12 ms·

Why Is Zambia So Poor?

160 points by timw6n 13y ago

hartator 13y ago
Anyone care for a little tdlr; ?
- Spooky23 13y ago
  Colonialism. The British created the place to exploit copper mines, but the Belgians were able to get control of the copper.
  - sgt 13y ago
    Zambia wouldn't necessarily be a better place if colonialism never happened.
    - Ma8ee 13y ago
      Colonialism destroyed all structure that was before in Africa. They had prosperous kingdoms that was destroyed. Then the colonialists left very suddenly and there were only chaos left. It's not more than about 50 years since Africa was left to fend for itself after the European powers left. Considering that it took hundreds of years with more wars than anyone care to count before Europe became the peaceful and prosperous place it is today I don't think Africa is doing that badly.
      - newnewnew 13y ago
        Their "prosperous kingdoms" didn't have written language or the wheel. There wasn't that much pre-existing structure to destroy.
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        > There wasn't that much pre-existing structure to destroy. That is a myth that the colonizers were very happy to bolster, for obvious reasons.
        oblio 13y ago
        That "wheel" remark was quite poignant, though :)
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        Like how the Inca or the Maya never were any real civilizations because they didn't use wheels?
        oblio 13y ago
        Well, they were real civilizations, bu I doubt anyone would dare to equate their achievements and influence with the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese or Egyptians. Especially for the Incas, it's hard for me to be impressed by their achievements around the year 1400 AD considering what the Egyptians already had achieved by the year 2000BC...
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        The point is that they were organized societies, not the utter chaos that was left behind when the European powers left Africa.
        smtddr 13y ago
        Don't even bother with the user "newnewnew". Look through a few pages of his comment history. He makes condescending remarks about liberals & keeps trying to prove Africa(and African-americans) are the cause of their own problems. And if you read a couple of pages of his comment history, it's not clear if he sees women as equal to men and/or doesn't understand how strong gender-discrimination is. But don't take my word for it. Seriously, look at his comment history. Here's just one, of many examples, of his mind set: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360762
        rdtsc 13y ago
        It was a trade-off but those kingdoms weren't the ones making the choice. It was made for them by the occupiers. They had perhaps some authority structures, some nation and ethnicity based borders, perhaps less civil war type conflicts. At least that was taken away. Whether it would have been better for British and others to stay away is hard to say.
        catmanjan 13y ago
        I used to think the lack of the wheel was a valid argument against the prosperity of Africa, but then I saw how wheels performed in such arid conditions. The soil is so volatile that wheels end up being dragged in the dirt, hence camels. It would have been cool if they had invented primitive AT STs though!
      - spindritf 13y ago
        Eastern Europe has been changing hands between various empires for the last 300 years and was razed at least twice in the last century alone. That was followed by Soviet occupation and communism it entailed. Poland lost 17% of its population in WWII. Local elites and leaders who didn't end in mass graves or concentration camps during the war, were imprisoned or murdered by post-war collaborators. The Red Army left in '93 and 20 years later it's a perfectly fine place to live. I don't buy colonialism as the explanation.
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        The Soviet occupation or the colonization in itself wasn't that made the mess. Poland had the Soviet occupiers and Africa had various European powers organizing the countries. None of the places was good places to live during the occupation (even though I think most people very much prefer Brezhnev and maybe even Stalin to King Leopold of Belgium), but there was at least some kind of organized society. The difference between the colonial powers leaving Africa and the Soviet Union leaving Eastern Europe was that the Soviet Union didn't take with them everyone that worked in any kind of administration and most people who could read when they left. In Poland the guys that was in charge of the central mail administration didn't flee the country. The Department of Transportation didn't burn all their archives and jumped on the first ship out of the country. That was what happened in most of Africa. Almost all the people who had been in charge and had any knowledge fled. That didn't happen in Eastern Europe in nearly the same degree.
        adamc 13y ago
        But wasn't that the result of the transition _from_ colonialism rather than _of_ colonialism?
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        In my previous comment I mentioned that the colonizers first destroyed the existing structures, so if the Europeans first hadn't colonized the continent, then there couldn't have existed any bad transition _from_ colonialism either. In other words, the first sin was to colonize the continent in the first place, destroy existing civil structures, and exploit the land and the population as they did. The second sin was to very abruptly abandon them and leave them without even the structures that had replace the original ones. In current Iraq and Afghanistan the US at least try to make sure that there is some kind of stable regime before they leave. Of course it might have been better to not invade in the first place, but since they did, it is their responsibility to try to make sure that some kind of civilian society have a chance when they leave.
    - dodyg 13y ago
      Say that to the American Indians or Australian Aborigines (just a few example)
- curtis 13y ago
