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Why poor countries stopped catching up
- A_D_E_P_T 9mo agoThe entire essay obsesses over GDP convergence while ignoring that GDP (especially in the West) increasingly measures asset shuffling, imputed rents, and healthcare billing rather than anything humans actually experience. (Healthcare, finance, real estate, and legal services combined are ~40% of US GDP!) So we've got 3000 words eulogizing a metric that tells you more about financialization than flourishing. Look at life expectancy, infant mortality, or caloric intake and you'll find a more interesting story -- with some poor countries doing very well, and increasingly so, whereas others are on a fairly grim trajectory.
- rayiner 9mo agoGDP per capita is highly correlated with metrics like infant mortality.
- danny_codes 9mo agoThough if you use us as a data point, seems like it goes down if you get too high
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- bryanlarsen 9mo agoWhich makes it even more interesting when the two highly correlated metrics are moving in different directions relatively.
- topaz0 9mo agoLife expectancy vs GDP per capita: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-gdp-pe... I don't have an R^2, but clear to me that it's far from one. Likewise for infant mortality rate: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-gdp-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-gdp-per-c... Edit to add: point being that a weak correlation, even if it is indisputably real, leaves a lot of room for other factors to be operative when it comes to particular differences.
- rayiner 9mo agoWhat does it look like if you separate out east asians and remove countries with an inflated GDP per capita from resource exports (like Botswana)?
- topaz0 9mo agoIt looks like cherry picking. More to the point, it looks like you are attempting to identify some of the particular factors that might affect gdp or health outcomes in ways that aren't correlated, and exclude cases where those are the operative factors. Which would provide support for the thesis that there are other operative factors, as suggested by OP.
- rayiner 9mo agoIt’s not cherry-picking. The question is: does GDP correlate with things we care about? In answering that question it makes sense to hold other factors constant. Asians have a longevity advantage in virtually every society where they’re found, so it makes sense to separate out the asian countries. It also makes sense to remove outliers where a single export makes GDP per capita seem artificially large.
- topaz0 9mo ago1. The blog states that the relationship between economic growth and initial wealth doesn't show a trend that had been expected from theory. It uses per capita GDP and per capita GDP growth as proxies for wealth and growth. Its analysis does not control for any pet theories, because the theory claims to be general. (Indeed, it refers to literature that does control for other factors and explains why they are unsatisfying: because if the other factors are more important than the economic ones, then the theory isn't worth much) 2. OP, roughly, objects that GDP (and its growth rate) is sensitive to a fairly specific fact of the modern global economy, namely uneven financialization, and hints at an argument for why GDP would obscure the relevant trends in wealth and growth of wealth. They claim that the dynamics of various health proxies are better representative of economic status and growth than GDP is. They do not claim that these are not correlated. Effectively, their claim is that the portion of the variation of GDP that is not explained by its correlation with health outcomes is enough to obscure the relationship between economic status and growth. 3. You comment tersely that they are correlated, which was never denied in OP, and does not address in any way the relevance of the particular confounding factor that OP proposed. In followups try to rescue that correlation by controlling for your pet "extra factors" that (1) objected to for how they weaken the relevance of the economic theory, and that are irrelevant to the point that OP was trying to make. To be clear, I have no strong evidence that financialization explains the way that GDP (and its derivative) differs from a linear function of other development metrics (and their derivatives), and if OP has evidence, they don't provide it in their brief HN comment. All I'm saying is, saying there's a correlation has very little bearing on OP's claim, and controlling for more irrelevant pet factors is not going to make it more relevant.
- AnimalMuppet 9mo agoHealthcare is far more than just billing. Healthcare is why I didn't have a heart attack (two stents in my heart). It's why I didn't go blind (cataracts). It's stuff that I directly benefit from.
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- raincole 9mo agoUS tourists spend $177B per year abroad. When they spend their money in other countries[0], they surely experience the benefit. The universal experience of Americans visiting Japan: how is such a developed place so affordable? Then they think Japan must do something exceptionally excellent. But the truth is it feels weirdly affordable because they are spending their American salary there. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings#:~:text=Table_title:%20International%20tourism%20expenditure%20Table_content:%20header:%20%7C,%7C%202024:%20119.2%20%7C%202023:%20110.3%20%7C https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings#:~:text...
