Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations | Hacker News Reader

Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations

noahpinion.blog

19 pointsmooreds48 comments

> What this means is that whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820. Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.

I don't agree with this statement. The author is using today's metric for wealth (GDP per capita) to compare post-renaissance world to ancient empires, concluding that they were not rich enough.

In ancient times, the idea of GDP/capita was unheard of. What mattered was whether you could create an army (and pay them a decent amount) to attack other nations, plundering them so you could have even more money to raise an even bigger army. The examples the author mentions (Romans, Persians, Mongols) had this initial money to begin with.

The evidence produced is definitely addressing a different argument than the one he actually starts with.

Comparing ancient empires to modern living standards is nonsensical for the purposes of determining if plunder was the basis for empire. And indeed, we know plenty of cases where plunder made wealthy and then ravished entire nations such as the Spanish conquest of Middle America.

His fundamental point is accurate though - there is not a fixed pot of wealth in the world, and the increased wealth of our modern age is due to technology and efficiency, not simply taking things from others.

The data is relevant to the other central point. If you compared the standard of living between 1AD Rome and 2024 US, the difference isn't because the US is better at plundering.

It is hands down technological innovation.

Then why is it constantly starting wars over oil?

Big shocker, but oil was useless before technology for use and extraction was developed.

All technology did in this case was unlock it as a resource worth plundering.

What a sad and cynical worldview. The idea that all technology, medicine, an innovation adds nothing to the betterment of The Human Condition. The idea that the only way Society can or has ever been improved is by stealing from others is laughable. I've never met anyone else that thought feeling and exploitation was a net positive for Global Society, so at least it's an interesting idea, even if I venementally disagree

If that's the case then plundering is a net positive, and the cause of every Improvement in the world. It should be in celebrated and encouraged

Yeah it’s a statement deliberately crafted to obfuscate and misrepresent in order to carry a false narrative.

If no country was particularly rich compared to today’s standard, then it is not convincing to conclude that plundering did not help. Because then you could conclude any other activity (eg trading, innovating, discovering) also was not helping.

A proper analysis needs to compare different countries within the same period, and ask whether countries that plundered are ranked higher than those that did not.

The usual trap when people apply today's way and thinking to history. Thanks for pointing it out. Historians fight this every day.

It's not a trap in this context. Somebody who dies from malaria in 1500 is just as dead as somebody who dies from malaria today. Their friends and family are likely to react differently due to different culture, and they will assign different causality, but dead is dead. The whole point of this article is to compare material conditions today to the past. Which isn't the only thing that matters, but it absolutely does matter, and comparisons can be made.

Yeah um, the British Empire? Anybody?

A small island off the coast of Europe got VERY RICH off of imperialism.

A small societal elite of that small island got very rich off imperialism, much like in Spain or Portugal.

The broader enrichment of the British people was kicked off by something different, namely the industrial revolution. Spain and Portugal didn't have those and the average person there remained bitterly poor until deep into the 20th century.

> Spain and Portugal didn't have those and the average person there remained bitterly poor until deep into the 20th century.

It’s mildly controversial, but I really like Buñuel’s Tierra Sin Pan (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Without_Bread). Honestly I never thought that level of poverty existed in Western Europe even in the 1930’s.

The height of the British empire was ~1500-1800.

Here is a graph of their GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-in-the-uk-...

There is definitely some increase, but it really kicks up in 1800s and 1900s, with the industrial revolution.

If Britain plunders a quadrillion worth of stuff and ships it home, their GDP does not have to change at all. It's just not what GDP measures.

The only way GDP is can be useful if we say that by wealth we mean GDP, but then we've just made the word wealth as useless as the GDP metric.

In the case of countries, our modern intuitive understanding of wealth is pretty much "how hard does a person in this country have to work in relation to how well they live" - at least that's what countries nowadays are optimizing for. A country in which <40 hour work-weeks are the norm, in which almost everyone can afford yearly week-long vacations, which has good infrastructure, as well as affordable high-quality services, food and goods, you'd probably call rich. That's just not something GDP tells you in a vacuum.

Often when looking back at the time of empires, our understanding of wealth becomes "how much actual wealth have the rulers of this country managed to accumulate", which is also not something GDP measures very well.

The increase in slope at 1850 onwards corresponds to the start of the British Raj rule, when about a trillion dollars of wealth was transferred. India went from 23% of global GDP to under 3% during this period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India_under_the_Bri...

Except that the slope stays the same (in the UK) after the end of the Raj in 1947. The growth rate of India's economy stayed pre-industrial until the end of WWII (probably not coincidentally), that's why the relative GDP shrunk.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison?t...

So maybe England was keeping India poor but that wasn't what made England rich.

Counterargument:

China got rich by plundering, ahem, technological transfer.

The IMF tells developing countries to respect western intellectual property, but when you think about it. If you truly cared about your country and it's people, why exactly would you let this straightjacket stop you? Only a fool would proudly wear it.

IIRC, the early stage US didn't respect European IP either...

