Why did South America never become as wealthy or developed as North America?

Great Debates
1

Central and South America are blessed with abundant space and incredible natural resources. The native cultures built architectural masterpieces and marvels of city planning far more advanced than any in North America and in many ways more advanced than Europe. Horses and other Old World technology were introduced to South America before North America, and many South American nations declared independence of Europe not long after the North American colonies did. Yet the USA and Canada are both first world nations with high standards of living while most Central & South American nations are still considered undeveloped or even third world where governments often change hands violently and poverty and crime are rampant.

What do you account for this?

2

Part, but not all, of it is the legacy of Spanish Colonialism. And this is true everywhere they left their mark.
They left no tradition of unselfish public service, & it shows in the corruption.

Also, North America, colonized by the UK/France/Dutch had a certain amount of infrastructure development. Less so in SA. The Spanish wanted gold, not a lot else.

US sponsered revolutions are another part, but I refuse to be drawn into that morass!

3

P.J. O’Rourke (in Holidays in Hell) has a relevant observation:

4

In the precolonial times South America and Central America were, in fact, considerably more developed than most of North America, including large, complex architectural structures, more intenstive argriculture and animal husbandry, more developed mathematics and mercantile practices, et cetera. Only in Mexico did there exist native cultures that were even comperable to those in the South.

The discovery and subsequent subjugation (and in many cases, genocide) of the native cultures by the Spanish conquistadors (shortly followed by the Portuguese, French, and English) virtually wiped the slate clean, displacing them with their own established cultures. The Europeans had, among other faculties, a resistance to a multitude of malignant diseases, the knowledge and practice of military operations and combined arms tactics, gunpowder and cannon, sailpower (by which to move troops and strike from sea without exposure to return fire), iron tools and cotton/linen textiles, et cetera. (See O’Neill’s Plagues and Peoples as a good introduction to why the Europeans, in general, came to dominate the Americas so easily.)

So the Europeans established themselves in the Americas by the same traditions and cultural mores they practiced in Europe. For the Spanish, this was perpetuating a bloated bureaucracy largely dominated by the Jesuit order across the southern part of North America and points south. For the still Catholic but more liberal French and the Protestant and Angelican English, more focus was given to commerce than brute pilage (and it probably helped that while the South American natives tended to have large reserves of gold and silver to steal, the North Americans were never so wealthy.)

So, while the Spanish (and Portugeuse) were getting fat, dumb, and brutal, the French and English were engaging more in sustainable exploitation (fur trapping, agriculture, exploration of manufacturing metals and materials). The eventual scism of the American colonists from their European powers eliminated the one-way drain of the enormous resources of this continent, and the geographical barrier (the Atlantic Ocean) prevented the Americans from having to utilize proportionally equivilent resources to defend from challengers, whereas the Europeans (with their relatively permeable borders) were constantly engaged in fighting and defense. Along with eliminating tribute to the traditional monarchies of Europe the North Americans also eliminated the monarcy, replacing it with a small and fairly efficient representative government which encouraged commerce, land trading and development without the kind of class strictures found in Europe.

The South Americans, meanwhile, were still laboring under the increasingly bloated and inefficient thumb of the Spanish and the Jesuits, who discouraged development and provided little in the way of encouragement, education, or commerce other than what was necessary to reinforce the authority of the Church and keep the gold flowing back to Spain. When that cow ran dry (and the Spanish were reduced to a second rate military and political influence in European affairs) South America suffered a similar decline.

There are other factors as well–the difference in amount of arable land between the two continents, the east-west alignment of North America along a temperate zone and the relatively accessibly geography as opposed to South America’s north-south alignment and significant mountainous barriers to travel between coasts, the relative ease of water transportation in the North as opposed to the few and hazardous rivers in the South, et cetera–but I think the most significant initial influence was the difference between the cultures and their differing goals and methods in colonization.

South America still has great natural resources, and nations like Brazil and Argentina have, if they can get their act together politically and economically, the potential to become economic competitors in the world marketplace, but they stand significantly behind the rest of the industrial world in terms of development.

There’s no saying that we can’t regress to the same point, though. Today a king; tomorrow a pauper. The cold laws of economic game theory bow down to no majesty.

Stranger

5

I’m surprised to hear Canada has gotten rid of the monarchy. Funny, I never got a vote for that. I must have missed the new release.

6

Well, you have to admit the monarchy has pretty much been marginalized here in the big C, upcoming Queen visit notwithstanding.

If it does come up for a vote, though, I’m going for the Republic. Viva la revolucion, eh.

7

So, Brian, why you talkin’ Spanish, eh?

8

Brian’s not here!

9

America did not become the powerhouse until the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries … roughly the same time as it experienced huge waves of multicultural immigration.

It was as these cultures abutted each other and infected each other with new and different ideas, creating many new ones as each took those ideas and made them their own (by rotating, transforming, and translating them in novel domains) that America developed the toolbox to create what was needed to dominate the world in technology and cultural influence.

South America was much more homogenous. Even Brazil had much less exposure to the world of ideas as America’s hodgepodge stew.

10

Sorry for the tipo.

11

IIRC Argentina was one of the wealthiest nations in the world in the 1950s. Then they decided to treat themselves to lots of government services and they still haven’t recovered. There’s a column in today’s WSJ making the same point about Europe: more government equals more unemployment and lower growth.

12

Good point–I was looking more at the precursors that allowed North America to dominate economically–but to extend that, the people who immigrated (from Europe) were self-selected to be the most risk-taking and profit-oriented distillation of the cultures they came from. That they selected (largely) the United States rather than other nations outside of Europe was a combination of open immigration policy, a lack of consistant class-system due to the mishmash of cultures, available resources and land to anyone willing to explore and risk, and a relatively unburdensome government that wasn’t consistantly engaging in major wars with neighbors.

