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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems are in East Africa and similar contexts.

The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.

As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.

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All of our problems are caused by our not prioritizing compassion in our systems' designs and implementations, including how our economic transactions are structured and performed.

Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.

Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.

And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.

In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.

The problem is capitalism cannot function without an underclass, and while each capitalist country itself harbors an underclass that is brutally exploited, the countries themselves also become effectively an underclass too on the global stage, specifically the global south or the "developing world." Many of these countries are being exploited in one way or another, either by way of shady finance dealings that saddle them with untenable debt, which they must satisfy by selling their resources to western corpos at rock bottom prices, or via trade deals that inherently favor the western nations. The only countries I'm aware of that managed to avoid this trap in a big way were South Korea, which effectively created incubators for their home industries to grow in without needing to contend with the world market until they were in a fit state to do so, and China, which effectively is one giant state-run corporation.

The rest get fed to global capitalism in one way or another, the ways varying, but the outcome being pretty consistent: they're broke, they're in debt, and despite oftentimes being quite rich in resources, remain both of those things.

While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work. Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work, but paying them like crap is not necessary as we’ve seen here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the generations.

I mean, that's just late stage capitalism. Growth is required, every revenue stream must have all slack taken out of it. Any money left in the market is inefficiency which capitalism inherently rewards those who can remove inefficiencies. A perfectly balanced market means that every exploitable dollar is, in fact, exploited, which means the poors can't have anything. Whatever money must be paid to them must be then recouped.

And if you think you're safe in the middle class, it was predicted that and would seem to be bearing out as correct that once capitalism has largely completed exploiting the underclass, it can't simply stop exploiting. The next class up becomes the underclass. Then the next. Then the next until we're all broke save for the rich on top, at which point the entire arrangement stalls, money stops flowing, and the system collapses into anarchy.

The project of neoliberalism is difficult to fully articulate, but a major component at least is the "taming" of capitalist economic systems so as to make them sustainable. This project succeeded for a good amount of time, but that was also predicated on having nations to exploit, and room to grow markets. As those things become less true the entire system seems less stable overall. I mean personally I've witnessed three "once in a lifetime" economic crashes so far, and we're looking to be winding up for another one with the incoming administration and their bonkers non-understanding of tariffs.

You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers. Arguably when you empower a doctors and lawyers class driving bmws and buying flights to aspen, they are spending proportionally more of their money in the economy than the billionaire class ahead of them that would have sat on this money if they extracted it by now and dumped it into gold bonds and land or something stupid like that instead of something that generates actual economic activity. And if you had them so poor they could barely afford food then there would be no BMW and no Aspen.

I don't disagree with you in the slightest, but I'm not in charge here, and our current batch of elites in power seem content to coast out the collapse, pocketing every dollar they can as the world crumbles around them. I don't personally think it's a good long term plan, and to be fair, numerous economists and even billionaires have come out saying that the world is not in a good way. But they still use their power to maintain the status quo and not foster badly needed change, so it's difficult to assess to what degree this is legitimate thought on their part, or simply saying what they know will sound good as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth.

The solutions here aren't arcane magic or anything: Money needs to leave the rich, and get to the working class to re-stabilize consumer habits. But since the Reagan era's slashing of all manner of corporate regulations, the system seems either incapable or unwilling to let that happen, no matter how much of an imminent threat it presents to that system. So we go on and circle the drain.

> as they eagerly continue stockpiling unconscionable amounts of wealth

It truly is, too.

I do appreciate the tropes of "It is the year 4,000 BC, and you are immortal, the pyramids are being built. You make $10,000 a day, tax-free, and spend none of it..."

But even that is hard to digest.

I'm in my mid-40s. If I tell my friends, "Someone gave you a million dollars a day, every single day since you've been born. And yet, there are multiple people out there with ten times more money than you," it becomes more digestible.

And still just as unconscionable.

> You forget that there is value in having moneyed consumers. You can sell them more things that cost more money than you could poor consumers.

