That's what free movement of capital without free movement of people does. Military and economic dominance means USA has a lot of the capital and keeps out a lot of the people. That money is coming from somewhere, like e.g. Africa where you see the opposite trend:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/africa-subsi...

In regards to both your's as well as u/returnUD 's comments, i never cease to be amazed at the insidious spread of the thoroughly debunked Dependency Theory. For a primer on how the developing world can get stuck in a poverty cycle, look into the history of Ghana and the utter moron Nkrumah. More damage is done by humanities majors pretending to understand economics than ebbil capitalists stealing magical resources from noble savages.

Well, of course. It is us, "developing" nations' populace that gets the shortest end of the stick with no hope and redemption in sight.

Honestly, injustice is just too great to bear. All you ever discuss is things like 10% gender-gap in payouts for the people within your arbitrary borders, yet the horrible exploitation inflicted on us by yourself is never ever discussed.

Developing nations benefit from the US dramatically more than the US benefits from developing nations. They get a massive, free technology transfer.

Or, see: China's several trillion dollar trade surplus with the US over the last 20 years.

25% of Vietnam's entire economy is currently made up of US imports from their nation, and it's almost all trade deficit for the US. Their economy is being constructed by US capital and US consumers, enabling them to dramatically lift their standard of living, exactly as China has.

Then we get to the free technology transfer, which enabled countries like China to rapidly leap forward without having to invent much of anything new. They get to focus on implementing things that are already known to work. The US invented nearly all the modern tech infrastructure, the list is hilariously long, here's the short version:

Internet, transistor, router, microprocessor, computer graphics, fiber optics, ram, most operating system tech, Unix, computer networking, the mobile phone, the smart phone, the hard drive, SSDs, the LCD, the LED, the laser, tcp/ip, hypertext, C/C++/Java/JavaScript/Basic/etc., the digital camera, qwerty keyboard, cable modem, the spreadsheet, the relational database, the fax machine, the GPU, 3D graphics cards, ethernet, hypertext, the mouse, streaming media, email, GPS, ecommerce.

Then we can go further back in time to all the older industrial technology invented by the US and Western Europe, which developing nations have been able to free ride over the last 50+ years.

And that's before we get to vaccines, medtech, biotech, pharma, genetech, aerospace, vast free research & data, process knowledge, and on and on.

Oh the exploitation, make it stop.

The hole in your sarcastic premise, is the fact that the US was once a developing nation, dealing with vastly more powerful colonial powers. It was the colonial powers and their capital that provided the seed capital for the US to become what it is. Just as China was / has been a developing nation and is graduating from that status, built up by foreign developed nation capital. Just as South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were all developing nations at one time.

Japan and Germany had to rebuild themselves from complete obliteration. Eastern Europe had to rebuild itself from decades of Soviet occupation and forced impoverishment: Czech took their GDP per capita from $2,800 in 1991, to $22,000 by 2008. Lithuania took its GDP per capita from $2,100 in 1995 to $15,000 by 2008; Estonia went from $3,000 to $18,000 over the same time frame.

I guess you can either whine about the wealth and power of other nations, or you can turn yourself into a successful nation like all of those examples have done.

Wow, what a wonderful idea. Let me just roll my sleeves and create a successful nation.

Germans, Czech, etc. were obviously so much smarter and hard-working than us - that's exactly the reason why they created a successful nation.

I have no words.

Inventing fake argumentation points doesn't actually work. I said nothing about such and such nation being smarter or harder working. You said that.

I said, directly and indirectly, that developing nations benefit immensely more from developed nations than vice versa. It was similarly true for the US as well when it was a developing nation. It's factually true and very easily demonstrated: it's why the global median standard of living is at the highest it has ever been, famines are almost non-existent globally, the median life expectancy globally continues to expand, there is less extreme poverty today than at any other time in recorded history, global equality is at an all-time high and has continued to improve, food security is at an all-time high, infant mortality is at an all-time low, etc.

