You’re going to get a LOT of reductive and low effort answers from Lemmy radicals. But this is a super complex question, and there’s not a 5-second ELI5 answer if you really want to understand.
Also, when the radicals scream at you, there’s going to be a core of truth. They’re going to yell about colonization and empires. That’s a major factor, but not an exclusive one. However, for getting radical and rabidly furious its all they’ll bother posting to you.
Things to investigate, because answering this for yourself in a meaningful way is going to take a while and require study. Here are some topics but NOT an exhaustive list:
Colonization
Resources (natural and otherwise)
Schooling, education, etc.
Stability, politically and otherwise (note this will have overlap with colonial and non-colonial powers destabilizing things intentionally for geopolitical gain)
Medicine as regionally practiced, traditional vs based on the the scientific method.
Geopolitics (isolationism, etc)
Geography (i.e. the US’s greatest asset is its location, it neighbors no enemies and its main enemies are separated by an ocean. One of the key reasons the US focuses on the ability to project force)
Religion
Corruption (politically and non politically)
Crime and non-military/nation based violence (also could get grouped under personal safety and security)
And again, honestly, a lot of these topics will overlap, but that’s what I mean by there isn’t a quick, easy answer.
And the reductive stupid answer is just yelling colonialism.
There’s a reason people get PhDs in this subject. It’s not a quick, easy question.
And the reductive stupid answer is just yelling colonialism.
Most of those reasons, that are very real, are explicitly derived of colonialism.
For instance:
2 (resources) is the cause that the US promotes puppet right-wing governments or directly destroys countries to pillage them.
3 (education) is systematically destroyed in many countries because they want to make public education disappear so it’s for profit. Again, following the US model and most likely benefiting US companies (for instance “educational” campaigns to teach proprietary products created by US companies, e.g. Microsoft)
4 (stability) is directly threatened by the US foreign policy of destroying every country that is ideologically or economically inconvenient for the unimpeded proliferation of unbridled, savage capitalism.
6: in many developing countries public health has been destroyed to follow for-profit schemes based in the US model, to benefit either US companies or US-backed right-wing politicians.
11: Crime is worst in countries reduces to poverty, in many cases by US-backed lending policies sending countries into misery.
All this, of course, is supported by years of colonial teachings after which the people in the “developing” countries despise themselves and look up to the powerful countries as inherently superior, even morally.
Not just the US. Cambridge Analytica is trying to manipulate our politics through scummy means such as misinformation campaigns. And our country is being fucked by the effects of Climate Change while western countries are celebrating because “it’s more sunny and warm now! :D”, and “finally more viable real estate!”
Many of the issues CAN be and are linked to colonialism, reread what I wrote.
Yes, your points are pertinent and support problems that colonialism is relevant to, I did not claim otherwise.
However, you’re clearly focused on negatives and crimes (in many cases rightfully so) the US has caused. But the question wasn’t exclusive to the US and is not exclusive to the US.
For the OPs question, trying to exclusively link everything to or overstate the colonial influence is an example of what I was saying as well.
It’s comforting to pretend that we just say one word “colonialism” and think that now we’re experts on the subject. But there’s so much more than colonialism, which again is a big factor (the first I listed), and overemphasis of it while disregarding the other real issues and nuances is counterproductive to learning.
Many of these issues can be also be related to the fact that the citizens of powerful countries are entitled assholes who vote their countries to continue the exploitation of other countries.
Your membership in one of those citizen groups is, of course, completely conjectural, but I have a strong opinion about it.
I’m not convinced, considering the US and many other countries with high standard of living are also leading the world in external debt (both total and per capita).
Maybe you mean debt to GDP+wealth ratio? Or more specifically, bad credit with international banks.
I’m not an economist though, so I’d be curious to hear if there is more explanation for why you consider debt to be “the main reason.”
I am aware that some countries have been “screwed over” by large banks that had specific detrimental stipulations for debt forgiveness though. For example, look at the Latin American Debt Crisis.
…the Fed convened an emergency meeting of central bankers from around the world to provide a bridge loan to Mexico. Fed officials also encouraged US banks to participate in a program to reschedule Mexico’s loans (Aggarwal 2000). As the crisis spread beyond Mexico, the United States took the lead in organizing an “international lender of last resort,” a cooperative rescue effort among commercial banks, central banks, and the IMF. Under the program, commercial banks agreed to restructure the countries’ debt, and the IMF and other official agencies lent the LDCs sufficient funds to pay the interest, but not principal, on their loans. In return, the LDCs agreed to undertake structural reforms of their economies and to eliminate budget deficits. The hope was that these reforms would enable the LDCs to increase exports and generate the trade surpluses and dollars necessary to pay down their external debt (Devlin and Ffrench-Davis 1995). Although this program averted an immediate crisis, it allowed the problem to fester. Instead of eliminating subsidies to state-owned enterprises, many LDC countries instead cut spending on infrastructure, health, and education, and froze wages or laid off state employees. The result was high unemployment, steep declines in per capita income, and stagnant or negative growth—hence the term the “lost decade” (Carrasco 1999).
Thought debt could go into some of the other categories. Calling it out individually or under a broader umbrella of economics would be fine, too. It’s just a suggestion list for OP to research.
Actually, you’re just reducing complex issue of exercising power over other countries to “colonialism” than trying to criticize people correctly recognizing this issue as “radicals”. Most of what you listed can be directly linked to western countries destabilizing other regions by military or covert actions, installing puppet governments, using their influence to steal resources and keeping other economies in check so that they don’t develop into competitors. No one thinks that it’s all because some country was a colony 200 years ago. Western influence never really ended in most of those countries and that’s what is keeping them down.