With increased financializarion and abstraction of tradable assets - the capital class no longer has to worry about "goods" or "customers" (in as much as they may be indicators of bad stocks with a dim future). Services are the future: as far as they are concerned, the amount of profits available in housing or healthcare may be infinite, of you need the chart to go up, increase the price of the cancer drugs in your portfolio.

Most countries have national healthcare systems which have pricing power over "cancer drugs". When those are expensive it's they're because genuinely very expensive to make, and increasingly they're personalized because every cancer is different.

> While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work

That was a temporary blip because the underclass had been temporarily exported to a bombed-out Europe that was unable to meet its production needs, giving the US a huge market and very little manufacturing competition. Then came the Nixon shock, stagflation, and Reagan.

It was because everyone was poor and so weren't capable of bidding up the prices of homes nor did they have expectations of living on their own.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cWvT

Also, 25% of homes in 1950 didn't have indoor toilets. It was very much not modern quality housing.

Note, more households in the US own their home now than they did in 1984. (I don't have numbers on this one back to the 50s.)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USHOWN

Fear about this is possibly suppressed memories of the 2008 recession, which was really bad!

>While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work

The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?

Black latino and asian people bought homes too you know. Thats what redlining was about: minorities and poor people were buying homes too close for comfort to the wealthy white people.

Literally the only thing every layman you're gonna ask knows about real estate is "location location location" which is exactly why redlining was harmful and has led to poverty that is measured in generations. Yes, racial minorities did buy homes (at a lesser rate than whites, and in worse places to buy homes) in redlined neighborhoods, with the added and so obvious it feels ridiculous I need to say it caveat that: the homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth substantially less, which not only meant they had a harder time being financed by colored applicants, and an easier one being financed by white ones for the purposes of rent extraction, but also meant even for the ones that did manage to buy, that the property was then worth substantially less when passed on to their children.

And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.

And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.

So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.

I admire where your heart is at, it’s wonderful to see that empathy has a large role in your life. Although I encourage you to look deeper at where compassion comes from. There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.

Empathy and compassion are social virtues, however if you bake it into the underlying governmental systems, you can end up in situations where those who are in control get to decide which type of “compassion” to enforce.

>>There are people in my family who believe being gay will commit your afterlife to eternal torture, and it is their compassion that compels them to act in intolerance of people’s choice to love.

All you should have to do in cases like this is tell them you simply do not believe in the things they do and to not press it again. If they continue, things are obviously not coming from a place of compassion – they’re just selfish intolerant assholes.

It is truly sad, my friend, that you have to deal with misguided people who believe their religiosity is enough to countermand the Greatest Command(ment): "To love God with all your being, and then to love your neighbor as yourself."

Your family's views are unequivocally wrong. Acting upon homosexual desires, like all other choices we make, is a personal choice; so long as no one is being forced to do anything, and the object of one's desire is sexually mature (each society must define that, itself, but let them be adults, respect their choices, and help them understand the situation), there is no sin there that I know of, except for, perhaps, a bit of greedy waste of sexual energy, but that is ubiquitous, AFAICT.

No, what makes a person deserving of hell is to disregard the happiness of others, or to even cruelly create unhappiness via oppression. We are to love one another, not judge them for their personal choices. Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class from Stanford). Regardless, one's sexuality (and gender identification) is one's own business, so long as what we do is consensual with other adult participants.

No one is truly practicing religion if universal compassion is not the teaching or the goal. Of course, liars and hypocrites and the willfully ignorant say otherwise, but what they say doesn't count for sh_t. You can identify them because, beyond their ebullient, self-satisfied faces of perceived self-superiority, they are deeply unhappy and very likely to have no power over their own demons. Such is the fate of the cruel hypocrites. When we sow unhappiness, that is what we reap.

I disagree with your last paragraph, though. There is only one kind of compassion: gentle, kind, and respectful (at least to some extent), and it is not any one religion's purview to determine it. It is a human potential, and a human requirement, required for our personal and societal evolution towards peace and happiness, each and every one of us. Anyone who tells you "their" compassion is special or solely of one path or another is just another over-confident fool who has been deceived into believing their false sense of self-superiority. That way is the way of the oppressors, the tyrants, and their followers who cause so much mischief and misery in this world.

