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>To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies. Uh, okay, so... I'm bad at explaining things, because that is
by scythe 15y ago
>To make a long story really short, the British did ridiculous amounts of good in their colonies.
Uh, okay, so... I'm bad at explaining things, because that is the point of what I wrote about the British. The British were successful not by being cutthroat but by being fair. The author characterizes such 'cooperative' strategies as ineffective, and says that they don't tend to succeed:
>The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
>The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.
>Again, I’m not saying it’s right, or fair, or proper. But it has worked. The cultures that have succeeded have used this formula, and that is one reason that they have succeeded instead of their rivals.
The Empire had lots of 'morality' and 'fairness' provisions that the societies it conquered did not. It could be said that this sense of fairness led to the loss of the Empire -- but Britain is arguably better off now than 80 years ago, whereas Mongolia is... not rich.
- ohashi 15y agoBut may be soon with all those natural resources!
- bergie 15y agoGenerally it seems natural resources only stunt the state of a country and benefit very few. Norway appears to be one of the only places with rich natural resources and a working society.
- ohashi 15y agoAustralia? USA? Canada? There are many different resources besides simply oil (I am making an assumption that's what is in your mind because of the Norway example). Mongolia doesn't simply have oil (and they rank #92 in the world for oil production - so they don't even have much of it), they have richer mineral deposits.
- westicle 15y agoThose examples don't necessarily refute grandparent's point. See link below regarding "two speed economies" in which resource booms can actually have a negative structural impact on production. http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell.asp?URL=02%20The%20resources%20boom%20and%20the%20two%20speed%20economy.htm http://www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1421/HTML/docshell.asp?...
- ohashi 15y agoI am aware that natural resources have caused trouble for a lot of countries. Just stating that it isn't an automatic death sentence to have them.
- bergie 15y agoAustralia, Canada and USA had reasonably well functioning economies to start with. And many of the resources were discovered outside the scope of globalization or colonialism, allowing much of it to feed back into the local ecosystem.