I agree with Slim. Africa has been the recipient of trillions of $ in “aid” over the years…most of which has been wasted and dissipated.
the problem with africa: corruption and political instability…plus tribalism.
Poor countries cannot afford “leaders” who loot treasuries, build estates in Switzerland, and launch pointless wars.
Irrelevant because we were comparing to India.
Yep, I knew EXACTLY where my comment was headed. I’m well aware of your points and I’m not responding to it. They’ve been dismantled before. This is a debate that goes nowhere and just ends up with BBQ PIT. Fear Itself asked WHY some academics would disagree with Jared Diamond as if he truly was unaware of a possible reason. I gave one reason. That is all. Jared Diamond’s opinion about environmental constraints is not the final word on Africa’s troubles.
On this particular topic of African poverty, I got my information hardcopy books. I did a quick search for online articles to cite but none of them equal the information I have in my books. Sorry, I’m not going to retype pages of information into this thread. Nobody goes to that effort here. If we have a convenient cite, we use it; if we don’t, we don’t.
If you look at your own posting history, you are the one that makes repeated sweeping generalizations without cites.
Btw, if I thought Africans were inferior, I wouldn’t have bought 20+ books from Thomas Sowell. I think he’s one of the smartest and best thinkers on economics and racial issues.
False dichotomy. Long term, he’s right. But in the short term, some charity is often needed. Look at Haiti right now. Long term, they need to get their economy running so people won’t be so poor. But you can’t just import millions of jobs this week when people are starving.
There are thousands of mini-Haitis around the world, and they can use both charity for the short term and economic investment for the long term.
Here are 2 of the Thomas Sowell books that talk about Africa’s exploitation (on the tiny chance anybody’s interested):
Economic Facts and Fallacies
–> Chapter 7 page 188 “Third World Facts and Fallacies”
Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One
–> Chapter 7 “The Economic Development of Nations”
I also have a few other books by other authors on Africa poverty in similar vein to Mr. Sowell. One example from William Easterly:
The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good
–> chapter 8 page 269 “From Colonialism to Postmodern Imperialism”
Both William Easterly and Thomas Sowell bibliographies do not cite each other as sources so there’s no incestuous rehashed information. They came to their own conclusions.
Now wmfellows, if you have a cite, online or a book, that mounts a credible challenge to the diaspora analysis, put it up. If it’s a book, I will buy it. I’m not interested in debating the topic with you directly. However, if you have compelling information by a notable scholar, I will read it. Your citeless rant doesn’t count.
It sounds like a cigarette brand to me. Enjoy the smooth taste of Carlos Slims.
Or a shady gambler.
This argument is a straw-man.
As someone who actually works in development, I can tell you that outside of crisis response (natural disasters, refugee situations, etc.) almost no modern development organizations use the "just hand people stuff’ strategy. Right now, the buzzword is “sustainable.” This means that most development projects are either business or education oriented. The idea is either to train individuals who can continue to provide important services (and profit for themselves) or to create business opportunities and train people on how to best take advantage of these opportunities. Even health-related charities try to create market incentives. I will be attending graduate school in International Development soon, and more than half the classes I take will basically be economics. So all of this is hardly a new revelation.
For example, one organization I worked with was dedicated to treadle pumps. Foot-powered treadle pumps (for irrigation) are cheaper and better for the environment than traditional gas-powered pumps. This organization worked to train local metalworkers in treadle pump construction. Then they trained a team of salespeople to put on treadle pump demonstrations at local markets and the like. It is hard to get people to change their habits and invest in new technology. But the project was somewhat effective and did provide quite a few people with a livelihood.
But nothing in development is easy. Even simple projects can have unintended consequences. Furthermore, everyone has their own interests- large foreign aid is as much about assuring access to resources as it is about actually helping anyone. Refugee assistance is essential, but also causes a number of problems that may actually prolong conflicts. Large corporate development can be a mixed bag, depending on how they respect the environment and their local workers. Anyway, there are no easy solutions.
This is not entirely true. West Africa’s medieval era was ruled by feudal kingdoms that really were not that different from what you’d find in Europe. They had very organized leaders, unifying religions, international trade, etc. Timbuktu was one of the richest cities in the world and a center of learning. To this day these kingdoms live on- traditional leaders in Northern Cameroon rule according to the political structures of the Hausa/Fulani kingdoms and continue to wield more power than their civic government counterparts. Wikipedia has some great reading on pre-Colonial African kingdoms, and I really recommend everyone checks out this little-understood part of history.
And this is why Colonialism’s legacy continues to be misunderstood. We tend to think of pre-Colonial Africa as some random assortment of tribes and can’t figure out why they don’t get along. But really, many parts were more like medieval Europe as far as political development and national identity. So when we started grouping random people together, it’s as if we took chunks of Spain, France, England and Germany and expected everyone to get along. When the Balkans can’t get along we recognize that it is a result of unfortunate political geography. But when Africa has trouble it become “Oh, those tribal black people and their silly ethnic feuds!”
Regarding India- British and French colonial styles differed dramatically.
The goal of British colonization was to create new markets for British goods. In order for a market to emerge, you’d need a middle class. Britain worked to create that middle-class. They trained an entire bureaucratic class that was so effective that Indian managers remain powerful around the world. They created educational infrastructure to teach the children of this middle class. They made sure transportation infrastructure was good enough to move goods to their new markets. They kept enough political stability that business could flourish.
France had more of a “mining” attitude towards their colonies. They were looking for little more than a source of natural resources. So they did not work to develop markets or create a middle class. They built a minimal infrastructure that was geared only towards moving goods out of the country. They did not invest in education. They worked with local warlords and despots and did not worry about political stability as long as they had access to the resources they wanted.