But, no, there is no compulsion in religion, so it should never be baked into any govt, but we can and should bake fairness in regulations regarding taxes, income reporting, and even minimum and maximum wages, so that the whole of society is, if not benefitting, at least not harmed by their commerce. No company can operate without either the consent of the state or this world's entire cultural and technological apparatus. We can at least ensure that their profit is not wholly destructive.

> Besides, it looks to me like many, or perhaps most, gay folks were born that way, in the same way we understand the biology of trans folks' brains likely differ in ways that are counter to "normal" sexually dimorphic structures

Interestingly, those earlier studies claiming to show that brains of the trans-identifying are atypical for their sex didn't control for sexuality, and many used exclusively homosexual cohorts.

So the findings were actually brain differences relating to homosexuality - later studies that controlled for sexuality (including same-sex and opposite-sex attracted transsexuals in the study population) couldn't replicate the earlier results relating to sexually dimorphic brain structures.

Instead, researchers found functional differences in brain regions relating to body perception, similar to what is seen in body dysmorphic disorder patients.

> (Dr. Robert Sapolsky details this in his freely available Human Behavioral Biology class at Stanford).

There is a video where he discusses this, albeit without properly citing any studies, but his description of the research is out of date. Probably it's an old recording.

That's very interesting.

Yes, my understanding of Dr. Sapolsky's work comes from rather old videos he did, so, sure, I don't doubt that what you're saying is probably true, but I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm going to have to rely upon the expertise of others to validate any claims/results. Thanks for your explication.

Regardless, what is important is (IMHO) that our notions of how genderish traits can mix and match in different individuals in ways that don't match our classical notions of gender. The best result of that would be recognizing that we have to take each person as they are, and let them be their happiest self, by their measure.

At the end of the day, however a person justifies it, respectful, kind, gentle-as-possible compassion is the best policy for us all, to everyone, always. It is always our choice.

While it's true that these systems are a holdover from colonialism, it's also true that Kenya has been an independent country for over 50 years with sovereignty and agency over internal affairs like how the coffee market works. I feel at some point the blame needs to be shifted accordingly.

> with sovereignty and agency over internal affairs like how the coffee market works

Kenya had sovereignty in production, but not in capital - which is what was needed to climb up the value chain.

Historically, Kenya's largest capital market has been the UK, and as such Kenya's administration was unable to break the oligopoly of coffee purchasers who were British-Kenyan dual nationals and descendants of British settlers.

The same kind of land reforms that former colonies like Indonesia, Vietnam, India, etc were able to drive did not happen in Kenya.

Now corporations from those former colonies are gobbling up land and production in Kenya and other African nations, but domestic African (excluding South Africa) continue to remain on the back foot.

The article (if I'm reading it right) is placing the blame on how the government of Kenya restricts its coffee market (e.g. only allowing a small number of export licenses). It's about internal laws. The government of Kenya has the agency to change these.

Over 60 years, actually. The coffee industry is regulated the way it is in Kenya because the current government wants it to work that way, not because of "colonialism."

You are arguing against people's religious beliefs about why the world looks like it does. Logic or reason will not be of any use. No matter what bad things happens in the coming one hundred or one thousand years, it will never be the fault of the people that the religion has designated as holy victims, and it will always be the fault of the people that the religion has designated as evil oppressors.

I thought the same when reading the article. All those rent-seeking policies that constrain the productivity of Kenya are not forever etched in stone. They aren’t fate. The government could change them. Blaming people who haven’t been around for many generations seems like excuses at this point.

Some countries in Africa are certainly "stuck" but Kenya is actually doing pretty well overall [1]. Per capita GDP is about where South Korea was in 1969, or India in 2018, and Kenya's economy has been growing pretty steadily since one-party rule ended circa 2002.

Economic reforms and cutting down bureaucracy are certainly part of the solution, but "just wait a bit longer" is too. If things continue progressing as they currently are, Nairobi will look a lot more like Seoul by mid-century.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDKEN

The solution is economic diversification.