- shermantanktop 9mo agoAnd they get the opposite feeling when they pay $30 for a hamburger in Zurich.
- LargoLasskhyfv 9mo ago-.^(raising eyebrow) Doesn't have to be swiss. There are enough domestic(CONUS) places where you can have the same prices, with ease.
- tim333 9mo agoWhen I visited Japan around 1983 it was the other way around - Japan was stupid expensive compared to the US or Europe. It's mostly down to investment flows moving the currencies. Back then Japan was the economic miracle dominating cars and cameras and everyone was buying in. Now Japan is in gentle decline and the hot money is all going to the US to invest in FAANG stuff.
- readthenotes1 9mo ago"Healthcare, finance, real estate, and legal services combined are ~40% of US GDP!" Healthcare is more properly medical care. There's very little health care or wellness preservation compared to treatment and repair. I would argue that legal services are more care-like, but there is a fair amount of treatment and repair.
- hirako2000 9mo agoEconomists are obsessed with numbers even when numbers simply contradicts numbers they aren't familiar with. Incorporating sociology, for what it's worth would radically change the picture. Do economists travel? And what is a poor country anyway.. Zimbabwe is put on the same table as south east Asian countries..where do geopolitical aspects get into considerations for countries like Cuba or more recently Venezuela or Iran. Do these things even matter. No surprise economists have lost legitimity for so many. They don't predict or diagnose the economy of the nations they live in, trying to explain what they call the "global south" as some call it is rather arrogant. What this research may have got right is to nuance what their predecessor had claimed. But that wasn't too hard. My tip for economists: go live in rural areas in each country you claim to diagnose. Speak to the locals, grand ma can tell you what it cost to get clean water just a few decades ago vs now. Maybe you will start to understand what poverty even means.
- chirau 9mo agoWhat's your point on Zimbabwe being put on the same table as south east Asian countries?
- hirako2000 9mo agoThe point is the drastic difference in level of development for a set of different countries in different region. Each nation faces different challenges.
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- jhanschoo 9mo agoI don't see how this comment relates to the article, which claims that the observed quick growth in "poor countries" was all just China modernizing. And Chinese growth is indeed correlated with better material conditions for the Chinese.
- jmclnx 9mo agoOur current world system is based on exploitation by the powerful on the weak. It has been this way since the dawn of time at many levels. So now, powerful countries take resources from less powerful countries. There are many ways this can be done, so here we are.
- nlitened 9mo agoI wonder if there is an example of a country that doesn’t have resources, so “powerful countries” cannot “take” them? Or every country has resources, and weak countries are those that prefer to sell them for cheap rather than work on making use of them?
- bibimsz 9mo agoEngland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan, etc. None of them have vast natural resources.
- School-Cotton 9mo agoEngland had coal at the start of the Industrial Revolution.
- WalterBright 9mo agoEngland adopted free markets which started the IR.
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- samantp 9mo agoSo true. There is a full powerful - weak spectrum. Those not at the top or bottom, in-between ones, turn a blind eye to this and accept it as a harsh reality of nature, enjoying spoils of this chain in the process. Worse, become servile to those above them and ruthless to those below. And as if this were not enough, doors of fashion philanthropy also open up for them!
- orionblastar 9mo ago> In the past, he said, poor countries were failing to outgrow rich ones because of unfortunate circumstances (“the war, bad policies, and dysfunctional institutions that afflicted developing nations in the mid-20th century”) Or is it the wealthy exploiting the poor through low wages?
- EGreg 9mo agoThey’re not exploiting them, it is a function of not having really strong safety nets or even UBI. So a lot of people are desperate to survive and keep a roof over their head. And technology makes money flow upwards to the rich and corporations. Soon with AI employment is going to become pity-employment. Make-work jobs. Because people just can’t seem to trust other people to be charge of their own time and have free money. Overton window in USA is not there yet. So capital will find ridiculous ways to exploit labor via the desperation of the masses. Maybe gig economies and race to the bottom for service providers as out-of-work people flood the market with useless crap, who knows.
- orionblastar 9mo agoSo they need a social safety net? I agree. They also need a minimum wage to earn enough to live on.
- EGreg 9mo agoOnce people have a UBI you can eliminate the minimum wage laws. People can take unpaid internships, hobbies etc.
