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Comment by genman | Hacker News Reader

We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development by large margin. You can make large investments and build everything for 1 million people, but after two decades there are now 2 million people and then 4 and then 8. Africa started out with 200 million people After the WW2 period. In the beginning of this century there were around 800 people. Now there are 1.5 billion people. The rate of population growth is just unbearable. And Africa is here just an example. The same problem affects also India and other places.

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That's not the reason that nations stay "developing". Nations stay "developing" due to extractive economic and political institutions that prevent economic growth. Great book about the topic by economist Daron Acemoglu ("Why nations fail").

The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.

I can't agree with this unfortunately. While getting rich further lowers the fertility rate then there is a certain threshold that must be first exceeded to get rich (relatively speaking of course).

There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop.

It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.

And providing more basics, like improved agriculture, education and essential infrastructure like clean water access, is a better means to combat that issue than sending in surgeons to play hero and have a feel-good moment without making any real difference in the root causes that led to someone needing surgery.

Current problem in Africa is that their capacity to produce food, while it is increasing relatively fast, doesn't increase enough to keep up with the population growth. This is why Russia can play with the grain shortage to begin with.

I don't think we really disagree per se. Not sure why you seem so adversarial.

And Russia is probably not playing with the grain shortage. They had an agreement in place to let the country they are at war with sell grain because it's so critical.

It's probably more complicated than that and a tangent.

No, I don't think that I provided a counter argument but rather a supplementary one. Population growth rate is a huge problem that hinders capacity to provide enough aid.

Russia certainly used the risk of hunger as a weapon to increase political pressure on Ukraine on the international level. Fortunately that attempt didn't play out and Russia was instead pressurized to make concessions. But they stopped the agreement the same moment they thought that it is not beneficial for them anymore. But this is just a side topic and was given as an example how the African incapacity to keep up with the population growth has wider geopolitical implications.

Ah, so it's me. Thank you.

There was a time when HN was more conversational than it typically seems these days. It gets hard to assume someone is making conversation rather than making an argument when the default seems to be the latter.

The Malthusian argument is incorrect and I disagree with the concept of physical infrastructure being the end-all-be-all. Japan, South Korea, Germany, as well as the USSR had explosive growth after WW2 not because they had massive existing infrastructure, but because of social systems & processes that enable a reliable, stable, productive society.

If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth.

An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.

I don’t think they’re making a Malthusian argument. It’s about the difference in the rate of change or two variables, not the absolute carrying capacity of a set of resources as in the Malthusian argument.

Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections.

Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society.

My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that.

We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.

Also forgot the part where India and North/West African regions were incredibly wealthy in the past and were basically strip mined by colonialism. It's been only 50 years or so that they're trying to catch up.

West Africa was never "incredibly wealthy". Yes, before Europeans it was part of long-range trading routes with the Muslim world, but empires were feudalistic and only a tiny elite had access to that trade-related wealth, while the vast majority of the population was barely surviving through subsistence farming and pastoralism, just like so many do today, or hunting and gathering.

Lets also not forget the slavery and slave trade that was practiced in Western and Northern Africa.

Although some might be interpreting the previous poster as having some bad motives for saying what they’re saying, it does seem to be objectively true that population growth in developing countries is absolutely huge. If the population level had remained the same as 50 years ago the level of development would be much higher. But of course the population growth rate is declining so standards of living should hopefully start to catch up.

Yes and no. This is my argument indeed that if the population growth stayed lower then a lot more people would have been able to rise above the poverty level (or even much higher).

UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead.

But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.

> why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development

Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>

Yes, the communist argument - everybody else is at fault but not myself. Yet the communist paradise, the 1/6 of all the land with incredible riches stayed poor and finally collapsed.

That argument has nothing to do with communism. At most, it could be seen as anti-capitalist. As I understand it, the argument is that some so-called “underdeveloped” country is actually rich in natural resources, but foreign companies have come in and extracted the vast majority of the wealth, given some resources only to a select elite, as essentially bribes, and the large masses of people get nothing, and so remain poor. Even though the wealth extracted, had it remained in the country, would have made the country on the same level, or even higher, than the so-called “developed” countries. I can see no argument for communism here.

If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.

You have to know the history to understand why this argument is communist.

I don’t see how this invalidates the argument itself. I mean, who cares if evil communists have made that argument. Does that make the argument wrong?

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