"...sources suggest that 6 million Kenyans are employed directly or indirectly in the coffee industry."

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

Also:

"Over half a million Kenyan smallholder farmers are farming coffee. But they only produce 2 to 3 kilograms of cherry per tree on average, while there is a potential of over 30 kilograms per tree. This low productivity, coupled with low prices and high costs for labour and fertilizer, make it extremely difficult for smallholder farmers to mitigate or adapt to climate change, invest in good practices, access markets and attract competitive prices. And in the end, the whole coffee value chain in Kenya is at risk."

https://www.solidaridadnetwork.org/news/coffee-sustainabilit...

Perversely enough, consolidation of production into 'big agra' and mechanized might be the best play to disrupt the existing system for something more efficient and less stagnant. There are myriad paths to get to said endpoint however, not all of them equal. I don't expect said path to go well for smallholders by definition, though even though the survivors would no longer qualify as smallholders for one reason or the other.

Winners and losers I must note are the result of any system, even in ones of very high equity or even or especially a 'null system'.

"the remnants of colonialism" include the ability to participate in world markets which create markets for local products. If Kenyans grew coffee (ignoring the fact that Kenyans growing coffee was itself a remnant of colonialism) just for the Kenyan market, the coffee sector in Kenya would be a tiny part of the local economy.

The reason New York City is the biggest city in the US is because when the Erie Canal was built, the agricultural riches of the Midwest had a route to world markets. Where you have a major seaport, you also need major banks and major insurance companies to smooth out the financial needs of traders and shippers, providing the funds right away back to the farmers, instead of them waiting till the voyages were complete. (without the Erie Canal, New Orleans would have become the largest city in the US)

Yes, there is a lot of money in trading, banking, etc. At every step of the transaction pyramid, a %age is added to the price, and the %age fees charged on that go up accordingly. But that measures the true value of the product at each stage; if you have a cheaper way of getting the same product to the same stage cheaper, the (supposed) riches will be yours.

The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.

It's painful having to remind people of this.

Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.

> Also the fact that everyone alive today is so as a result of either being on the winning side of colonialism or from their ancestors otherwise clubbing somebody else over the head.

That's a poor justification for it, though, and I don't want to live in a society that goes out of its way to view itself as Hobbesian.

Violent conflict between human beings is inevitable. It stems from our conflict with nature.

We're all winners here and that's far better than the alternative.

You have to work with the world as it is, not as you'd wish it to work (especially that it likely couldn't possibly work that way anyway). "State of nature" sucks, because nature sucks. All the nice and good things come from building systems, social or otherwise, on top of the natural state of things - systems that work with our natural inclinations, instead of pretending they don't exist.

Right but nature doesn't suck. You make humans sound incapable of cooperation when this evidently isn't true. In this world uncooperative behavior is mostly a choice. Particularly in the west.

To the extent humans fail at cooperation, that's nature at work. When we cooperate, we defy nature.

> To the extent humans fail at cooperation, that's nature at work. When we cooperate, we defy nature.

Well that seems a little silly, no? Humans are social creatures; cooperation is just as natural as any other human behavior (including fallibility). It seems almost a little christian in its doomful profession that humans are only our worst attributes.

Peace and love is all well and good until your crops have failed for the third year in a row. Your food stores are empty. You killed and ate all of the livestock last season because there was nothing left to feed them. There's nothing wild to hunt. Your village has resorted to eating anything it can scavenge, even if it's inedible or even poisonous. People are gnawing on their fingers.

And it's like this for your village and your neighboring village and their neighboring village and so on.

Tell me about it when your neighboring villages' adult men are charging down the hill at you, filthy, starving, crazed and screaming at the top of their lungs, axes in hand.

Sure, but we are capable of more cooperation than your fantasy admits. Let's wait until there's no alternative to misanthropic behavior to indulge.

Surviving industrial level mass-enslavement is now considered the winning side of colonialism or you still don't consider native Americans and African descendants as people?

Well surviving it till today sure beats being part of a lineage that was snuffed out by some evil slave owner in 1846.