Colonialism has done really bad things in the African and Middle Eastern continent. When they withdrew they irresponsibly drew the borders and now civil wars happen all the fucking time
Yes, but OP was asking for more than a single high-level example. And, again, exclusively answering colonialism would be disingenuous if we implied that was THE answer instead of part of it.
In this topic: people who underestimate the importance of infrastructure and low crime and low corruption.
1st answer: developing countries don’t have enough infrastructure to benefit from wealth. Not enough trains to move raw goods around, not enough roads or not enough electricity to do anything even if those good arrived.
2nd level: when governments get the money for such projects, they steal it from the people through corruption. See Turkey and all the invested dollars on earthquake-proofing buildings, it was all stolen in ways people didn’t understand or realize until the earthquake happened.
3rd level: even if the government didn’t steal the money, criminals can. Even in the USA we deal with transformer thieves (transformers are bundles of copper that convert long distance high voltage power into short distance power for houses). These copper bundles can sell for $$$$ in the black market.
So even if #1 and #2 miraculously happen, a criminal will steal the infrastructure and they gotta start all over again.
Everyone knows how to make cities more advanced and better. Build highways, trains, mass transit. Invest into freight (trains or boats). Invest into education so that people can run these machines.
And many 3rd world countries advance forward. But it’s harder to do than it looks.
developing countries don’t have enough infrastructure to benefit from wealth
It’s even worse: they only have the infrastructure to allow us to profit from their wealth. Colonial powers made sure the railroad between the mines and the ports are top notch, so their mineral riches can be carted off efficiently to the metropole.
China and other advanced nations prove that an export based economy can work though.
I will say that export driven economies are very difficult though. See Taiwan and their export of chips. It only works because Taiwan is basically modern Vulkans / Wizards who have chip technology that no one else in the world has.
A system of top level universities to build that kind of knowledge and infrastructure is difficult and outside the reach of most countries.
The machines are Dutch and the designs are made by the customer. The Taiwanese advantage is their government subsidised chip manufacturing. They aren’t wizards.
Global Foundries up in Buffalo, New York had the same exact Dutch equipment as them and couldn’t get past 12nm.
Taiwan / TSMC is hitting 3nm today (a feat that even Intel and Samsung cannot accomplish yet), and is well on its way to 2nm designs.
They’re fucking wizards who are 5+ years ahead of USA. Thank god they’re allies of us. But they’re severely kicking our ass in terms of yields, production, and even technology, using the same machines to ink smaller-and-smaller transistors to a degree impossible to us in the USA today.
The problem is by the time we figure out 3nm, TSMC will be at 2nm or better. They just consistently lead and are superior over us for the last 20 years or so.
nanometer is a marketing term now and doesn’t reflect actual sizes. Samsung were first with “3nm”.
America was doing “3nm” in 2018. You don’t seem to have any understanding of this issue.
From Wikipedia:
The term “3 nanometer” has no direct relation to any actual physical feature (such as gate length, metal pitch or gate pitch) of the transistors. According to the projections contained in the 2021 update of the International Roadmap for Devices and Systems published by IEEE Standards Association Industry Connection, a 3 nm node is expected to have a contacted gate pitch of 48 nanometers and a tightest metal pitch of 24 nanometers.
Also from Wikipedia:
South Korean chipmaker Samsung started shipping its 3 nm gate all around (GAA) process, named 3GAA, in mid-2022. On 29 December 2022, Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC announced that volume production using its 3 nm semiconductor node termed N3 is under way with good yields.
In early 2018, IMEC (Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre) and Cadence stated they had taped out 3 nm test chips, using extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) and 193 nm immersion lithography.
nanometer is a marketing term now and doesn’t reflect actual sizes. Samsung were first with “3nm”.
And iPhones chose TSMC’s 3nm, because TSMC is more than just 3nm, but also at a scale and price-point that Apple desires.
America was doing “3nm” in 2018
I’m talking about industry and manufacturing. Test labs doing one or two wafers back in 2018 doesn’t matter compared to the millions-of-chips that roll off of Taiwan’s production facilities.
No one in the USA can mass produce designs like this. Korea / Samsung is 2nd best, but still is slower at mass production than Taiwan.
Which brings us right back to my point. They aren’t wizards, they are simply benefiting from the enormous government investment into the extremely expensive chip manufacturing industry.
Their manufacturing efficiency is top tier, their government built facilities are top tier. However they weren’t first, they aren’t the only ones who can produce them and now that the US is interested in chip manufacturing again the new facilities will match TSMC in a few years.
We just invited the Taiwanese to stay in Arizona. I don’t expect Taiwan to give us their latest-and-greatest technologies. But this is still good for us in the great scheme of things.
But even USA’s #1 chipmaker, Intel, has fallen behind Taiwan. USA’s 3rd party manufacturer, GlobalFoundries, is 12nm and has no plan to go further. TSMC is still the only one who can help us with the CHIPS program, albeit by building a factory in Arizona but that’s still Taiwanese controlled technology.
TSMC is literally a Taiwan-sponsored company. Its the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. They’re 100% full bred Taiwanese executives, engineers, and scientists. Their literal geopolitical aim is the “Silicon Shield”, the creation of such companies and processes to encourage other entities (like USA) to defend them.
There’s a reason why AMD, Intel, NVidia, Apple, Samsung, and Qualcomm (aka: Snapdragon aka Android’s #1 chip) are all made in TSMC aka Taiwan. Because they got better manufacturing technology than us. We literally cannot replicate their feats of production.
IE: Yields (percentage of completed chips without errors), costs, production node advancements (3nm vs 2nm), etc. etc.
Advanced FPGAs like Xilinx FPGAs used in the F-35 project.
