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Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

>I don’t even have a clear narrative for how my own country went from Deadwood to Real Housewives,

Because Zambia is poor.

To become a strong country, find a number of smaller countries and start killing their populations until they let you extract their resources and ship them back to your country. Eventually, leave the responsibility for killing people to local representatives that you give a bunch of guns and a tiny cut of the resource profits to. If the locals rebel, and look like they will be successful, find the strongest rebel and offer him the same deal. If he refuses, kill him, and go to the next strongest rebel.

Leave $1 in the country for every $100 you take out of it, and since you're leaving it with the elites that you created, they're just going to spend it on imports anyway.

Isn't that what the global south is for?

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Which countries did, for example, Singapore invade and start slaughtering?

Or South Korea. I know South Korea was invaded, but cannot remember they started slaughtering people before becoming rich.

A lot of SK's economic growth was the result of supplying goods to the US military post-Korean War. And the US military did plenty of slaughtering, such as in Vietnam. The South Korean military also played a not-insignificant role in that clusterfuck.

My favorite example would be Taiwan.

Kicked out of their home country, yet they thrive.

It's the other way around, I believe. Some of the citizens are exiles from China, but as for Taiwan they declared independence. China wants them back, they don't want to go back into the fold.

At least, that's what I've been told.

It's a lot more complex: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_taiwan#Political_st...

Taiwan has very emphatically not declared independance.

You mean that East India Company trading post? It's an ex-colony that has been run by the same dictatorship since independence.

No, I mean the other Singapore.

Of course I fucking mean the former British empire trading post. Do you have a relevant point to make, or are you just desperate to show that you've heard of foreign countries?

None, they followed the Singapore strategy http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/steve-hanke/doing...

> Leave $1 in the country for every $100 you take out of it

Keep in mind that things don't have an intrinsic price. Copper is worth a lot because it can be used for electrical and electronic machinery. If the Europeans had never even visited Zambia, most of that copper would never have been extracted, and the rest might have been used for pots or daggers (hopefully they would also find tin to make bronze). I'd say that Zambia derives more utility from 0.6% of the revenue of copper sold to the developed world than it would from 100% of the copper used with bronze-age technology.

In other words, it's not a case of taking $100 and leaving $1, but of taking $0.1, turning it into $100, and giving back $1.

> Many of the mining companies pay just 0.6 percent royalties to Zambia, far below the already-meager industry standard of three percent.

Is your comment a justification of this disparity?

No.

+1. If you just replace "smaller" with "less armed", you get the history of most Sub-Saharan African countries in a nutshell. Unfortunately the schools there still teach more history about medieval Europe than post-colonial Africa.

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