Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

asteriskmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 230 posts

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#131

Post by hoseja »

brutusborn wrote: post #37
ninkendo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there has to be poor people in order for there to be rich people, let’s make robots be the poor people. The best endgame we can probably hope for is for there to be a sustainably small number of really comfortable, happy humans on this planet, and an army of robot servants/AI to keep us all fat and happy.

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.

This is impossible with baseline humans, no matter how good you make education (without slipping into much heavier indoctrination).

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#132

Post by yucky »

karpierz wrote: post #127
fsloth wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely disrespectful of the economic savvy and work ethic of South Korean people. Korean state had an extremely focused industrial policy to improve the added value created by the country's economic output. The thing that needs critique here is that free trade would be somehow always beneficial. South Koreans state aggressively supported those industries it wanted to uplift. Countries do rise up from third…

Your implication is that Ghana failed where South Korea succeeded because they didn't work hard enough. Of course people in South Korea worked hard to get where they are. So did people in Ghana. But in South Korea, the US protected them and funded them. Meanwhile in Ghana, the US stripped them of their wealth. How well off do you think South Korea would be if the US didn't intervene in the Korean War?

   > Of course people in South Korea worked hard to get where they are. So did people in Ghana.
By what measure did Ghana work as hard as South Korea did? Is that just an assumption?

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#133

Post by FollowingTheDao »

mdp2021 wrote: post #128
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #79

Maybe "poverty" is a fake word that was created by people who wanted to sell you something. https://newint.org/features/1992/06/05/poverty/ Think about it. Did people know there was such a think called "poverty" before some people started hoarding everything and not sharing it? That's capitalism! Maybe some people do not mind living in "poverty" and just because you cannot convince them to buy into your false dichoto…

> Did people know there was such a think called "poverty" before Diogenes the Cinic 2400 years ago reportedly lamented hunger (and the absence of shortcuts to curb it, NSFW). That is the poverty contextual to the article.

Hunger is not poverty, hunger is hunger. Even wealthy people can be hungry.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#134

Post by serverholic »

jdthedisciple wrote: post #14

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…

Yes because the system is built to support certain types of people.

If we are playing monopoly and you’re good at monopoly then it makes sense that you’d likely win if we started over. Also, some people are smart enough to study the game and emulate good monopoly play but they’re not naturally good at it.

However if we switched to another game you might lose your advantage.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#135

Post by yucky »

aflag wrote: post #30
awb wrote: post #9

> Yet even though extreme poverty has fallen, in 2018 about 80% of the world population still had material living standards less than one-third of that in the United States. That’s it right there. If wealth is relative then you can’t possibly create a system that will result in equality of outcome since we’re all born unique.

Quoted post unavailable.

Do you think culture plays any role at all in the relative success one nation or group of people has vs another?

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#136

Post by Tade0 »

My country's(Poland) GDP per capita grew 8-9x over the past 30 years.

My personal take is that it's not just the political system during this time, but the transition from communism to a market economy that made it happen.

The centrally-planned economy back then had interesting features, among them generally full employment and frankly ridiculous expectations regarding the amount of work(at least in terms of hours).

All this proved to be fertile ground for a burgeoning hustle culture when people found that their labour can actually amount to something in a market economy.

My generation grew up with largely absent parents because in the 90s it was normal to have a side hustle or do overtime on a regular basis.

You see this a lot in other countries that were economically successful - with enough people disregarding their health and private life you can really move forward at a rapid pace.

I'm conflicted whether this is a good thing really.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#137

Post by tekla »

zozbot234 wrote: post #89
mdp2021 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither the original post nor this answer make clear sense in the context. The original post seems to relate that "South Korea went from 6% of the GDP in the USA in 1953 to that of the UK in 2020" with a history of dictatorship, while the point of the article is exactly the - noted - "strangeness" of the results. The above reply mentions some quality in products of Samsung while the article is explicitly about the di…

South Korea was a dictatorship that managed to democratize peacefully . That already makes it unusual compared to most dictatorships.

I suggest that you read up on the 518 incident before claiming that Democratizing South Korea was peaceful.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#138

Post by mdp2021 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #42

The more interesting question is "Why isn't the whole world poor?" Poverty is the natural state of society, wealth is an exception.

The title of the submission stands for "Why have not we managed to obtain a codified body of solutions from success stories".

And for "why we instead are beyond poverty", that is a most peculiar question to be asked to Hackers, crafters of tools, engineers, providers of solutions, efficiency augmenters.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#139

Post by fsloth »

karpierz wrote: post #127
fsloth wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is extremely disrespectful of the economic savvy and work ethic of South Korean people. Korean state had an extremely focused industrial policy to improve the added value created by the country's economic output. The thing that needs critique here is that free trade would be somehow always beneficial. South Koreans state aggressively supported those industries it wanted to uplift. Countries do rise up from third…

Your implication is that Ghana failed where South Korea succeeded because they didn't work hard enough. Of course people in South Korea worked hard to get where they are. So did people in Ghana. But in South Korea, the US protected them and funded them. Meanwhile in Ghana, the US stripped them of their wealth. How well off do you think South Korea would be if the US didn't intervene in the Korean War?

US military intervention and economic uplifting are partly two different things.

I would limit this discussion to "how can a once poor country become an industrialized economy".

Since not all countries do this, the question is incredibly interesting. Perhaps I were too harsh but "US helped them" is not a satisfactory answer.

The fact that north korea is poor and south korea is not, is an interesting part of this puzzle as rare empirical sample of an area with roughly equivalent starting position well into modern history, and it should not be explained away by "because US duh".

I found "Why Nations Fail" an extremely interesting book pondering the puzzle of apparent differences in economic outcomes between countries and warmly suggest it to anyone interested in the topic. It's not really about state failure but about the bigger picture of what makes some states successfull (using the metrics of the author of course).

Post reply on HN