USA literally can’t make these chips. We design them, but only Taiwan has the advanced process nodes to actually make them physically. We send our designs to Taiwan, and they ship them back to us by boat.
Intel literally cannot make these chips in its Arizona, Texas, or Utah fabrication labs. Literally cannot make them. That’s why Intel contracted TSMC to make the Intel Alchemist chips (!!!). The other major advanced manufacturer, Global Foundries (Buffalo, New York) failed 10 years ago and cannot make anything more advanced than 12nm nodes (roughly Taiwan’s 2016 era technology). USA advancement of chips stalled out a decade ago, we rely almost entirely on Taiwan…
Except for the few chips we’re contracting out to Samsung instead, since Korea is the other place who can take these chip orders.
Which is all foundry investment. None of the technology needed belongs to Taiwan. Intel is ramping up for Intel 3 and are already doing high volume production on the Intel 4 using EUV.
Foundries are extremely expensive and everyone was happy to let Taiwan do the whole thing. Now with the geopolitical risk, investment is ramping up into chip foundries again. Once that is done the manufacturing will be mostly on par. Which is completely different to your first post about wizards and no one else can do it nonsense.
We are however going around in circles so I’ll likely leave it here.
Intel doesn’t have the ability to accept orders from many other companies. One of Intel’s few customers, Altera, was bought up by Intel.
There’s a reason why I was talking about GlobalFoundries from Buffalo, New York. They were the last 3rd party fabricator of USA.
So no. Intel cannot make iPhones, even if they come a year or two later than TSMC’s 3nm process (TSMC was making the 3nm iPhone 15 last year), it is meaningless in the scope of Apple or Qualcomm.
In any case, you’re comparing Intel 2024 vs TSMC from the year 2022. TSMC is releasing 2nm this year and has been producing 3nm for the past 2 years consistently. Intel barely catches up, will NOT have the flexibility to take 3rd party designs from AMD, Apple or Qualcomm… and then immediately falls behind TSMC’s 2nm process in just months.
We are however going around in circles so I’ll likely leave it here.
Name a single factory in the USA that is capable of making a Snapdragon or iPhone M3. I dare you. All you’ve contributed is nonsense. Intel cannot make these chips. GlobalFoundaries cannot make these chips. TI can’t make these chips.
CHIPS act isn’t about “pulling ahead” of Taiwan. CHIPS act is just barely catching up to them if we perfectly execute over the next few years. And there are severe doubts if the USA is capable of doing so. I’m glad that we’re trying to catchup in this important manufacturing race. But I fully admit we’re behind and need further investments.
Which is completely different to your first post about wizards and no one else can do it nonsense.
Name a factory anywhere in the world that competes with TSMC 3nm.
Aside from Samsung (aka: South Korea), who is truly the only 3rd party fabricator who accepts orders from other companies (ie: can support fabless companies like Apple or NVidia), and can provide the advanced process nodes to hit the iPhone M3 specs.
And remember, 3nm is a node that TSMC has been producing at scale for iPhones since 2022. We’re reaching the 2nd year of TSMC’s mass-production of 3nm and no other country in the world has mastered 3nm like Taiwan has. They are literally wizards. If you want the best and most advanced transistors, you go to TSMC. Period.
The actual research that you’re giving Taiwan credit for is US research. There’s a reason the US was able to tell the Dutch government “You can’t allow this hardware to go to China.”
The basic research for the Extreme Ultraviolet lithography was done at US DOE labs as a hedge against Japan dominating the world semiconductor supply. The US allowed a few companies in as part of the EUV-LLC private-public partnership, and ASML ended up buying out the other players who had the licenses from the US. The EU certainly had a hand in the research after the test bed was built proving it could work. www.sandia.gov/media/ultra.htm
You can see this in painful clarity watching the Argentinian railroads. Created and operated by the UK originally, it has a clear shape of a funnel from all over the country towards the main port city, Buenos Aires.
That’s a general pattern though - sea transport is the most efficient, thus railroads will tend to integrate around important ports. It applies even in the UK.
But the USA and western EU countries are rich, but, for example, China, India, Russia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Mexico and others are not very rich, how is this possible?
Even New Zealand is rich, but other island countries are not.
Culture and wealth. But wealth creates better culture, and better culture makes more wealth.
Only Russia seems to be the only country doing things wrong in your list btw. I expect China, India, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Mexico to all be richer in 10 years than they are today.
It takes a lot of hard work, smarts, and money to catch up but countries like those are scrappy and are doing good work to catchup. China is a bit risky, I think they’re funding it with too much debt though in weird ways, but their hearts and minds are at least in the right place with regards to expansion of their country, economy, and education.
China’s main problem is corruption. But everyone’s got corruption issues,.
Culture plays a big part. But people don’t like admitting it.
Was reading a book about the Congo and there was a Malaysian UN guy. He said this country fucked. He said colonialism had an affect on this country sure but it also had an affect on his. He said, in a nicer way, at some point they need to take responsibility for their country and short their shit out. They are responsible of the mess it’s in. Seen another doc where a Chinese guy was building a road but he couldn’t even buy gravel and in the Chinese words the local workers were lazy and they kept working a day, stealing stuff and not coming back. He seen a railroad the Belgians built that was in complete disrepair he basically said “look you inherited a functioning country with low crime, infrastructure and an encomy. You guys butched it all”.
Just look at Rhodesia, South Africa and God knows how many other countries.
Everyone seems to be focusing on colonialism, but that really only brought Europe to a standard of living near India and China.
The real major thing that happened was that “the West” started industrializing before the rest of the world did. Some of the wealth came from colonial holdings that industrial countries had, but a lot of it came from having citizens who were more than a order of magnitude more economically productive than citizens of other countries for over a century.