For proof, compare Spain's GDP to Netherland's GDP in the 1600s. Spain at the time controlled the most valuable mines in South America, but Netherlands invented the stock market and that eventually surpassed the value of the mines Spain held in South America. It makes me think about all the cyber criminals who if they channeled the same effort they do to commit crime into some kind of entrepreneurial business would do much better.

The article is so stupid it is funny.

It might be helpful if you explain why you think it's stupid instead of writing a one sentence dismissal. Otherwise why make a comment?

We can just gesture vaguely to the entire western industrial apparatus. Do you think it was a coincidence that the industrial revolution began in imperial Britain?

funnily enough, their username alone suffices.

products require raw inputs. where do we think these resources came from? there is no better example than oil, which the west violently plunders to this day

> Nations don't get rich by plundering other nations

Maybe he needs some history lessons.

person A starts with 1k and B starts with 100k. B successfully turns it into 100m, A turns theirs into 1m.

B laughs at A. "It's my advanced technology and industry, nothing else, that led me to this great success."

Wealth of Russian empire came exactly from plunder. They wre exploiting far east for valuable furs, then sold to the west. That was their whole schtick for a long time.

The author is speaking about nations, though. As in huge collectives of people.

If a tiny sliver of the elite rolls around in gold, but the average person is poor (and Russian peasants were very poor, indeed until today, the average Russian is among the poorest people of European ancestry), I would argue that the nation isn't wealthy.

Well, plunder might not serve the nation. But it's not the nation who makes the decisions. Wealthy elites always do (except meaybe one time in France, possibly).

So the conclusion is that one of the things wealthy elites tend to do when given the opportunity doesn't serve their nation, but at most themselves. Which is not really groundbreaking after two world wars.

Although I understand that it might be culturally relevant in times where entire nations are expected to pay reparations for what wealthy elites of their country used to do.

Showing that the nations didn't benefit might be a counterargument to that.

That is the entire premise of the article, that people are missing.

If you want a prosperous nation (of people), you achieve that through investment in technology, efficient systems, and the future. No country is richer in 2024 than 1 AD because they have gotten 1000x better at plundering.

The basic fallacy of the article is that the plunder did not become "the investment". Yes plunder is not sufficient but in all the history it is the necessary condition. No country has ever become rich by methods we now consider just.

That simply isn't true. You have tons of examples in either direction. Lot of countries that didnt plunder are rich, and lots that did, arent. Plus the timing is wrong.

"So the conclusion is that one of the things wealthy elites tend to do when given the opportunity doesn't serve their nation, but at most themselves. Which is not really groundbreaking after two world wars."

It nevertheless makes sense to study the exceptions, because these exceptions made a difference.

Well, average person is poor because they were exploited subjects. This was the innovative idea of those days: exploit more of tge population. It didn't change much till French revolution. All the welfare in the west is achieved thanks to fear of communism.

It's the same for Great Britain. We plundered the wealth of countless countries.

While I don't doubt that you (you?) plundered a lot of wealth such as the Koh-i-Noor, you made a lot more money by selling industrial products to willing customers. This is what set you apart from, say, Russia of the 1800s, which was unable to produce any sophisticated stuff for the nascent world market.

All production requires resources. So plunder is not always in terms of jewels and gold, if you capture a country and force them to buy fabric from your mills or enslave people to work in the plantations or kill all natives and capture the land for the plantation it is a form of plunder.

The raw materials for many of these industrial products came from plunder.

This is true until today, on a global scale. Mining and other resource production tends to kill people and create horrible lunar landscapes. I grew up in a rust belt city myself.

It is also somewhat nationality-agnostic. Coal miners in Merthyr Tydfil weren't any less exploited than coffee gatherers of Ghana.

> selling industrial products to willing customers

Like opium.

This is an interesting topic. Nowadays, the American concept of "war on drugs" is really ubiquitous, but for a large part of humanity's existence, drug business was considered legitimate. Pure cocaine was freely sold in pharmacies until 1914 or so.

I am not that sure if our current moral position is the final one. At the very least, marijuana prohibition has swung from almost universal to a shrinking set of the most conservative US states.

Similarly, opium prohibition may not be a thing in 2050 or 2100 again.

Parent is talking about the "Opium Wars" which weren't legitimate drug business.

> to steal goods violently from a place, especially during a war:

Those evil Russkies! Plundered the poor animals for their furs, instead of delivering them to civilization!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%22The_White_Man%27s_Burd...

They didn't plunder animals. They were too lazy for that. They plundered local Asian hunters and their communities.

I mean that was the schtick for pretty much all empires. Why single out Russia?

Because when people talk about empires and colonization they usually forget Russia.

> What this means is that whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820.

Did he just ignore the entire British empire?

Today’s richer nation plunder poorer nations through skilled migration. You may have heard of it as “brain drain” - the plunder of people who know modern science, and the techniques of industrial production.

Industrialised nations maintain their place in the world by having other, poorer, countries subsidise the raising and training of doctors, nurses, engineers and accountants.

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