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It's neither values or "people getting what they deserve". Nor is it "socialism". Resources are just a curse. When resources dominate an economy like in Venezu
by pydry 4y ago
It's neither values or "people getting what they deserve". Nor is it "socialism". Resources are just a curse.
When resources dominate an economy like in Venezuela or Nigeria or Iraq or Russia then the spoils get contested and that fighting inevitably leads to unstable governments, authoritarianism, corruption, economic stagnation, etc. etc.
The only country to really escape the resource curse is Norway and that's likely coz they were discovered quite late after they had developed a high trust society and were able to manage the spoils effectively and fairly. They're the exception not the rule.
- trabant00 4y agoEastern Europe (where I'm from) has no significant resources. The corruption is still rampant. So there must be another cause.
- pydry 4y agoEastern Europe has been routinely contested territory by great powers for the past 1000 years. It's got very unfortunate geography.
- from 4y agoWell the government owned every legal business and then was pressured to dispose of all those businesses quickly when the USSR collapsed. It is not surprising that that kind of environment invites massive amounts of corruption, especially because there was almost no one before privatization who had enough money to buy those businesses for their true prices. At a lower level it probably has more due to do with low wages and general disillusionment with "the system."
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago>When resources dominate an economy like in Venezuela or Nigeria or Iraq or Russia then the spoils get contested and that fighting inevitably leads to unstable governments, authoritarianism, corruption, economic stagnation, etc. etc. Oh please. Last I checked the midwest and Austrialia were doing just fine. There are tons of commodity exporters that don't fit this pattern.
- pydry 4y agoAre you serious? You picked two places with badly dysfunctional politics. Australia started out pretty good and has a long way to fall, but it is getting worse all the time - and most of its dysfunction is thanks to lobbying from resource extractors like Gina Rinehart. Even so they have actual functioning non-resource economies unlike Nigeria and Venezuela and resource extraction can not dominate politics nearly as much.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago>Are you serious? You picked two places with badly dysfunctional politics. Are you serious? You're comparing Australia to Nigeria? Hell, I almost included Russia(!!) in my comment because even they have quite functional and non-corrupt government relative to the area of the spectrum we're talking about here. Just because some nation doesn't turn the screws on industries you don't like as hard as you want them to doesn't make them dysfunctional and corrupt.
- pydry 4y ago> You're comparing Australia to Nigeria? Yes, because Australia has been developing a resource heavy economy with dysfunctional politics to match while Nigeria's has been completely resource dominated for a long time and been a basket case for most of its history because of it. >Hell, I almost included Russia(!!) in my comment because even they have quite functional and non-corrupt government A country more resource dominated than Australia and less resource dominated than Nigeria is more politically dysfunctional than Australia and less dysfunctional than Nigeria? Shocking (!!). It's weird that I even have to utter this sentence but... Russia is not non-corrupt, by the way.