7 ms·

Simple answer; people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians; these politician

Simple answer; people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians; these politicians are then going to work for the interests of their rich foreign patrons and against the interests of their own people (for kickbacks/self-enrichment). The corrupt politicians will do things like saddle their people with significant public debts (which will force the people to pay ongoing interest to rich countries; through tax and inflation). In the private sector, they will award big, generous contracts to foreign companies, suppress people's wages to allow foreign corporations to maximize their profits, allow child labor, sweat shops, etc... That's why, as a regular citizen, it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians. Otherwise you'll be paying for their corruption through taxes, inflation, wage suppression and loss of opportunities. I can recommend David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5000 Years"; it makes a strong case about the immorality of international debt.

stelonix 4y ago
This, precisely. Basically, suffering and low-HDI is exported to developing nations, just like pollution was exported by moving manufacturing to these places. Since big players do not have to abide by international law and can pretend to care about human rights through virtue-signaling, we have whole continents with gargantuan inequalities. Any attempt by these abused nations to get together, be it through free-trade or other agreements, will be attacked by the elites in developed nations, either through their foreign policies (economic warfare) or under the hood by espionage/sabotage.
realgeniushere 4y ago
So I agree it has to do with bad governance. But you deflect all blame away from the people in those poorly governed country, instead blaming wealthy people in other countries. I’ll say though, the worst thing the West has done to the third world is insist on democracy. Peasants don’t know what they need government to do, and the political classes in those countries don’t have the maturity to steer them.
- jongjong 4y ago
  People in those poorly governed countries don't always have a choice. You could be living in such a country, see everything that's wrong with your political system and yet be punished for it nevertheless. There is a flawed assumption which infers that because the majority of people in a specific country are idiots, everyone who lives in that country should be punished... Imagine how hard life is for intelligent people in those countries who are ruled by corrupt fools, surrounded by gullible fools and utterly powerless to do anything about it. People can't choose the country they were born in so they should not be punished on that basis.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    > Imagine how hard life is for intelligent people in those countries who are ruled by corrupt idiots, surrounded by idiots and utterly powerless to do anything about it. I think the "those countries" in your sentence could very easily include many rich countries as well as the set of countries you were originally contemplating.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    > so they should not be punished on that basis I keep seeing the word "punished" used as though there are some parents somwhere who are meteing out deliberate action against their children. It's not like that. It's just bad situations happening to adults and children alike. The only antidote we know of is having democracy and free(ish) markets to allow as much agency as possible to accumulate to individuals, rather than to state officials.
    - realgeniushere 4y ago
      That is how many people see the world. Mankind is collectively some kind of God that is responsible for your individual plight.
  - realgeniushere 4y ago
    If you put your hand in the fire, no one has punished you with a burn.
mathverse 4y ago
This is true but the example in the article (South Korea) is one of the most corrupt rich countries out there.
- hattmall 4y ago
  It's more about making the corruption accessible. Corruption is inevitable, this is covered in Plato's Republic and still holds true today. If people were not corrupt there would be campaigns to avoid political office, not seeking it. The difference many times in the level of success of a nation is the level and accessibility of corruption. The US is extremely corrupt, political office is held almost entirely as a means of personal enrichment. Economic consideration is exchanged quid pro quo as a matter of fact in many scenarios. However these corrupt practices are carried out in an open format under a set of guidelines that mean anyone with money can access the corrupt system. Anyone can look at the system and say objectively "this is wrong" but doing away with it only pushes it behind closed doors and limits access to a select few.
phpnode 4y ago
There's really no reason to blame this on the foreigners installing corrupt politicians, corruption is far more frequently organic and homegrown. Corrupt people work to further their own goals, if that happens to be using their power to take on e.g. debt on unfavourable terms then so be it, but that's not because they're beholden to foreigners, it's because that is their best route to enriching themselves - they can just steal the borrowed funds! Keep in mind that corrupt societies are the most likely to have their debts forgiven, i.e. they are not likely to pay back the money borrowed. I really recommend reading The Dictator's Handbook to learn more about how corruption works.
- mathverse 4y ago
  It's not as simple as that. Building domestic industries takes time and you can never be sure about the outcome (especially if you believe everyone around you is corrupt as was believed in the countries behind the Iron Curtain). The easy money from foreign investors is hard to resist.
- karpierz 4y ago
  They have their debts forgiven on the basis of adopting certain policies (free market reform) that allows corporations from wealthy countries to set up shop and extract raw materials from the counter while avoiding giving back to the country via taxes. The profits get booked in Singapore or the Bahamas, and the stock price keeps going up.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Free market reforms do not forbid taxes on natural resource extraction. The U.S. has plenty of such taxes, and they score very highly on measures of economic freedom.
    - karpierz 4y ago
      Of course. But we aren't talking about the States, we're talking about countries that are forced into return as a condition of loan forgiveness. Some of those conditions involves avoiding any sort of export tariffs and using the declared value of goods to calculate profits (ex: if I spent 20$ extracting copper, and sold it for 20$ to an overseas company which totally isn't related to me, then the taxable profit in your country is 0$).
quonn 4y ago
> people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians > it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians Exactly. But the corrupt politicians do not get installed by other countries. They get installed by a culture of corruption within a country.
zozbot234 4y ago
