Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

This is a fascinating letter that helps combat some of the "doom and gloom" that's so prevalent in... well, everything.

I kept coming back to one thought while reading this: why are people so mistaken about Africa in particular? The article covers misconceptions all over the place, but it keeps coming back to Africa, and it seems that the disparity between what people think and what's actually the case is far larger there than anywhere else.

It would be easy to blame this on casual racism and move on. And I'm sure that's a factor. But there must be more.

I wonder if there might just be a cliff effect in people's perceptions. The perception of China, for example, changed rapidly from "shithole" to "where all our stuff is made". India quickly switched from "shithole" to "where our IT gets outsourced". (And reminder, I'm talking about perceptions here, specifically in the US, or possibly the western world as a whole.) I wasn't around for it, but I have the impression that more or less the same thing happened for e.g. Taiwan and Japan.

If that's the case, then Africa is still in the "shithole" perception category simply because we don't see much of them. Not much of our stuff comes with a "Made in Kenya" label on it, and our experience with IT-related outsourcing to Africa is mostly limited to Nigerian scammers. Once that changes, the perception will rapidly go from "those guys have no food" to "those guys are taking all of our jobs".

A counterpoint would be South America, which is not overall perceived as "shithole" but nor is it a place we interact with a whole lot.

Perhaps it's just mental inertia. The places that are changing most rapidly will be the most incorrectly perceived.

It's not totally wrong about Africa. HIV hit Africa like a sledgehammer, and stopped development cold for 20 odd years. 10 years ago, people had seen Sub Saharan Africa going backwards for a decade.

Plus, that was the 20 years when everyone looking for cheap labor went to China.

Now, they're much better at preventing and treating HIV. And China is going to Africa for cheap labor. So things are getting much better.

Also, Africa had the 3rd biggest war in human history[1], which probably didn't help development much. There was a major genocide and assorted other significant wars, all of which have been pretty much forgotten in the developed world.

[1] In terms of deaths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War

This really is a nitpick and I don't mean to detract from your point in any way, nor from the horror of that war, but that war looks like it's quite a bit farther down the list from #3 in terms of death toll.

It's kind of shocking to take this list and sort it by number of deaths:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_...

We're generally taught, at least implicitly, that the two World Wars were uniquely terrible. I'm assuming (and I certainly could be wrong, here) that this is the basis for your "3rd biggest" comment. But it's not really true. Even if you exclude long, ongoing events that aren't really single "wars", like the Mongol conquests, there are still some astonishingly deadly events farther in the past.

The An Lushan Rebellion is the one that amazes me the most, personally. It's one of the deadliest wars in history by absolute death toll, and since it happened so long ago (in the 8th century), that means it killed a huge portion of the world population at the time. The low estimates for deaths in that war amount to 5.5% of the population of the entire planet. The high estimate is over 15% of the world population.

And it's not the only one that rivals the World Wars. The Taiping Rebellion killed 20-100 million. And, well, you can see the list above. It's amazing how many of these things involve China. I mean, that's where all the people were, and thus the greatest potential for killing them, but even so it seems a bit excessive.

Two points:

I still perceive India as a "shithole". Whereas China's elite has used its newfound wealth to finance widespread infrastructure and especially sanitation projects, India's has not, not on a mass countrywide scale. Fallen prey to coordination problems is the best gloss you can put on it but I still find it scandalous.

Second, South America's recent progress has mostly been under governments of the left, using more or less coercive statist means that neither the Gates Foundation nor the average HNer would endorse. But maybe it's worth considering.

It's easy to overstate how leftist many of the governments there are. Outside of Venezuela (and Cuba), I wouldn't consider anything they have done surprisingly or inappropriately leftist. Photo-ops with Chavez or Castro are meant more for domestic PR than anything policy related.

Most are more authoritarian than leftist, but they are all way more leftist than the U.S. government.

Argentina, for example, has nationalized the oil companies (YPF), and price-fixes and subsidies most utilities, and has started price-fixing food.

Uruguay has also on a lower scale tried price fixing.

Both, plus Brazil, have extensive welfare programs (with the dual purpose of capturing vote for the ruling parties of course).

Such things are typically characterized as leftist.

Sources: I'm Uruguayan.

