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We don't know why Malawi is poor

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Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#81

Post by JumpCrisscross »

> The fertilizer subsidy program (FISP) consumes up to three-fourths the agriculture budget in some years to subsidize maize inputs for smallholders. It is politically untouchable because rural maize farmers are the median voter. Several administrations have made some attempt to reform it and backed down. Resources that could go to roads, irrigation, or diversification go to propping up the existing structure.

Idk, this one doesn't seem super difficult to diagnose. The political system has been captured by a special interest with consolidated control.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#82

Post by JumpCrisscross »

WhatsTheBigIdea wrote: post #19
dirasieb wrote: post #12

[flagged]

Can you cite a reference for this assertion? I'd like to read about it if true.

> Can you cite a reference for this assertion?

It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.

Malawi was hunting and gathering until the 10th century [1] and colonised by Europeans in the late 19th century. That makes it simultaneously one of the last places in the contiguous old world to be settled and one of the last in Africa to have been European colonised. If the standard outliers to any macroeconomic theory are Japan and Argentina, then Malawi occupies a similar niche in theories of history and development.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#84

Post by ZhadruOmjar »

peterfirefly wrote: post #31
rwyinuse wrote: post #11

Perhaps there are cultural reasons that explain this, such as attitudes towards work, entrepreneurship, private ownership etc? I have no idea if Rwanda and Malawi have difference there, but globally one can see clearly see the impact of culture. Just look at how well Japan did despite losing WW2 and having little natural resources, or how badly Russia has done despite its huge landmass and resources, because the poli…

More like: Rwanda has a competent dictator (and has had the same one for 26 years, more if you consider the years where he was the strongman behind the President). A competent dictator is better than an incompetent dictator -- or even, in many ways, an incompetent democracy.

I'll mention it here because it's tangentially related to your comment. The book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families" about the Rwandan genocide and aftermath helped me understand the country and it's current state much better. The book has the added benefit of being from 1999 so has far fewer of the culture war components one would expect from a similar book released today.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#85

Post by rafram »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #81

> The fertilizer subsidy program (FISP) consumes up to three-fourths the agriculture budget in some years to subsidize maize inputs for smallholders. It is politically untouchable because rural maize farmers are the median voter. Several administrations have made some attempt to reform it and backed down. Resources that could go to roads, irrigation, or diversification go to propping up the existing structure. Idk, t…

That describes plenty of very rich countries as well.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#86

Post by Henchman21 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #51
RobotToaster wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Malawians have a reputation of being extremely kind people, maybe that makes them bad at capitalism?

I mean, is it beyond belief that many of them are OK with living a simple agrarian life? Or have very little opportunity to learn that there is any other way to live?

In this community it is well beyond belief. It’s up there with UFOs and lizard people. Not extracting every. Last. Penny. From EVERYTHING no matter the impact. Anathema to a hardcore capitalist forum like this.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#87

Post by antonvs »

nathan_compton wrote: post #17
tines wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does: > Geography. Jeffrey Sachs and others have long argued that geography is destiny: landlocked, tropical, distant-from-markets countries face structural penalties through transport costs, disease burden, and weak agricultural conditions. Malawi has all three. Sure, but the empirical literature pegs the landlocked penalty at about 1% of annual growth. This is meaningful over decades, not enough to close a gap t…

Yes, but for "land locked". I've been owned.

I seriously don’t get the mentality you have.

You didn’t read the article, but you did a half-hearted search for some reason, and posted a completely incorrect comment as a result.

Why? What are you trying to achieve?

When people claim that LLMs don’t have superhuman intelligence yet, this kind of behavior is a counterexample.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#88

Post by giacomoforte »

rwyinuse wrote: post #11

Perhaps there are cultural reasons that explain this, such as attitudes towards work, entrepreneurship, private ownership etc? I have no idea if Rwanda and Malawi have difference there, but globally one can see clearly see the impact of culture. Just look at how well Japan did despite losing WW2 and having little natural resources, or how badly Russia has done despite its huge landmass and resources, because the poli…

This viewpoint never made sense to me, because you have variation within any culture, and because advantageous strategies win out over time, any culture will evolve. Therefore, it never made sense to me to consider culture a static immutable group of homogeneous people. To me it is pretty obvious that some systematic challenges must exist that keep what we consider to be successful strategies from succeeding in those environments.

Your examples of Russia and Japan are easily explained by geopolitics. Indeed, Japanese individuals don't tend to excel out of Japan while many Russians do.

Re: We don't know why Malawi is poor

#90

Post by bluGill »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #55
rdtsc wrote: post #46

> It ranks 107th out of 180 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which is middling, but not especially bad, roughly comparable to Indonesia and Brazil. I would still guess corruption is a major reason. Sometimes the way it’s measured and how it’s reported is not accurate. People internalize corrupt practices as normal and stop viewing it as corruption. A bribe is a gift, a nepotistic appointm…

So corrupt even the reporting of corruption is corrupt?

Countries trying to become uncorrupt generally go way down because they can start reporting on found corruption. This means people care and so it is worth reporting.
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