When colonizers first arrived in the Americas, ritualistic human sacrifice was common practice and contact between different tribes meant violence and death.

Also the African slave trade largely existed off the back of tribes conquering each other and selling the losers into slavery, which is also commonly how slavery works back into antiquity. The alternative to being sold into slavery is that they kill you.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world

Sure, but when the uber-wealthy capitalists make the laws, avoid paying the taxes that support the entire system, and then greedily take as much as possible for their own selves without regard to the well-being of the workers or the Earth, the parasite is overwhelming the host.

As always, compassion is the answer to all our problems, even the thorny one of finding out how to fairly reward those who innovate, while preventing them from devastating the Earth and her peoples while they do so.

And, above all, we must not let the wealthy and their attorneys make the effing laws or elect our leaders. That's always a nightmare receipe for a bad system, and here we are.

> The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.

I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".

The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)

[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.

These days anti-trust measures tend to be framed in terms of increasing competition rather than market freeness. Which does make some sense. Hard to argue with increasing competition unless you're Peter Thiel.

Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".

The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.

(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)

> Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's about making sure you can be competitive, and you as a particular business don't have an inherent right to be competitive. Instead it's a collective right to have access to competition.

A right to participate in a reasonable way does not go far enough in many markets.

> I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice

I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreadin...

I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.

Do you think by "remnants of colonialism" the OP meant "capitalism"? It's plain to me that he did not. I read it as him meaning an extensive bureaucracy designed to control the subject population is still in place and causing the price of the good to rise while the actual people who produce and innovate the product are left out of sharing in the windfall.

You say colonialism opened up Kenya to the global market. But nearly every country in the world, the colonized and the uncolonized, is now part of the global market, so it is not true that Kenya would not be part of the global market today without it.

The global market we have today is the result of an ordering of things that is a remnant of colonialism -- I think that is what fsckboy is referring to. It could have happened another way; but the particular one we have happened this way.

The argument goes -- and I think there is a lot to this argument -- that using "remnants of colonialism" to refer only to, for example, an extensive bureaucracy that excludes people who produce much of its proceeds is misleading, because other extensive institutions that are also remnants of colonialism are an important part of commerce, law and order, and public welfare all over the world.

Why do you think there's a lot to this argument? Genuinely curious.

Who said police, courts, etc. are not remnants of colonialism? Also, what is the relevance of that to this discussion about coffee selling and the problems in the Kenyan coffee market?

It is hard to see how there would even be a Kenyan coffee market without colonialism.

Why not? China was not colonized and there are markets for its goods to be consumed around the world also

I agree in general, however when you actually interact with these places you soon realise that the markets are completely skewed by corrupt practices of various kinds (not just cash bribery). I don’t know whether you’ve ever been to Kenya or anywhere else in East Africa but it’s obvious how things work after just a short time there.

What’s described in the article is a situation where the government has introduced export licensing and endorsed a coop system that effectively cements organizations in their current positions in the market.

It’s not just governments that do this, commercial interests do too by acting as gatekeepers.

I am by no means “putting capitalism in my gunsights” here - however it’s clear that one of the issues is corrupt and poor regulation. That’s not to say there shouldn’t be regulation, but that it should aim at stimulating a fair market where honest traders are able to transact freely and dishonesty is punished.

You'd have to be foolish or blind to not see how the ditribution of wealth in our current world closely follows what it was under colonialism. Sorry, but colonialism was a net negative for Kenyans and many other.

Kenyans can't fight the "monopolies" and "cartels", indirectly funded by western actors to keep exploiting their cheap labor to cultivate coffee. The large coffee market you speak of is not elevating the average man, stuck in a lobor-intensive and severly underpaid activity, benefiting a global system of exploitation.

> You'd have to be foolish or blind to not see how the ditribution of wealth in our current world closely follows what it was under colonialism

Who did Ireland, Finland, South Korea and Botswana colonize?

Second question: how did it work out for Spain, Scotland, and Russia?

