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Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

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Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#171

Post by karpierz »

fsloth wrote: post #153
karpierz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 agains…

But we're not talking about long lived, historic institutions; we're talking about South Korea, a republic formed out of the ashes of Japan's colonial project, and Ghana, a new country formed from the rapid retreat of Britain from its colonial empire.

You can talk about the legacy of the colonial institutions in the respective countries, but that has little to do with how hard South Korea worked in the 1950s, and more to do with how Japan and England administered their colonies, and how the transition from colony to state happened.

They're interesting books for sure, I remember enjoying reading them. But they're very selective in the facts they tell and how they tell them, and so they're almost worse than fiction in that respect.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#172

Post by ZeroGravitas »

yucky wrote: post #132
karpierz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, similar to the assumption that the differences between North and South Korea can't be put down to "lazy people" and "hard working people" being magically seperated on opposite sides of the border.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#173

Post by SQueeeeeL »

bennysonething wrote: post #157
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

Wait, I didn't realize Ghana was an anarcho communist state!!! I just assumed it was typical stuff like being endlessly marginalized and sold out by the powerful, and their population being treated like oxen by foreign investors, but that also makes sense!

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#174

Post by throwaway294566 »

aflag wrote: post #120
throwaway294566 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A person's behavior and its abilities are determined by genetics ("nature") or family/society/circumstances ("nurture") or some ratio of mixture of both. Current political sensibilities prohibit talking about genetic aspects and demand that all, or at least as much as possible is ascribed to family/society/circumstances. Ascribing traits, especially negative ones, to genetics, is commonly called racism. However, for…

OP said that we can’t possibly create a system which will result in equality of outcome, while quoting that 80% of the world are poorer than the average American. In that context, equality of outcome means that the whole world shares the same average. Maybe I misunderstood that part, but if that’s what’s being said, then I’m not sure what is that uniqueness. Surely, the fact the US exist is evidence that such a syste…

Even if, by magic, you manage to get all the world on exactly the same income per family/person at one point in time, that equality will only last a moment. Add any amount of time with some random changes in society, environment, sunspots, whatever, and some parts of the world will decrease, some increase in income. One island might be the new hot vacation spot, the other might be unreachable due to storms for a month, or have a volcanic eruption. People might get bored and vote for some crazy asshat leader in some country. Whatever happens, the income distribution will, with time, spread out from the initial condition of equality, basic statistic says that it'll roughly look like a gaussian distribution getting wider over time (It won't be strictly gaussian, and look less so after a while, since there are boundary conditions and secondary effects like development aid going to the poorer).

We are not uniform, the environment is not uniform, resource distribution is not uniform, and even if you tried to make it so, it won't stick. Any non-isotropic planet will produce inequality.

For the example of the US being unique or special, that might not be permanent. And the usual explanations might not always hold. But in any kind of world we can imagine, there will always be some luckier and unluckier parts, resulting in inequality.

Now you can try to improve the standard of living all over the world (and of course people do that). But as long as e.g. the USA is still interested in improving their own standard of living, there will be a game of catchup that might be unwinnable. The only solution I see would be to cause e.g. the US to cease improving its standard of living. However, I'd consider that immoral and inhuman. Everyone, even the top half of the distribution, have the right to strive for something better.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#176

Post by mdp2021 »

FollowingTheDao wrote: post #152
mdp2021 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Poverty is

And the situation of the people fighting starvation, how do you call it? Indigence?

What would be this "poverty" you are talking about, which would be different from indigence - and surely it is not the pauperty of personal choice, which existed well before Newcomen, well before the Medici, even before the Sumers had barns according to some?

'Poverty' means "improductivity". But it is most commonly used for "indigence". Beggars are indigent, but not paupers, to your scheme?

There is a documentary - I think, "Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey" - in which «hoard[ers]... not sharing» are seen: monkey resemblant hominids: it implied that the discovery of scarcity was very ancient.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#177

Post by zardo »

Leary wrote: post #169
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…

They were all part of the Sinosphere?

They were all cold war economic influence battle grounds that saw huge investment from the US.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#178

Post by throwaway294566 »

majani wrote: post #112
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.

What would it take for the pareto principle to be considered a scientific law? Surely it can be seen everywhere you look

It is, not the pareto principle as such, but the basic laws of statistical distributions:

Depending on the underlying mechanisms, large systems will converge on some statistical distribution of outcomes. The easiest-to-prove mechanism that does this is the central limit theorem, leading to lots of those gaussian normal distributions out there. Slightly more complex, there is also the log-normal distribution, that also results from the application of the central limit theorem on logarithmic scales, e.g. for entropy domains. A log-normal distribution roughly adheres to the pareto princile (the tail looks like a power law, at least closely enough to fit the usual 80/20 shorthand). Power laws (or power law tails) also occur for similar reasons, and those are the actual distributions for which the pareto principle holds.

One has to expend lots of resources/energy/ingenuity to make systems not adhere to one of the aforementioned distributions, at least for t->\infty.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#179

Post by Ardon »

sam-s wrote: post #175

I find it fascinating that no one dares even to mention IQ, either here or in the original article.

I've been deeply interested in this issue for years, and my impression is that IQ just isn't that strong a lens of analysis. It's incredibly difficult to prove which way the causality goes.

A quick example of this: There has yet to be an IQ test (that I'm aware of) that participants can't increase their score in by studying/practicing. This implies that groups with higher IQs may just be unintentionally 'studying' for IQ tests in their education/environment, putting the ball back in the socioeconomic/environmental factors court.

The validity of IQ itself remains a hotly debated topic, let alone how that might affect the development of nations. You're much more likely to be productive as a researcher of this topic, I think, by leaving IQ out. Just like this article, and these comments.

Re: Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

#180

Post by FollowingTheDao »

mdp2021 wrote: post #176
FollowingTheDao wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Poverty is And the situation of the people fighting starvation, how do you call it? Indigence? What would be this "poverty" you are talking about, which would be different from indigence - and surely it is not the pauperty of personal choice, which existed well before Newcomen, well before the Medici, even before the Sumers had barns according to some? 'Poverty' means "improductivity". But it is most commonly used…

> And the situation of the people fighting starvation, how do you call it? Indigence?

I call it a situation caused by greed and capitalism that can be resolved in a second by just giving these people food.

Scarcity created by nature is not poverty, it is famine. Scarcity created by humans is poverty.

To whit I give you the definition of poverty:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/poverty

poverty, the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.

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