  It's a little long for a TLDR, but: > The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor. Just when you think you’ve got the right narrative, another one comes bursting out of the footnotes. It’s the informality. No, it’s the taxes. No, it’s the mining companies. No, it’s the regulators. > And that’s what makes fixing it so difficult. Does Zambia need better schools? Debt relief? Microfinance? Nicer mining companies? Better laws? Stronger enforcement? Yes. All of them. And all at the same time. > You can’t fix the land issues without tackling the corruption. You can’t fix the corruption without tackling the politics. You can’t fix the politics without addressing the culture. Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
  - curtis 13y ago
    Shortly thereafter, the author also writes: > A week after I leave Lusaka, I meet a Zambian expat in Zimbabwe. She left Lusaka four years ago, and she says every time she returns, there are more cars, more roads, more restaurants, bars, gyms, decent cappuccinos. > I tell her that in Lusaka I saw construction cranes on the horizon in every direction. > “It’s all malls,” she says. “Zambians love to go to the goddamn mall.” > That’s not the only reason for optimism. Inflation is down to seven percent from 20 percent last decade. International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure. The new draft of the constitution limits presidential powers and confronts the MP-hopping problem. Fundamentally, Zambia is a stable country sitting on top of an El Dorado of fertile land and lucrative minerals. In the long run, things will probably get better.
- cpleppert 13y ago
  I've been to Zambia and the short answer is basically they have 1) government corruption 2) and don't have anything else besides copper. So even though you have a participatory political system the copper companies get insanely good deals and nothing is spent on education for example. Besides Botswana they are actually doing really well for a sub-saharan African country. The politics have been a mess for a long time, basically two parties have dominated politics for the past forty years(one after the other) so you had a quasi single party state but a reasonable rule of law to keep things from getting out of hand and a fair electoral system for the past twenty years or so. I'm not sure I buy the claim that the government doesn't do anything. Basically, it was explained to me that no one wants to upset the factions with political influence. Paradoxically, Botswana has a much more closed political system yet doesn't seem to have the problems with corruption Zambia has.
  - VLM 13y ago
    "basically two parties have dominated politics for the past forty years(one after the other) so you had a quasi single party state" AKA the USA model. If you swap/replace "auto companies" with "copper" its basically Detroit with a slightly healthier economy and political system.
    - jpatokal 13y ago
      Not quite: the US auto industry is around 5% of US GDP, tops. Depending on how you count, copper is around 80-95% of the Zambian economy.
      - polymatter 13y ago
        VLM compared it to the situation in Detroit not the US. Thus the relevant statistic would be the share of auto industry to Detroit's GDP (which my google-fu failed to find)
mailarchis 13y ago
I guess this is the core reason "It’s easy to paint all of the problems in Zambia with this brush, to talk about kleptocrats wringing their privilege for as much income, as many perks, as they can squeeze. But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around. In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything."
- milkshakes 13y ago
  so.... the reason they are poor is that they don't have a lot of money?
  - mailarchis 13y ago
    I'm not an expert in economics, so maybe someone with a better understanding can weigh in. But what I think the writer is trying to say here the economy (value of the total goods produced which is reflected in money circulated) is too small to support the population of zambia.
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      I would say that is not a very interesting answer. When asking why people are poor, the answer, "because the economy is small," makes about as much sense as, "because they are poor." It doesn't add any information. Why is the economy small? Answers like, "because they are poor," are forbidden.
      - acjohnson55 13y ago
        But it's true. What do the poor typically lack? Financial buffer to afford to take risks, resources to build business and industry, and savvy to trade and compete with wealthier players on a level playing field. It plays out in persistently poor regions of wealthy countries too.
pessimizer 13y ago
>I don’t even have a clear narrative for how my own country went from Deadwood to Real Housewives, Because Zambia is poor. To become a strong country, find a number of smaller countries and start killing their populations until they let you extract their resources and ship them back to your country. Eventually, leave the responsibility for killing people to local representatives that you give a bunch of guns and a tiny cut of the resource profits to. If the locals rebel, and look like they will be successful, find the strongest rebel and offer him the same deal. If he refuses, kill him, and go to the next strongest rebel. Leave $1 in the country for every $100 you take out of it, and since you're leaving it with the elites that you created, they're just going to spend it on imports anyway. Isn't that what the global south is for?
- EliRivers 13y ago
  Which countries did, for example, Singapore invade and start slaughtering?
  - testrun 13y ago
    Or South Korea. I know South Korea was invaded, but cannot remember they started slaughtering people before becoming rich.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      A lot of SK's economic growth was the result of supplying goods to the US military post-Korean War. And the US military did plenty of slaughtering, such as in Vietnam. The South Korean military also played a not-insignificant role in that clusterfuck.
    - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
      My favorite example would be Taiwan. Kicked out of their home country, yet they thrive.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
Zambia is poor because it never had an Ice Age.
- krapp 13y ago
  explain?
  - hgh 13y ago
    Perhaps referring to a theory about glaciers over a continent melting and essentially "raking" the soil to create a relatively robust and even quality, which didn't happen so much in Africa as other places.
  - Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
    Observation is prior to explanation. Compile a list of countries good at wealth-creation. Then make another list of the ones where people went through Ice Age conditions. Now compare them.