Why the Indian subcontinent and China didn’t industrialize at the time is up to debate, but some theories are related to lower labor costs not sparking the positive feedback engine of industrialization until it was too late to compete against the West and going into periods of relative decline that Western countries could take advantage of.
The West was able to make itself the factory of the world, pushing the rest of the world into resource extraction.
It wasn’t until after World War II that other parts of the world were able to industrialize.
I have always assumed that white light-skinned people have a leg up because they’re white light-skinned. That is, they’ve lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places where you need low melanin to get sufficient vitamin D to survive. Places with low sunlight and harsh winters, which means places where failing to develop efficient agriculture, food preservation/storage, insulated shelters, and textiles meant starving or freezing to death.
Non-white light-skinned people lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places with more consistent sunlight and milder winters, where sun over-exposure was a more pressing threat than under-exposure. That means more forgiving crops and climates, so less pressure to streamline agriculture and subsequently industrialize.
Edit: I feel the need to specify that I am not talking about “white people” as a coherent race, but as a loose term to describe light-skinned people from harsher climates in general. Don’t read any racial commentary here, I’m not making any.
There are several times in history that Europeans would not be considered the peak of human development due to very measurable differences in quality of life.
You’ll also find other pseudoscience bullshit trying to justify the superiority of one group over another from at least Roman times.
The fact of the matter is that several areas had the resources and technical development to start the Industrial Revolution; it just happened to spark in the United Kingdom first and spread through Europe quickly.
Okay. I dunno if you think I’m saying any group is “superior” because I’m very much not . I thought I was very much explicitly saying that their advantage was much more based on incidental environmental conditions than any kind of genetic superiority, or anything remotely close to that. Just brainstorming explanations for history that cut that exact “superiority” bullshit out of the picture
Romans literally thought they were the best because the people north of them were too emotional due to cold weather and people south of them weren’t hard enough due to hot weather.
And I also brought up that the most developed part of the world shifted over time, something that you’ve talked past rather than addressing to how it affects your theory of vitamin D.
I really don’t understand the source of conflict here. You seem like you agree that Europeans did happen to have the conditions amenable to development, but what’s your alternative? That the cause wasn’t just a coincidence? I’m really confused what your disagreement is.
I also mentioned India and China. You probably could have included parts of the Middle East as well if they weren’t as wrecked by the Mongol invasions as they were.
The vitamin D hypothesis doesn’t play out when looking at those areas.
Nothing I said conflicts with any of that? Han, Mongol, Turkic, Persian, and many other “ethnicities” across the continent play out just fine when taking light skin tone into consideration. Again, explicitly not race. I am talking about “white” as a skin tone, potentially correlated with harsher climates.
Okay. I am, in the context of skin tone, witch is the only thing relevant to my point. I don’t subscribe to racist ideology. “White” isn’t even a coherent race.
Also you’re too focused on trying to defend yourself from that one accusation, as if that’s the only thing challenging your argument? What about that point someone made that in some points of history, regions of relatively high development change over time? Like at this point in time, Europe is the one with high development, but back then, it was in warmer areas, with cold areas not being as developed. You know, like the Mediterranean? Known for mild winters? Which Greece and Rome were located in?
All I’m saying is that regions with harsher winters experienced early consistent pressures to develop specific technologies: agriculture, food storage, preservation, textiles, and weatherproof shelters. Early development of those technologies helped push them toward industrialization earlier. Not that they’re the only regions that were ever developed, especially after the establishment of wider trade routes. I don’t understand the enthusiasm of everyone to turn this into a race thing.
I get what this guy is trying to say but the phrasing and unnecessary racialising explains the downvotes. A better and less offensive way to put this could simply have referred to climate: that you suspect the harsher climate in Europe rewarded industrial and penalised agrarian lifestyles in a way that wasn’t true for civilisations near the equator. Being white or not has nothing to do with it - correlation versus causation.
Yes, correlation is exactly what I’m saying. I’m not saying “white” as a race, I’ve been explicitly saying “white” as skin tone. The same environmental conditions which reward efficient agriculture and the conditions for industrialization also correlate to pressures toward sun-absorbant skin.
My position has nothing to do with “race” and everything to do with coincidentally correlated environmental effects. Was I not sufficiently clear? When did I even bring up race, distinct from skin tone in-and-of-itself? “White” isn’t even a race, so far as race is even a rational concept.
I do understand the point you’re making actually, but you’re wading into emotionally charged waters here. I would argue “white” is an inherently racial term, but the more importantly, the correlation is not really relevant to the discussion and needlessly muddies your broader point (that climate may inspire or disincentive industrialisation) by injecting it with racial discussion.
I don’t know how else to specify that my point is purely about melanin levels in the skin being coincidentally correlated, and NOT related in any way to implicit genetic arguments. I explicitly defined “white” by melanin levels, not by race. “White” isn’t even a coherent race.
You could easily have used geographical notions, and not bothered with the melatonin point. It even took a stretch to pull in colour into your point. If you drag evolutionary advantages of being white into a conversation, then you might be a racist.
Again, nothing to do with race. Western Europeans, Persians, Chinese, Turks, and various other races/ethnicities all have light skin. Again, not an evolutionary advantage, just coincidental effects of geographical pressures of regions with low light and greater seasonal causing.
I feel like twisting what I’m saying into having anything to do with race, especially after repeatedly clarifying, is in bad faith. I’m specifically trying to explain the relative technological advancement of lighter-skinned people in a way that completely nullifies the notion of evolutionary advantage. I’m specifically trying to counter any notion of racial advantage. Why are you trying to flip that around to the exact opposite of what I’m saying?
