Horrible examples if you were trying to prove something here, especially Japan. Both countries were already heavily developed, and both had done so from internal processes. They had had their infrastructure destroyed, but the core of industrial development and prosperity were already there…they just needed to be rebuilt. That’s not going to be the case in trying to develop a country in the way the OP is talking.
Give me an example of where an outsider has ever been able to force a country to become developed and prosperous. I can’t think of a single example, personally. The only ones that come close would be the Europeans colonial period, and they don’t really work because the colonists basically came in, wiped out the locals (or exploited them), and then built their development using the models and methods they brought with them (that had been internally developed in their mother countries prior to the colonization).
IMHO you are putting the cart before the horse. You have to build the industry and structure first THEN worry and address all the other stuff you are talking about. If the business is not successful, obviously, it’s not going to have the effect we are talking about. If it IS successful, then it’s going to continue, and the people working there are going to benefit, even if the benefit seems small to us. The cumulative effect, assuming the business continues to prosper, is that the people there will continue to prosper, even if as I said it wouldn’t be what you and I might consider prosperous. As I said in my first post, there are no guarantees here…it might work, or it might not, and it will take as long as it takes. It can’t be imposed on the locals, it has to be learned and incorporated from the bottom up. Some places may never get there, since the corruption at the top or internal fighting and violence may preclude the level of stability needed to even begin this process. But, IMHO, if it’s going to happen at all, ever, it needs to happen from within, not be imposed from the outside.
This suggestion is often repeated but I don’t understand the source of its reasoning.
Not a single country in the 10,000 years of civilization became prosperous by retrofitting some type of organized education system on top of the existing population.
One might mistakenly look to China as an example of “education” leading to prosperity. However, they had a long history of respect for scholarship that was already deeply ingrained in the culture and not implanted by some outside force (such as a philanthropist, or economic development “expert”). Their priority for schooling was unrelated to interests in building wealth. As a matter of fact, the Chinese looked down on the merchants as lower in status.
Poor countries need to find ways to produce items that others find valuable. The educational institutions will follow naturally from that. That’s what has happened everywhere else in history. Schools are not a prerequisite for building wealth. Wealth is a prerequisite for building schools that people want to attend.
Building factories is easy. Building social institutions is hard. The social and political culture needed to sustain development is usually going to take generations to develop, and is usually not going to be something that can be purchased.
Exactly. It has to be developed (from within IMHO) and it will take as long as it takes. The time period is going to depend on a lot of factors that will be unique to each country. Japan (and South Korea to an extent) was able to fast track itself through this process and very rapidly. China TRIED to fast track itself through it and failed miserably to impose it, but is now succeeding through an internal, organic process where dictating progress and prosperity didn’t work.
Why are you so devoted to development from within? Both Japan and South Korea massively benefited, economically speaking, from US involvement in their affairs. The US essentially rebuilt Japan (which was completely broken) after WWII. Most post-conflict countries don’t have another nation willing to step in and rebuild their entire infrastructure, so they end up languishing, often for years, with terrible roads and rails that further impede development. (I’ve had the joyful experience of trying to get around the former Yugoslavia, where the roads and rail systems are still badly damaged by the war.)
Like I sad, I agree that bureaucrats and leaders have to come from within, but external motivation can be a powerful force. USAID funds lots of programs in the Philippines. If the Philippines can’t get its shit together on human trafficking, they’re going to get ALL funding cut. What does it take to get their shit together? I’ll tell you what the Philippines did: they passed a law specifically criminalizing trafficking. They’ve made a concerted effort to educate people about trafficking. They’ve set up a government council on trafficking. They are doing this…why? Well, part of it has to do, of course, with the fact that there are many excellent civil servants in the Philippines who want to combat trafficking, which is a vile and disgusting crime. But it would be a little overly idealistic to not consider that they don’t want to get their USAID funding cut. The threat of having this external funding source ended has been enough to get people moving on a vital human rights issue.
By the way, human trafficking is the ONLY factor that can get a country’s USAID funding cut. A country can do all kinds of crazy shit with no repercussions from USAID, but don’t do anything about trafficking and BAM - no more money. If you’re interested, the basis for decision is The State Department’s Trafficking in Persons Report. There are three tiers; if you get onto Tier 3, you lose development funds. The Philippines is currently on the Tier 2 Watch List, so they have one year to improve matters or they’re gonna lose a lot of money.
Well, Japan probably got more outside benefit from Europe than America when they started to industrialize, but otherwise…certainly. I’m not saying a country has to do this all from it’s own resources or in a vacuum or something. No country could or has done that. What I’m saying is that the direction has to come from within, from the countries own citizens, not be imposed by some well meaning rich guy who simply decides that poor country A needs to be developed tomorrow. As I said in my first post, the theoretical rich guy can help a lot buy investing capital into the country in question…but he can’t MAKE them develop or become a developed nation.
I have to run to a meeting, but I think this really summarizes what I’m trying (unsuccessfully perhaps) to get at:
You’ve got a major flaw in your interpretation of the timeline. Japan was economically developed before WW2 damage and the followup USA aid of reconstruction. Japan was wealthy enough to have built a fleet of battleships before WW2.
