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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Most advanced civilization was invented by the British and Americans, some by a few other Western Europeans. That didn’t stop plenty of other countries borrowing the technology to start their own industrial and technological revolutions. China didn’t need to invent the car, or the computer, or laundry detergent to use those things. “On their own” isn’t a standard we apply to other modern civilizations.

Sure, African countries are less functional and developed than the West, but many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity. It seems ridiculous pessimistic to think things will never improve. Most African countries are far from being Haiti.

developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built,

1.1% real growth per year is anemic: https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/reimagining-economic-growth-in-africa-turning-diversity-into-opportunity

Yes because some countries have extremely high birth rates and highly dysfunctional societies with no real economy to speak of, and that hugely distorts per capita growth figures. If you look on a per country level (as the very article you link says) there are many success stories.

TFR is falling in Africa, this means share of working age people increases. If two societies, one where share of working age people increases and another where share of working age people decreases (due to TFR at flat bottom) have same % of GDP per capita growth, what does that tell you?

many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity.

Man I want to believe this but I just don't. It happens every once in a while but as far as I can tell it's only ever cyclical. The country getting out of a low-trust hole can only do it for 10-15 years before the next coup based on tribal lines.

You can't even read the Africa section of the economist regularly without losing your mind. There's such a constant background simmering of rape, mass murder, and corruption going on at some level on that continent it's just impossible to fathom.

I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".

Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well

You could have said this about Europe as well. What did the Welsh have to do with the Scottish or English? People in Provence, Brittany, and Isle-de-France didn't even speak the same languages. Italian only coalesced as a basically-uniform and mutually-intelligible language in the last couple hundred years, and at the time of the discovery of the New World there was no "Spain", but instead "the Spains" because they were a bunch of fiercely-independent kingdoms with their own privileges and rivalries, bound together through fragile personal unions. Prussians, Brunswickers, Saxons, Badeners, and Bavarians didn't have much in common. Russia is a giant, multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire, and even today eastern/south-eastern europe don't match ethnic and national borders well - they certainly didn't back in the bad old days of the great Habsburg empires.

Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power.

Up until the late 19th century, just about every significant country in Europe was some type of monarchy (i.e. dictatorship), mediated by local elites (as is the case in Africa as well). How did they escape this seemingly-impossible corruption trap?

Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.

Even more recently there's been a bunch of ex-dictatorships emerging into strong market economies without much outside influence. Most of the Asian Tigers would be closer to facist than anything else. Spain, etc.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa. After contact with the Westerners, Japan got its act together, modernized, and repulsed their attempts at colonization. It took China longer but they managed too. Africa is older than those places and has had Western contact as long, and is not doing as well. Not even close.

Writing was independently invented in three or four places. None of them were in sub-Saharan Africa.

None of them were in Western Europe either.

Western Europeans are largely descended from people in one or two of those places, however.

Europeans spread literacy quickly, Africa didn't. Also Europeans didn't invent writing, but getting separate characters for vowels and consonants, written in sequential fashion, is almost as large step as getting writing at all. E.g. Aztec phonetic writing was so bad that they preferred pictography to it.

The alphabet was invented by Phoenicians though, not by Europeans. Africans also seem to be creating plenty of new writing systems these days, at least a few of which are spreading rapidly online, so maybe whatever was holding them back on this front has been at least partially resolved.

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