If you were right, none of that could be true, because all the wealthy & powerful nations would be busy oppressing all the poor nations, such that they could never climb the standard of living tiers.

Over five decades Vietnam suffered repeated occupation, genocide, famine, civil war, a brutal form of Communism, and overall had a large percentage of its population killed. Today they're on a booming express train toward a middle income economy. What excuse could you possibly present next to that? Countries like Vietnam (and China before it), or Czech, or Estonia, demonstrate very clearly what's possible and they deserve credit for their accomplishments.

They were (probably are) and they did. One becomes smarter and more effective through learning and application, not whining and recrimination. S. Korea was demonstrably worse off than Ethiopia as well as many other sub-Saharan countries in the 1950s and look at them now. Did they achieve this through colonization, exploitation, and slavery?

Well, maybe you should stop supporting our dictatorial regime for your own interests and give us the same freedom afforded to the 50s S.Korea before you point your uneducated fingers at me.

There is no national government that does not A) act in its own self/best interest and B) does so with the express approval of all of its citizens. The fact that you decide to blame the population of an entire nation (who are largely ignorant of global affairs as well as having no stake/vested interest in big money deals between nationstates) is indicative of your knowledge base on the subject. The game of wealth has been going on for much longer than Thirdworldism (1970s), Dependency Theory (1960s), Globalism (1940s), Socialism (~1850s), or even Capitalism (1700s).* Resource exchange and the wealth derived from it are hallmarks of pastoral societies, potentially even out dating currency exchange given the obvious value raw material plays in terms of power. What may be considered unique to the late stage Holocene is the domination of raw material exchange by Western Societies, but only in terms of its global scale. The Chinese (there are many empires that can be called this but i hope you can suss that out for yourself) knew the value of spices and precious metals even as Europeans were trying to figure out why the Saracens lived longer and better despite being "satan worshipers." Global mass transfer is what cemented the Western ascendancy on the globe. But the idea that this ascendancy was appropriated from others is a bridge too far (unless one is making an emotional or faith based argument) given the destruction the West wrought on itself, as well as the fact that every single Western Empire did substantially better economically once shorn of their colonial possessions. What is more, non colonial nations like Sweden and Switzerland are demonstrably wealthier than the original western colonialists Spain and Portugal. This, in my as well as far more notable historian's opinions, is due to culture and governance. This can be seen in the staggering achievements of the East Asian tiger economies vs. the abject shitholes of sub-Saharan Africa. The tigers were resource poor, xenophobic, and overpopulated. the -holes were resource rich, comparatively open, and underpopulated. Yet somehow, East Asia is opulently wealthy and powerful while sS Africa can barley keep the lights on. It would be foolish to claim that there were no outside influences in either case, but to blame the disparate outcomes on a single nation is not only unhelpful to solving the problem, it is deleterious. One can always make a "lead by example" argument, but that is just a transposed American Exceptionalism argument which is silly. I'd be interested in any reading you could point me to on this subject, assuming you've actually done any. My sources are all antiquated paper media, but i will give you a truncated reading list should you defy my expectations. More your speed might be the doc Empire of Dust as a point of departure. Nonetheless... "Western Guilt&Third World Poverty" Bauer,"Dont Decry Colonialism" Drake, "Decolonization" Fieldhouse, "The Middle East: Geostrategy and Oil" Khalidi and many, many more.

Well, I thought the same about you - a typical first-worlder thinking he is smart because his culture initiated him into "intellectualism".

Few bubble influences there as well, with your willingness to defend a viewpoint with extreme bias without even any context of what the OP is talking about. It seems like you would go to any length to prove to yourself that you deserve to go to Harvard and spend your vacation money on NYC or wherever while the kids mine cobalt in Africa and middle-easterners get neglected by their "own" governments cuz selling oil to first-world is more lucrative than educating a nation.

I cannot reply directly, but i am neither sorry nor embarrassed my "culture" instilled a "read, don't rage" sentiment in me. It makes me sad that yours does not, apparently.

F-ck off kid.

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