    - ufo 13y ago
      Correlation does not equal causation.
- why-el 13y ago
  What an extraordinarily unbacked statement.
crassus 13y ago
Westerners, and Americans in particular, are very bad at understanding nationalism. This prevents them from understanding the failure of post-colonialism. Throughout Africa and the Middle East we see countries with straight borders that used to be colonies of Western powers. These powers left and left behind democratic governments. These governments are plagued by the fact that the countries they rule over are not nations. A country is a political entity - a set of borders enforced by an army. A nation is a psycho-social entity. It is a group that people identify with, normally composed based on ethnic, linguistic, or religious similarity. Nationhood marks an in-group. Americans have an anti-nationalist, universalist ideology, so their brains reject this reality to the detriment of the places their armies occupy. In most post-colonial countries, there are many different nations within an arbitrary border. Democracy does not work because the citizens don't see themselves as the same people. When a person gets power in the government, of course he turns into a "kleptocrat" instead of working for the common good because he doesn't value the "common good". He values the good of his people. These post-colonial countries are also prone to civil war. If one ethno-religious group gets the majority over another, the losing group doesn't see the government as legitimate. So there is war and genocide. The post-colonial idealists in the West have done more damage to the world than the colonialists ever did through the proxy of civil war. Democracy in the Congo led to decades of Civil War and now we even see Bantus eating Pygmies[1] - rape, disfigurement, and even cannibalism have become weapons in a brutal civil war. Likewise, if American troops leave Afghanistan, we will see a recap of the 90's civil war between the northern and southern ethnic groups. There is no "Afghan" people - there are Pashtun and Tajik and Uzbek[2]. And they were on the tail-end of a civil war before the USA invaded, and now the USA wants them to vote together. What insanity. In an ominous sign, no Pashtun will join the "national" Afghan army. Putting people within the same borders and putting a single army in control over them doesn't magically make them care about each other. This is leaving behind the absurdity of trying to impose Western norms on an African continent lacking thousands of years of western history with literature, law, and democracy. You don't get to Tom Paine without Cato - and there was a 1700 year process connecting the two. Western thinking about the rest of the world is full of unicorns and pixie dust. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/09/congo.jamesastill http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/09/congo.jamesasti... [2] http://origins.osu.edu/sites/default/files/2-12-map586.jpg http://origins.osu.edu/sites/default/files/2-12-map586.jpg
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Wealth can't be created by transfer payments, it can only be grown. Many countries, like Zambia, are really bad at economic growth. The reasons can be kleptocracy, bad legal systems, but also lack of investments in infrastructure.
- hgh 13y ago
  True, but pretty much a tautology. Zambia has been growing at 6+ % for 6-7 years, raised a massively oversubscribed bond issuance to invest in infrastructure, and a Transparency International corruption perception index score just shy of Italy's. All of the things you mention are relevant, but things are changing more quickly than you would expect.
- LarrySDonald 13y ago
  This is really the major issue. "Growth" in the sense of "increase in actual production" is going terrific (granted, mostly by virtue of "Copper is practically the new oil - reserves, especially easy to access them" matters). What isn't going so great is the second part of "We should be careful with that and funnel it back into the national economy. Pay to play - the copper and other metals are only there once and we know what they are worth". You can't really grow forever, but you can still grow and they do. But this is sort of like the early oil rush in the midwest. Oh wow, holy crap, people will give us 25 cents a barrel for crude! And we don't even have to dig it up, they'll even come over and do it! How cool is that?!? Uhh, not that cool when you were sitting on top of oil reserves the size of saudi arabia that are now all but bone dry with some entrepreneurial farmers pumping up a few barrels for a slight short term profit. The main law that seems to be missing everywhere is "X amount stays here. No really. Invest whatever you want, but a certain part of the gained value is stuck in the local economy and another chunk is paid to locals because OUR HOUSE".
melipone 13y ago
Not sure, but I heard that the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond addresses this question.
nickthemagicman 13y ago
Why are people in America so eager to help out other countries? We have so many people in need here. Is it just more glamourous to be Leonardo di Caprio in Africa on an zany adventure than help some poor homeless family on the streets of Tagg Flatts Oklahome? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_poorest_places_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_poorest_places_in_t...
- winter_blue 13y ago
  Ah, you know what's interesting about that list? Most of those places have very high proportions of Native American populations. So we're looking at a different problem here: helping out the Native Americans. If the Europeans hadn't come over and colonized this continent, America would've been yet another "Africa" - so to speak.
  - nickthemagicman 13y ago
    Damn, just noticed that now that you mention it. America just kinda wants that whole 'Native American holocaust' thing to kinda quietly slip under the rug.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- ebiester 13y ago
  Simple: The absolute poverty is much worse in Africa than it is here, and the marginal suffering per dollar invested is higher in Africa. The problems that are here should be discounted, mind you, but we're talking orders of magnitude here.
  - nickthemagicman 13y ago
    Yeah but what's the return on those dollars. You help people here they have a future, in third wold countries not so much.