Right. And of course you have countries like Chile, which has the highest GDP per capita of any south american country and probably the most stable economy, all after adopting free market principals from Friedman. And some of these countries have grown, but to what extent? Where would Brazil be if it dropped it's insanely regulated state and bloated beauracracy and freed up its people? These countries are all still held back by their overbearing governments.

Chile is a terrible example of this; it has one of the higher levels of income inequality on that side of the continent and privatized education and health care. Private education in Chile is appalling; wealthy Chileans send their kids to study to the US or EU and the middle class that can't afford education sends them to Argentina or Brazil. Capital is concentrated on a few hands with a strong dependency on basic commodities exports with low added value. It's better than many places, but the GDP figures don't reflect the realities of a substantial amount of its population.

This "inequality" stuff is really getting annoying. The poor in Chile are far better off than other countries in the region, but because the rich are also richer somehow inequality is all that matters to some.

In fact, the wikipedia article "Poverty in South America" doesn't even mention Chile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_South_America

If the poor can't afford basic health care then there is something really wrong with an economy.

Are you just making stuff up? Chile has a public education system with voucher options, but almost all of the schools are publicly funded with voucher options, and even the private ones get government subisdies. And health care is a mix of public and private (like most countries) and free if you are over 60 or make a low income. So I think you are going to need to elaborate on those points a bit more

I'll give you Chile as a counterexample, although it's not as recent as the others.

An enlightening example is to consider people's perceptions of New York City. The popular perception / comedian's perspective I remember of the 2000s was that NYC was also a shithole, where you would be mugged at the drop of a hat and everyone was murdered.

Of course, things were bad for a long time between early 80s and early 90s, but that wasn't the case by the time I moved there in 2003. I lived there for 4 years and never saw anything exciting, despite doing some dumb things. However, I had cousins, living in in New Jersey, who refused to take the subway or bus "'cause bad stuff happens there."

Actual anthropologists must surely have better ways of quantifying this, but it sure seems like negative popular perceptions of places lag at least 10 years behind reality.

This is an interesting campaign trying to tackle those exact issues of perception: http://www.africafornorway.no/

That is truly excellent.

Japan has been a relatively developed, industrialized country for a very long time, judging by the fact that they spent the 1930's and 1940's trying to conquer east Asia and were doing a decent job of it.

True, but there was a time prior to that, before modernization. "Those sandal-wearing goldfish tenders? Ha ha! Bosh! Flimshaw!"

Postwar Japan was a different beast for quite a while. Weird Al Yankovic's line "don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan" was what parents used to guilt their kids into eating until Biafra happened. A "Made in Japan" joke was funny in the '50s and '60s because it was true, for the most part. "Toyota" was a word that to most people meant "poor bugger couldn't even afford a Beetle". My '71 Datsun (Nissan) pickup could barely reach highway speed (although it did have a sort of tractor-like utility about it) and I don't think there was a single original body panel left on it by '79. But the cameras weren't bad. And then the "miniature" electronics (a radio you could put in your pocket!) happened. It took a while to get back up to speed. Now people look for "Made in Japan" as a sign of quality instead of a warning.

There's a classic (and probably apocryphal) story about this, from the time when Japan was just starting to turn things around. I can't locate it (even though I'm sure it's out there) so I'll paraphrase and retype:

Back in the dark ages, when computers filled rooms and devoured power, IBM decided to take a risk and try outsourcing some electronics manufacturing to Japan to see how it would go. They put out bids with full specs and also specified a 3% defect rate, which was considered aggressively low at the time.

They found a willing Japanese supplier and manufacturing began. Some months later, the parts arrived in big crates. The IBM people cracked open the first one to find their parts inside, but some of them were off to the side in a separate compartment. A note was attached. "Dear sirs: our cultural differences make it so that we have difficulty understanding some of your requests, but we have done our best to do what you have asked. Here are the 3% defective parts as you requested, packaged separately for your convenience."

> Postwar Japan was a different beast for quite a while. Weird Al Yankovic's line "don't you know that other kids are starving in Japan" was what parents used to guilt their kids into eating until Biafra happened.

Sure, but that was largely due to the effects of WW2. Children were also starving in Germany and the UK in the postwar era.

In reality, Japan modernized in the late 1800s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiji_restoration

I believe that was implied, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned "postwar" in response to what Japan was pre-war.

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