The fact that they refuse to acknowledge that the skin tone part of their argument is irrelevant leads me to believe that they are being disingenuous about their motivations. You’ve clearly pointed out that climate is a sufficient explanation and that references to skin tone are unnecessary and misleading.
What are you talking about? I have multiple times clearly pointed out that climate is the explanation, and skin color is just another result of climate. I’m trying to explain a correlation, not imply causation.
Why are you trying to explain this correlation? Nobody else had mentioned skin tone, so you weren’t correcting anyone. You just brought up a completely unrelated correlation out of the blue for no reason? And you’re defending it in comment after comment instead of just saying “sorry that was a non-sequitur, my bad”.
Because it’s not a non-sequitur? The whole post is about the observed development of Western Europe. I didn’t realize no one was allowed to make comments unless they correct people, I guess I’m using outdated discussion modalities. I forgot that now we over-simplify everything to place ideas into simple, emotionally-directed groupthink boxes
All I said was the development in Western Europe was jump-started by the environmental pressures to develop the technologies that lead to it (seasonal variation, low sunlight, cold climate), and that the same environmental pressures also selects for paler skin. People like you started twisting that into some bullshit about “evolutionary racial advantage”, in comment after comment even after I repeated that that has nothing to do with my point.
Not everything has to be racially charged, but since you insist, I’m done. Bully someone else with your emotionally reductive bullshit.
People are just trying to point out why you’re getting shit my dude. You don’t want to hear it. If you want to be part of conversations in the future, learning to accept criticism is a skill you might want to work on developing.
There’s no criticism of anything I’ve said here, only a series of emotionally twisted straw men. If you want to be part of conversations, be a part of them. Don’t make up your own imaginary conversations to criticize. I’m done with your nonsense
That might be a salient point, had anyone actually engaged the argument I actually made.
I’m not mad, I’m just… disappointed. Nostalgic for rational, good faith discussion on old forums. Frustrated with the post-rational labyrinth of echo-chambers that the Internet seems to have become. Saddened by the apparent abandonment of sincere engagement in favor of sterile down votes. A bit heartbroken that maybe it was always this way and I was just young enough to ignore it, and lucky enough to find little temporary oases of respite over the years.
But not mad, certainly not mad. Mad is groupthink down votes, truth by mindless consensus, rejection of discussion. I’m just… bleh. I saw this shit at Reddit, I thought this place would be better. But I think it’s just people, I don’t think it can be any different. I’m just… kinda done. Whatever, I don’t really care anymore. Bleh.
Quite a few people engaged with your argument. If you read back through the responses with a charitable eye you might be able to see it. Those who criticized you were ultimately trying to help you get your point across to others by suggesting you drop the part of your argument that addresses white supremacist talking points. That part of your argument was distracting and largely irrelevant to the conversation, and it made people think you were attempting to covertly inject racist ideas into the discussion (a common white supremacist tactic).
If you read back through the responses with a charitable eye
made people think you were attempting to covertly inject racist ideas into the discussion
Yeah, this is the source of my disappointment, and this response is only more disappointing. You only expect nuanced, charitable perspective from one side, and that’s reasonable to you? I clarified multiple times, but some of the words look like an easily opposed argument I wasn’t making, so ignore those clarifications. Way easier to tear down an unrelated straw man than to engage with the nuanced position actually being presented.
The Internet was a mistake. I’m done with these echo chambers. Thank you for the perspective.
Did I say I only expect nuance or charitable interpretation from one side? I expect it from both, but I’m not seeing it from you. I see people largely agreeing with you but begging you to reconsider the way you frame your argument. I see you responding only to the negative and evidently not even SEEING the positive responses. You might be right that the internet isn’t a good place for you, you seem ill-equipped to handle even gentle disagreement.
My charitable interpretation was calmly clarifying. The response was “Nuh uh, you’re saying white people are racially superior and evolutionarily advantaged”. One can only talk to a brick wall so long.
Gentle disagreement I love. Straw-manning, the majority of the responses, is pointless. I have only seen one person even remotely agree, the only one who seemed to engage with my point. Everyone else is straw-manning.
The Internet is not gentle disagreement, it’s dominated by oversimplification and echo chambers. It’s toxic. I’m done talking to brick walls.
Seems to me you’re pissed off that you made a stupid argument and people called you out for it. Frankly, you came in with white supremacist talking points and you shouldn’t be surprised that people were distrustful. You got a lot more grace than you deserved from most in this thread. Not from me, admittedly, I assumed you were malicious because you didn’t seem thick. Now I think you’re just overly emotional about the whole thing and it’s clouding your perception.
You insist I’m using white supremacist talking points after I clarified several times that I wasn’t, in fact the exact opposite.
You insist that I’m mad despite clarifying several times that I’m not, and consistently using calm, rational tones.
You’re doubling down on proving my point: it’s easier to debunk the argument you wish someone made than to engage with what they actually say.
I’ve been having perfectly pleasant discussions online for 20 years. It’s a shit show now. The majority of the discussions now devolve into this same self-righteous refusal to deviate from assumptions. You continue to demonstrate this behavior . Enjoy your echo chamber.
“I have always assumed that white light-skinned people have a leg up because they’re white light-skinned.“
You’re voicing white supremacist talking points. You don’t even really debunk them in your original post. You just propose an alternative. You still haven’t explained why you felt the need to even bring this line up. Nobody was wondering about skin tone’s role in economic development. Except you I guess.
That is, they’ve lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places where you need low melanin to get sufficient vitamin D to survive. Places with low sunlight and harsh winters, which means places where failing to develop efficient agriculture, food preservation/storage, insulated shelters, and textiles meant starving or freezing to death.
