You’re going to get a LOT of reductive and low effort answers from Lemmy radicals. But this is a super complex question, and there’s not a 5-second ELI5 answer if you really want to understand.
Also, when the radicals scream at you, there’s going to be a core of truth. They’re going to yell about colonization and empires. That’s a major factor, but not an exclusive one. However, for getting radical and rabidly furious its all they’ll bother posting to you.
Things to investigate, because answering this for yourself in a meaningful way is going to take a while and require study. Here are some topics but NOT an exhaustive list:
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Colonization
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Resources (natural and otherwise)
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Schooling, education, etc.
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Stability, politically and otherwise (note this will have overlap with colonial and non-colonial powers destabilizing things intentionally for geopolitical gain)
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Infrastructure (transportation, economic, water, medical, etc.)
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Medicine as regionally practiced, traditional vs based on the the scientific method.
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Geopolitics (isolationism, etc)
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Geography (i.e. the US’s greatest asset is its location, it neighbors no enemies and its main enemies are separated by an ocean. One of the key reasons the US focuses on the ability to project force)
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Religion
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Corruption (politically and non politically)
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Crime and non-military/nation based violence (also could get grouped under personal safety and security)
And again, honestly, a lot of these topics will overlap, but that’s what I mean by there isn’t a quick, easy answer.
And the reductive stupid answer is just yelling colonialism.
There’s a reason people get PhDs in this subject. It’s not a quick, easy question.
Actually, you’re just reducing complex issue of exercising power over other countries to “colonialism” than trying to criticize people correctly recognizing this issue as “radicals”. Most of what you listed can be directly linked to western countries destabilizing other regions by military or covert actions, installing puppet governments, using their influence to steal resources and keeping other economies in check so that they don’t develop into competitors. No one thinks that it’s all because some country was a colony 200 years ago. Western influence never really ended in most of those countries and that’s what is keeping them down.
And the reductive stupid answer is just yelling colonialism.
Most of those reasons, that are very real, are explicitly derived of colonialism.
For instance:
- 2 (resources) is the cause that the US promotes puppet right-wing governments or directly destroys countries to pillage them.
- 3 (education) is systematically destroyed in many countries because they want to make public education disappear so it’s for profit. Again, following the US model and most likely benefiting US companies (for instance “educational” campaigns to teach proprietary products created by US companies, e.g. Microsoft)
- 4 (stability) is directly threatened by the US foreign policy of destroying every country that is ideologically or economically inconvenient for the unimpeded proliferation of unbridled, savage capitalism.
- 6: in many developing countries public health has been destroyed to follow for-profit schemes based in the US model, to benefit either US companies or US-backed right-wing politicians.
- 11: Crime is worst in countries reduces to poverty, in many cases by US-backed lending policies sending countries into misery.
All this, of course, is supported by years of colonial teachings after which the people in the “developing” countries despise themselves and look up to the powerful countries as inherently superior, even morally.
Not just the US. Cambridge Analytica is trying to manipulate our politics through scummy means such as misinformation campaigns. And our country is being fucked by the effects of Climate Change while western countries are celebrating because “it’s more sunny and warm now! :D”, and “finally more viable real estate!”
Many of the issues CAN be and are linked to colonialism, reread what I wrote.
Yes, your points are pertinent and support problems that colonialism is relevant to, I did not claim otherwise.
However, you’re clearly focused on negatives and crimes (in many cases rightfully so) the US has caused. But the question wasn’t exclusive to the US and is not exclusive to the US.
For the OPs question, trying to exclusively link everything to or overstate the colonial influence is an example of what I was saying as well.
It’s comforting to pretend that we just say one word “colonialism” and think that now we’re experts on the subject. But there’s so much more than colonialism, which again is a big factor (the first I listed), and overemphasis of it while disregarding the other real issues and nuances is counterproductive to learning.
Many of these issues can be also be related to the fact that the citizens of powerful countries are entitled assholes who vote their countries to continue the exploitation of other countries.
Your membership in one of those citizen groups is, of course, completely conjectural, but I have a strong opinion about it.
Colonialism has done really bad things in the African and Middle Eastern continent. When they withdrew they irresponsibly drew the borders and now civil wars happen all the fucking time
I’m not convinced, considering the US and many other countries with high standard of living are also leading the world in external debt (both total and per capita).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_external_debt
Maybe you mean debt to GDP+wealth ratio? Or more specifically, bad credit with international banks.
I’m not an economist though, so I’d be curious to hear if there is more explanation for why you consider debt to be “the main reason.”
I am aware that some countries have been “screwed over” by large banks that had specific detrimental stipulations for debt forgiveness though. For example, look at the Latin American Debt Crisis.