Also… as far as your analysis of post-WW2 is concerned, you ignore the possibility that Japan and South Korea would have progressed economically regardless of USA involvement. Certainly, the length of time and/or the particular industries they specialized in could have been different but the general outcome of economic progress could have been the same.
I know that Japan was economically developed before WWII, but it was destroyed by the war itself. I’m getting my information from the book Embracing Defeat, by John Dower, which discusses at length the really terrible shape Japan was left in following the war. But I fully admit that I am not an expert on Japanese economic history and it is true that Japan and S. Korea could have developed along the same lines without US involvement.
The average IQs of the highly economically successful countries are substantially higher than countries which have been left behind. Unless you have a natural resource to sell, it’s hard to get wealthier without a higher-IQ population. You can’t just paste education on anyone. And even if you have good natural resources, without a broad-enough population of high-intellect leaders and workers, you are going to be at the mercy of external populations who use your resource as a mechanism to generate wealth for them, and not you.
Pockets of success in various areas reflecting high-performing subpopulations are found in some under-developed countries; a good indicator of potential success is whether or not those subpopulations are found in any country you propose to get developed.
As examples, India and China have a huge sub-population of people with a capacity for math, computer and engineering sciences. I predict reasonable success for them in developing.
I think the world is likely to remain flat for most of sub-saharan Africa; to date there is minimal evidence their populations contain large-enough numbers of people who can become highly-enough educated and innovative enough to compete on the world stage.
There are numerous studies showing that poor nutrition in childhood stunts IQ. On top of that, IQ is something that tends to be built up over generations - you can’t just get someone from a poor family, purport to educate them for half the day, but leave them with their illiterate family for the other half, and expect an outcome anywhere near that of a Western child.
No, I think you can do exactly that. I don’t believe there’s anything inherently inferior about third world people. If you took a newborn baby from some third world village and raised it in an affluent western society (and we can thank several celebrities for their willingness to perform this experiment) I believe that child will grow up to be indistinguishable from a child whose family has been living in western society for generations.
And if so, that implies that it’s the societies that are causing any differences, not anything inherent in the people themselves. So a third world society with western affluence “pasted on” could change in a single generation.
There were several studies conducted testing black children adopted by white parents. Both the 1975 and 2000 studies show similar results.
One key difference that doesn’t match your hypothetical is that the black children came from within the USA. If there’s a study that tracks African born infants adopted by white USA parents, I’m not aware of it.
Children in the US from affluent ($100k/yr) families self-described as “black” significantly underperform children from poor (less than 10K/yr income) families self-described as “white” or “asian” on the SAT.
We’ve been round and round here and elsewhere about the notion of “race” and “black” and hereditary. In summary, there is no evidence anywhere, in any political system or nation anywhere in the world that various populations are “indistinguishable” when given the same opportunity. In nations with majority African-descent populations, whites and asians are the most successful groups. In nations with asian or white majority populations, blacks are the least successful groups. Nations with black majority populations have not been successful (with success based on achievements by their black populations) on the world economic stage anywhere, even when they have huge natural resources and have had independent governances for as long as former asian colonies.
There simply is no evidence anywhere that these large population groups are inherently equal in potential to produce modern, educated, stable and financially successful nations.
It’s true that all the IQ studies done support a concept of differences among nations as a whole and their subpopulations in particular, but it’s also true you can simply ignore standardized testing like that and just look at practical results, which will parallel the IQ results.
I actually agree with this, and I’m basing this on my own experience. As you may know, I taught English as a Foreign Language in an elementary school in rural Bulgaria while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer. My students were a good mix of the three main ethnic groups in Bulgaria - probably about 50% Bulgarian, 35% Turkish, and 15% Roma. The ethnic Bulgarians and Turks were equivalent in their scholastic endeavors. (I only realized who was Turkish when a massive chunk of my kids were absent one day and it turned out to be Eid al-Fitr. Then I realized that there was a really noticeable difference between Bulgarian and Turkish names. Anyway.)
My Roma students, on the other hand, massively underperformed in class. Very few of them had the textbooks. Even the younger kids, for whom textbooks should be free, often didn’t have the textbooks. (It’s still a mystery to me exactly why this was.) They were often disruptive in class.
The reasons for this are incredibly complicated and a lot of it has to do with the endemic racism against Roma all over Eastern Europe, but in the classroom specifically, I eventually, and cynically, came to the conclusion that my Roma kids did poorly because their parents legitimately did not care if they learned anything in school. My Roma kids had illiterate parents who had not attended school themselves, whereas my Bulgarian and Turkish kids usually had parents who were literate and were at least high school graduates. It’s extremely rare for Roma to graduate from high school. Dropping out at twelve to get married is the norm, even today. But yeah, having parental support, having a cultural background that encourages education, those things really do matter.
But I also think that it’s important to keep trying. At least on paper, the Bulgarian government is making a concerted effort to improve education for Roma. It might take awhile, but I think it is possible. I had some really bright Roma students, who attended school only sporadically and at least a couple of them eventually just disappeared. I think judicial application of policies intended to improve attendance, such as conditional cash transfer programs, could do a lot to change attitudes.