- balloot 13y ago
jquery 13y ago
Zambia's average IQ is 77. Is it possible that an average IQ of 77 isn't conducive to prosperity?
- mynameishere 13y ago
  People reject this for various reasons: 1. They firmly believe IQ doesn't means anything. 2. They realize IQ means something but that it is mostly mutable (Flynn effect, etc). 3. They realize it's not especially mutable, but the tests in poor countries are unreliable. 4. They reject such possibilities because they actually believe their lifetime of propaganda that "All men are created equal" etc, etc, and so don't even give IQ much thought. 5. They don't even raise the question because it's politically or socially uncomfortable. For people in academia or in charities, this could extend to losing employment and gaining pariah status. 6. They realize demographics actually do matter but don't want to consider the fact because: 6a. Same reason as #5. 6b. It's hopeless. No one wants to just walk away from a problem. 6c. Sunk-cost fallacy. 6d. "Helping" people or even discussing "helping" people gives a sense of moral purpose, or even moral superiority. (This is Bill Gates' reason, almost assuredly.) By contrast, saying, "Well, forget Zambia, look at the whole damn world: Black people just sort-of breed poverty," is the exact opposite. To say that in polite company is very offensive.
  - jquery 13y ago
    You'd think for people in academia, addressing socially and politically uncomfortable truths would be their du jour. How can the world fix the problem when it won't even look at possible causes?
    - true_religion 13y ago
      I think the above poster is getting something wrong. While no one is going to come out and say "IQ is the cause for poverty", they'll happily say that poor education is and aim to fix it. By providing good nutrition to the young, and good education the IQ 'problem' mostly takes care of itself.
    - 13y ago
tokenadult 13y ago
"So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day" And that is the key fact. Many of the comments in this thread are not specific to Zambia. There was a time when Zambia looked like a success story among African countries, as the first national leader after independence seemed more democratically minded and less corrupt than many leaders in Africa. The year Zambia became independent, I have read, it was wealthier than Taiwan--where my wife was living at the time. Zambia was neither unusually poor nor unusually badly governed among countries of the world when it gained independence. So the key question in looking at international examples of national development is to slog through the process of John Stuart Mill's "method of agreement and difference"[1] and figure out what commonalities help countries develop and prosper, and what commonalities drag down the fortunes of the inhabitants of a country. "Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief." That jumps out at me as a huge difference between Zambia and many countries that have developed more successfully--clear land title that can be readily transferred for money. Taiwan makes better use of its land, and developed better, I hypothesis, in part because it is clear who owns what land and who has rights in land. (There was land reform for poor peasants, making them landowners, in Taiwan in the 1950s. Then the economic development began there.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of_agreement_and_difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of... AFTER EDIT: I posted hurriedly at first, having an appointment to get to. One other point, which generalizes to more parts of Africa and more parts of east Asia, is that for a given level of educational spending, many east Asian countries invested mostly in good-quality primary education for the masses, while many African countries set up a national university available only to an elite minority of the population. (And often enough, the national university graduates from African countries became part of the "brain drain" to other countries.) Raising the skill level of the masses diversifies the economy and makes even countries with very limited natural resources--of which Japan and Taiwan are noteworthy examples--able to develop through trade and transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and then to a postindustrial economy. Few African countries have pursued a national education policy of broad primary education, those that have are among the African countries that are faring best.
nkurz 13y ago
Perhaps it's just my ignorance of Africa, but I was recently amazed to learn Zambia had a thriving 1970's rock music scene known as Zamrock. I was even more amazed that it sounded incredible. I can't say it will help you understand Zambia, but "Strange Dream" by Witch is one of the most haunting songs I've ever heard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jOTvDU9Ts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jOTvDU9Ts Here's an interview with Emmanuel Jagari Chanda, the leader of Witch, which includes an overview of what else was happening musically in Zambia at the time, as well as some perspective on what's changed since: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/emmanuel-jagari-chanda--we-intend-to-cause-havoc?template=RBMA_Lecture%2Ftranscript http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/emmanuel-jagari-...
narrator 13y ago
If you want to get a feel for what Africa is really like watch the acclaimed documentary Darwin's Nightmare (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424024/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424024/). I've knew a couple who slummed it in Tanzania for a few years and there stories are hard to believe but are more or less in line with this movie.
halfninety 13y ago
Democracy is a way to guarantee human rights in a developed or semi-developed country, it's not a way to develop your poor country. Installing democracy in a poor country is like installing Windows 7 on a 486: you gain the benefits of the new system, but you have to live with the accompanied slow speed, caused by the fact that the minimum system requirement is not met.
axilmar 13y ago
The reason Zambia is poor is the exact same reason other countries are poor: the people of Zambia don't sell enough products to other economies in order to get richer. Why don't they do that? it's a matter of culture. They don't open up to the possibilities of the economy around and outside their country.