Except the middlemen in this case have continued through from the colonial period, with seemingly little competition since. And it's also mandated that you can sell only through the middlemen and not independently, and you start to wonder if they're just bribing politicians to keep the system rigged in their favour.

They do bribe the system, its called lobbying and is legal in most all countries.

It may be surprising for you, but it's very rare for it to be legal.

It's also almost never persecuted either, for obvious reasons. But totalitarian governments are usually not confident enough to officialize their money-movements. They usually claim to fight corruption with all their might.

The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.

It is not pleasant to think about it in these terms; but it does seem like some of the greatest improvements in general human welfare have their roots in relatively ungenerous undertakings by methodical, reasonable, self-interested actors. The Romans roads and the Pax Romana, and the profound legacy of Roman law, were not the result of a benevolent desire to help everyone in the world and save them from evil.

Yay - I can't wait for Pax Sinica to do away with the inefficiencies of democracy if it means more suffering humans will be uplifted. A brief period of reeducation is worth the amazing infrastructure and getting things done. The end will justify the means, right? /s

There's something unsettling about the might makes right amd post-hoc justifications dor colonialism. Especially considering the colonialists did not have those "noble" goals in mind. No one lauds Google the way they laud the British empire, yet the same exploitation vs. public benefit arguments apply.

No one is saying it is right; but we shouldn't draw the wrong lessons from the Roman Empire or many other cases of institutional development. Being brutal and taking from others is not something that distinguished the Romans from other people (nor did it distinguish the colonial Europeans).

To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality. The Roman roads were genuinely of value to peoples besides the Romans. Perhaps the Chinese, to, will create institutions and a scope of activity that is of value to peoples outside of China. Probably not in Asia...

> To dismiss the Romans, the colonials, &c, as of no benefit, however, is to deny reality.

At no point did I dismiss the knowledge-transfer as being of no benefit. The point I was making is that it is very easy to be on a high horse and say "It was worth it" when you were not on the sharp end of the stick. By reframing the set-up with China as the imperial power, I hope to show the readers that the cost of "upliftment" might be something the unwilling subjects may consider culturally valuable (like democracy)[1]. Such one-dimensional analysis is intellectually lazy.

1. Imperialism has been dissected many times over the centuries, in fiction and otherwise, but it bears repeating.

Is it really arguing in good faith to put hypotheticals side by side, on an equal footing, with evidence?

Maybe the Pax Sinica won't play out that way at all -- who knows.

> Is it really arguing in good faith to put hypotheticals side by side, on an equal footing, with evidence?

Is it arguing in good faith to consider other perspectives outside of our own? Yes it is, and I consider the reverse to be in bad faith.

While I don't fully agree with Kant, I find the Universability of an approach to be a good filter for identifying not-okay actions that are justified by the perpetrators - sometimes me (a.k.a. the Silver Rule: "Don't do to unto others what you don't want to be done unto you")

My high school history teacher would share historical accounts and encourage us to analyze the authors motivations and biases.

> the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.

Can you provide some examples and resources to back up this hard truth?

Population sizes are one way to get an intuition for the extent of the change. There was considerable improvement in agricultural productivity over the last 400 years.

Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life. For example, I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators. About 12% of the world's households have cars. These and many other material benefits are possessed by regular people today but would have been out of reach 400 years ago to any member of the European nobility or, as Adam Smith puts it, "...an African king, the master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.". (In his time, Smith was commenting on how remarkable it was that an English workman could have pots and pans made of metal and a window made of glass.)

> Another way to get an intuition for it is the prevalence of various conveniencies of life.

But all these things were invented after colonialism of most colonial countries.

And they are prevalent in uncolonized countries in roughly the same ratios as colonized countries. Arguably the uncolonized (China being the main one) have more than the colonized (India being the main one)

When exactly did colonialism end, in your view? The British Empire was pretty substantial until the forties. The refrigerator and automobile were both invented well before that.

It is not strictly correct to say China was uncolonized. I suppose parts of it were not.