…the Fed convened an emergency meeting of central bankers from around the world to provide a bridge loan to Mexico. Fed officials also encouraged US banks to participate in a program to reschedule Mexico’s loans (Aggarwal 2000). As the crisis spread beyond Mexico, the United States took the lead in organizing an “international lender of last resort,” a cooperative rescue effort among commercial banks, central banks, and the IMF. Under the program, commercial banks agreed to restructure the countries’ debt, and the IMF and other official agencies lent the LDCs sufficient funds to pay the interest, but not principal, on their loans. In return, the LDCs agreed to undertake structural reforms of their economies and to eliminate budget deficits. The hope was that these reforms would enable the LDCs to increase exports and generate the trade surpluses and dollars necessary to pay down their external debt (Devlin and Ffrench-Davis 1995). Although this program averted an immediate crisis, it allowed the problem to fester. Instead of eliminating subsidies to state-owned enterprises, many LDC countries instead cut spending on infrastructure, health, and education, and froze wages or laid off state employees. The result was high unemployment, steep declines in per capita income, and stagnant or negative growth—hence the term the “lost decade” (Carrasco 1999).
https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/latin-american-debt-crisis
In this topic: people who underestimate the importance of infrastructure and low crime and low corruption.
1st answer: developing countries don’t have enough infrastructure to benefit from wealth. Not enough trains to move raw goods around, not enough roads or not enough electricity to do anything even if those good arrived.
2nd level: when governments get the money for such projects, they steal it from the people through corruption. See Turkey and all the invested dollars on earthquake-proofing buildings, it was all stolen in ways people didn’t understand or realize until the earthquake happened.
3rd level: even if the government didn’t steal the money, criminals can. Even in the USA we deal with transformer thieves (transformers are bundles of copper that convert long distance high voltage power into short distance power for houses). These copper bundles can sell for $$$$ in the black market.
So even if #1 and #2 miraculously happen, a criminal will steal the infrastructure and they gotta start all over again.
Everyone knows how to make cities more advanced and better. Build highways, trains, mass transit. Invest into freight (trains or boats). Invest into education so that people can run these machines.
And many 3rd world countries advance forward. But it’s harder to do than it looks.
developing countries don’t have enough infrastructure to benefit from wealth
It’s even worse: they only have the infrastructure to allow us to profit from their wealth. Colonial powers made sure the railroad between the mines and the ports are top notch, so their mineral riches can be carted off efficiently to the metropole.
China and other advanced nations prove that an export based economy can work though.
I will say that export driven economies are very difficult though. See Taiwan and their export of chips. It only works because Taiwan is basically modern Vulkans / Wizards who have chip technology that no one else in the world has.
A system of top level universities to build that kind of knowledge and infrastructure is difficult and outside the reach of most countries.
The machines are Dutch and the designs are made by the customer. The Taiwanese advantage is their government subsidised chip manufacturing. They aren’t wizards.
You can see this in painful clarity watching the Argentinian railroads. Created and operated by the UK originally, it has a clear shape of a funnel from all over the country towards the main port city, Buenos Aires.
But the USA and western EU countries are rich, but, for example, China, India, Russia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Mexico and others are not very rich, how is this possible?
Even New Zealand is rich, but other island countries are not.
Is it all culture or not?
Is it all culture or not?
Culture and wealth. But wealth creates better culture, and better culture makes more wealth.
Only Russia seems to be the only country doing things wrong in your list btw. I expect China, India, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Mexico to all be richer in 10 years than they are today.
It takes a lot of hard work, smarts, and money to catch up but countries like those are scrappy and are doing good work to catchup. China is a bit risky, I think they’re funding it with too much debt though in weird ways, but their hearts and minds are at least in the right place with regards to expansion of their country, economy, and education.
China’s main problem is corruption. But everyone’s got corruption issues,.
Culture plays a big part. But people don’t like admitting it.
Was reading a book about the Congo and there was a Malaysian UN guy. He said this country fucked. He said colonialism had an affect on this country sure but it also had an affect on his. He said, in a nicer way, at some point they need to take responsibility for their country and short their shit out. They are responsible of the mess it’s in. Seen another doc where a Chinese guy was building a road but he couldn’t even buy gravel and in the Chinese words the local workers were lazy and they kept working a day, stealing stuff and not coming back. He seen a railroad the Belgians built that was in complete disrepair he basically said “look you inherited a functioning country with low crime, infrastructure and an encomy. You guys butched it all”.
Just look at Rhodesia, South Africa and God knows how many other countries.
Everyone seems to be focusing on colonialism, but that really only brought Europe to a standard of living near India and China.
The real major thing that happened was that “the West” started industrializing before the rest of the world did. Some of the wealth came from colonial holdings that industrial countries had, but a lot of it came from having citizens who were more than a order of magnitude more economically productive than citizens of other countries for over a century.
Why the Indian subcontinent and China didn’t industrialize at the time is up to debate, but some theories are related to lower labor costs not sparking the positive feedback engine of industrialization until it was too late to compete against the West and going into periods of relative decline that Western countries could take advantage of.
