The Third World
One thing I hope we can all agree on:
It
is a disgrace that in the 21st century
real poverty, famine, malnutrition
and lack of medical care
still exist
on earth.
The dispute is over what will actually
work
in changing this state of affairs.
What needs to happen to
make Africa rich like us?
Summary
- How to end poverty in the third world
Make Poverty History
sums up the inability of people to understand the cause of third world poverty and famine,
and conversely,
the cause of western prosperity.
Yes, it is brilliant that millions of people are focused on how to end poverty in Africa.
But Make Poverty History promotes the delusion that the solution to poverty is:
- Aid.
- Debt relief.
- Fair trade.
And that:
- The main problem is to get the West
(for example, the G8) to change.
In reality, the solution to poverty is:
- Democracy.
- Free speech and a free society.
- Capitalism.
- Free trade, not fair trade.
And:
- The main problem is that
Africa needs to change.
Aid, Debt relief and Fair trade are not the answer
To elaborate, aid and debt relief, when given to
governments that care about their citizens,
might do some good,
at times of emergency at least
(long-term aid may distort markets and cause harm).
But poor countries do not have good governments, or they would not be poor.
They have rotten governments, which stamp
on
political freedom
and
economic freedom.
Aid and debt relief, when given to
dictatorships like these,
fuels civil wars, genocide, arms purchases and palace building;
fills Swiss bank accounts;
and distorts markets, often increasing poverty.
- $1 trillion in aid has been given to Africa since WW2,
and there is nothing to show for it.
Aid is obviously not the solution to poverty in Africa.
- The Globalization Institute
-
More Aid, Less Growth, report, 2005.
- Aid may cause poverty.
For every 1% increase in development aid received by a developing country,
there is a 3.65% drop in real GDP growth per capita.
- Dambisa Moyo
of Zambia argues against aid for Africa
in her book
"Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way For Africa" (2009).
-
Interview, 22 Feb 2009. She is asked: "What do you think has held back Africans?"
She says:
"I believe it's largely aid. You get the corruption - historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty - and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people."
- On Asian growth without aid:
"China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live .. with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.
...
Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.
...
I wish we questioned the aid model as much as we are questioning the capitalism model."
- She recommends making micro-loans
such as at
kiva.org,
where you eventually get your money back.
Though this is time-consuming
- a better solution would be for us to donate to charity,
and for them to run micro-loans on our behalf,
recycling the money constantly
(and using some for admin costs).
-
Fair trade
often means a form of
Protectionism,
and, like all state attempts to control prices,
is likely to increase poverty, not reduce it.
- Confusingly, "fair trade"
also sometimes stands for attempts to
eliminate
protectionism,
such as eliminating the
Agricultural subsidies
of the
CAP.
In which case, the "fair trade" people are on the right side.
- The EU
Africa must adopt western values
The solutions to poverty are well known.
If it is ever to become prosperous,
Africa must abandon
dictatorship, socialism, communism, Islamism, pan-Arabism,
statism, protectionism,
tribalism, superstition, racism and corruption,
and must adopt western values of:
democracy, capitalism, science, free speech, freedom of religion,
free press, a free society,
property rights, the rule of law,
the ability to make binding contracts,
free enterprise, minimal bureaucracy, minimal taxation,
minimal state enterprise,
and free trade.
Is there anything the West can do?
Is there anything the West can do to help end poverty?
Yes there is:
- Make Africa change.
Declare a long term goal of ending all dictatorships in Africa.
Declare that the goal is to establish capitalist democracies in all of Africa.
Simply saying this would be a huge step forward.
- Work towards that goal. Sanction dictators. Seize their assets.
Support dissidents.
Link aid, loans, trade and arms to democratic reform.
There are many
methods of ending dictatorship
other than by war
(though war should always be an option).
- Scrap all agricultural subsidies in the EU and the US.
- End trade barriers.
Of course, many trade barriers are internal to Africa.
But we can at least
end the external ones.
African aid and lack of growth
v. Asian growth and lack of aid
-
Poverty That Defies Aid, Marian L. Tupy, June 19, 2005
(and post)
- "between 1960 and 2005, foreign aid worth more than $450 billion, inflation adjusted, poured into Africa. Result? Between 1975 and 2000, African gross domestic product (GDP) per capita declined at an average annual 0.59 percent rate. Over the same period, African GDP per capita fell from $1,770 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to $1,479."