- orionblastar 8mo agoI agree that a UBI would have to be used when AI and robots take over jobs.
- EGreg 9mo agoAutomation, d’oh Outsourcing worked while we didnt have AI to the level we needed It was always gonna be a temporary stopgap. Sorry, the global community doesnt have enough empathy for humans THAT far away to actually share wealth w them. At least we graduated to having social safety nets within nations.
- rayiner 9mo ago“Sharing wealth” is an idea that has millions of children’s blood all over it. It’s a recipe for keeping countries poor and backwards, so children die of disease, hunger, and political instability. When my dad was born in a village in the British Dominion of Pakistan, India/Bangladesh/Pakistan and Singapore were similarly poor. Nehru went to Cambridge and learned about socialism. Lee Kuan Yew went to Cambridge and learned about capitalism and high-trust British people: https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8 https://youtu.be/b_6H26fpZp8 The rest is history. Singaporeans now get to stay in their home country, while desis flee to Anglo countries to escape the society Nehru and their grandparents created. Waiting for Europeans to give you money is a loser mentality, and people peddling that mentality in the name of “empathy” are causing harm. What the third world needs from Europe is the social and political technology that Europe itself used to become rich. That’s what people like LKY understood that so many third world leaders failed to learn.
- vivzkestrel 9mo agoyou most certainly want to watch this one about india since you brought it into the conversation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LveXy5VBGUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LveXy5VBGUc india is not a poor country anymore
- rayiner 9mo agoIndia is a desperately poor country. It has a GDP per capita of under $2,700 annually. That’s poorer than the U.S. was in 1880! Singapore has a GDP per capita thirty times higher. If India had grown as quickly as Singapore since 1965, it would have a GDP per capita of $21,000, higher than Russia or Turkey. As recently as 1990, India was richer per capita than China. Today, China is more than four times richer than India per capita. Of course if India can maintain the current growth trajectory for another couple of decades, and doesn’t fall into the middle income trap, that will change. But Nehru really fucked us all over. If he hadn’t become infatuated with socialism, India would already be on the precipice of being a developed country.
- rayiner 9mo agoSocial sciences departments around the world should be working overtime to explain the first chart on this page: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/latin-america-economic-growth/ https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/latin-america-economic-gr... It’s a graph of regional GDP per capita as a percentage of the U.S. Latin America was around 40% around 1950, but has declined to around 25% by 2018. Sub-saharan africa has slowly lost ground since 1950. Southeast asia has gone from almost as poor as Africa in 1950 to almost as rich as southern europe (50% of US GDP per capita). What makes some countries rich and some countries poor? In the modern era, I think political dysfunction explains a lot. Developing countries with neoliberal governments that started out authoritarian (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan) have done well. Countries that can’t maintain a stable government have suffered. In my home country, they were experiencing 5-6% per capita GDP growth for about 15 years. But then a motley coalition of idealistic students and Islamists overthrew the government. I suspect that will lead to a lengthy period of slow growth, because who wants to invest in a country where people regularly overthrow the government?
- School-Cotton 9mo agoSorry, coy “in my country” posting is one of my biggest online pet peeves. Why not just say that you mean Bangladesh?
- rayiner 9mo agoI just say it so it doesn’t seem like I’m cherry picking a random example.
- selimthegrim 9mo agoHasina had gone nuts and was torturing people. I don’t think people are gonna wanna invest in a country where someone like that is in charge plus Adani already has them over a barrel.
- rayiner 9mo agoChina does that and people are fine investing there. Bangladesh isn’t Vermont, you can’t apply the same rules. However many people Hasina killed will pale in comparison to the excess child deaths that will result from interrupting GDP growth.
- MinimalAction 9mo agoNice article! The upshot is that the boom of Chinese commodity prices in the mid-2010s is what stopped poor countries from catching up. That's a high level answer, but there's more nuance to it. In many places, I firmly believe the poor governance added with unnecessary bureaucracy is how half the countries lose sight on development. The prime example is India and to some extent Brazil.
