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by temujin
3920 days ago
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* Just within the last 50 years, we've made a ton of progress on this "impossible problem". By any reasonable measure, global poverty has been cut by at least half. Keep in mind that both China and India each still have larger populations than the entire continent of Africa, and that the median Chinese and the median Indian were not in significantly better shape than the median African 50 years ago. Furthermore, some African leaders, most notably Rwanda's Paul Kagame, are now achieving some success at adapting Asian development patterns to their own conditions. * Taiwan and South Korea did not need draconian one child policies, or any other form of population control, to become prosperous. And they've gotten much further than China. Of all the lessons you could draw from East Asia's rise, "copy the one child policy" is close to the most nonsensical. I won't deny the obvious fact that you can't sustainably have each generation be 5 times larger than the previous one, but we have tons of data points indicating that women's education, and other things you'd want to do anyway to facilitate economic development, happen to solve the "unsustainable fertility rate" problem as a side effect, and the causal mechanisms are fairly well understood (when women are permitted to do other things with their lives than serve as full-time brood mares, most of them take advantage of the additional options...). |
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The overwhelming majority of that progress comes from replacing an evil, murderous, and incompetent dictatorship in the world's largest nation with a decent dictatorship. One faction, led at enormous personal danger by Deng Hsiaoping, replaced the preferred successors of Mao with ordinary dictators that wanted to rule a prosperous middle income country instead of a disaster area.
All the other progress in the world is small in comparison and we aren't going to see China rescued from sociopathic communism again.
There has been progress in SE Asia and India and Latin America and even some post-post-colonial recovery in Africa. There isn't that much grinding poverty in Latin America to alleviate anymore and SE Asia is getting there. But that leave the most intractable problems to deal with.
India and Africa have enormous birth rates, populations that have proven resistant to education, and local politics unfriendly to economic growth. Latin America and China brought down birth rates and raised educational achievement quickly as soon as their governments allowed it, but India and Africa have tried and the people aren't taking to either.
There are some encouraging places like Tamil Nadu and Botswana, but there are diminishing returns in development as in any industry. It gets harder and harder to grow economies once you've done the easy cases like China and Korea.
And because of birthrates, the hard cases just become a larger and larger problem. Two thirds of mankind will be Sub-Saharan African and Indian/Pakistani by 2100 according to the most optimistic projections. Will they still be grindingly poor? I hope not. Still there's no clear road from today to a decent future for most of mankind.