61–70 of 230 posts
A strange example since back then South Korea was a dictatorship that massacred over 100,000 of its own citizens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_massacres
Okay and? Look at Samsung phones. They so good!
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…
> That's why, as a regular citizen, it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians. There is no way to ensure reliable and honest politicians. The best you can do is hope most policymakers are at least somewhat honest, and then institute stringent checks and balances to ensure a corrupt politician can't do too much damage. Which is what most developed democracies do, with varying d…
You can make the whole world not poor (and quite a few people not as rich as they are). Solution is simple - allow free movement of goods, services AND people. Perhaps also follow-up with allowing anyone to buy any piece of land anywhere so that rich can also buy up cheaper land (fair deal?). A lot of reasons for conflict (and need to organize around nation states) will stop remaining so important. I guess, one can d…
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Entities without competition inflate prices until they capture all the extra new pie. You receive increase in salary from your boss one year and next year it gets eaten away by monopolies like healthcare, education, housing and landlords.
Rent seeking may be zero sum, but the economy as a whole not. If we banned rent seeking the economy would likely grow faster. You could argue that's changing the game, but the economy is a weird one in that changing the game is part of the game.
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What are you talking about? Everyone is eating bigger pieces of pie these days. A lot of the things we take for granted weren’t even available to wealthy people one or two hundred years ago. Electricity, running water, sewage, pharmaceuticals, vaccines, effective surgery, motorized transport, sturdy housing. Not to mention the increasingly universal availability of education. Sure, some people still live in squalor,…
the developing world does not have access to TV Refrigerator and to a lesser extent Cellphone and our society and tech as we know it cannot produce the energy they need to power these appliances
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You are trying to put a racist spin on something that is simply a matter of time and circumstances: You cannot instantly, just by declaring it to be so, have technology, infrastructure, efficient agriculture. You need to start where you are and continuously improve the status quo in your country. That takes time. How much depends on things like corruption, means, climate, openness for change, local resources and topo…
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…
There's really no reason to blame this on the foreigners installing corrupt politicians, corruption is far more frequently organic and homegrown. Corrupt people work to further their own goals, if that happens to be using their power to take on e.g. debt on unfavourable terms then so be it, but that's not because they're beholden to foreigners, it's because that is their best route to enriching themselves - they can…
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I used to have the same utopic dream, but I have started to question whether a "small number" is actually desireable. If everyone on earth is working on great things, having more people might be better. Maybe even Elons vision of people spilling out into the stars.
Everyone on Earth is contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem. "Spilling out into the stars" is impossible, there aren't enough physical resources.
And I'm not aware of any current physical limits to space colonization? I thought the main limit was energy, and the sun has a lot to give for a while.
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It's a combination of a lot of factors. Access to a rich market is one thing but protecting your own markets against much stronger competition is another. South Korea was a mercantilist nation and it protected its core industries in the early stages. That's why companies in traditional industries (construction,banking,insurance,food etc etc) in Korea are still mostly Korean when in Eastern Europe they are German,Fren…
>protecting your own marketing against much stronger competition is another. That's the whole point. Most countries that do this are locked out of rich markets. They're said to be competing "unfairly". They know mercantilism works they just can't practice it without being slapped with countervailing tariffs. It was US policy both to allow and encourage mercantilism for South Korea because that meant it could function…
My personal (purposely incomplete!) answer is because the whole world doesn't deserve to be rich. 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 n…