- dartharva 9mo ago"Poor governance" tends to be an easy catchall term to shift blame on for economic failures, but reality is, like you said, a lot more nuanced. India's socialist government looks justifiably horrible and inefficient when looked at through a rational economist's glasses, but what many don't realize is that its main priority for most of its existence has been stabilizing regions and preventing balkanization, which it has achieved significantly, sadly having to fall back to political nationalism (another catchall term the author of this article himself uses to push some blame) and socialist federal overreach to achieve it. We tend to be quick to notice failures but God knows how many circumstances we have dodged that were too close to disruptive civil war without recognizing it.
- orwin 9mo agoTo be fair, I understand why 'preventing balkanization' is a target, but I'm not sure it's a correct one. By de-federalizing a bit, even temporarily, for a few decades, India might have fared a bit better overall. But I understand why they chose not to, it is a very dangerous choice that can end very poorly.
- constantius 9mo agoI probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin. Genuine question, not a judgment.
- scuppernong 9mo ago"What if it was just China?" is a reasonable guess for many of the dazzling claims of statistical worldwide improvement made by Steven Pinker/Noah Smith and their ilk
- duxup 9mo agoThat's what always surprised me about the whole concept of BRICS nations. Those countries have more interest in competing with each other to get access to other markets than to work/stick together in any way.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> Those countries have more interest in competing with each other to get access to other markets than to work/stick together in any way. Access to markets isn't an exclusive asset. They don't compete over it, and mostly they can't compete over it, because they already have it.
- SanjayMehta 9mo agoWhat I don't understand is the concept of NATO or the EU: why would a group of countries willingly band together as "happy vassals," as the Belgian PM put it.
- disgruntledphd2 9mo ago> What I don't understand is the concept of NATO or the EU: why would a group of countries willingly band together as "happy vassals NATO: Russia is a threat to both Europe and the US, lets band together to make sure we can fight them. EU: Europe keeps fighting wars, lets make our economies more inter-dependent so that doesn't happen as much. For NATO, I can see the happy vassals thing (and that's what the Belgian PM was referring to), but can you explain who is the overlord in the EU example?
- mfru 9mo agoGermany, France and formerly the UK
- deaux 9mo agoIf the modern right's obsession with "ivory tower academics" was real instead of a stick with which to beat ideas they don't like, the field they'd focus on would be economics, not gender studies. Most of it is astrology for those who like to wear suits. It has been decades since the complexity and chaos factor of the real world has overtaken the ability to make meaningful correlations or predictions in all but the most straightforward cases where one institute (e.g. a central bank) controls everything. It's made even worse by the great bias towards "everything about globalism and capitalism is obviously fantastic for the world!". This case is such a prime example of both of the above. Firstly, the one-off China event having such a big impact on its own that general theories are entirely irrelevant. Second, of course > "Now that those were swept away—they were, he said, merely a “temporary phenomenon”—the catch-up growth that economic theory predicted had finally arrived. Globalization was working; development was succeeding; the gap between rich and poor countries was closing.
- anon291 9mo agoEverything useful about economics was figured out ages ago. Free markets and the rule of law guarantee wealth and prosperity for the masses
- bryanlarsen 9mo agoAnd with just those two you get massive and frequent recessions, inequality, and so much more. It's a good base, but far from enough.
- anon291 8mo agoWealth inequality is a net good
- econgs321 9mo agoClassic example of economic theory managing to dress up a kind of ahistorical theology as respectable science. Consider this: if you take 'countries' as given (questionable), and some become rich whereas others remain or become poor, by induction you'd expect those trends to continue. A country that has remained poor for decades is likely to remain poor for decades, etc. "Bad governments" and other conditions that create poverty are not some kind of mean-reverting aberration. The economists will carry on though, and thanks to their connections with finance and government, their prestige will never truly wink out.
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- hn_throwaway_99 9mo agoIs it against the rules to say that most of the comments here (at least right now) are drastically missing the point? "Rich countries exploit poor ones!!" - ok, fine, you could argue that's been happening since the beginning of time, doesn't change anything about the conclusions of the article. "The article obsesses over GDP convergence!!" - you can argue GDP is not the perfect metric but the fact is a lot of these poor countries have not been converging on lots of quality of life metrics that matter. The fundamental thrust of the article is that poor countries only "converged" for a short while due to the Chinese-driven commodity boom, and I think this argument is very compelling. Worse, as history has shown tons of times, commodity booms often end up being bad for a country in the long term because they don't lead to meaningful investments in other productivity-improving endeavors (e.g. Dutch disease that the article mentions). And I think a subtext of this article is that the economic profession in general has a ton of soul searching to do. Too often economics has depicted rosy outcomes for a host of activities where it has just been flat out wrong. This article goes into detail about how "convergence" almost never happened except for a short "sugar high" driven my Chinese commodity demand. Similarly, I've seen a few mea culpas over the years arguing that the once orthodox view that globalization would be great for everyone failed to take into account how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power, one aspect in the rise of populism and some of its dangerous effects.