160 points by timw6n 13y ago

hartator 13y ago

Anyone care for a little tdlr; ?

Spooky23 13y ago
Colonialism. The British created the place to exploit copper mines, but the Belgians were able to get control of the copper.
- sgt 13y ago
  Zambia wouldn't necessarily be a better place if colonialism never happened.
  - Ma8ee 13y ago
    Colonialism destroyed all structure that was before in Africa. They had prosperous kingdoms that was destroyed. Then the colonialists left very suddenly and there were only chaos left. It's not more than about 50 years since Africa was left to fend for itself after the European powers left. Considering that it took hundreds of years with more wars than anyone care to count before Europe became the peaceful and prosperous place it is today I don't think Africa is doing that badly.
    - newnewnew 13y ago
      Their "prosperous kingdoms" didn't have written language or the wheel. There wasn't that much pre-existing structure to destroy.
      - Ma8ee 13y ago
        > There wasn't that much pre-existing structure to destroy. That is a myth that the colonizers were very happy to bolster, for obvious reasons.
        oblio 13y ago
        That "wheel" remark was quite poignant, though :)
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        Like how the Inca or the Maya never were any real civilizations because they didn't use wheels?
        oblio 13y ago
        Well, they were real civilizations, bu I doubt anyone would dare to equate their achievements and influence with the Ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese or Egyptians. Especially for the Incas, it's hard for me to be impressed by their achievements around the year 1400 AD considering what the Egyptians already had achieved by the year 2000BC...
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        The point is that they were organized societies, not the utter chaos that was left behind when the European powers left Africa.
        smtddr 13y ago
        Don't even bother with the user "newnewnew". Look through a few pages of his comment history. He makes condescending remarks about liberals & keeps trying to prove Africa(and African-americans) are the cause of their own problems. And if you read a couple of pages of his comment history, it's not clear if he sees women as equal to men and/or doesn't understand how strong gender-discrimination is. But don't take my word for it. Seriously, look at his comment history. Here's just one, of many examples, of his mind set: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6360762
      - rdtsc 13y ago
        It was a trade-off but those kingdoms weren't the ones making the choice. It was made for them by the occupiers. They had perhaps some authority structures, some nation and ethnicity based borders, perhaps less civil war type conflicts. At least that was taken away. Whether it would have been better for British and others to stay away is hard to say.
      - catmanjan 13y ago
        I used to think the lack of the wheel was a valid argument against the prosperity of Africa, but then I saw how wheels performed in such arid conditions. The soil is so volatile that wheels end up being dragged in the dirt, hence camels. It would have been cool if they had invented primitive AT STs though!
    - spindritf 13y ago
      Eastern Europe has been changing hands between various empires for the last 300 years and was razed at least twice in the last century alone. That was followed by Soviet occupation and communism it entailed. Poland lost 17% of its population in WWII. Local elites and leaders who didn't end in mass graves or concentration camps during the war, were imprisoned or murdered by post-war collaborators. The Red Army left in '93 and 20 years later it's a perfectly fine place to live. I don't buy colonialism as the explanation.
      - Ma8ee 13y ago
        The Soviet occupation or the colonization in itself wasn't that made the mess. Poland had the Soviet occupiers and Africa had various European powers organizing the countries. None of the places was good places to live during the occupation (even though I think most people very much prefer Brezhnev and maybe even Stalin to King Leopold of Belgium), but there was at least some kind of organized society. The difference between the colonial powers leaving Africa and the Soviet Union leaving Eastern Europe was that the Soviet Union didn't take with them everyone that worked in any kind of administration and most people who could read when they left. In Poland the guys that was in charge of the central mail administration didn't flee the country. The Department of Transportation didn't burn all their archives and jumped on the first ship out of the country. That was what happened in most of Africa. Almost all the people who had been in charge and had any knowledge fled. That didn't happen in Eastern Europe in nearly the same degree.
        adamc 13y ago
        But wasn't that the result of the transition _from_ colonialism rather than _of_ colonialism?
        Ma8ee 13y ago
        In my previous comment I mentioned that the colonizers first destroyed the existing structures, so if the Europeans first hadn't colonized the continent, then there couldn't have existed any bad transition _from_ colonialism either. In other words, the first sin was to colonize the continent in the first place, destroy existing civil structures, and exploit the land and the population as they did. The second sin was to very abruptly abandon them and leave them without even the structures that had replace the original ones. In current Iraq and Afghanistan the US at least try to make sure that there is some kind of stable regime before they leave. Of course it might have been better to not invade in the first place, but since they did, it is their responsibility to try to make sure that some kind of civilian society have a chance when they leave.
  - dodyg 13y ago
    Say that to the American Indians or Australian Aborigines (just a few example)
curtis 13y ago
It's a little long for a TLDR, but: > The only thing I’m able to conclude after my trip here is that it’s incredibly difficult for a poor country to go about getting un-poor. Just when you think you’ve got the right narrative, another one comes bursting out of the footnotes. It’s the informality. No, it’s the taxes. No, it’s the mining companies. No, it’s the regulators. > And that’s what makes fixing it so difficult. Does Zambia need better schools? Debt relief? Microfinance? Nicer mining companies? Better laws? Stronger enforcement? Yes. All of them. And all at the same time. > You can’t fix the land issues without tackling the corruption. You can’t fix the corruption without tackling the politics. You can’t fix the politics without addressing the culture. Thomas’ family told him his nephews didn’t need to be in school. From their perspective, that’s not totally irrational. In a country with so few formal jobs and so much competition for getting them, I can see how spending hundreds of hours, thousands of kwachas, on education would seem superfluous. Thomas’ daughter wants to become a lawyer. You could almost forgive Thomas if he told her that the bar exam failure rate is more than 90 percent, so what’s the use?
- curtis 13y ago
  Shortly thereafter, the author also writes: > A week after I leave Lusaka, I meet a Zambian expat in Zimbabwe. She left Lusaka four years ago, and she says every time she returns, there are more cars, more roads, more restaurants, bars, gyms, decent cappuccinos. > I tell her that in Lusaka I saw construction cranes on the horizon in every direction. > “It’s all malls,” she says. “Zambians love to go to the goddamn mall.” > That’s not the only reason for optimism. Inflation is down to seven percent from 20 percent last decade. International investors pledged $750 million last year to build infrastructure. The new draft of the constitution limits presidential powers and confronts the MP-hopping problem. Fundamentally, Zambia is a stable country sitting on top of an El Dorado of fertile land and lucrative minerals. In the long run, things will probably get better.
cpleppert 13y ago
I've been to Zambia and the short answer is basically they have 1) government corruption 2) and don't have anything else besides copper. So even though you have a participatory political system the copper companies get insanely good deals and nothing is spent on education for example. Besides Botswana they are actually doing really well for a sub-saharan African country. The politics have been a mess for a long time, basically two parties have dominated politics for the past forty years(one after the other) so you had a quasi single party state but a reasonable rule of law to keep things from getting out of hand and a fair electoral system for the past twenty years or so. I'm not sure I buy the claim that the government doesn't do anything. Basically, it was explained to me that no one wants to upset the factions with political influence. Paradoxically, Botswana has a much more closed political system yet doesn't seem to have the problems with corruption Zambia has.
- VLM 13y ago
  "basically two parties have dominated politics for the past forty years(one after the other) so you had a quasi single party state" AKA the USA model. If you swap/replace "auto companies" with "copper" its basically Detroit with a slightly healthier economy and political system.
  - jpatokal 13y ago
    Not quite: the US auto industry is around 5% of US GDP, tops. Depending on how you count, copper is around 80-95% of the Zambian economy.
    - polymatter 13y ago
      VLM compared it to the situation in Detroit not the US. Thus the relevant statistic would be the share of auto industry to Detroit's GDP (which my google-fu failed to find)