> That's why, as a regular citizen, it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians. There is no way to ensure reliable and honest politicians. The best you can do is hope most policymakers are at least somewhat honest, and then institute stringent checks and balances to ensure a corrupt politician can't do too much damage. Which is what most developed democracies do, with varying degrees of success.
- phpnode 4y ago
  The best thing you can do to minimise corruption is to make it necessary to bribe so many people for the corrupt to achieve their goals that doing so would be uneconomical. The reason Qatar is hosting the world cup right now is because FIFA has a very small selectorate, and therefore it's only necessary to bribe a relatively small number of people to swing the vote.
- wizeman 4y ago
  Or you could just have strong (and enforced) laws that greatly limit how much power politicians have and then you wouldn't have to keep all these additional layers of corrupt politicians, institutions and government bureaucrats fighting with each other about who gets to be corrupt every 4 years. How to achieve that is left as an exercise for the reader :)
somedude895 4y ago
> Simple answer; No, read the article before commenting please. Edit: I just realized this comment breaks the site's rules > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. I do wish @dang was around though, most of the comments in here don't reference the article at all, even though it's really insightful.
- jongjong 4y ago
  The article touches on corruption but it dances around the root causes of corruption and the international debt-based monetary system which systematizes it. Woke politicians and economists are all too happy to talk up the cause of oppressed minorities until you point out the possibility that they are the root cause of the oppression... No, it's not the ancestors from a distant past who are the oppressors, it's happening now.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    What I find strange is that economists declare the money/debt problem nonexistent except maybe Keynes who said you will have to either inflate money to erode debts or use something like the Bancor system where excessive balances are sanctioned with fees. Other economists just assume that all of this debt is 100% voluntary and could be paid back at any time.
FormerBandmate 4y ago
Why do you think South Korea managed to do better than its peers? That’s the entire subject of the article and you don’t seem to have covered it at all
civilized 4y ago
The question was "why isn't the whole world rich", not "what are some bad things rich countries have done to poor countries". Are you confident that if rich countries hadn't done the bad debt/political things to the poor countries, they'd now be rich? Why didn't this happen to countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc?
phkahler 4y ago
Yeah, balancing both budget and trade imbalance (better yet, a trade surplus) should take a country out of poverty over time. South Korea turned from agrarian to massive tech exporter over the time talked about. I'm writing this comment on a Samsung phone BTW. Not every country can have a trade surplus though, that part is a zero sum game. Having your own currency is probably important with a trade deficit, so exchange rate can be used to prevent outflow of currency used locally. That and tarrifs.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  A trade deficit is an investment surplus, and vice versa. It's not like one is always good or the other always bad, you can't reason like that from a single number.
  - phkahler 4y ago
    Money leaving the country directly translates to lower levels of wealth. An exception would be capital expenditures, in which case it might be good. I was mostly referring to consumption though.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Ok but why are poor countries financing the rich countries in this scenario? I mean think about it. Country A borrows from Country B and buys Country B products, which effectively finances Country B companies. This is particularly bad when the imported products aren't physical capital but basic necessities.
ravenspeed 4y ago
If "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" by Gilens et al. convinced you, then, you have reason to assume oligarchy in the US. Whether you can assume the same in other well off countries is an open question. Is it not strange that investment bankers get into state institutions? Is it not strange that those rich countries do not mind your privacy (AMD PSP, Intel, ARM CPUs). As if intelligence agencies form a hidden legislative role and they fear their own citizens. Why is there a need to become like China? Despite all that, people have many more potential conspiracies. Popular ones are: - Leader of the WEF - Soros - Gates How valid those potential conspiracies are, is another question. One example, Epstein supposedly killed himself. Some people are sceptical about that. But I would say: beware your confirmation bias. Potential coincidence should not make you disregard due process. In my estimation, you do not need conspiracies. It is very simple, if you are very rich, you can buy yourself free from your duties (e.g. Amazon) and you can influence policy making (i.e., lobbying). It is also easy to see why the US or rather the intelligence agencies engage in conflict (e.g. Taiwan/TSMC). To be fair, an article on Vox says that the above finding is false. It is hard to be certain on "truth" or to be "certain" at all. You end up with beliefs (which has many forms: assumptions, trust, axioms, ...). Better stay off politics and news.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bumby 4y ago
I wanted to look into this because that was my initial thought as well. I took the Corruption Perceptions Index [1] mentioned in the article and plotted it against the World Bank GDP per capital [2] for about 167 countries that had data in both sets. Indeed, about 60% of GDP can be explained by corruption level measured by CPI. [1] https://www.transparency.org/cpi/2021 https://www.transparency.org/cpi/2021 [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_rec...
imtringued 4y ago
I agree with the foreign debt strategy. E.g. Greece is being talked about as if it was somehow an immoral country that is constantly living beyond their means and somehow the Germans are the heroes who bail out the Greeks who used the debt to buy uh what exactly did they buy? German exports? Wait a moment. If Greeks are buying German products, why aren't Germans just buying Greek products instead of bailing them out? It would be mutually beneficial and solve the debt problem. It turns out, paying off the debt is the last thing Germany wants. If anything, it wants the debt to stay there to act out a nationalist hero role that is both counterproductive to German and Greek citizens and only really benefits the German export industry and the handful of workers directly employed by them. For Greek products to become competitive in Germany, wages in Germany would have to go up. In other words, Greece is a scape goat to distract from domestic issues in Germany just like the EU was the scape goat for the UK.
kornhole 4y ago
If your politicians are the most honest and working for the people, they can be branded as tyrants by the empire's propaganda machine which will use it as justification for military and economic warfare until they submit to the neoliberal rules based order. Look at many countries like Syria, Iran, and Cuba who are being crushed by crippling sanctions.

