11–20 of 230 posts
Make the question smaller. Why isn’t all of America equally rich? Why aren’t all neighborhoods in your city equally rich? The answers are similar: historical path dependence, founder effects, compounding network effects, and fortunate or unfortunate accidents.
That's why, as a regular citizen, it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians. Otherwise you'll be paying for their corruption through taxes, inflation, wage suppression and loss of opportunities.
I can recommend David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years"; it makes a strong case about the immorality of international debt.
One reason is how much ever we try to disagree, the socio economic construct is still a zero sum game with an ever increasing pie. People who argue otherwise point to the size of the pie without practically ever stating what those in difficult positions can realistically do to get more of it. Other reasons are that honestly there is not much "real work" to be done so we can argue that a very small % of existing popul…
Imagine this scenario to help understand why:
Let's say the top richest people gave away so much money that every person on earth was a millionare.
What would happen?
People wouldn't change their spending and other habits, in fact they would buy more useless stuff.
Prices would thus rise and rise until they matched the new million-fold buying power. (Think about this: Would you keep your pretzels at $0.50 if you knew everyone was a millionare? Ofc not.)
And then? Then we would be right back to where we started: Most people would be just as poor as before, and the rich would be just as rich as before.
To the downvoters: I'm genuinely interested in your serious rebuttals of my hypothesized scenario.
One reason is how much ever we try to disagree, the socio economic construct is still a zero sum game with an ever increasing pie. People who argue otherwise point to the size of the pie without practically ever stating what those in difficult positions can realistically do to get more of it. Other reasons are that honestly there is not much "real work" to be done so we can argue that a very small % of existing popul…
Why can't every country follow in its footsteps? Well, some did and were encouraged for similar reasons. Taiwan, Japan, etc.
However, without preferential access to the markets of the world's richest nation(s), export oriented industrialization becomes very difficult if not impossible. You cant incrementally build up your car export industry if you can't sell your cars. This is, broadly speaking, why we have a Daewoo but no equivalent for, say, Ethiopia.
The US generally prefers not to encourage EOI. It usually prefers to stripmine poor 3rd world countries and sell luxuries to their elites instead.
One reason is how much ever we try to disagree, the socio economic construct is still a zero sum game with an ever increasing pie. People who argue otherwise point to the size of the pie without practically ever stating what those in difficult positions can realistically do to get more of it. Other reasons are that honestly there is not much "real work" to be done so we can argue that a very small % of existing popul…
This seems to be the inverse of a zero-sum game: the West might have got a lot richer, but hundreds of millions of people were lifeted out of extreme poverty at the same time.
But Park Chung Hee could not have done it alone. It was koreans humility and willingness to be guided that achieved this dream. For example if we compare the generation that built Korea and those from Eastern European countries there is a stark difference. Koreans believed that through hard work and capitalism and by generating wealth they will increase the living standards. In EE countries this generation despite being as uneducated as the koreans believed that the wealth "exists" and it should be distributed by the state and that they work enough in honest jobs. They never understood how wealth generation works.
Simple answer; people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians; these politicians are then going to work for the interests of their rich foreign patrons and against the interests of their own people (for kickbacks/self-enrichment). The corrupt politicians will do things like saddle their people with significant public debts (which will fo…