- "In contrast, South Asia performed much better. Between 1975 and 2000, South Asian GDP per capita grew at an average annual 2.94 percent. South Asian GDP per capita grew from $1,010 in constant 1995 dollars adjusted for PPP to $2,056. Yet, between 1975 and 2000, the per capita foreign aid South Asians received was 21 percent that received by Africa. The link between foreign aid and economic development seems quite tenuous."
African stagnation over the last few decades.
Stats from Angus Maddison.
Dramatic Asian growth over the last few decades.
Stats from Angus Maddison.
Live 8 and Make Poverty History
- Make Poverty History
-
Click, click, click. If only saving half the world from poverty were so simple
- Stephen Pollard
on Make Poverty History:
Debt relief and more aid will not make poverty history.
And trade barriers will increase poverty, not reduce it.
-
In contrast,
we do actually know what will make poverty history:
"Much Third World poverty is the result of governments taking the decision,
in effect, to remain poor. The conditions under which they can prosper are known,
and available, if those in power choose to avail themselves of them.
As Hernando de Soto
... points out, it is easy to make a country prosperous. It needs only security of life and property,
and markets in which property rights can be valued and traded."
-
Live8: a triumph for sentiment, not for results
by Allister Heath
- "The real question is: why are some countries rich and others poor?
To the Make Poverty History crowd, the answer to this question,
by far the most important in economics and all of the social sciences,
usually lies with Western exploitation, insufficient aid
and the alleged ravages caused by free trade or greedy multinationals.
This conveniently omits to explain how so many poor nations in Asia have got rich"
-
Africa needs business, not showbusiness, Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, July 5th 2005,
points out that almost all global rock stars are brilliant at business and marketing themselves,
which is how they got rich and famous.
"I love old rockers - not for the songs, which are awful, but for their business affairs, which so totally rock. In 1997, David Bowie became the first pop star to hold a bond offering himself. How about that? ... Moody's in New York gave them their coveted triple-A rating.
Once upon a time, rock stars weren't rated by Moody, they were moody - they self-destructed, ... they hoped to die before they got old. ... Today, Paul McCartney is a businessman: he owns the publishing rights to Annie and Guys & Dolls. These faux revolutionaries are capitalists red in tooth and claw.
The system that enriched them could enrich Africa. But capitalism's the one cause the poseurs never speak up for."
-
Make Poverty History Ireland
openly supports restrictions on both third world
imports and exports.
- The
Live 8 march
in Edinburgh, July 2005,
included banners for:
- "Bush - World's No.1 Terrorist"
- "George W. Bush - Terrorist"
- "Stop Bush's Reign of Terror"
- "Hands off Iran and Syria!"
- "Fight poverty not war. Bring the troops home."
- "Bread not bombs"
- "Water not war"
- "Stop the war"
- Socialist Youth.
- Italian communists
- RESPECT
- Palestinian flags.
Why would I join a march that contained such banners?
- To clarify, "Bread not bombs"
is indeed what I hope for for Africa.
I hope for an end to the war-mongering tyrannies of Africa.
But that's not
what it means in this context.
We all know that in this context
it is about Iraq
and what it means
is "Bring the British and American troops home"
and "Abandon the Middle East to fascism".
- The
Dublin march
included banners for:
- The Socialist Workers Party.
- The Socialist Party.
- The violent
organised crime group
Sinn Fein-IRA.
I would never join a march that contained such banners.
The cause of famine that charities dare not talk about:
third-world governments.
-
Band Aid and Live Aid
(also here)
dominated headlines in 1984-5,
letting the world know about the appalling
Ethiopian Famine.
-
Yet no one at that time ever got to hear the cause of the
Ethiopian Famine,
which was
communism.
To be precise,
the Ethiopian famine was caused by the Ethiopian communist government.
Killing the Ethiopian government
would have done more to save lives
than all the famine relief
put together.
But we could not hear this, because it was not politically correct.
- Ethiopia in 1984
-
Cruel to be kind?,
David Rieff,
June 24, 2005
- On the impossible situation facing charities working under
genocidal totalitarian regimes,
whether The Red Cross under the Nazis
or Live Aid in Ethiopia.