I brought it up specifically to debunk white supremacy. To point out that any apparent correlation between skin tone and economic development that an actual white supremacist might claim is sufficiently explained by this coincidence. Not because of being smarter, or more industrious, or any other notion of racial superiority. Purely because of certain coincidental environmental conditions.
Not that these conditions are currently relevant, not that they’ve been relevant since the agricultural revolution, simply that those environmental pressures gave people in certain regions a head start in, specifically, the technologies that facilitated the developed West. Not all technologies, not even most. I specifically addressed the main topic of conversation of why Western Europe appears more developed.
I would imagine actual white supremacists would passionately disagree with my claim that that development is due purely to environmental coincidence and not, y’know, supremacy. And yet, thanks to knee-jerk reactions to sloppy reading comprehension, my attempt to debunk white supremacist talking points was misconstrued as support. Because it’s easier to argue against the point you want to debate then the one someone actually made.
You’re really set on trying to insist I have the exact opposite argument than I do, huh? Despite repeated explanations, and directly calling out the straw-manning, you’re just dead set on it. Despite the fact that “Western countries being developed is a quirk of environment, not the consequence of any innate superiority” is about as diametrically opposed to white supremacy as possible. Anything to validate your assumptions.
Did you forget what the entire topic of the post is?
Why are so many countries in the world “developing” and poor, while essentially only Western countries have a high standard of living?
Debunking white supremacy seems like an extremely relevant and logical response. Unless, of course, you believe that white supremacy is the explanation.
You didn’t say “Western countries being developed is a quirk of environment, not the consequence of any innate superiority” though. You said the thing I quoted above. I’m addressing the words you actually said.
Honey, I’m bored. You’re either incredibly dense or unwilling to have a straightforward discussion. I think you should stick to your plan of leaving the internet.
Then go back and read the rest of the words I actually said, instead of stopping halfway to confirm your bias so you can feel superior. You do get that selective reading is exactly the toxicity I’m talking about, right?
There’s something to say about winters leading to social orders around food storage and planning ahead, but then England didn’t really need to do that that much (it’s quite mild there, gulf stream and all) and they were the first to really start the industrialisation game. It was plain and simple pure capitalism. The Nordic countries, where those climatic conditions are very much real, are way more naturally Socdem than the Anglos.
Another geographic, not so much climatic, factor is the availability of water power: Europe is blessed with a metric fuckton of small streams large enough to build a mill on. Wheat and rye are also quite easy to deal with, you can use a scythe to harvest, etc. That meant a comparatively productive agriculture, which meant more tradespeople, traders, and with that finally a bourgeoisie which could do that capitalism and industrialisation thing and exploit the serfs harder than the nobles ever managed to do, being stuck in age-old social relations which didn’t allow for ordering people around like that. Then a ton of other small factors, including things like Luther lobbying nobles to institute public schools so that people would learn to read – so they could read the Bible, but they could of course also now read an Almanach and do some maths.
1 The middle income trap. Many countries used their cheap uneducated population as an opportunity for cheap labour, for large companies. This brings lots of capital to the country and people, and the country develops. Building more schools, infrastructure etc. but as a country develops, pay increases for workers, and suddenly their labour is no longer cheap. Their country’s economy is now effectively stuck.
2 Conflict and instability. Investors don’t want to pour money into a country where it might have a coup, leadership change, etc. They don’t want to lose what they invest, since these events usually result in lots of private property being taken or destroyed. This fact leaves a lot of countries in a catch 22. They need investment to stabilize, but need to stabilize to gain investment.
A lot of countries are also unstable because of badly drawn borders. This often leaves a lot of ethnic tensions that continue to boil away indefinitely. Sometimes the borders give a country horrible geography and incentivise them to invade their neighbors.
One example would be that country #1 is downstream of a major river, behind country #2 and #3. Country #2 and 3 use a lot of the water and there is none left for country #1 and their only option is to invade.
The final and probably most common reason is that dictators don’t care about prosperity, and that dictators lead to more dictators. Far more often than not, coups lead to another, worse dictator, focused on holding power than their country’s success.
The reason that south Korea and Taiwan are successful and democratic today are because they rolled the 1/1000 chance on a benevolent dictator that WILLINGLY steered the country into democracy and genuinely improved the economy.
There's a lot but it mainly comes down to how Europeans were more developed than the rest of the world due to their frequent wars, so when they went to colonize the world nobody stood a chance. And since colonialism and the subsequent horrible decolonization messed up those countries, we get the state of the world today.
To be more specific, colonialism basically turned affected countries into oversized plantations run by foreigners. Any political development that was already there went out the window, and of course no more could be made. Then you got decolonization, where you had countries either being fought off (like France) or packing their bags and leaving (like the British). This created massive power vacuums, and when you have power vacuums you get power struggles and dictatorships and from there we see the world's current state. On the other hand you have Botswana, where they actually had a native ruler class who could rule when the British left. They were an occupied country, not an oversized plantation, so they're virtually one of the best places to be in Africa. Also specifically in Africa colonies would have their borders drawn with no care for the relationship between the people living there, and occasionally they'd actively set them up for failure by putting rival ethnic groups together.
And of course you have neo-colonialism and shit that even now continue to hold back African development.
TL;DR: Europeans came, turned everything into a plantation, then when they left the plantation collapsed and either a dictator came or things returned to survival for the fittest which then produced war-torn dictatorships. These countries should be able to become decent countries with time, and there are many examples of that happening, but the West is still preventing it in many places. See: France in Africa, cold war-era US in Latin America.