- bibimsz 9mo ago[flagged]
- seizethecheese 9mo agoYou may be right but what if IQ is downstream of GDP not the other way around? No dog in this fight, just a philosophical question.
- jopython 9mo agoThe existing data leans heavily against "IQ is just downstream of GDP."
- GMoromisato 9mo agoI wish I could reply to the original post, but I can't because it is flagged. But if I could reply, I would say the following: This post is almost certainly wrong--as in, the existence of Big Foot is more likely. Take an example like Haiti vs. Dominican Republic, two halves of one island. Haiti at #175 is near the bottom of the list in GDP per person, while DR is #71--above both China and Mexico. And consider that as recently as 1960, both had similar GDP per person. And of course, there's the famous example of North Korea ($600 GDP per person) vs. South Korea ($50,000+ GDP per person). If countries can diverge so radically, even though they share very similar land and peoples, it is much more likely that the differences between rich countries and poor countries is due entirely to external factors, like governance and history, and not the IQ of people.
- bibimsz 9mo agoI will grant you that the most oppressive regime in the world does have an impact on GDP in Korea. But DR and Haiti are not the same genetically. Haitians African ancestry is 85% and 95%. In the Dominican Republic is 38% and 40%. So I don't see that as an exception to the rule.
- GMoromisato 9mo ago
- seizethecheese 9mo agoCatch up growth is premised on the assumption that productivity producing innovations diffuse through the world. This assumption is true, of course, but not universally. Many technologies also rely on culture, institutions, human capital.
- WalterBright 9mo agoA long essay, which ignored the elephant in the room. Prosperity and growth come from free markets. The correlation is very strong. Poor countries are poor because they eschew free markets.
- rayiner 9mo agoYes, but also political stability and rule of law. It doesn’t have to be “rule of law” in the sense of liberal democracy. But it has to be reasonably fair and predictable for routine business issues. That’s one thing China has focused a lot on that doesn’t get mentioned much. Apart from politically charged topics or pillars of their industrial policy, you actually can get a relatively fair shake from Chinese courts these days.
- WalterBright 9mo agoPolitical stability and rule of law are essential ingredients for free markets.
- disgruntledphd2 9mo agoIn fact, "free" markets are downstream of them. Political stability and rule of law are important everywhere, whereas a fetish for free markets is something that's only important in some places. We rarely get better results from healthcare or education (or infrastructure) from a free market system, and yet those are fundamental ingredients towards most human development (which can, but does not require free markets). And anyway, what does a free market mean? Do regulations make markets less free or just shape them?
- WalterBright 9mo ago> We rarely get better results from healthcare or education (or infrastructure) from a free market system Healthcare in the US was very good and inexpensive before the government got involved in it. Public education does a very poor job in the US, at enormous cost. > what does a free market mean? It means a market where force and fraud are absent. > Regulations Regulations to reduce force and fraud are a proper function of government.
- tbrownaw 9mo agoI assume someone somewhere has a dataset for technology diffusion broken out by country or at least region? Like so[1], but as a table and not limited to just here. Perhaps that sort of thing could be useful enough to justify the extra bytes? [1] https://techliberation.com/2009/05/28/on-measuring-technology-diffusion-rates/ https://techliberation.com/2009/05/28/on-measuring-technolog...
- topaz0 9mo ago> [...] three factors [...] Capital accumulation is one. The obvious omission here is well developed in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: it's hard to accumulate capital when all of the productivity growth from foreign "investment" by the rich world is captured by the "investors".
- kazinator 9mo ago> Globalization was working; development was succeeding; the gap between rich and poor countries was closing. So there was tremendous reason for optimism about the future. Even if that had turned out true, so what? The gap between rich and poor countries closing is not the same thing as the gap between the rich and poor closing!