Did the charities, by limited cooperation with the Ethiopian democide,
cause more deaths than they saved?
- Why is the Third World poor?
-
Noam Chomsky's crackpot world view
- that the Third World are somehow
"oppressed" or "exploited"
by the First World.
Many people on the left claim
(based on no evidence) that
the Third World is poor
because we are rich.
-
In reality, of course, the cause of third-world poverty is simple.
Third-world people are poor because of third-world governments.
-
How the West grew rich
by Dinesh D'Souza.
- If the west got rich by slavery, empire, and exploiting other peoples,
then we have a philosophy of despair
- for the third world can't do the same.
In other words they will never get rich.
-
If, on the other hand,
these things
are expressions of the
west's pre-existing wealth, technology and power,
rather than causes of it (*),
then we have a philosophy of hope.
If the west got rich because of
science, democracy, and capitalism
- with empire, and even natural resources, largely irrelevant -
then we have a philosophy of fantastic hope:
If the Third World adopts
science, democracy, and capitalism,
then they will get rich just like us.
- (*) After all, why was it Western Europeans
that travelled and conquered the world?
There must have been something pre-existing
in Western European culture
that made empire possible.
- David Landes
denies that European colonialism and empire
was a significant cause of European wealth.
-
Quote from Ibn Warraq
on the idea that the third world is poor
because of the legacy of imperialism.
"Ibn Warraq pointed out that more than 50 years after the West left its colonies
in the Third World, Leftists are still blaming all the ills of Africa and the Middle East
on the former colonial powers,
while the same left-wingers only 10 years after the fall of Communism
blamed Russia's troubles on unrestrained capitalism."
- Theodore Dalrymple
points out that much of the Arab world has no idea where
Western wealth comes from:
"They may claim, for example, that the West has achieved its preeminence by illicit use of force and pillage, by exploiting and appropriating the oil of the Muslim lands, say.
.. the claim about the exploitation of oil is not merely self-serving; it is patently absurd. If anything, the direction of the exploitation has been precisely the opposite, for merely by virtue of their fortunate geographical location, and with scarcely any effort on their part, the people of the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere have enjoyed a high standard of living thanks entirely to the ingenuity of those whom they accuse of exploitation and without whom the oil resource would not be an economic resource at all.
...
I have talked to a lot of young Muslim critics of Western society, living in the West, and few of them were aware of the philosophical basis of Western achievement, which they believed to be merely materialist and founded on crude plunder, never having heard any other viewpoint."
- Hernando De Soto
(and here)
- Let's make the Third World rich too!
- What I love about De Soto is that he refuses to see the third world's
future as modest, self-sufficient and agrarian,
living in harmony with nature in rural villages,
their countries existing on permanent welfare
- which seems to be the model the left promotes.
He sees no reason why they can't become high-tech, modern, complex,
urban, globalised and prosperous
- like us.
For me, South Korea is the model for the future of the third world.
- The Institute for Liberty and Democracy
- De Soto's main point is that
capitalism depends on lots of things we take for granted
- property rights, a clear registry of who owns what,
enforceable contracts with strangers.
Also
making it as easy and fast as possible
to do things like set up a business, rent a building,
hire someone, buy and sell land, raise a loan,
issue shares, etc.
Then capitalism is a pre-Internet "network effect".
You don't have to trade just with people you trust
(which is what most of the poor,
economically unfree
world
has to do).
You can buy and sell with strangers.
And the economy explodes.
- Hegemony of the Heart,
by Clark S. Judge,
summarises De Soto's work.
-
The Maoist/fascist
"Shining Path" in De Soto's
native Peru
want to kill him.
- Liberty Institute, India
(pro-democracy, pro-free market).
The correlation between lack of political freedom and poverty.
Freedom House, 2001.
The correlation between lack of political freedom and poverty.
Freedom House, 2004.
The correlation between democracy and prosperity.
From
Rudolph J. Rummel.
The correlation between lack of economic freedom and poverty.
From
The Heritage Foundation, 2006.
Capitalism and globalisation are the solutions to
third world poverty.
Anyone who cares about the third world should promote
globalisation and
economic freedom.
Anti-globalisation protesters are spoilt, rich children
who want to prevent the rest of the world
from enjoying the fruits of capitalism
that they have grown up with.
They are worse than immoral.
Poverty is not funny.
