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:
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Colonization
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Resources (natural and otherwise)
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Schooling, education, etc.
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Stability, politically and otherwise (note this will have overlap with colonial and non-colonial powers destabilizing things intentionally for geopolitical gain)
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Infrastructure (transportation, economic, water, medical, etc.)
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Medicine as regionally practiced, traditional vs based on the the scientific method.
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Geopolitics (isolationism, etc)
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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)
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Religion
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Corruption (politically and non politically)
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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.
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.
You wrote all that, and didn’t mention the main reason, which is debt
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).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
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).
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/latin-american-debt-crisis
Quoting myself here…
Here are some topics but NOT an exhaustive list:
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.
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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.
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.
Is it all culture or not?
Is it all culture or 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.
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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
whitelight-skinned people have a leg up because they’rewhitelight-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-
whitelight-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.
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.
The “Western” countries pillaged the rest of the world for centuries.
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.
It’s true, former British colony The United States is still a developing country for this very reason.
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.
Uhhhhh.
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)
Don’t be so much of a drama queen. USA is fine.
Better than some places? Sure I’ll grant you that.
Fine? Absolutely not.
Horrific levels of violence, 22% of the worlds prison population, massive drug abuse issues and a failing health care system.
I don’t know a single person from Australia who is remotely interested in immigrating to the US, while I know plenty of Americans keen to live here.
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.
Dude. No one said the US is worse than the Philippines. But the US is still not fine.
This is literally a topic about poor, destabilized countries.
The Philippines is far more on-topic than USA here. Philippines in fact might be too rich / developing compared to many even worse-off countries.
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…
HAHAHA.
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).
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.
I understand you, but still calling the USA a third world country is too much
I agree. The entire USA is not a third-world country.
Still, some people in the USA are living like those in third-world countries.
…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 :(
I’m sorry for my English. I translated a few sentences through translator
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.
ethical capitalism
:D
Ethical in the sense of developing a functional economy you can bleed in the long term as opposed to short term cut-throat exploitation.
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.
Why then is there not such corruption in developed countries as in developing countries? Is it a matter of culture?
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
Because you need a middle class to have a high standard of living.
And you can’t have a middle class when your culture has internalized class oppression that tells you to never question your superiors.
I think it is because of population vs resources allocated per person. When a nation is developing it is still trying to catch up with the high number of population it can service, but with little resource it can utilize or there is but not yet utilize. It has no choice but to cut corners in turn lower standard of education, health, social services, housing and unutilize laws. This in turn having some or majority of the people receiving less and some none at all. This makes them vulnerable to bad influence and bad decision e.g. vote buying, rebellion. They cannot participate in the nation building process in a right mind since they are trying to survive. Anyways, I’m probably just talking bullshit. To be fair not all Western nations have high standard of living e.g. some nations in eastern Europe.
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.
I think a big factor is the western labour movement wrestling away some of the prosperity created by the industrial revolution. Developing nations have profitable industries but the wealth doesn’t make it’s way down to the average citizen because they haven’t forced it to happen. The small minority of people who do profit from dirt cheap labour are quite happy for things to stay that way indefinitely, and so it does, because they are the ones who hold political and financial power.
