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Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

asteriskmag.com

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Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#151

Post by nickpp »

asimpleexample wrote: post #103

The world runs on debt. You need people/countries in debt in order for the system to operate. Here is an example of a country which tried to escape it and didn't fare well. It might also have had something to do with it being socialist. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/04/14/d... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_debt_of_the_Socialist_...

It might also have had something to do with having a planned economy unable to fulfil the most basic of the population needs, from food to toilet paper. Rather shocking for a country that used to be Europe's wheat exporter before installation of communism and Russian-controlled puppet regimes.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#152

Post by FollowingTheDao »

mdp2021 wrote: post #143
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And even the frugal can be hungry: that is the meaning of poverty in the article, and the analysis is about a solution against it - because whether you embrace the idea of "[GDP-based] growth" or that of "frugality", hunger is a bad state to live in. The point of the article is about "how to have growth", and it is a transposition on different assumptions of "how to have food even though you are frugal". Diogenes was…

You people love to talk yourselves in circles for no reason. Poverty is a fiction made up by capitalists.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#153

Post by fsloth »

karpierz wrote: post #146
fsloth wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 puzz…

"Why Nations Fail" comes from the Jared Diamond school of "My Model Fits My Data So It's Causal". It's a series of just-so stories, which discounts outliers (ex: Singapore, India, China). They take the scientific method (find examples to disprove your hypothesis) and invert it (find examples that match your hypothesis), which does nothing except provide people with the feeling of confidence that they've finally come…

Yes, but like Guns, germs and steel it contains data even though the model is flawed, so is an interesting read in any case :)

I think the key point of the book is that unless there is a massive transfer of people from place to place the power of historical institutions can carry over generations and generations.

Is quality of institutions the one truth to explain it all? No, but I find it pretty hard to argue against that it is a relevant factor in historical evolution of polities regarding their quality of administration and general expectations of life outcomes of their populations.

My intent was not to sell the book as "the one truth", sorry.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#156

Post by [deleted] »

jongjong wrote: post #12

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#157

Post by bennysonething »

rippercushions wrote: post #115

What ties together their poster boys of South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore? They all had a baseline of education and decent government (for corporations, anyway), which they used to attract foreign investment (read: money flowing into the country) for industries that employed large amounts of people in roles where they could learn useful skills, kick-starting middle class wealth that could then propel the rest of the…

Actually there is a simpler explanation:

Rule of law

Property rights

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#158

Post by postalrat »

majani wrote: post #117
postalrat wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is the natural state of which societies? All of them?

I think he meant to say "poverty is the default state." After all, you are born with nothing, and if you do nothing, you will get nothing.

What does being born have anything to do with the state of a society?

And if you want to go down that road then I'm wondering why we aren't considering before you are born. Or that when you are born you typically have your parents, siblings, etc. Not nothing.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#159

Post by bumby »

jongjong wrote: post #12

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…

I wanted to look into this because that was my initial thought as well. I took the Corruption Perceptions Index [1] mentioned in the article and plotted it against the World Bank GDP per capital [2] for about 167 countries that had data in both sets. Indeed, about 60% of GDP can be explained by corruption level measured by CPI.

[1] https://www.transparency.org/cpi/2021

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_rec...

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#160

Post by bergenty »

Tade0 wrote: post #136

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).…

This doesn’t seem accurate. Are you saying Poland had GDP growth rate of more than 30% a year?
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