- cyberax 9mo agoI think that the answer is the death of democracy and the golden age of corruption in poor countries. During the 80-s and early 90-s, the Western world was still trying to defend nascent democracies. It was lampooned by everyone ("Team America: World Police", anyone?) but it _did_ work to some degree. Around 2000-s the West switched into the "whatever you do, we don't care as long as you stay inside your country" mode. Moreover, the West made it easy to expatriate money. You could earn your fortune in Russia by stealing money from schools via various corrupt schemes, but once you crossed the border of Russia, you instantly became a respected businessman who should be treated with respect. The last year's Nobel in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu for his work on extractive versus inclusive institutions ("Why Nations Fail"). And the West unwittingly (?) recreated the same conditions that resulted in development gaps during the early colonial era. And yes, the West is to blame here. Not China. Pretty much nobody in, say, Congo is abusing child labor to get money to emigrate to China. But I bet that quite a few people from Congo now have very nice properties in London.
- jackyli02 9mo agoReasons this piece is unimpressive: 1. It never really seemed to explain WHY poor countries stopped doing better. It just framed it as "sike, they never were getting better!". But the WHY is still missing. 2. The penultimate paragraph present a thesis that China's commodity boom is the main driver behind the "great convergence". This claim is baseless. Just because the commodity boom in China coincide with the great convergence does make one the "product" (verbatim quote) of the other. In fact these two events are structurally connected and there is no simple one-way causation relationship. Other factors like financial deregularization played a vital role in the great convergence but was completely ignored. 3. Some of the evidences (eg. "Dutch disease") are over-generalizations and ignore the differences between nations.
- maxglute 9mo agoThe good news is PRC, like western capitalist pigs are willing to sell the rope that hangs them. It's never been more affordable and accessible to build up nascent manufacturing. PRC now one stop shop for bootstrapping development from cheap energy to infra to capital goods at involution prices vs PRC developed by paying premium on western capita goods. PRC, also like western capitalist pigs assume their dominance is so entrenched that others are unlikely to catchup, at least not in relevant time frame. The bad news is unlike western capitalist pigs that drank own koolaid, PRC might be right. Ultimately PRC manufacturing has to also be calibrated to price in bottom 40% of domestic pop whom are relegated to low income, ~2000 USD per year, i.e. they will structurally hold on to low/medium end manufacturing competitiveness even as they move up the value chain. Realistically PRC won't be vacating those low end until 2050s when that cohort starts dying. Or potentially never with automation. In the meantime, as long as global south slowly trend towards low-middle income, i.e. ~5000 usd customers, that's still growing 3billion+ people into market / S-curve territory for consumer goods from phones to air conditioners to low end nevs. TLDR PRC is giving all the tools for poor countries to catchup, betting they won't. Maybe that's hubris, but there's a reason PRC isn't actually trying to export it's political/development model, because bluntly they don't think others can replicate it, least of all due to PRC agglomeration scale alone. Maybe India.
- orwin 9mo agoPRC economic boom followed a massive investment in infrastructure and government-led development plan, taking Stalin's 5-year plans as an example, and Keynes demand-side economics as a functional economic theory (unlike the USSR who chose to ignore non-marxist economists basically). It is replicable on a smaller scale, but you need huge initial investment (or slave labour).
- maxglute 9mo ago> smaller scale Quantity has a quality of it's own. The sheer quantity of massive country agglomeration effects is what makes PRC system not replicable, i.e. you need country with 800 million people to sustain 500m "modern" workforce that can optimize for every industrial cluster that becomes mutually reinforcing. This not something smaller countries (i.e not PRC or India) can invest of enslave their way into. Current PRC is a model predicated off cultivating and integrating 800 million people into an all domain supercluster, that population scale is an initial investment gate.
- Keeeeeeeks 9mo agoIf I had to guess it’s because GDP growth in industrialized countries are driven by financialization facilitated by cheap power and energy, and the countries that are more financialized don’t exactly want the countries with precious minerals to be industrialized enough to be self sufficient. That’s why a lot of global south countries with valuable materials (oil, data center building blocks, etc) are often chronically destabilized, but not so much so that it’s impossible to find someone to buy unrefined materials from.