[kgbcia]

Good read, sent it to my Kindle. It was the CIA who messed up that country in the modern era. Glad they found oil and now have insane GDP growth. Hope they don't ruin the Amazon rainforest nearby. Hope the racial tensions ease down and infrastructure is built up, so I can visit one day.

[blackhawkC17]

> Glad they found oil and now have insane GDP growth.

Guyana has weak political institutions and high corruption & tribalism. It’s more likely to become a poor resource-cursed nation than a successful one.

I truly hope this isn’t the case, but if history teaches us a lesson..

[PittleyDunkin]

What country on earth is strong on protection from corruption and tribalism? Point out the country and I'll point out the nature of the above.

[blackhawkC17]

No country is 100% immune to it. But some countries have developed systems to tame the effects as much as possible.

Examples are most of Western Europe, the U.S., and Canada. There’s a clear correlation between low corruption and high economic development.

[PittleyDunkin]

I can't speak to western europe, but the clear devotion the US and Canada have to capital makes this difficult to buy as a general difference. I suspect the distinction in corruption between the west and the rest of the world must come from a working person's perspective.

And I would love to hear from any non-westerners here as I suspect it's impossible to get a meaningful evaluation from the west.

[blackhawkC17]

I’m a non-Westerner (Nigerian in particular). Corruption in developing/underdeveloped countries is extremely worse than in developed countries.

My country is a fitting example. Most citizens (of all classes) don’t pay taxes, people pay petty bribes to violate laws, government officers request for bribes to carry out mundane activities like getting a driver’s license or passport, and citizens are happy to oblige.

Everyone wants to bypass the law and feel smart, not realizing that it makes the whole system terrible and everyone poorer in the long run (people generally don’t want to make long-term capital investments in corrupt countries, so that’s why most of Africa struggles to get foreign investment).

This kind of petty corruption is hard to explain to a Westerner who hasn’t experienced it. And it’s no surprise that corruption is keeping African nations (and many nations from other continents) behind.

[PittleyDunkin]

I appreciate your comment. I presume you prefer the west (at least in terms of political and economic stability) to your home country from your comment. Do you have any concerns about how capital openly purchases the interests of politicians in the us? I guess I had written off the difference in citizen comfort to the mountains of cash americans roll around on.

[Affric]

Count up the number of bribes you have had to pay as a normal working person in the west.

Places with big corruption problems have people demanding bribes at every turn.

[throaway915]

Canada is fantastically corrupt, just not at the ground-level

[PittleyDunkin]

That's what I'm saying—corruption looks different in different places but society still bends towards the cash

[aziaziazi]

You right corruption happen in 100% countries at a level or another.

GP says that looking at history, oil in a country soil seems correlated with more corruption.

I a way, you could see oil as a curse. I bet some locals does, I would if I’d face the political, societal and environmental drawbacks without much benefits.

[PoignardAzur]

The glib answer would be Singapore.

[sghiassy]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

It’s unfortunately not that simple for poor countries to benefit from resources

[DenseComet]

What method do you use to send articles like this to your kindle?

[RMPR]

Not OP but converting the page to PDF in reading mode (with Firefox) then using Amazon's sendtokindle[0] feature yielded decent results. Now I just use an e-reader that can read PDFs natively.

0: https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/