stelonix 4y ago

This, precisely. Basically, suffering and low-HDI is exported to developing nations, just like pollution was exported by moving manufacturing to these places. Since big players do not have to abide by international law and can pretend to care about human rights through virtue-signaling, we have whole continents with gargantuan inequalities. Any attempt by these abused nations to get together, be it through free-trade or other agreements, will be attacked by the elites in developed nations, either through their foreign policies (economic warfare) or under the hood by espionage/sabotage.

realgeniushere 4y ago

So I agree it has to do with bad governance. But you deflect all blame away from the people in those poorly governed country, instead blaming wealthy people in other countries. I’ll say though, the worst thing the West has done to the third world is insist on democracy. Peasants don’t know what they need government to do, and the political classes in those countries don’t have the maturity to steer them.

jongjong 4y ago
People in those poorly governed countries don't always have a choice. You could be living in such a country, see everything that's wrong with your political system and yet be punished for it nevertheless. There is a flawed assumption which infers that because the majority of people in a specific country are idiots, everyone who lives in that country should be punished... Imagine how hard life is for intelligent people in those countries who are ruled by corrupt fools, surrounded by gullible fools and utterly powerless to do anything about it. People can't choose the country they were born in so they should not be punished on that basis.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  > Imagine how hard life is for intelligent people in those countries who are ruled by corrupt idiots, surrounded by idiots and utterly powerless to do anything about it. I think the "those countries" in your sentence could very easily include many rich countries as well as the set of countries you were originally contemplating.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  > so they should not be punished on that basis I keep seeing the word "punished" used as though there are some parents somwhere who are meteing out deliberate action against their children. It's not like that. It's just bad situations happening to adults and children alike. The only antidote we know of is having democracy and free(ish) markets to allow as much agency as possible to accumulate to individuals, rather than to state officials.
  - realgeniushere 4y ago
    That is how many people see the world. Mankind is collectively some kind of God that is responsible for your individual plight.
- realgeniushere 4y ago
  If you put your hand in the fire, no one has punished you with a burn.