RickJay, as much as I like Canada (and I do, I do) and recognize the sincere contributions they have made toward peacekeeping and assistance to other nations, I don’t think they can really be considered a strong economic or political power on the world stage. Frankly, they’re probably better off for that, but when talking about the wealth of North America the main focus is on the US. (At least, for the time being.) Perhaps an additional point is that South America has never developed one overarching nation that dominated the continent and, for better or worse, was able to utilize the entire mass of resources as a single economic entity (though it’s probably stretching to think of the US in those terms, too.) In any case, by the time Canada spun off onto it self-governence, the authority of the Crown was significantly diminished.

Just my musings, anyway. YMMV.

Stranger

13

I’ll be the first to speak the politically incorrect unspeakable.

The protestant work-ethic and the spirit of competitiveness is infused in North American culture. In general, the “manyana” attitude is frowned upon here.

I sit back and await the slings and arrows.

14

Not from here because you have only described in a crude, simplified manner what is just the result of processes that were been described in a more complex fashion in the prior posts.

Most of the Latin American nations, after their wars of independence, retained a Spanish-legacy system of social, political and economic organization that discouraged initiative and competitiveness and insisted that everyone be resigned to their lot in life, barring a “stroke of good fortune”.

And here’s the deal: Spain lagged behind Europe economically, socially, and politically until a generation ago. But TODAY it’s just as modern and go-go-go and cosmopolite and sophisticated as any other part of Europe. It took a bloody civil war and 40 years of Fascism to get them used to how that way of seeing the world was a crock.

Spain was a very incompetent metropolitan power, ever paranoid that any least concession to improve the ability of the colonials to have an efficiently functioning society was giving them the keys to rebellion. At the time of independence, many of the Latin American nations essentially had to attempt to build the apparatus of Democracy from squat zero, by copying American or French-Republican models, that were not yet that well-proven either. But neither translates perfectly.

Also, since upon their creation there was no legitimacy other “my army was the one that won the war of Independence”, many new nations became unstable, with disunity the norm. Special problems also arose in the ones with large Indian populations, whom the Spanish-descended ruling classes sort of expected to keep in serfdom, but who had a rather reasonable expectation of being allowed a say in governing the lands where they were majorities (and are still waiting!).

Worse yet, the economies were locked into mercantilist and even feudal models well after North America and Western Europe ditched those. The Old Spanish POV on this is one of absolute risk avoidance. You do not take one chance of losing ANY of what you already have, no matter how big the payoff in taking chances or making changes. When you add that to a continuance of social stratification, now with the overclass being the ones ever paranoid that any least concession to improvement the masses’ life was giving them the keys to revolution, this meant that unlike those up north, there was never the necessary critical mass of commoners who were stakeholders in a dynamic, progressive system.

(Also, the philosophy of “progress” was an Anglo-Germanic movement, so of course it got to the northern lands before it even percolated to Latin European nations)

…of course, I would expect some poster to soon show up to say it’s all the USA’s fault, it’s The Man keeping them down. There’s an element of that but it’s not that simple. By the time the USAmericans were ready to move out and head South in search of markets, resources, and strategic advantage, it was a mini clash-of-civilizations all over again, and of course the peoples with the less-sophisticated socio/econo/political system again got dominated. Sure, the USAmericans took full advantage of it, and supported those social forces that would help them to maintain hegemony – what else would you expect? Does not absolve of many quite amoral things that were done in that effort, but it bears reminding that a nefarious plot by the gringos can NOT be posed as the only explanation for what’s wrong down South.

15

Why? Seems like having a powerful neighbor to the north who’s fostering unrest and unease in your backyard for his own gains is a nontrivial factor to dismiss.

16

I didn’t dismiss it.
I cited it as a contributing cause.
I simply decline to argue the extent of it.

17

Well, there was the whole Monroe Doctrine of the 19th Century, and various ways that both 20th Century North American (well, United States) business interests and government agencies ran roughshod over government regimes that tended toward independent goals, not to mention how the current US drug war encourages political corruption and the continuance of organized criminal cartels, ad nausum.

But yeah, the South American nations as a whole have done themselves no good turn in their various economic schemes like underfunded socialist enterprises and inflationary “fiat money” printing to pay off government debts. Brazil, in particular, seems poised to develop economic muscle if only it could maintain a consistant fiscal policy and engage the world marketplace. Clearly there are many social factors involved preventing it from establishing a more significant economic presence in the world market.

Stranger

18

Spain was effectively exploitative in the use it made of its massive share of Latin America, with a few exceptions. Save for the mercantilist period (which admittedly led to the American Revolution), Britain’s uses of its colonies, though highly beneficial to the mother country, tended to produce a much more successful settlement structure. The Netherlands, a minor player in the Americas, was similar to Spain in its colonial policies; Portugal and France seemed to produce an in-between policy, partially exploitative and partially geared at successful settlement.

19

That simply leads us right back to the original question – why did the US become so much more powerful than Latin America in the first place?

20

Heat might be a factor. Heat and humidity induce torpor and sloth. They make it harder to get anything done – not just the farmer’s or the manual laborer’s work, but the professional’s office work. Everyone tends to do as little as possible. That’s one reason (one of several) the American South lagged behind the rest of the country economically until electricity and air conditioning became widespread in the 1950s, and it is one reason the equatorial regions of the world still lag behind the temperate regions.