Of course we can get into infrastructure and education and all that, but all these things have their roots in the simple fact that these countries had a horrible start (whether a civil war or a dictatorship) and in many cases had to build states from scratch, and in politics a bad start can cost you decades.
Also its created a cyclical problem. (And Im going to do a terrible job of explaining this but I hope people can grasp what I’m on about.)
Getting any kind of significant change going in a “developing” nation requires MASSIVE investment that they cant afford, which requires investment from mega-multinationals or foreign nations, who then (either rightly or not) have to tread super carefully because it looks like they are trying to buy the country by proxy, which means they dont want to make the super-mega investments because one little leadership change and a little nationalisation makes their investment worthless.
Basically you need either a super benevolent form of colonialism or super ethical capitalism to get the ball rolling without just repeating the mistakes of the past.
Due to the lack of functioning government, the mafia/corporations took over and nowadays the government is but a puppet. I send my thoughts and prayers to the Americans.
Anyone who has been to a developing country (in my case: the Philippines) vs USA will laugh at what USA citizens think of corruption.
You got Fucking assassinations paid for by Filipino government likely to cover up political rivals. Open corruption in the Police where you can just pay them to get out of parking tickets or even criminal acts. Etc etc.
Don’t be so much of a drama queen. USA is fine. There are entire countries of people trying to leave their country to enter USA to escape truly awful corruption issues. Phillipines is one corrupt example (especially if your family was politically on the wrong side of the Marcos family or whatever)
The thing is, in the US everything is 10x bigger. There’s no corrupt single cops. The whole police establishment is a huge massive overpaid problem that kills people and go one unpunished. There’s no political bickering and assassinations in the country, they do it everywhere else in the world, and still receive global forgiveness because you just can’t sanction the US. Richest country in the world and yet has the biggest share of prisoners, homeless, personal debt. Highly educated, but by far the most school shootings.
The US isn’t “fine”. You can’t see past the superficial bling because it’s a rich country. It’s a really twisted country.
The US isn’t “fine”. You can’t see past the superficial bling because it’s a rich country. It’s a really twisted country.
And that shit exists in the Philippines but is at least 100x worse. You likely don’t understand because you’ve never been to a place like that.
And note: Philippines is actually a lot better than other countries as well. Truly 3rd world countries like Congo care even less about their citizens. Such states are closer to something like a Civil War or maybe even Crime-lord / Mafia ring, where militia get military weapons from Russia or something and no one cares to listen to the official government anymore because the literal crime lords have more physical power.
Richest country in the world and yet has the biggest share of prisoners, homeless, personal debt. Highly educated, but by far the most school shootings.
USA has one of the best bankruptcy laws meaning debt isn’t actually punishing here. There’s at least schools in existence here… free schools mind you… and everyone’s allowed. There’s no segregation system or class system anymore so everyone (including women) are allowed to go through the public school system. Etc. etc. etc.
If you ever get into significant debt that you can’t pay it off? File for bankruptcy protection. That’s why the law exists, to prevent debts from becoming overly burdensome. That’s why so many citizens can enter deep debts, because we have a forgiveness system that few other countries even have.
The reason why student-loan debt gets so much attention btw, is because student loan debt is the one and only debt that cannot be protected during bankruptcy-protection.
Speaking about the police, I would also like to say that there is no police as such in developing countries.
I have never seen the police in the USA take bribes (and even if they did, it’s simply impossible to imagine, honestly, it would be funny, like in some cartoon, ahaha) and the police there, I think, really work ( True, I did not understand these subtleties).
What I also like is that any crazy suspects who try to injure other people (for example, mentally ill people) with a knife or a gun are simply shot, and they are not “coddled” with them, as happens in Europe and developing countries.
But on the other hand, there are some disadvantages: the police can shoot an innocent person, the less “criminalized” weapons are, the more shootings there will be (both among ordinary people and among police), the more power the police have (this also applies to the first point), more violence.
Also, it’s good if there are a lot of people in the country who are fine with mental health, but it seems to me that in the USA, unfortunately, they don’t attach much importance to mental health.
But in developing countries, for example, in Russia, it’s just terrible… what kind of mental health? What are you about? And what is it? Are you depressed? No, you’re just lying…
You don’t know what a developing country actually is. Iran, Syria, Russia… it’s just tough.
At any moment, someone or something could fall on you from the roof, not only sites are blocked, but VPNs are at the level of the Great Firewall of China, terrible education, medicine, basically you can’t buy anything because of sanctions, there is no justice, there is no private property, all banks, convenience store chains, Internet providers, EVERYTHING “belongs” to the state intelligence service, even food, and even of poor quality that you are afraid of either getting poisoned or dying from eating them.
Therefore, when Americans say that “the USA is a developing country,” it’s not even funny anymore, it just looks like, excuse me, a mockery for those who live in real developing countries.
By the way, in our country even the likes of McDonald’s, and in general all businesses in the country “belong” to the state mafia intelligence service (structure)…
Living in this country (and I live in Russia) you constantly live in stress, fear and panic. I have already developed some mental illnesses this way, such as C-PTSD. But I’m afraid to get treatment in this country, because, for example, you have to tell a psychologist everything, and if you say something like “Russia is committing genocide in Ukraine,” then they can simply inform on you, and then put you in prison for 15 years, and this person, who reported on you, you will not be able to see again, even when you get out of prison (because some Russians act vilely).
