How are some countries so much more developed than others around the world?

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This seems so obvious and rude, frankly, but I don’t understand how I am able to sit in my apartment with my own food to make and job to go to when some men, women, and children are living in extreme poverty with no clean drinking water. How did this start and how did it continue to cycle to where we are now?

In: Economics

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Europeans colonized and conquered everywhere else on the planet, then subjugated all those peoples, extracted all the wealth possible from those regions/economies, scorched the Earth as they left.

Then spent all of the time from the end of the colonial era up until now continuing to extract any resources from the “third world” countries that they made third world. The US Gov’t, lobbied by fruit companies, fought innumerable wars in South America toppling legitimate governments and setting up corrupt dictatorships to drive down the prices on bananas. I’m sure there’s a comprehensive wiki article on the “Banana Republics”.

Let’s see. Diamond companies extracting and profiteering on conflict diamonds far war zones in African nations. But wait, why are there so many civil wars in African Nations? Well prior to the colonial era many defferent African ethnicities(?)/cultures lived peacefully together. Then European nations colonized Africa and to ensure their power and prevent retaliation and even to encourage cooperation from local people as the Europeans extracted slaves, they told different cultures each was better and “less”, “savage” than the other, turning long peaceful people against each other to prevent them from uniting against the Europeans and get them to capture and sell each other as slaves instead. Slavery ends, the slave trade dries up, Europeans get out of Dodge and you’ve got civil wars and ethnic cleansing between the demographics that the Europeans turned against each other hundreds of years later. And of course European corporate intrests profiting off of the valuable resources in conflict zones. Watch Blood Diamond for Hollywood it’s pretty decent. Also I’m sure theres a great wiki hole to crawl down about this.

Omar Ghadafi was installed in Libya by the CIA so we could set the prices we wanted on that sweet sweet Libyan oil. It’s a matter of publicly known fact that half his generals were trained at US military academies. Why would a foreign dictator’s army be trained by the US? Because he was OUR dictator. It’s just a miracle that Obama was president when the rebellion against Ghadafi began. Obama told him to step down which is an insanely ethical thing for a us president to do. I gurantee you if George Bush was president at the time we would have been sending troops to support the “legitimately elected democratic leader of Libya” against the “communist hippy terrorist rebels”.

Iraq: wasn’t in too great a shape before but just to make sure we launched a preemptive “defensive invasion”???¿?¿¿ and fucked it up more than Hussein ever could’ve dreamed of. And whadayaknow now Western oil companies own all the rights to all the Iraqi oil 🤷🤷🤷

Watch Vice. Again. It’s Hollywood. But it’s not entirely wrong either.

Google pictures of Iran in the 60s, looked just like America. Now look at it. That’s because the CIA assassinated an Iranian president to install it’s own puppet government… And then failed at that last part leaving it to be taken over by religious extremists.

This is all the POST colonialism/slavery stuff.

Oh! Here’s a good one! Haiti!

The only slaving nation to have a successful slave revolt that ousted the Europeans and left the slaves in charge of the who country. Do you know why it’s cripplingly impoverished now? Because all the western nations including the US punished it economically for over a hundred years for overthrowing the whites. Period.

In short the answer to your question is that we’re as well off as we are because during the colonial era western nations conquered the entire planet and destroyed everything they touched to enrich themselves.

Then after colonialism made Europe/US the richest most powerful countries in the world they all continued to hold down all the others I’m every other way they could and are still doing all of that right now.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A variety of factors but mainly imperialism and availability of resources.

Imperialism: Most developed countries got that way by exploiting other countries, like for example African people stolen to work as slaves in America. This also applies to valuable resources like oil as much as people (see the middle east.

Availability of resources: certain places (for example Papua New Guinea) have a scarcity of things like good farmland or wood/stone to build with and any culture that struggles for survival doesn’t really have time or resources to innovate, even if there’s very smart people in that culture.

Anonymous 0 Comments

All European and East Asian countries without a history of communism are developed. Capitalism plus high-IQ genes equals wealth.

Correlation between genes and IQ:

[https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-between-EDU-PGS-gnomAD-and-population-IQ_fig5_332076417](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Correlation-between-EDU-PGS-gnomAD-and-population-IQ_fig5_332076417)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Because they keep reproducing at an alarming rate.

Imagine if every woman in the U.S had 5 children. How would we sustain that?

Anonymous 0 Comments

One point that people haven’t talked about yet is foreign investment in natural resources. It seems like having a lot of natural resources like gold or oil would be good for a country, but it’s actually quite bad for most of its citizens. You don’t need to be educated or all that healthy to work a mine, so the government doesn’t bother with those things and instead keeps the money for itself. You do need educated people to *run* the mine, and to develop the equipment for it, but you can get that from foreign countries.

The government only wants to spend money on it’s citizens when it helps the government. Singapore has great government support and a high standard of living because it has nothing to offer except intellectual goods. So people there have to be educated and healthy. Venezuela has a ton of oil, so people there only need to be educated and healthy enough to work the oil wells. In fact, the government wants to prevent education and development, because that would pose a threat to those in power

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of good explanations here. I’d like to add that the book [*Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies*](https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393354326/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Guns%2C+Germs%2C+and+Steel&qid=1569179710&s=books&sr=1-1) addresses this question very well, too. (With the caveat that some people have issues with the author’s conclusions or methods, but I think it’s a good book.)

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your question is the fundamental question in a whole subfield of economics known, appropriately, as Development Economics. This alone should tell you that it doesn’t have a simple answer, and very smart people can have lots of disagreements about how to answer it.

Other answers in this thread have given a lot of the historical perspective, which is important, but one thing we know for certain now is that even if economic development happened slowly initially, it now has the potential to happen very very fast. The explosive economic growth of South Korea (in the *post* Colonial era) is a great example. This is good because it doesn’t mean that poor countries are just victims of a bad history and are forever doomed to lag hundreds of years behind rich countries. However, we’re still not sure entirely why some countries have developed so quickly while others have stagnated, and outside efforts to spark development have a tendency to fail or even backfire.

The theory that I am partial to is that *institutions* matter a lot. People won’t make the necessary investments (in buildings and machinery, but especially in themselves) for a developed economy if they have no guarantee that the government will help them protect those resources. If there’s a significant threat that others can strong-arm you out of the fruits of your labor because they have more economic/political/military power, it doesn’t pay to build anything. I like this explanation because it simultaneously explains why some societies have a much easier time of industrializing and why it can be so hard (especially for outsiders) to induce development in certain environments.

Anonymous 0 Comments

A lot of ahistorical nonsense being peddled here. Please ignore anyone talking about ‘colonization’ – the European nations were already more productive per capita when the Age of Colonization began (which is why they colonized foreign lands rather than the reverse).

The actual reason is that they had the right resources and the right culture at the time to develop further. Other places were either too unstable, too stable (stultifying) or lacking in necessary resources.

In terms of why inequality persists, perhaps the best way to understand this is to consider building an automobile.

Automobile production is a complex process, requiring strong general infrastructure and many tiers of skilled labor. As a result, it is linked with nations that can provide all of that.

But let’s say you’re not one of those nations and want to build your own cars. Where is the incentive to do so when you can simply buy a car from a nation that already has those features? The result is that developing nations tend to *stay* developing – because it’s always more expensive to do it themselves than have others do it for them.