Why Isn’t the Whole World Rich?

At least in part due to unavoidable scarcity.

The California coastline is a beautiful place. More people want to live there than can physically live there. Whoever gets to live there, by whatever means, has something that many people want. That's wealth, and it cannot be equally distributed.

If you were to start the world from scratch, give everyone $1000, hierarchies would still immediately develop. People have different affinities, skills, people encounter different ideas at different times, happen to meet people or live in a certain place during a certain movement. As long as people are free to exchange their resources, they will not end up equally distributed.

And even if we're talking about a post-scarcity Star Trek situation with replicators and holodecks, you still would never eliminate a hierarchy of value. Maybe everyone can live in on the California coastline in their holodeck, but the actual California coastline is still scarce, and people will still prize it. Or maybe Captain Picard hand carves a chair. It can be replicated exactly, but there will be a certain value to having the actual chair that he carved.

We're already seeing this phenomenon in a world with highly efficient and advanced manufacturing. We pay a premium for things that are hand made, simply for the fact that the process that produced the thing is inherently limited.

We'll never escape scarcity, and this is just one of the things that will always maintain a hierarchy of value.

It’s a factor and I think those that argue against it overshoot their case by completely dismissing it altogether.

Yet to argue that it’s a large factor you have to explain all the many cases of genetically almost identical populations with vastly different outcomes across either space or time.

By time I mean historically. Europe was a lot poorer than much of the Muslim world and the Orient until the enlightenment and the industrial age. Did Europeans suddenly mutate into a higher intelligence population?

Russia has been in steady decline since probably 1980 or so. Their ethnic makeup has not changed to any significant degree.

China exploded in the past 30 years. Probably even less genetic change there.

North and South Korea from space is the most dramatic example. That has an obvious political cause but the genes are about identical.

The variance in societal scale outcome just does not map well to human genetics, revealing it as a minor rather than a major factor.

> people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians

> it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians

Exactly. But the corrupt politicians do not get installed by other countries. They get installed by a culture of corruption within a country.

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 dream...

I'm with you on this.. There can only be rich countries if there are poor countries.. Otherwise there would just be.. countries..

One of the reasons that the standard of living is so high in rich countries, is because we're paying poor countries to do the work + pollution, if they had as much money as rich countries, they'd be unwilling to do that work/polution for that price, and the "true" price of the work would reveal itself..

In Denmark, the vast majority of what's consumed is not produced in Denmark, that'd be too expensive and nobody would afford it.. Being rich is not about how much money you have.. it's about how much MORE money you have than someone else.