The West was able to make itself the factory of the world, pushing the rest of the world into resource extraction.
It wasn’t until after World War II that other parts of the world were able to industrialize.
I have always assumed that white light-skinned people have a leg up because they’re white light-skinned. That is, they’ve lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places where you need low melanin to get sufficient vitamin D to survive. Places with low sunlight and harsh winters, which means places where failing to develop efficient agriculture, food preservation/storage, insulated shelters, and textiles meant starving or freezing to death.
Non-white light-skinned people lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places with more consistent sunlight and milder winters, where sun over-exposure was a more pressing threat than under-exposure. That means more forgiving crops and climates, so less pressure to streamline agriculture and subsequently industrialize.
Edit: I feel the need to specify that I am not talking about “white people” as a coherent race, but as a loose term to describe light-skinned people from harsher climates in general. Don’t read any racial commentary here, I’m not making any.
I get what this guy is trying to say but the phrasing and unnecessary racialising explains the downvotes. A better and less offensive way to put this could simply have referred to climate: that you suspect the harsher climate in Europe rewarded industrial and penalised agrarian lifestyles in a way that wasn’t true for civilisations near the equator. Being white or not has nothing to do with it - correlation versus causation.
There’s something to say about winters leading to social orders around food storage and planning ahead, but then England didn’t really need to do that that much (it’s quite mild there, gulf stream and all) and they were the first to really start the industrialisation game. It was plain and simple pure capitalism. The Nordic countries, where those climatic conditions are very much real, are way more naturally Socdem than the Anglos.
Another geographic, not so much climatic, factor is the availability of water power: Europe is blessed with a metric fuckton of small streams large enough to build a mill on. Wheat and rye are also quite easy to deal with, you can use a scythe to harvest, etc. That meant a comparatively productive agriculture, which meant more tradespeople, traders, and with that finally a bourgeoisie which could do that capitalism and industrialisation thing and exploit the serfs harder than the nobles ever managed to do, being stuck in age-old social relations which didn’t allow for ordering people around like that. Then a ton of other small factors, including things like Luther lobbying nobles to institute public schools so that people would learn to read – so they could read the Bible, but they could of course also now read an Almanach and do some maths.
Yes, correlation is exactly what I’m saying. I’m not saying “white” as a race, I’ve been explicitly saying “white” as skin tone. The same environmental conditions which reward efficient agriculture and the conditions for industrialization also correlate to pressures toward sun-absorbant skin.
My position has nothing to do with “race” and everything to do with coincidentally correlated environmental effects. Was I not sufficiently clear? When did I even bring up race, distinct from skin tone in-and-of-itself? “White” isn’t even a race, so far as race is even a rational concept.
There are several times in history that Europeans would not be considered the peak of human development due to very measurable differences in quality of life.
You’ll also find other pseudoscience bullshit trying to justify the superiority of one group over another from at least Roman times.
The fact of the matter is that several areas had the resources and technical development to start the Industrial Revolution; it just happened to spark in the United Kingdom first and spread through Europe quickly.
Okay. I dunno if you think I’m saying any group is “superior” because I’m very much not . I thought I was very much explicitly saying that their advantage was much more based on incidental environmental conditions than any kind of genetic superiority, or anything remotely close to that. Just brainstorming explanations for history that cut that exact “superiority” bullshit out of the picture
1 The middle income trap. Many countries used their cheap uneducated population as an opportunity for cheap labour, for large companies. This brings lots of capital to the country and people, and the country develops. Building more schools, infrastructure etc. but as a country develops, pay increases for workers, and suddenly their labour is no longer cheap. Their country’s economy is now effectively stuck.
2 Conflict and instability. Investors don’t want to pour money into a country where it might have a coup, leadership change, etc. They don’t want to lose what they invest, since these events usually result in lots of private property being taken or destroyed. This fact leaves a lot of countries in a catch 22. They need investment to stabilize, but need to stabilize to gain investment.
A lot of countries are also unstable because of badly drawn borders. This often leaves a lot of ethnic tensions that continue to boil away indefinitely. Sometimes the borders give a country horrible geography and incentivise them to invade their neighbors.
One example would be that country #1 is downstream of a major river, behind country #2 and #3. Country #2 and 3 use a lot of the water and there is none left for country #1 and their only option is to invade.
The final and probably most common reason is that dictators don’t care about prosperity, and that dictators lead to more dictators. Far more often than not, coups lead to another, worse dictator, focused on holding power than their country’s success.
The reason that south Korea and Taiwan are successful and democratic today are because they rolled the 1/1000 chance on a benevolent dictator that WILLINGLY steered the country into democracy and genuinely improved the economy.
The “Western” countries pillaged the rest of the world for centuries.
