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Comment by ein0p | Hacker News Reader

What’s missing in your world view is that “high functioning” countries largely ride on the backs of lower functioning ones and depend on low cost labor to sustain their quality of living. Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back.

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> largely ride on the backs of lower functioning ones

Where has this lie come from? "Higher functioning" countries generally stem from countries that were doing well long before they met many other countries. The British invented naval clocks, required to circumnavigate the globe, before they went round the globe on a regular basis. How did they do that if everyone was equal before they met?

Really? You’re going to claim that the prosperity of Britain did not come from systematically plundering the rest of the world? Is this what you’re going to go with as your counterpoint?

>Really? You’re going to claim that the prosperity of Britain did not come from systematically plundering the rest of the world?

I think the OP's question is how did Britain get it a position where it had the capability to "systematically plunder the rest of the world"?

Do you think that was luck? Were the British simply "evil", and everyone else not so? One has to assume they were already high-functioning, prior to the plundering.

British empire sucked until Spanish got so rich they basically destroyed their economy

I never claimed it was luck. I merely pointed out the mechanism of acquiring the riches. Eg most people in the US have no idea much of the East Coast was built with money from the Chinese opium trade, and how many of our “elites” got their start as basically drug cartel members. There’s lots of this in the history of any empire. You just have to dig a little - the empires don’t like to talk about how they made their first trillion

In the case of Britain, it was the following (and more):

- be colonised by the Romans 2000 years ago

- spend the next 1000 years rediscovering and (eventually) surpassing the Romans' achievements

- invest heavily in education (when the Incas were building their monuments, most of Oxford University had already been constructed) and subsequently have 1000 years of cumulative effect of those investments

- be highly connected to Western Europe, with all the continual advancements shared between countries all trying to outdo each other

- be an island nation, with a seafaring tradition that was accelerated by all of the above to the point of being the best in the world

You missed the part when they shoot cannonballs through the chests of Indians for not paying enough taxes

That happened after they got powerful. It is like the Mongol invasions of Europe and China, they didn't become powerful from those invasions those invasions happened since they were powerful.

It didn't. It came from the Industrial Revolution and a step change in the productivity of british society. Many economic studies have shown that the "Empire" and especially parts of it like India, the African colonies etc were a net negative to Britain economically speaking. This should not be surprising - just as Afghanistan or Iraq were a net negative to the US more recently, but still allowed certain segments of US society (the military industrial complex) to enrich themselves at the expense of other parts.

Probably in 50 or 100 years there will be some Afghan nationalist movement which will be telling everyone that the entirety of US wealth is based on plunder of Afghanistan. That's roughly how it is with India nationalists and Britain today, but of course, it is nonsense.

Do you believe that just no one thought to "plunder" other places? Think about what enabled the British to go afar and make an empire. The ability came before the empire.

> Eg the US is just coming off of 20+ years of riding on China’s back.

That China’s per capita GDP increased 4x over that period — was that because of, or in spite of the US ‘riding on their back’?

most people can only see "winners" and "losers" in economic transactions.

We gave them lots of money. When there's more money, prices go up. When prices go up, GDP goes up.

Yes. Same as you can be exploited and grow your earnings over time as you move up the value chain. Note however how unbelievably strenuously the US is trying to keep them from progressing technologically. It’s to the point of imposing its will on _other_ countries by now. That is not accidental, and it has nothing to do with “national security” or whatever. It’s just to be able to milk that teat for a little longer. Military gear by design uses older chips that are easy to produce should a war break out.

America's biggest sources of imports are Mexico, Canada, China, Germany, and Japan.

I'm wishing we could do more to improve the lives of people living in countries like Sudan, Venezuela, Burundi, Haiti, DR Congo, etc. They're humans too even if they don't make the news. Right now those countries are too dysfunctional to be competitive for most exports.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS?most_rec...

Problem is that they've been made so dysfunctional by colonialism, and then often even after formally gaining independence, they continued to be purposefully destroyed by colonial forces through colonial taxes, financing corruptions, political influences, etc. Haiti was one of the riches countries in that part of the world, until France killed their economy by sanctions in revenge for their successful slave uprising. It lasted until 20th century, Haiti was paying France huge money. Some African countries are still to this day paying France taxes and France keeps all their money in the French central bank. Other countries like Belguim, Spain and even US were not much better. US dealers were buying off the colonial debts and traded with them on US stock-exchanges until 1940s or so.

And today this continues in the form of corruption by multi-national corporations. Almost all diamond mines are owned by a few western companies. Do you really think they want progressive democratic government in any of those countries? Nope, corrupted dictators are way better for business...

>Problem is that they've been made so dysfunctional by colonialism

Every country was a utopia until the British and French got there?

>Almost all diamond mines are owned by a few western companies.

How valuable are diamonds if not for the demand and marketing of the colonial nations?

Life is objectively worse for people under colonial rule.

Are you saying the incas should thank the Spanish for boosting their immune system?

Should native Americans be happy their children got sterilized?

> Every country was a utopia until the British and French got there?

Nope, but you can bet that in every single case it got way worse when British, French, Spanish, Belgians, Russians, Italians, Venetians, Turks, etc. occupied them by often unspeakably brutal use of force, and then exploited their natural and human resources while giving close to nothing in return.

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