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That's not the reason that nations stay "developing". Nations stay "developing" due to extractive economic and political institutions that prevent economic gro

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.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      I don't think we really disagree per se. Not sure why you seem so adversarial. And Russia is probably not playing with the grain shortage. They had an agreement in place to let the country they are at war with sell grain because it's so critical. It's probably more complicated than that and a tangent.
      - genman 3y ago
        No, I don't think that I provided a counter argument but rather a supplementary one. Population growth rate is a huge problem that hinders capacity to provide enough aid. Russia certainly used the risk of hunger as a weapon to increase political pressure on Ukraine on the international level. Fortunately that attempt didn't play out and Russia was instead pressurized to make concessions. But they stopped the agreement the same moment they thought that it is not beneficial for them anymore. But this is just a side topic and was given as an example how the African incapacity to keep up with the population growth has wider geopolitical implications.
        DoreenMichele 3y ago
        Ah, so it's me. Thank you. There was a time when HN was more conversational than it typically seems these days. It gets hard to assume someone is making conversation rather than making an argument when the default seems to be the latter.

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.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    I don't think we really disagree per se. Not sure why you seem so adversarial. And Russia is probably not playing with the grain shortage. They had an agreement in place to let the country they are at war with sell grain because it's so critical. It's probably more complicated than that and a tangent.
    - genman 3y ago
      No, I don't think that I provided a counter argument but rather a supplementary one. Population growth rate is a huge problem that hinders capacity to provide enough aid. Russia certainly used the risk of hunger as a weapon to increase political pressure on Ukraine on the international level. Fortunately that attempt didn't play out and Russia was instead pressurized to make concessions. But they stopped the agreement the same moment they thought that it is not beneficial for them anymore. But this is just a side topic and was given as an example how the African incapacity to keep up with the population growth has wider geopolitical implications.
      - DoreenMichele 3y ago
        Ah, so it's me. Thank you. There was a time when HN was more conversational than it typically seems these days. It gets hard to assume someone is making conversation rather than making an argument when the default seems to be the latter.