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The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding

The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender. but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?

pyuser583 4y ago
Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on. America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals. Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them. But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.
  - realjhol 4y ago
    We have more trinkets yes, but in exchange we've been reduced to a deracinated blob with no hope or future, now in a state of terminal decline
  - cudgy 4y ago
    More chattel does not necessarily mean a better life. Dictators that look more like you are not necessarily more beneficent.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard "Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century." in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud. India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_Indi...

pyuser583 4y ago

Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.

fsckboy 4y ago
life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on. America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals. Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them. But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.
- realjhol 4y ago
  We have more trinkets yes, but in exchange we've been reduced to a deracinated blob with no hope or future, now in a state of terminal decline
- cudgy 4y ago
  More chattel does not necessarily mean a better life. Dictators that look more like you are not necessarily more beneficent.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard "Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century." in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud. India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_India https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_Indi...