[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?