[cryptonector]

Other resource-rich countries haven't fared as well. Indeed, it is a truism that the more natural resources, the worse a country performs economically. Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others) while a bunch of resource-rich countries have done poorly or terribly (Brazil, Argentina, all of Africa, India, Russia, and others).

It's what you do with the stuff that matters.

If what was done in the U.S. is plunder, then what is it that you say is happening in "the Middle East, Latin America and Africa"? Be consistent.

[HumbleGamer]

Well, should we consider some of the underlying factors for why African nations in particular are doing terribly? Seems the 1885 Berlin treaty set that continent back for at least a few centuries, the effects of which are still causing havok to this day.

[cryptonector]

See my replies below. There are certainly countries that did well in spite of plunder. And countries that reverted from wealthy to poverty with no plunder in sight.

Ideas matter.

[jalayir]

India is hardly resource rich. Especially not per-capita.

[jogjayr]

And, all things considered, India's hardly done "terribly".

It's a remarkable achievement to maintain a united, democratic, mostly peaceful nation for 70 years straight (and counting). Most former colonies collapsed into destructive civil war, then military rule, within decades of independence. India has so far avoided that fate. Heck, most developed European countries have barely managed to avoid it in the past century.

India has as much (probably more than) linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious variety as the European continent, far lower levels of education, absurd amounts of competition for resources, education, and jobs due to population pressure. All of those things are potential triggers for conflict and civil war.

I can't comment about other countries that may or may not have lived up to their economic potential (Brazil, Argentina, Russia etc) because I know next to nothing about them. But India is doing terrifically well, considering the hand we were dealt.

[notfromhere]

The colonies that fell apart we're ones where there wasn't much organization and what organization existed was for resource extraction.

The Dominions were built for settlement, so they were sustainable states. India and other Asian colonies already had their own very established cultures and civilizations, and hence fared much better.

Pretty remarkable India hasn't exploded into separatism due to resource pressure, but I don't know how sustainable that is given that the population is still increasing

[cryptonector]

India has done very well in one sense: it's still a democracy!

And it's growing quite fast nowadays.

But in the time since independence it's hardly done very well at all -- certainly not in relation to its full potential!

[jogjayr]

It's hard to compare India to any other country except for China. No other nation is of a comparable size. It's all well and good to say "well Japan, South Korea, Singapore did great after being devastated by war and depression and famine". Just like software, scale matters for national development.

Japan post-war still had the relative advantages of having been an advanced industrial nation pre-war, with all that that entails: educated population, knowledge of how to run industry and finance, culture of industrial entrepreneurship etc. Plus it got tons of help from the US getting back to its feet. Ditto for South Korea; US help to keep them from falling over to the Communists. Both nations are also relatively homogenous ethnically, religiously, and culturally.

Singapore is tiny: a city-state. It's half the population of metropolitan Mumbai and has 1/3rd higher GDP. If Mumbai was an independent city-state with immigration controls, we'd likely be talking about it as an up-and-coming Asian tiger.

I'm not downplaying any of these countries' achievements. They are tremendous and they've done very well for themselves. I'm just pointing out the context of their achievements and how that doesn't apply to India.

I think it's impossible to say India hasn't lived up to its full potential because we can't run history backward and forward like a simulation, change a thing here (eg. make India a liberal free-market economy in the 60s instead of a closed, socialist one) and see the difference. China is doing great now but they had to go through the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution on the way there. India is doing not-as-well but at least millions didn't die.

[manojlds]

And in context of parent comment, India was plundered by the British.

[cryptonector]

Plunder is a silly excuse. Whatever plunder, it's been over for a long time. A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea. Argentina (then reverted -- what foreign power plundered them from the 50s onward, eh?!). The U.S., naturally. And others.

China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.

Stop making excuses.

Incidentally, Argentina is a hugely important case-study. It was never really plundered. Its history has tremendous parallels to the United States', oddly enough. It had a tremendous growth between the 1880s and the Great Depression, and grew to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world at the time of WWII. Yet somehow it has missed out on decades of growth potential, and is now full of shanty towns, with a huge proportion of the population in true poverty (not what we call poverty in the U.S.). HOW IN THE WORLD DID THAT HAPPEN?! There were no significant wars in Argentina since its peak. There has been no foreign power plunder in Argentina in that time. The make-up of the population didn't change much. So what happened?? Well, it's easy to see what happened there: bad ideas.

"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.

[jogjayr]

> Plunder is a silly excuse.