Poverty is not a matter of living in a squat
or not having enough for a pint.
Poverty is a matter of watching your children starve and die.
- Anti-capitalism
- Anti-globalization
- Anti-consumerism
- Anti-globalisation protesters
- Demos are not democracy:
- The Law of Protests:
Protests and demos do not represent public opinion
-
Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism
by Jean-Francois Revel
- "Anti-globalists have tried to replace democracy with a despotism of the mob, advancing the
brutal proposition that street demonstrators are more legitimate than elected governments.
...
Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is
conferred by ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows."
- It has been said before:
Those who cannot win elections, take to the streets.
Nobody will vote for the anti-globalisation street thugs, anti-semites and
totalitarian marxists.
So democracy will not help them.
Furious that no one finds their arguments convincing,
they turn to demos and riots to try to bypass the democratic process.
Western governments, sensibly, will let them protest
but will never listen to them.
- French anti-capitalism
- The G8
- The protesters against the
G8 summits
really do have something they could protest about:
the inclusion of Putin's illiberal dictatorship of
Russia
in this group of otherwise civilized liberal democracies.
But of course that's not what bothers them.
Opinion survey, Apr 2008,
shows that most people, both in the West and in the third world,
agree with
me,
not with leftists like Naomi Klein.
Most people in the world want to become rich (or at least comfortable),
and they are
very interested in how the rich countries got rich.
Only in
France and
Turkey here
is there a
plurality stupid enough to dispute the free market.
And in France's case it is only a decadent
pose,
since the free market
made France herself rich,
and France is despite everything
one of the most free market countries in the world.
This survey provides grounds for optimism about the developing world.
For instance,
with 66 percent support for the free market,
China's future looks bright.
They adopted some of the West's
worst ideas in the 20th century
(socialism and totalitarianism).
Let's hope they're going to adopt the West's best ideas in the 21st century
(capitalism and democracy).
The total wealth of the world keeps increasing.
It has been this way since around 1400 AD.
| Year (AD) |
1400 |
1500 |
1600 |
1650 |
1700 |
1750 |
1800 |
1850 |
1875 |
| World |
44.92 |
58.67 |
77.01 |
81.74 |
99.80 |
128.51 |
175.24 |
359.90 |
568.08 |
Gross world product, 1400-1875
(in billions of 1990 dollars).
It keeps increasing.
Stats from
here.
| Year |
1900 |
1920 |
1925 |
1930 |
1940 |
1950 |
1955 |
1960 |
1965 |
1970 |
1975 |
1980 |
1985 |
1990 |
1995 |
2000 |
| World |
1.102 |
1.733 |
2.102 |
2.253 |
3.001 |
4.081 |
5.430 |
6.855 |
9.126 |
12.137 |
15.149 |
18.818 |
22.481 |
27.539 |
33.644 |
41.016 |
Gross world product, 1900-2000
(in trillions of 1990 dollars).
It keeps increasing.
World
GDP growth, 1961 to 2007.
It is never negative.
Every year,
the total wealth of the world increases.
See
full size.
From
here.
The total wealth of the world keeps increasing.
However, the world population has been increasing.
So one must consider whether wealth per capita has been increasing.
The answer is yes.
| Year (AD) |
1500 |
1600 |
1700 |
1820 |
1870 |
1900 |
1913 |
1940 |
1950 |
1960 |
1970 |
1980 |
1990 |
2000 |
2006 |
| World |
566 |
596 |
615 |
667 |
873 |
1262 |
1526 |
1962 |
2113 |
2775 |
3736 |
4521 |
5162 |
6053 |
7275 |
World GDP per capita (in 1990 dollars).
It keeps increasing.
Stats from
Angus Maddison.
See
graph
and
graph
and
graph.
World GDP per capita over the last 200 years.
It keeps increasing.
Note how the world's wealth really takes off after 1950,
that is, after the age of imperialism.
Our wealth is not based on slavery or imperialism.
That is just a Chomskyite fantasy.
World GDP per capita over my lifetime.
It keeps increasing.
World GDP per capita over recent years.
It keeps increasing.
In the next 100 years, the entire world may become rich like us.
Wouldn't that be wonderful?
Return to
Capitalism
page.
takes the side of the protesters.
Wouldn't it be cool to see a pro-globalisation movie?
Since 1995.