mathverse 4y ago

This is true but the example in the article (South Korea) is one of the most corrupt rich countries out there.

hattmall 4y ago
It's more about making the corruption accessible. Corruption is inevitable, this is covered in Plato's Republic and still holds true today. If people were not corrupt there would be campaigns to avoid political office, not seeking it. The difference many times in the level of success of a nation is the level and accessibility of corruption. The US is extremely corrupt, political office is held almost entirely as a means of personal enrichment. Economic consideration is exchanged quid pro quo as a matter of fact in many scenarios. However these corrupt practices are carried out in an open format under a set of guidelines that mean anyone with money can access the corrupt system. Anyone can look at the system and say objectively "this is wrong" but doing away with it only pushes it behind closed doors and limits access to a select few.

phpnode 4y ago

There's really no reason to blame this on the foreigners installing corrupt politicians, corruption is far more frequently organic and homegrown. Corrupt people work to further their own goals, if that happens to be using their power to take on e.g. debt on unfavourable terms then so be it, but that's not because they're beholden to foreigners, it's because that is their best route to enriching themselves - they can just steal the borrowed funds! Keep in mind that corrupt societies are the most likely to have their debts forgiven, i.e. they are not likely to pay back the money borrowed. I really recommend reading The Dictator's Handbook to learn more about how corruption works.

mathverse 4y ago
It's not as simple as that. Building domestic industries takes time and you can never be sure about the outcome (especially if you believe everyone around you is corrupt as was believed in the countries behind the Iron Curtain). The easy money from foreign investors is hard to resist.
karpierz 4y ago
They have their debts forgiven on the basis of adopting certain policies (free market reform) that allows corporations from wealthy countries to set up shop and extract raw materials from the counter while avoiding giving back to the country via taxes. The profits get booked in Singapore or the Bahamas, and the stock price keeps going up.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Free market reforms do not forbid taxes on natural resource extraction. The U.S. has plenty of such taxes, and they score very highly on measures of economic freedom.
  - karpierz 4y ago
    Of course. But we aren't talking about the States, we're talking about countries that are forced into return as a condition of loan forgiveness. Some of those conditions involves avoiding any sort of export tariffs and using the declared value of goods to calculate profits (ex: if I spent 20$ extracting copper, and sold it for 20$ to an overseas company which totally isn't related to me, then the taxable profit in your country is 0$).

quonn 4y ago

> people from rich countries will use flaws in the political structures of certain other countries to install corrupt politicians > it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians Exactly. But the corrupt politicians do not get installed by other countries. They get installed by a culture of corruption within a country.

zozbot234 4y ago

> That's why, as a regular citizen, it's vitally important to live in a country which has reliable, honest politicians. There is no way to ensure reliable and honest politicians. The best you can do is hope most policymakers are at least somewhat honest, and then institute stringent checks and balances to ensure a corrupt politician can't do too much damage. Which is what most developed democracies do, with varying degrees of success.

phpnode 4y ago
The best thing you can do to minimise corruption is to make it necessary to bribe so many people for the corrupt to achieve their goals that doing so would be uneconomical. The reason Qatar is hosting the world cup right now is because FIFA has a very small selectorate, and therefore it's only necessary to bribe a relatively small number of people to swing the vote.
wizeman 4y ago
Or you could just have strong (and enforced) laws that greatly limit how much power politicians have and then you wouldn't have to keep all these additional layers of corrupt politicians, institutions and government bureaucrats fighting with each other about who gets to be corrupt every 4 years. How to achieve that is left as an exercise for the reader :)

somedude895 4y ago

> Simple answer; No, read the article before commenting please. Edit: I just realized this comment breaks the site's rules > Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. I do wish @dang was around though, most of the comments in here don't reference the article at all, even though it's really insightful.

jongjong 4y ago
The article touches on corruption but it dances around the root causes of corruption and the international debt-based monetary system which systematizes it. Woke politicians and economists are all too happy to talk up the cause of oppressed minorities until you point out the possibility that they are the root cause of the oppression... No, it's not the ancestors from a distant past who are the oppressors, it's happening now.
- imtringued 4y ago
  What I find strange is that economists declare the money/debt problem nonexistent except maybe Keynes who said you will have to either inflate money to erode debts or use something like the Bancor system where excessive balances are sanctioned with fees. Other economists just assume that all of this debt is 100% voluntary and could be paid back at any time.