It's really isn't. "Colonial plunder" isn't a horde of soldiers rampaging through your country taking your gold and women. Colonial plunder is generations upon generations of domestic industry killed by high taxes to favor imports from the ruling country, turning peasants into serfs bonded to the land to pay taxes, exploiting and inflaming pre-existing class, caste, and religious differences time and time again to keep the people from uniting against the rulers. People (at large; there are outliers) stop getting an education or starting any business larger than a shop because what's the point? The financial system doesn't grow beyond small moneylenders. People become bitter and try to keep the little they have from their grasping neighbors, everyone fighting over the few crumbs the ruling country throws you. For hundreds of years.

> A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.

As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?

> China is the latest: from the depths of the Great Leap Forward (backward) to now. And that's even though China too was plundered. That's a huge "so what" to the plunder thing.

Incontestably true; India hasn't done as well as China. China still isn't quite a developed country yet and India is maybe 20 years behind China. I don't think it's a great shame to come second to China. Their political system has always optimized for getting things done no matter the cost. India went a different, maybe softer, way. Probably not even deliberately, I'll admit.

To this day it saddens me when middle-class, educated, relatively well-off Indians say things like "I wish we had a government like China's so our roads won't have potholes anymore".

[cryptonector]

I don't think colonial plunder remotely explains Latin America. Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy? (Incidentally, the degree of "colonial plunder" in Latin America varies a great deal, from genocidal in Mexico, to practically none in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, but economic performance of the entire region has been lackluster, with the exception of Argentina between the 1880s and the 1930s.)

You're not entirely wrong about the impact of plunder being many generations-long, because, for example, Paraguay's bad performance almost certainly goes back (at least in part) to the ruinous Triple Alliance War, way, way back in the 1870s (in that war Paraguay lost almost all its males aged 12-60). But it doesn't have to be like that, and it isn't always. If it had to be like that then Europe might never have risen again after WWI or WWII, yet there it is. South Korea wouldn't have risen after Japan's occupation of it. China wouldn't either after the Japanese war, or the Opium wars.

> > A lot of countries have managed to grow very fast from abject poverty to first-world status. Japan. South Korea.

> As I mentioned in my reply to your other comment, they are much smaller, and had plenty of help from the US. Do you have any other examples?

Sure. I mentioned Argentina in another post, which grew fabulously fast between the 1880s and the Great Depression. China, of course, I mentioned above. Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina, Japan, Japan and Germany again, South Korea, China. I'm probably missing a few. Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).

As for China, it's certainly on the cusp of first-world status. They have... a lot of bad ideas weighing them down though. The SOEs, for example, and the state-owned banks and their terrible lending practices, financial repression, unbelievable malinvestment following the 2008 crisis, unresponsive government, corruption, pollution, and so on. These bad ideas could easily sink China just as a very different set of bad ideas sank Argentina.

My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit. Peronism (Argentina) falls into the 'bad' category, while Maoism (China) falls into the 'terrible' category. Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either (please don't blame Belgium's genocides in Congo on capitalism; that's a very lame and boring argument).

To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed. The difference between Mao's and Xiaoping's China is so stark that it is impossible not to see it as the difference between awful ideas on one hand and at-least-OKish ideas on the other.

The Argentina/China examples cannot be explained otherwise than above, or at least I've not seen alternative explanations -- none! not even unbelievable ones, or at least I don't recall any. China is certainly a counter-example to the plunder-explains-it-all theory. Though I expect that you'll tell me that the plunder of China was minimal in proportion to its population (but recall that the famines of the Great Leap Forward were not minimal that way!). At the end of the day, good ideas can lift a nation from a poor history, or they can sink it from a great history -- this much should be clear, and if that's true, then plunder is no excuse, or not enough of an excuse anyways.

This debate about the impact of plunder reminds me too of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Prussia won that, and imposed what it thought would be crushing reparations on France, which it intended to use to improve the wealth of the German people. But it didn't work. France managed to borrow what it needed to pay those reparations, underwent very fast growth, and paid off its debt in just a few years, all the while Germany under-performed. One might call what Prussia did "plunder" (is it not?), yet it failed, just as the Versailles reparations in the other direction after WWI had the same exact effect, but reversed because the reparations direction reversed too. Plunder is not the explanation that you think it is -- it can be in specific cases, but may not even be a good rule of thumb.

[jogjayr]

> Also, why aren't plunderer Spain and Portugal super-wealthy?

Well they're not exactly poor either. They're still considered first-world, advanced nations. And they've had some "bad ideas" like, military rule, since the end of colonialism. Seems like their past plunder has insulated them somewhat from these missteps.

