have geographic reasons because at the time of colonialism South was actually more advanced than North. And it should be emphasized here the sole reason South was more advanced was geography. The flaw is, what happens thereafter is, indeed not anymore a function of the geography of Americas, but also not of the democratic institutions in place, but of the economics and politics of the colonial empires involved. Unlike North America, South America was exploited and then left without a concentration of central political authority, leading to huge regional gaps of power which then lead to those kind of extractive institutions with some kind of elite on the top. That is the effect, the result, not the cause. To grossly simplify, the region becomes poor or the power controlling the region declines, which leads to extractive institutions, which then keeps the region from developing but that is a wholly different assertion than what Acemoglu defends for this specific case.
The reasons for the outcome in Americas could be found by looking at the power struggle between the colonial empires, and the decline of the Spanish Empire. North America, where mainly England and France had influence was of course bound to overtake South America. I see no reason at all to buy this romantic "because the people were given freedom!" idea.
The sad thing is, this doesn't seem to be changing at all anytime soon, despite people brainwashed by the government saying that this is the best time ever for the country.
My philosophy to stay sane is avoid reading most of the common trend topics and most of the news, and just work hard hoping to have some financial security for the future (which is not an easy thing to achieve here)
I can say that historically people in Argentina does not have a strong incentive to collaborate economically because in the past you could live very well from the land within less than 2500 m2 that was easy to obtain. In some places you are enforced to collaborate.
Also the system was always corrupt in some areas. For example the port of Buenos Aires.
Were these the 14 million in Gulag, or the 20 million that Stalin murdered?
The only fact that gets tossed out is that Russia was never a peaceful country, and there were never times without a violent regime.
How about this: for every 1 who suffered in Soviet Union there were 10 who benefited. But how many do suffer now for every 1 oligarch to benefit?
'Suffering' is a funny way to pronounce 'murder'.
But how many do suffer now for every 1 oligarch to benefit?
Speaking of 'brain wash' - buzzword much?
I'm counting people killed in purges and the Ukraine famine before Josef and Adolph got feisty with each other in 1940.
Currently the Russian population is degrading without any purges and people die from poor conditions and criminals (including police raids) in their cities.
But before there millions who really worked for the future and now there are few.
If you're pining for the days of Stalin, and people who pull together for a common future, North Korea amped Stalinism to 11.
Joe Bob says 'check it out'.
In this and other comments, you seem to be attributing all the achievements of the Soviet Union to their ideology. That's certainly a factor, but it's about as dumb as Americans claiming their nation is blessed by God with a special destiny. The Russians had just kicked out a severely anachronistic monarchy, so achieving progress was almost inevitable. And the Soviet Union had an empire of its own after World War II as well, and their centralized system was very good at capturing resources for a Moscow-centric elite.
But I agree it's not black and white, either. Just as the USA sometimes lives up to its own ideals in an inspiring way, you could find examples of that in the history of the Soviet Union too.
During same Holodomor times people dies through out Russia as well, and the event was caused by coincided mismanagement and bad seasonal conditions.
For that matter, it's much more devastating when an uncontested empire falls, rather than when one of many powers may fail.
What basis do you have for that? Sure, China will undoubtedly take the distinction of largest economy in the world, but that's attributable to its outsize population. In terms of per capita income, what advantages does China have that you think it will surpass the West?
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/03/acemoglu_on_why.htm...
The only other country that comes close in this regard is China.
For instance, geography/natural resource endowments have to be taken into account. Just look at Saudi Arabia. It is a country where a few do really well but compared to other developing countries it is doing pretty well as a whole, all because it has large oil deposits.
Even setting those factors aside, the debt represents ~1 year of economic output for the U.S., the infrastructure and goods sitting around in the country represent much more than that.