mailarchis 13y ago

I guess this is the core reason "It’s easy to paint all of the problems in Zambia with this brush, to talk about kleptocrats wringing their privilege for as much income, as many perks, as they can squeeze. But even if Zambia was run by a coalition of charitable technocrats and Mormon philanthropists, that wouldn’t solve the most fundamental problem of all: There simply isn’t that much money to go around. In 2011, Zambia spent a total of $4.3 billion running itself. Stretch that to cover every man, woman, and child, and it amounts to just $325 per person per year. That amount—less than a dollar per person per day—has to cover education, health care, infrastructure, law enforcement, foreign debt … everything."

milkshakes 13y ago
so.... the reason they are poor is that they don't have a lot of money?
- mailarchis 13y ago
  I'm not an expert in economics, so maybe someone with a better understanding can weigh in. But what I think the writer is trying to say here the economy (value of the total goods produced which is reflected in money circulated) is too small to support the population of zambia.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    I would say that is not a very interesting answer. When asking why people are poor, the answer, "because the economy is small," makes about as much sense as, "because they are poor." It doesn't add any information. Why is the economy small? Answers like, "because they are poor," are forbidden.
    - acjohnson55 13y ago
      But it's true. What do the poor typically lack? Financial buffer to afford to take risks, resources to build business and industry, and savvy to trade and compete with wealthier players on a level playing field. It plays out in persistently poor regions of wealthy countries too.

pessimizer 13y ago

>I don’t even have a clear narrative for how my own country went from Deadwood to Real Housewives, Because Zambia is poor. To become a strong country, find a number of smaller countries and start killing their populations until they let you extract their resources and ship them back to your country. Eventually, leave the responsibility for killing people to local representatives that you give a bunch of guns and a tiny cut of the resource profits to. If the locals rebel, and look like they will be successful, find the strongest rebel and offer him the same deal. If he refuses, kill him, and go to the next strongest rebel. Leave $1 in the country for every $100 you take out of it, and since you're leaving it with the elites that you created, they're just going to spend it on imports anyway. Isn't that what the global south is for?