> Since the Industrial Revolution I think we've had these amazing growth stories: UK, US, Germany, Argentina...Many others had less spectacular but steady growth rates (think Australia, Canada, France, ...).

Right but the thing all these countries have in common: they weren't under the colonial yoke during the Industrial Revolution like India was (Argentina attained independence in 1816, for example). India wasn't allowed to have an Industrial Revolution; it was suppressed by British tax and trade policies. Don't you think that's at least a partial explanation for why India's behind today?

Post WW2 Japan, Germany don't count: they still had most of their pre-war population and memory of being a prosperous society. South Korea benefited from generous US aid (and still does, in terms of military aid). The US was highly incentivized to help SK as much as possible because they feared it turning communist. India, at the time of Independence, hadn't been a prosperous nation for at least 200 years; the educated, skilled class was tiny.

> Capitalism inarguably is at least neither bad nor terrible -- I would argue it's awesome, and that it's not even an idea, but rather what results when you have freedom (which _is_ an idea, and a very good one at that), but I'm willing to let you have the last word (for this post's threads anyways) to the contrary provided you're willing to tell me how it is worse than Peronism or Maoism, or even just comparable to either

I'm with you all the way there. I never contested the benefits of capitalism for a country; it has a much better track record than Peronism or Maoism. The evidence shows it's been great for poverty reduction. But, and I keep coming back to this, India didn't have the opportunity to determine its own economic policy until only 70 years ago. And we ended up with a socialist for our first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Arguably he earned the right to be the Prime Minister by being the most prominent freedom struggle leader after Mahatma Gandhi and he was accordingly popular, no matter his economic policies. You can't legislate for randomness like that.

> My thesis here is that some ideas are bad, and some are _terrible_, and others are at least not bad enough to crush the human creative spirit.

To me it seems like there's two ways for good ideas to take hold: the people have the freedom to choose their leaders, can recognize good ideas and choose accordingly, or the government isn't democratic but the leadership is "enlightened" and focused on national development over personal enrichment (or at least makes development a priority).

In India's case it had a government focused on enriching Britain till 1947. Afterwards voters simply voted for the most popular guy (sort of like George Washington) who happened to be a socialist who espoused five-year plans and centrally-planned growth. Remember, at the time, those ideas hadn't been completely discredited. And this may be slightly controversial but, lacking any sort of democratic or political culture, and having a low level of education on average, voters may simply not have known "good" ideas from "bad". As a counterpoint, he US didn't initially have universal suffrage: only white property-owning males could vote. This, while unfair, ensured that voters were educated, somewhat prosperous, and invested in growth rather than populist handouts. Whereas by the time India attained independence, universal suffrage was expected of any democracy.

Also an important factor: the nation isn't acted upon by negative external forces. Chile, Argentina, Guatemala (to name just 3 South American underachievers) have suffered from foreign countries (I won't name which ones but it's easy to find on Wikipedia) financing military coups and assassinations against socialist leaders and socialist governments. You can argue all you want that a socialist government isn't good for growth but any democratically-elected government has more legitimacy than a military junta.

There's so many factors that can blunt the impact of good ideas or ensure they never take root.

> To me all of this is blindingly obvious. Again, the Argentine example is instructive, as it is one of the fantastic growth stories, but one that ended poorly when bad ideas were applied. China is another great example, with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being calamitous, with the rape of Nanking and the Opium wars not all that far in the past, yet it rose up when Deng Xiaoping put an end to the Maoist nonsense and brought a good enough measure of individual freedom (at least to trade) back into the picture, and then China bloomed.

And what I'm saying is history is far more random than that. What if Mao had been replaced by someone with even worse ideas? What if they'd gone to a liberal democracy immediately rather than a government laser-focused on development at the cost of everything else?

[boomboomsubban]

>Some of the wealthiest countries are deprived of natural resources (Israel, Singapore, Monaco, and others)

Not exactly great examples. All three contain excellent natural resources, ports on major trading routes, that drive or drove their economy.

[cryptonector]

That's not oil, land, water, etc. By your definition almost every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.

Lots of other countries have strategic trading locations: Malaysia, Indonesia, India, South Africa, Argentina (well, not since the Panama canal, I guess), Egypt, Saudi, Iran, and so on.

Maybe, just maybe, ideas matter?

"People, ideas, materiel. In that order!" - John Boyd, COL, USAF.

[boomboomsubban]

>By your definition alm every country has tons of natural resources, and yet results are so disparate.

Not really, being the easternmost port on the Mediterranean and southernmost point of Asia are fairly special things. Add in the almost city-state nature of those examples, and they do noting to prove your point.