Global trade has, indeed, brought everything everywhere; but the present operation of global trade -- the norms used, the international bodies involved, even the weights and measures -- are all the result of power projection by western, colonial powers and prudent adaptation by other countries. Even China's legal system is an adaptation of a western legal system (the civil law). The prevalence of certain institutions is something we take for granted today but does have its roots in colonialism.

After the beginning of colonialism, I mean.

While civil institutions were spread to colonies by colonialism, they were adopted by uncolonized countries also. Countries can adopt beneficial things without being taken over and having their resources and wealth extracted.

The same way Americans adopted civil rights from countries which had them earlier on. Europeans who banned slavery earlier than Americans did not need to invade America and extract its resources to bring them out of being a slave-owning polity.

This year's Nobel economics prize was for this topic. Although, they did sort of just give it to Acemoglu because he's so productive you can't not give it to him.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/sum...

https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/a-nobel-prize-for-an-i...

From reading your own link:

> So, if the paper has so many problems, why did it prove so influential? First, because it utilized cutting-edge techniques at the time (instrumental variables was a new thing back in the 2000s), and because it used novel datasets and clever inference to answer a big-picture question. While “the conditions of colonization determined the institutional quality of colonies” is not a new idea (in fact, Marxist Karl Kautsky came up with a similar idea in 1907), treating it in a formal and empiric manner like this was fairly novel in the 2000s.

So it seems like the answer is not resoundingly clear at all, but the novel methods and analysis was worth the prize, not the perceived veracity of the claims.

Anyways, the topic is about how colonial powers set up institutions in colonized countries, and different types of institutions lead to different types of economic outcomes (inclusive vs extractive). But consider China and India. The former has no colonial institutions, having never been colonized. But both are growing at similar places with similar GDP growth rates (China being slightly ahead). So the idea that only a colonial power could build such institutions, thus all the negatives are outweighed. I don't buy that at this moment. I'm open to learning more though.

> The hard truth is that the combination of institutions that are the remnants of colonialism have a lot to do with unprecedented improvement in material well-being all over the world, over the last 400 years or so.

It has a lot to do with the unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations and a handful of successful colonized ones. The majority of former-colony states are still struggling, most with the luxuries, many with the essentials, a few with even managing a stable state.

The hard truth is the people in the developed world have only had it as good as they do because so many in the developing one have gone without to a frankly criminal degree for far too long. And they continue to be exploited. If you don't believe me look the shipbreaking yards where barefoot Bangladeshi work with plasma cutters to hack up ships beached there, or the electronic scrap heaps where people set fire to piles of e-waste to salvage the metals within, on and on. There are hundreds if not thousands of these examples where the West continues dominating the global south in clear, unmistakable ways, and precious few where the relationship goes the other way.

As someone who has written extensively on this topic, both on the internet and not, it is frankly just offensive to see this viewpoint shared as though it's serious. Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial. To the colonized it represents an entire category of scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies to this day, and many simply as a gigantic, unforgettable one across their collective souls.

>And they continue to be exploited.

Poverty isn't necessarily exploitation. The situation of Bangladesh would not be improved if every wealthier nation was suddenly sucked into the sea. In fact, the situation of Bangladesh would become considerably worse.

Bangladesh has grown rapidly by selling clothing to rich countries, and through the work of NGOs. Supposing we put a forcible stop to this "exploitation" by placing sanctions on Bangladesh, so no one can trade with it, and kicking out all of the NGOs. Bangladesh becomes much poorer.

>Colonialism benefited colonial nations, because of course it did. It wouldn't have been done if it wasn't beneficial.

According to an old European history textbook I read: Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net. Supposedly the Brits did colonialism first, and other European countries followed in Britain's footsteps because "that's what an industrialized nation does".

Do you believe Putin's invasion of Ukraine makes economic sense? I don't think that's what motivates him.

The invention of the map might be the deadliest invention in history. To paraphrase Carl Sagan: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could momentarily color a small additional part of their map with their nation's color."

>unprecedented improvement in material well-being in certain parts of the world, namely the colonizer nations

Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:

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

With a ranking of the largest empires:

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

The top 10 per capita wealthiest countries in Europe, from Wikipedia, are: Luxembourg, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, San Marino, Iceland, Belgium, Austria.