EliRivers 13y ago
Which countries did, for example, Singapore invade and start slaughtering?
- testrun 13y ago
  Or South Korea. I know South Korea was invaded, but cannot remember they started slaughtering people before becoming rich.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    A lot of SK's economic growth was the result of supplying goods to the US military post-Korean War. And the US military did plenty of slaughtering, such as in Vietnam. The South Korean military also played a not-insignificant role in that clusterfuck.
  - alexeisadeski3 13y ago
    My favorite example would be Taiwan. Kicked out of their home country, yet they thrive.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago

Kudzu_Bob 13y ago

Zambia is poor because it never had an Ice Age.

krapp 13y ago
explain?
- hgh 13y ago
  Perhaps referring to a theory about glaciers over a continent melting and essentially "raking" the soil to create a relatively robust and even quality, which didn't happen so much in Africa as other places.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y ago
  Observation is prior to explanation. Compile a list of countries good at wealth-creation. Then make another list of the ones where people went through Ice Age conditions. Now compare them.
  - ufo 13y ago
    Correlation does not equal causation.
why-el 13y ago
What an extraordinarily unbacked statement.

crassus 13y ago

Westerners, and Americans in particular, are very bad at understanding nationalism. This prevents them from understanding the failure of post-colonialism. Throughout Africa and the Middle East we see countries with straight borders that used to be colonies of Western powers. These powers left and left behind democratic governments. These governments are plagued by the fact that the countries they rule over are not nations. A country is a political entity - a set of borders enforced by an army. A nation is a psycho-social entity. It is a group that people identify with, normally composed based on ethnic, linguistic, or religious similarity. Nationhood marks an in-group. Americans have an anti-nationalist, universalist ideology, so their brains reject this reality to the detriment of the places their armies occupy. In most post-colonial countries, there are many different nations within an arbitrary border. Democracy does not work because the citizens don't see themselves as the same people. When a person gets power in the government, of course he turns into a "kleptocrat" instead of working for the common good because he doesn't value the "common good". He values the good of his people. These post-colonial countries are also prone to civil war. If one ethno-religious group gets the majority over another, the losing group doesn't see the government as legitimate. So there is war and genocide. The post-colonial idealists in the West have done more damage to the world than the colonialists ever did through the proxy of civil war. Democracy in the Congo led to decades of Civil War and now we even see Bantus eating Pygmies[1] - rape, disfigurement, and even cannibalism have become weapons in a brutal civil war. Likewise, if American troops leave Afghanistan, we will see a recap of the 90's civil war between the northern and southern ethnic groups. There is no "Afghan" people - there are Pashtun and Tajik and Uzbek[2]. And they were on the tail-end of a civil war before the USA invaded, and now the USA wants them to vote together. What insanity. In an ominous sign, no Pashtun will join the "national" Afghan army. Putting people within the same borders and putting a single army in control over them doesn't magically make them care about each other. This is leaving behind the absurdity of trying to impose Western norms on an African continent lacking thousands of years of western history with literature, law, and democracy. You don't get to Tom Paine without Cato - and there was a 1700 year process connecting the two. Western thinking about the rest of the world is full of unicorns and pixie dust. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/09/congo.jamesastill http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jan/09/congo.jamesasti... [2] http://origins.osu.edu/sites/default/files/2-12-map586.jpg http://origins.osu.edu/sites/default/files/2-12-map586.jpg

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Wealth can't be created by transfer payments, it can only be grown. Many countries, like Zambia, are really bad at economic growth. The reasons can be kleptocracy, bad legal systems, but also lack of investments in infrastructure.

hgh 13y ago
True, but pretty much a tautology. Zambia has been growing at 6+ % for 6-7 years, raised a massively oversubscribed bond issuance to invest in infrastructure, and a Transparency International corruption perception index score just shy of Italy's. All of the things you mention are relevant, but things are changing more quickly than you would expect.
LarrySDonald 13y ago
This is really the major issue. "Growth" in the sense of "increase in actual production" is going terrific (granted, mostly by virtue of "Copper is practically the new oil - reserves, especially easy to access them" matters). What isn't going so great is the second part of "We should be careful with that and funnel it back into the national economy. Pay to play - the copper and other metals are only there once and we know what they are worth". You can't really grow forever, but you can still grow and they do. But this is sort of like the early oil rush in the midwest. Oh wow, holy crap, people will give us 25 cents a barrel for crude! And we don't even have to dig it up, they'll even come over and do it! How cool is that?!? Uhh, not that cool when you were sitting on top of oil reserves the size of saudi arabia that are now all but bone dry with some entrepreneurial farmers pumping up a few barrels for a slight short term profit. The main law that seems to be missing everywhere is "X amount stays here. No really. Invest whatever you want, but a certain part of the gained value is stuck in the local economy and another chunk is paid to locals because OUR HOUSE".

melipone 13y ago

Not sure, but I heard that the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond addresses this question.

nickthemagicman 13y ago

Why are people in America so eager to help out other countries? We have so many people in need here. Is it just more glamourous to be Leonardo di Caprio in Africa on an zany adventure than help some poor homeless family on the streets of Tagg Flatts Oklahome? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_poorest_places_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_poorest_places_in_t...

winter_blue 13y ago
Ah, you know what's interesting about that list? Most of those places have very high proportions of Native American populations. So we're looking at a different problem here: helping out the Native Americans. If the Europeans hadn't come over and colonized this continent, America would've been yet another "Africa" - so to speak.
- nickthemagicman 13y ago
  Damn, just noticed that now that you mention it. America just kinda wants that whole 'Native American holocaust' thing to kinda quietly slip under the rug.
deleted 13y ago
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ebiester 13y ago
Simple: The absolute poverty is much worse in Africa than it is here, and the marginal suffering per dollar invested is higher in Africa. The problems that are here should be discounted, mind you, but we're talking orders of magnitude here.
- nickthemagicman 13y ago
  Yeah but what's the return on those dollars. You help people here they have a future, in third wold countries not so much.
balloot 13y ago

jquery 13y ago

Zambia's average IQ is 77. Is it possible that an average IQ of 77 isn't conducive to prosperity?