I, of course, followed the events in the United States and knew that under Trump you almost had a coup d’etat, and this is terrible, of course. But, frankly speaking, knowing that Trump has a suspicious biography, and he collaborates with the Russian (Putin) mafia, then if he, I want to say, becomes president, then you can really start to have the same crap as in Russia: massive and systemic human rights violations, murders of the opposition, poisoning of activists, degradation in education, science and medicine (at a minimum), political and economic instability, extreme corruption, Internet censorship, lifelong presidential terms, totalitarianism and the like…
Moreover, the US dollar is one of the most stable currencies in the world, and if Trump is elected president, it will simply be a threat to the whole world.
In this case, I am more than sure that education will decline even in developed countries, organized crime will increase around the world, not to mention democracy and private property, which will certainly not exist in the USA (if Trump is elected).
…not only was I born in a developing country, where it’s hard to find a job (or if you do get a job officially, you need to get a military ID - and this means that you either have to waste 1 year of your life or die in Ukraine , killing civilians), so they took away all the foreign services and “goodies” from me (from the age of 15 I wanted to make PayPal for myself, I waited until I was 18, then I was happy, but after 2-3 years this payment system, like Visa/MasterCard , Payoneer left our country because of the gangster-mafia Russian government; as a child I watched Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, I know, there was MTV, and a lot of other Western, interesting things…), and my family are fucking toxic narcissists, sociopaths and, I apologize, like many Russians, cynics. It’s just awful…
You probably ask me how I live? I don’t live, I survive. More precisely, I’m trying to survive, because… my narcissistic mother is not working now (because she can’t find a job in our “village”) and I’m trying, like a 21-year-old, to do something to have an income…
Again, there was an excellent opportunity to make money on the Internet, but you understand, PayPal is no longer there, everything is bad with foreign banks, there are no the same foreign payment systems, complete totalitarianism as regards (sources of) income/expenses…
…and I can’t move to another country. At first I had no money, and now I am forced to hide in the forest, because, considering that there is no private property in Russia, at any moment my door could be broken down (for which they will not pay a cent; because the courts, in in principle, not in this country), and taking me somewhere to the forest is quite possible.
It’s also bad that you want to talk to someone, express your thoughts, but again you can be turned over and go to jail, so I have to keep everything to myself :(
when Americans say that “the USA is a developing country,” it’s not even funny anymore, it just looks like, excuse me, a mockery for those who live in real developing countries.
As surprising as it may be, not everyone lives in the “good parts” of the US that they show on TV.
There are definitely parts of the country where life is similar to how you described, except with less government control.
In some parts of the country, there is no safe drinking water. In some places, you can’t even boil the water to make it safe to drink.
There is similar poverty as you described, and while there isn’t much chance of warfare of any kind, there are places where being a certain race could get you shot and/or killed if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Extractive capitalism pulls resources and wealth out of “developing” nations, leaving them poor. Power and money maintain power and money through a boot on the throat militarily and economically and by fomenting internal conflict within the “developing” nations.
Because developed countries already went through their corruption. The processes by which these countries became democracies tend to be bloody. Other countries were behind the curve, then their political and social development was frozen in time by Western colonialism.
Be careful of falling into the exceptionalist trap (my culture is special, we don’t do corruption), or the natural progress fallacy (you have to be corrupt and warmonger first, then you grow up, mature and become a stable and moral democracy, it’s the way it happens). Both are false premises that stem from cultural hegemony. There’s plenty of corruption (lobbying is a form of legal bribery too), and instability in the developed western world. The US survived a coup attempt just a few years ago. Lots of officials and politicians are caught stealing public funds every year.
The difference lies in the narrative lens. When it happens to the west it’s “a few bad apples”, or a lone bad actor. When it happens in the developing world it’s that filthy culture struggling to become as civilized and democratic as us. It’s the pure expression of neo colonialism. The real material difference is that the West has accumulated more wealth for longer. And they control the mass media machinery.
Mostly corruption and stability doesn’t allow for business to develop along with the wealth that brings.
There are other factors but mainly you need good governance and free markets to allow for wealth creation. It at least that is the only model that has worked so far.
Riches have high standarts of living. Poors have no life, they survive. “Developed” countries has more middle class than others, which are promised to be rich by rich if they help rich to get richer by stealing from poor by capitalism.
Imagine 3 people, with different amounts of wealth. 1 of them will always be richer than the other 2 by definition. There’s nothing wrong with this.
The problem comes when richest has much much more than the poorest. There’s little problem if poorest has 1 and richest has 3. There’s a huge problem if poorest has 1 and richest has 1 billion.
It’s not about how we sort countries, it’s about how wealth is distributed.
Look up ‘Elite Capture’. It’s really hard to build good institutions and keep them strong and free from corruption, and they will be under siege by special interests from day one.
It’s only my interpretation of it, so be wary. My idea is that after ww2, USA was terrified of USSR, so they did their best to avoid countries “falling” to it.
This best was of two categories: if it was an old power, feed it with all possible money, so they can can develop an industry to get all of the modern commodities (home, car, a fully equipped kitchen…) If it was a colonised or USSR friendly country, forbid all trade, and feed civil war with all means possible, so that this country stop being communist.
Then, democracy had that people had to be listened to a bit, or they would vote communist. Car industries were favoured because it can be converted into a war industry if it needs. Roads and trains are also war assets. Healthcare and food are priorities to make people happy. Education and research are priorities for any country that want to stay relevant, and these benefit from co-operation with other countries.
The way I see it, the west built solid infrastructures and invested in the people in order to fight USSR, while USSR progressively fell into an oppression that prevented these progresses. The third world countries were left alone because no side would allow them to join the other side.
Now the world is full capitalist, so no one will invest in the countries that were left behind. With less investment they progress more slowly.
I’m just curious. Considering that, for example, there is political and economic instability in RuSSia, there is no justice, RuSSia does not pay for international debts, even because of sanctions. What happens if other countries refuse to pay?