FormerBandmate 4y ago

Why do you think South Korea managed to do better than its peers? That’s the entire subject of the article and you don’t seem to have covered it at all

civilized 4y ago

The question was "why isn't the whole world rich", not "what are some bad things rich countries have done to poor countries". Are you confident that if rich countries hadn't done the bad debt/political things to the poor countries, they'd now be rich? Why didn't this happen to countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc?

phkahler 4y ago

Yeah, balancing both budget and trade imbalance (better yet, a trade surplus) should take a country out of poverty over time. South Korea turned from agrarian to massive tech exporter over the time talked about. I'm writing this comment on a Samsung phone BTW. Not every country can have a trade surplus though, that part is a zero sum game. Having your own currency is probably important with a trade deficit, so exchange rate can be used to prevent outflow of currency used locally. That and tarrifs.

zozbot234 4y ago
A trade deficit is an investment surplus, and vice versa. It's not like one is always good or the other always bad, you can't reason like that from a single number.
- phkahler 4y ago
  Money leaving the country directly translates to lower levels of wealth. An exception would be capital expenditures, in which case it might be good. I was mostly referring to consumption though.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Ok but why are poor countries financing the rich countries in this scenario? I mean think about it. Country A borrows from Country B and buys Country B products, which effectively finances Country B companies. This is particularly bad when the imported products aren't physical capital but basic necessities.

ravenspeed 4y ago

If "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" by Gilens et al. convinced you, then, you have reason to assume oligarchy in the US. Whether you can assume the same in other well off countries is an open question. Is it not strange that investment bankers get into state institutions? Is it not strange that those rich countries do not mind your privacy (AMD PSP, Intel, ARM CPUs). As if intelligence agencies form a hidden legislative role and they fear their own citizens. Why is there a need to become like China? Despite all that, people have many more potential conspiracies. Popular ones are: - Leader of the WEF - Soros - Gates How valid those potential conspiracies are, is another question. One example, Epstein supposedly killed himself. Some people are sceptical about that. But I would say: beware your confirmation bias. Potential coincidence should not make you disregard due process. In my estimation, you do not need conspiracies. It is very simple, if you are very rich, you can buy yourself free from your duties (e.g. Amazon) and you can influence policy making (i.e., lobbying). It is also easy to see why the US or rather the intelligence agencies engage in conflict (e.g. Taiwan/TSMC). To be fair, an article on Vox says that the above finding is false. It is hard to be certain on "truth" or to be "certain" at all. You end up with beliefs (which has many forms: assumptions, trust, axioms, ...). Better stay off politics and news.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bumby 4y ago

I wanted to look into this because that was my initial thought as well. I took the Corruption Perceptions Index [1] mentioned in the article and plotted it against the World Bank GDP per capital [2] for about 167 countries that had data in both sets. Indeed, about 60% of GDP can be explained by corruption level measured by CPI. [1] https://www.transparency.org/cpi/2021 https://www.transparency.org/cpi/2021 [2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_rec...

imtringued 4y ago

I agree with the foreign debt strategy. E.g. Greece is being talked about as if it was somehow an immoral country that is constantly living beyond their means and somehow the Germans are the heroes who bail out the Greeks who used the debt to buy uh what exactly did they buy? German exports? Wait a moment. If Greeks are buying German products, why aren't Germans just buying Greek products instead of bailing them out? It would be mutually beneficial and solve the debt problem. It turns out, paying off the debt is the last thing Germany wants. If anything, it wants the debt to stay there to act out a nationalist hero role that is both counterproductive to German and Greek citizens and only really benefits the German export industry and the handful of workers directly employed by them. For Greek products to become competitive in Germany, wages in Germany would have to go up. In other words, Greece is a scape goat to distract from domestic issues in Germany just like the EU was the scape goat for the UK.

kornhole 4y ago

If your politicians are the most honest and working for the people, they can be branded as tyrants by the empire's propaganda machine which will use it as justification for military and economic warfare until they submit to the neoliberal rules based order. Look at many countries like Syria, Iran, and Cuba who are being crushed by crippling sanctions.