You can really see the difference. Even in Cameroon, among the same ethnic groups, British colonized areas are light years ahead of French colonized areas. All colonization is harmful, but some systems have had more lasting damage than others.
Actually, Timbuktu was one of the great medieval centers of learning. At one time, it was home to great libraries full of thousands of books. These days, many of those books have fallen into the private hands of Tuareg nomads, who use these ancient manuscripts to record family secrets and then bury them in the desert. There is a large effort to get these books someplace a little more accessible and safe than a hole in the desert.
I fail to see why you can’t do both. Especially when you’ve got gazillions…
Africa was also the battleground for numerous proxy Cold War fighting and assassinations well into the 1980’s.
Yes, it’s terrible when your country’s leaders give the nation’s wealth to themselves and their cronies, funnel money into tax havens and launch pointless wars. Thank God the West is more civilized than that…
Mexico has such grinding poverty that poor Mexican indios hire organized crime to smuggle them into the USA; to work in a country that unlike Mexico, lacks a public health care entitlement; sometimes below Yank minimum wage; a few end up in slavery. The class hostility between rich & poor in Mexico is far stronger than in the USA, where both major parties have a mix of rich & poor supporters; an election believed to be stolen by the rich interests party sparked massive protests beyond what *Bush v. Gore *did in the USA.
And you think a Mexican billionaire, who manages to be the world’s richest man while his poor neighbors toil in dispossession, has a better handle on how to approach poverty? What has he done to alleviate it?
In case you’re missing it: This is like taking Dives’s advice on how to help Lazarus, before Dives died!
Sowell is an economist and not a historical scholar, and particularly not a scholar of African history.
Fellows is in the same position.
Beyond that, you have moved the goalposts. (Actually, you are attempting to start a different game on a different field.)
Whatever Sowell and Fellows happen to feel about current economics and aid in Africa, your claim was that there was a body of scholarship that claimed that colonialism was not a major cause for current African problems. Neither of your cited sources establish that point.
Yes, an interesting dliemma we have here: how to analyze Africa’s economic history. We have 2 component words “economic” and “history” juxtaposed together. This causes an intractable problem. If we mention economists’ arguments, we can dismiss by saying that they are not “historians.” If we mention historians’ arguments, we can dismiss by saying they are not “economists.”
Nevermind that virtually all economists study history and likewise…
…all historians write about history unobjectively through editorial lenses of psychology, military strategy, etc, and even… economics.
We can dismiss anyone by slice-&-dicing their credentials to irrelevance and to suit our needs, can’t we?
I think this type of dismissal is inept (not to mention it’s also a roundabout ad hominem) and relies on lazy boxed categories instead of analytical deconstruction of someone’s actual arguments.
For example, I read Naomi Klein’s book on anti-capitalism. She has valid points. I’m not going to dismiss her because she’s not an economist nor historian nor ex-government official. We also listen to Noam Chomsky’s commentary about leftist politics even though his formal training (PhD) is linguistics.
As a moderator who has has seen thousands of messages, I’m not sure why you would rely on this lazy technique.
(Next up, how will we ever discuss moral implications of human cloning? Virtually no molecular biologists have a dual PhD in moral philosophy and no philosophy professor has a PhD in molecular biology. We’re all too stupid discuss it. Hmmmm… what do we do?!)
Fear Itself asked a side question about Jared Diamond’s thesis of geographic determinism and I answered. I won’t discuss that topic further.
You didn’t read Sowell’s chapter then. It does establish that point.
Also to clarify, I’m well aware that colonialism and de-colonialism contributed to Africa’s current problems. No scholar is denying that, including Sowell. What some folks are saying is that colonialism is not the primary reason why Africa is way behind 1st-world countries. That’s the qualification.
Piffle.
There are econmomic historians. Sowell is not among them. Your claim that historians are “unobjective” (with the silly and spurious implication that economists are “objective”), bears no weight.
You made a claim that you cannot support. Live with it.
Sowell and Fellows may or may not be dead on regarding the failure of current efforts to improve the situation in Africa, but they provide no serious analysis regarding your claim that colonialism did not seriously harm Africa. (For that matter, since the stuff to which you have linked, so far, does not even address colonial period Africa, it may be the case that you are attempting to extrapolate from their views of current events to some historical view that they do not even espouse.)
I don’t claim that economists are “objective.” I’m pointing out that dismissing someone as a lightweight can be applied to any trained expert using ad hominem boxed categories.
The chapters both address colonialism and geographic determinism. I can only assume you didn’t read the book(s).
W. Edwards Deming is one giant reason Japan is kicking ass all over the place economically. well the part where the Japanese were willing to listen and give his theories a try.
Both charitable giving and investment have their place. Some things, like vaccinations in third-world countries, may be better served by charity, especially if time is of the essence. If your goal is to save infants from crippling disease and death, charitable giving will work better than moving to Africa, building factories and training people to do high-tech work so they can afford to have their kids vaccinated. It’s probably no coincidence that the Gates Foundation spends a lot of money on such medical services.
OTOH, the way to pull people out of long-term poverty is through education and jobs, not by permanently feeding them.
Also, today’s charity can become tomorrow’s investment: founding a university someplace poor could be seen as an act of charity, but if it eventually becomes illustrious, it will provide a return; i.e., like an investment. Some institutions funded by Andrew Carnegie’s charitable gifts are examples of this.
What a bitch, to be the world’s richest man and no one’s heard of you.
Never hear the term “narcopederasta”?