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(I've been to South Africa once, for two weeks this summer) The author notes that it's "obviously bad" that inequality is so high in South Africa. I may be in
by avar 4y ago
(I've been to South Africa once, for two weeks this summer)
The author notes that it's "obviously bad" that inequality is so high in South Africa.
I may be inadvertently challenging some orthodoxy here but why is that?
The author also notes that around 1/4 of working age people contribute tax revenue. Would the rest really be better off without the top X% of taxpayers, other things being equal?
I think implicit in this critique is that the reader should think anything less than maintaining a western European standard of living is a failure on the government's part.
But South Africa's GDP PPP per capita is around that of Mongolia or Egypt, while one might think from reading this article that South Africa is a "temporary embarrassed" western European country.
The country has a lot of problems, but if you frame it like that one could view the status quo as a resounding success. While traveling there I ran into a lot of immigrants from countries to the north that migrated there for a better life.
I've read a few articles about South Africa with a similar tone, but they never really seem to get to the point.
Yes the ANC is corrupt, but even if you suppose the country were run with Swiss efficacy you're begging the question about what a $15,000 GDP PPP per capita version of Switzerland would look like.
The answer is likely to me much closer to Mongolia than Switzerland in terms of basic services, infrastructure etc
- awanderingmind 4y agoIt's not an issue of maintaining a 'western European' standard of living - it's an issue of millions of people suffering because of lack of access to basic services, and a sky high crime rate that brutalises the population. The situation can be much better than it is without being comparable to western European standards. According to worldbank data the murder rate in SA is around 10 times higher than in Egypt, and around 5 times as high as in Mongolia. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=ZA https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=EG https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?locations=MN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location... If you like the correct framing is 'extreme suffering due to poverty', not 'high inequality'. The inequality is galling because there is a small percentage of people (myself included) who enjoy a good quality of life while millions of people live in poverty. Purely in terms of 'inequality being bad', there are good reasons to believe that it undermines democracy (citation required I suppose).
- avar 4y agoI was mainly commenting on the parts of your post that dealt with government disfunction, corruption etc. Framing the murder rate as suffering "due to poverty" in the context of South Africa doesn't pass the sniff test. Indonesia's GDP PPP is similar to SA's, but it's safer than some western European countries in terms of murder rate. Closer to home, Namibia has compatible income inequality, but around a third of the murder rate. In South Africa around 70% of murder victims knew the perpetrator [1]. It seems safe to assume that most of that's within a similar income bracket. Just that statistic seems to discount some wider societal forces as the primary driver. 1. https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder-in-south-africa https://issafrica.org/iss-today/what-do-we-know-about-murder...