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by eru 163 days ago
Division of labour is a good thing. It's why we are rich today.
3 comments

That's a stretch. One can hold the view that division of labour is a useful economical principle, but also that oligopolies represent a dangerous concentration of power.
What oligopolies?
Well, it’s either a that, or we took a bunch of resources from all over the world by force. Maybe a bit of both?
Who took resources by force?

For comparison, Ireland is amongst the richest places in Europe these days, and they never colonised anyone. They used to be colonised.

I’m talking about my home, the dear old US of A. And every other western country besides Ireland to a greater or lesser extent.
If that were true, you'd expect some correlation between amount of colonisation done in the past, and wealth today.

(And even more, you'd expect to see a causal connection. So you'd need to exclude the alternative explanation that rich countries engage in a bit of colonisation as a rich man's hobby. And there's plenty of other correlations without causation.)

We could run a formal statistical analysis. But just have a look at Portugal and Spain. They ran extensive colonial empires, but aren't exactly rich these days. Germany and the Nordic countries were rather less involved in colonies, and are rather rich.

Russia ran and runs an extensive colonial empire, and they are comparatively poor (and we know that what wealth they have comes from oil and gas).

The Netherlands ran a big colonial empire and they are rich.

> I’m talking about my home, the dear old US of A.

The core of what became the US was already rich before they even stopped being colonies, and long before they had any colonies of their own.

where "we" is bezos

meanwhile my local highstreet is essentially dead