mynameishere 13y ago
People reject this for various reasons: 1. They firmly believe IQ doesn't means anything. 2. They realize IQ means something but that it is mostly mutable (Flynn effect, etc). 3. They realize it's not especially mutable, but the tests in poor countries are unreliable. 4. They reject such possibilities because they actually believe their lifetime of propaganda that "All men are created equal" etc, etc, and so don't even give IQ much thought. 5. They don't even raise the question because it's politically or socially uncomfortable. For people in academia or in charities, this could extend to losing employment and gaining pariah status. 6. They realize demographics actually do matter but don't want to consider the fact because: 6a. Same reason as #5. 6b. It's hopeless. No one wants to just walk away from a problem. 6c. Sunk-cost fallacy. 6d. "Helping" people or even discussing "helping" people gives a sense of moral purpose, or even moral superiority. (This is Bill Gates' reason, almost assuredly.) By contrast, saying, "Well, forget Zambia, look at the whole damn world: Black people just sort-of breed poverty," is the exact opposite. To say that in polite company is very offensive.
- jquery 13y ago
  You'd think for people in academia, addressing socially and politically uncomfortable truths would be their du jour. How can the world fix the problem when it won't even look at possible causes?
  - true_religion 13y ago
    I think the above poster is getting something wrong. While no one is going to come out and say "IQ is the cause for poverty", they'll happily say that poor education is and aim to fix it. By providing good nutrition to the young, and good education the IQ 'problem' mostly takes care of itself.
  - 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago

"So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day" And that is the key fact. Many of the comments in this thread are not specific to Zambia. There was a time when Zambia looked like a success story among African countries, as the first national leader after independence seemed more democratically minded and less corrupt than many leaders in Africa. The year Zambia became independent, I have read, it was wealthier than Taiwan--where my wife was living at the time. Zambia was neither unusually poor nor unusually badly governed among countries of the world when it gained independence. So the key question in looking at international examples of national development is to slog through the process of John Stuart Mill's "method of agreement and difference"[1] and figure out what commonalities help countries develop and prosper, and what commonalities drag down the fortunes of the inhabitants of a country. "Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief." That jumps out at me as a huge difference between Zambia and many countries that have developed more successfully--clear land title that can be readily transferred for money. Taiwan makes better use of its land, and developed better, I hypothesis, in part because it is clear who owns what land and who has rights in land. (There was land reform for poor peasants, making them landowners, in Taiwan in the 1950s. Then the economic development began there.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of_agreement_and_difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of... AFTER EDIT: I posted hurriedly at first, having an appointment to get to. One other point, which generalizes to more parts of Africa and more parts of east Asia, is that for a given level of educational spending, many east Asian countries invested mostly in good-quality primary education for the masses, while many African countries set up a national university available only to an elite minority of the population. (And often enough, the national university graduates from African countries became part of the "brain drain" to other countries.) Raising the skill level of the masses diversifies the economy and makes even countries with very limited natural resources--of which Japan and Taiwan are noteworthy examples--able to develop through trade and transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and then to a postindustrial economy. Few African countries have pursued a national education policy of broad primary education, those that have are among the African countries that are faring best.

nkurz 13y ago

Perhaps it's just my ignorance of Africa, but I was recently amazed to learn Zambia had a thriving 1970's rock music scene known as Zamrock. I was even more amazed that it sounded incredible. I can't say it will help you understand Zambia, but "Strange Dream" by Witch is one of the most haunting songs I've ever heard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jOTvDU9Ts http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6jOTvDU9Ts Here's an interview with Emmanuel Jagari Chanda, the leader of Witch, which includes an overview of what else was happening musically in Zambia at the time, as well as some perspective on what's changed since: http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/emmanuel-jagari-chanda--we-intend-to-cause-havoc?template=RBMA_Lecture%2Ftranscript http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures/emmanuel-jagari-...

narrator 13y ago

If you want to get a feel for what Africa is really like watch the acclaimed documentary Darwin's Nightmare (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424024/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424024/). I've knew a couple who slummed it in Tanzania for a few years and there stories are hard to believe but are more or less in line with this movie.

halfninety 13y ago

Democracy is a way to guarantee human rights in a developed or semi-developed country, it's not a way to develop your poor country. Installing democracy in a poor country is like installing Windows 7 on a 486: you gain the benefits of the new system, but you have to live with the accompanied slow speed, caused by the fact that the minimum system requirement is not met.

axilmar 13y ago

The reason Zambia is poor is the exact same reason other countries are poor: the people of Zambia don't sell enough products to other economies in order to get richer. Why don't they do that? it's a matter of culture. They don't open up to the possibilities of the economy around and outside their country.