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We must collectively understand the reason why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of i

• DoreenMichele 3y ago
  Malawi is one of the countries mentioned in this article as a source of polio outbreaks. A famous singer has invested millions in hospitals there and they still lack adequate water infrastructure. I imagine their post operative stats are probably not great. Getting surgery in a modern hospital and going home to inadequate clean water and inadequate nutrition likely actively fosters post operative infections. Population growth tends to stop with adequate education plus reproductive rights for women. Development isn't just about infrastructure. It's also about culture, education, developing the local population so they can sustain a more developed society. My recollection: water.org was started by a man who went to Africa with a medical charity, concluded that a lot of the health issues they were treating were directly caused by lack of clean water, decided we should fix that. We already invest in other countries, just not necessarily wisely. Advanced surgery being brought to primitive conditions is more about people wanting to feel heroic than about really improving things.
• BariumBlue 3y ago
  The Malthusian argument is incorrect and I disagree with the concept of physical infrastructure being the end-all-be-all. Japan, South Korea, Germany, as well as the USSR had explosive growth after WW2 not because they had massive existing infrastructure, but because of social systems & processes that enable a reliable, stable, productive society. If the societies are fragile (vulnerable to drought, markets, or violence), or rotting (corruption, superstition, tribalism), even great infrastructure can make for subpar growth. An analogy I always think of are Wadis (dry riverbeds); in very dry places with little rainfall (like Hudaydah in Yemen / Saudi Arabia), when it DOES rain, the dry dirt riverbeds don't soak up any water and transport it all out in flash floods - but it IS possible (and has been done) to invest in the land's ability to hold that water rather than purge it. Similarly, in a "always-developing" society, there'd have to be a investment in the people to ensure they can benefit from solutions to their issues.
  • epicureanideal 3y ago
    I don’t think they’re making a Malthusian argument. It’s about the difference in the rate of change or two variables, not the absolute carrying capacity of a set of resources as in the Malthusian argument.
• epicureanideal 3y ago
  Although some might be interpreting the previous poster as having some bad motives for saying what they’re saying, it does seem to be objectively true that population growth in developing countries is absolutely huge. If the population level had remained the same as 50 years ago the level of development would be much higher. But of course the population growth rate is declining so standards of living should hopefully start to catch up.
  • deleted 3y ago
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  • genman 3y ago
    Yes and no. This is my argument indeed that if the population growth stayed lower then a lot more people would have been able to rise above the poverty level (or even much higher). UN prediction for Africa is that they fall close to the reproduction threshold for the end of century. Until that the poverty trap will continue. It also means that by that time now 4 billion people require their needs satisfied instead. But the population growth has been huge and exponential. From 200 million to 4 billion in 150 years is an incredible amount of growth.
• andrewmutz 3y ago
  That's not the reason that nations stay "developing". Nations stay "developing" due to extractive economic and political institutions that prevent economic growth. Great book about the topic by economist Daron Acemoglu ("Why nations fail"). The reason that countries that have high population growth tend to be poor is because when a country gets rich its people have fewer children. The high fertility rate does not cause the poverty, instead its the other way around: the poverty causes the high fertility rate.
  • genman 3y ago
    I can't agree with this unfortunately. While getting rich further lowers the fertility rate then there is a certain threshold that must be first exceeded to get rich (relatively speaking of course). There must be a feedback loop that incentivizes to get better education, to get better productivity to get richer. Raising a child is expensive, raising a highly educated child is very expensive. If you have 8 children then you can barely feed them unless you are very rich indeed. Even if you manage to provide good education for few of your children then the larger part of them continues the poverty loop. Breaking out of poverty requires breaking of this loop. It should be very obvious - if your economy grows 5% but your population grows 10% then everybody is getting poorer as the growth per capita is negative. The same applies for everything, education, sanitation, food production. If you capacity to provide any of them is lower than the population growth then the amount of the poor continues to increase.
    • DoreenMichele 3y ago
      And providing more basics, like improved agriculture, education and essential infrastructure like clean water access, is a better means to combat that issue than sending in surgeons to play hero and have a feel-good moment without making any real difference in the root causes that led to someone needing surgery.
      • genman 3y ago
        Current problem in Africa is that their capacity to produce food, while it is increasing relatively fast, doesn't increase enough to keep up with the population growth. This is why Russia can play with the grain shortage to begin with.
• teddyh 3y ago
  > why some countries stay "developing". The reason is very simple - the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of infrastructure development Opinions are divided: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP8CzlFhc14#t=3m>
  • genman 3y ago
    Yes, the communist argument - everybody else is at fault but not myself. Yet the communist paradise, the 1/6 of all the land with incredible riches stayed poor and finally collapsed.
    • teddyh 3y ago
      That argument has nothing to do with communism. At most, it could be seen as anti-capitalist. As I understand it, the argument is that some so-called “underdeveloped” country is actually rich in natural resources, but foreign companies have come in and extracted the vast majority of the wealth, given some resources only to a select elite, as essentially bribes, and the large masses of people get nothing, and so remain poor. Even though the wealth extracted, had it remained in the country, would have made the country on the same level, or even higher, than the so-called “developed” countries. I can see no argument for communism here. If anything, the argument is a nationalistic one, and nationalism have traditionally been associated with the right, not the left.
      • genman 3y ago
        You have to know the history to understand why this argument is communist.
        • teddyh 3y ago
          I don’t see how this invalidates the argument itself. I mean, who cares if evil communists have made that argument. Does that make the argument wrong?
• harshalizee 3y ago
  Also forgot the part where India and North/West African regions were incredibly wealthy in the past and were basically strip mined by colonialism. It's been only 50 years or so that they're trying to catch up.
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    West Africa was never "incredibly wealthy". Yes, before Europeans it was part of long-range trading routes with the Muslim world, but empires were feudalistic and only a tiny elite had access to that trade-related wealth, while the vast majority of the population was barely surviving through subsistence farming and pastoralism, just like so many do today, or hunting and gathering.
    • genman 3y ago
      Lets also not forget the slavery and slave trade that was practiced in Western and Northern Africa.