The top 10 largest European colonial empires, based on my skim, belonged to: Britain, Russia, Spain, France, Portugal, Turkey, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium.

There's just not much of a relationship.

> Once you take into account the costs of conquest, infrastructure, and administration, plus the opportunity for colonial administrators to take a cut on the sly (since the monarch was thousands of miles away), colonies weren't profitable on net.

Yes, colonialism was not profitable. They did it because we hadn't invented modernity yet so we didn't know how to be profitable.

One reason "Britain" (the UK) exists is that Scotland tried to get into colonialism, bankrupted themselves, and had to sell themselves to England.

Generally speaking, getting a lot of resources is actually bad for your economy because it outstrips your ability to develop value-added businesses and institutions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

> Compare a per capita GDP ranking of European countries:

You're arguing with a Maoist (or someone who's been listening to them.) One thing about these people is that they believe Finland and Ireland are colonizers, because they just think all European countries are the same.

My favorite thing on the internet is when people confidently state what other people's opinions are and are wrong.

FWIW, Mao had some good ideas, and some crazy ones. Like most historical figures, really, but even then I wouldn't take being called a Maoist an insult. That said, no proper leftist of any stripe would call Ireland a colonizer nation. They may have attempted it, but the subsequent ratfucking on the part of Great Britain ever since then and their continued existence inside the geopolitical abusive relationship that is the United Kingdom brings them far closer, ethically, to the Congo than to Britain. Lest we forget fun times like the Great Famine, or as the Irish call it, "that time Britain took all the fucking food." Or, more accurately the landlords did, the handling of which is one of Mao's better ideas.

> That said, no proper leftist of any stripe would call Ireland a colonizer nation.

It's a rich nation with a welfare state and universal healthcare.

This is an issue for anyone whose philosophy says that all rich countries got that way by stealing their wealth from the third world.

As far as I understand it, pretty much every part of the world is wealthier, with larger populations, better medical care, more plentiful food, better tools, &c, &c. Even places that are very poor -- many of the developing countries, for example -- have considerably more resources than they did in times past.

One way to gain an intuition for the extent of the change is to consider population sizes. India in 1600 had about a tenth of its present population. To have a population so much larger, agricultural productivity in India, as well as in the rest of the world, had to increase a great deal in the intervening years.

Another way is to consider the spread of various conveniencies of life -- refrigerators, motor bikes, microwaves, automobiles -- and affordances they enable. Relatively few people in Bangladesh own motor vehicles, but many of them find work in commercial enterprises that are only possible because of the way that commercial trucks open up the interior to world markets. Something like 12% of the world's population has cars today, and that number is steadily increasing. I am not totally certain of this figure, but I believe about two thirds of households in the world have refrigerators.

The benefits of modernization are spread very unevenly amongst the world's peoples today (and we must acknowledge that another example I offered, of the Pax Romana, conferred many advantages specifically to the Romans) but it is hard to argue that there has not been a tremendous benefit worldwide as a result of changes brought about mostly by colonial powers over the last 400 years or so. The thing to consider is not what life in Bangladesh is like, relative to life in the Denmark (or the UK, &c), but what life in Bangladesh was like 400 years ago.

The Europeans do not have it as good as they do -- and, more generally, the world is not so much better off materially -- as a result of simply transferring well-being from one place to another. There were no automobiles, refrigerators, &c, to steal from other countries 400 years. The path to modernity involved real changes in human productivity that allowed for a genuine net benefit.

> scars: some on their infrastructure, some on their economies, a lot on the places in which they live, a few on their actual bodies

Can you identify some of the most significant negative consequences of colonization that remain today? Things that wouldn't have happened if those people had engaged in global trade themselves while still being self-governing. As I understood it, the legacies were mostly good - especially government institutions and united nationhood instead of separate enemy tribes.

There’s an episode of Omnivore about coffee, going from farm in Rwanda to coffee shop in the USA and addresses these challenges.

The solution to amoral familialism?

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