It is my impression that Rwanda has been improving under the Kagame rule, but that the improvement is still precarious.

Rwanda's GDP per capita is $834 [1]. That's way worse than my poor country (Nigeria) at $2,085 [2], so that improvement is very much in question and under a dictator nonetheless.

Edit: Removed the part describing Kagame as genocidal because I mixed up his identity. He's still corrupt and power-drunk though.

1- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... 2- https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

I am ignorant about the details in case of Nigeria and Rwanda, but GDP per capita may not be a good measure of living standards in nations with massive inequality.

A couple of ultra-rich oil tycoons in an otherwise poor country will artificially increase the per capita figure.

To boost the per capita GDP of Nigeria from $834 to $2085, your two oil tycoons would need to have annual income of more than 130 billion dollars each.

A couple of ultra-rich people can't really move GDP per capita figures anywhere; that's not how averages work.

By "a couple" I meant something like several thousand. A tiny minority within the entire population.

How many are, for example, the Saudi princes? Five thousand or so?

First, you are getting this casualty reversed if you think a few thousand billionaires just drop on a poor country, raising GDP. What happens is wealthy countries give rise to wealthy elite, and poor countries have poorer elite. The billionaire's income cannot just be added to GDP, and removing the billionaire does not reduce GDP by the amount of his income.

We can do a thought experiment -- let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million? No, because part of that $100 million is taking money away from other uses, e.g. someone with a fixed entertainment budget going to see her instead of doing something else. Only the resulting increase in overall income -- if any -- is the measure of how much Taylor adds to GDP.

GDP is the sum of total final production in an economy, and while a billionaire may play an important role in organizing production and encouraging more production to happen, it's usually the case that if they were never born or left, the economy would continue with other replacements for the billionaire's contribution. The replacements would be less efficient and so output would be a bit smaller. That difference is the contribution to GDP, not the billionaire's entire income.

And if you talk about Saudi oil princes, then they are not producing anything at all. Make those Oil princes disappear, and Saudi Arabia's GDP would be unchanged. Actually it would certainly increase, since imports subtract from GDP and those oil princes like to stash their wealth overseas and import luxury goods.

Bottom line, please don't confuse household income with national income, they are different beasts, and you cannot increase or decrease national income in a material way by adding or removing rich households to the country, anymore than you can make a business increase or decrease in revenue by paying the CEO more. Rather, CEOs of high revenue companies earn more, and those of lower revenue companies earn less. Dropping a bunch of highly paid CEOs on a small restaurant isn't going to turn it into a revenue monster.

> What happens is wealthy countries give rise to wealthy elite, and poor countries have poorer elite.

This does occasionally happen, and by choosing your definition of "elite" carefully enough you can make it happen in more cases, but it is generally not the case. Poor countries generally have much greater inequality than wealthy countries, with the result that elites in poor countries (say, top 1%, 5%, or 10% by either net worth or income) are often wealthier than elites in richer countries.

> let's say Taylor Swift makes $100 million. Does that mean she increases GDP by $100 million?

Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost". Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it. If she spends it all immediately on domestic products and services, then yes, she does increase GDP by her earnings, because her spending replaces the forgone spending you correctly identify on the part of her fans. Similarly if she lends it to businesses who use it to buy domestic products and services, or if she buys their stock from them or from other shareholders who then go on to use it in the same way. So-called "entertainers" tend to be quite spendthrift, and those from the US mostly spend their money in the US.

To some degree Ms. Swift is an exception on this count, known for her wise investing, estimates are that she's grown her net worth to only US$450 million over her 18-year music career, despite currently earning US$150 million per year from her work; as a very rough approximation that means she's spent the first 15 of her 18 years of showbiz earnings already, and most of her savings are probably also in US stock markets and money markets.

> Poor countries generally have much greater inequality than wealthy countries, with the result that elites in poor countries (say, top 1%, 5%, or 10% by either net worth or income) are often wealthier than elites in richer countries.

This is false, and massively so. Look here: https://ceoworld.biz/2020/02/07/how-much-the-top-1-of-worlds...

The relationship between Gini and GDP is complex and the correlations are small. The top 1% of poor countries like Haiti or Bangladesh are not richer than the top 1% of the US, they are much poorer, because even if the lorenz curve is such that 1% of the population get 40% of the income in one place and 30% in another -- which is a huge change -- it does not change the fact that one of these has a GDP of $800 per capita, and the other of $70,0000. This is really just math and an understanding of the definitions, plus a rough understanding of the possible differences in Lorenz curves (hint: in poor countries, there just isn't that much of a surplus for the wealthy to accumulate and Lorenz curves don't vary that much).

> Generally, the answer in cases like this is "almost".

Also false. Gross Domestic Output is usually 150% of Gross Domestic product, and then market income varies much more because NIPA (National Income Product Accounts) throws away spending on purchase and sale of assets, nor does it care about moving money around, but it tries to focus purely on net addition of domestic production, with appropriate netting for intermediate inputs. Here are the definitions - https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook. National income and product accounts can be a little confusing, but it's not too hard and you do need to know what GDP is before getting into discussions about it.

Here is a brief summary: GDP is production of final goods services in a region. If an island that produces fish has 1000 billionaires move to it. Then the GDP of the island only increases by the number of extra fish that are produced to feed the billionaires when they live there. Once you understand this point, and stop thinking that the billionaires are somehow adding to the island's GDP with their billions, then you will have an idea of what GDP actually is, and then you will have a better intuition for the methods of measuring a billionaire's contribution to GDP. But it does take some study because GDP, as an economic concept, tries to measure actual production of final output, and is not a measure of market income at all.

> Your explanation leaves out what she does with the money after she gets it.

Yes, because I do not double count. You can measure final output by looking at what everyone earns from producing goods with appropriate netting, or you can measure final output by looking at what people spend on the purchase of other's production, again with appropriate netting, but it is really double counting to do both at the same time. We are talking about how much Taylor Swift produces. Her purchase of other people's production doesn't get added to her own production. That is their production and they deserve the credit for doing it, whether that is equipment for recording studios, marketing people, construction workers maintaining venues, all those others involved in the music business who also contribute to GDP, not just Taylor Swift. And if she retired, they would work for someone else, continuing to produce. Similarly, when Taylor buys someone else's production, that does not add to her own production, it is the production of whoever produced that good. If Taylor likes fine cuisine, then cooks are the ones adding to GDP when she buys their food. GDP is a measure of production in an economy. We can change this and look at GDI, and try to measure income -- what people spend on production. In that case, we would only look at Taylor's spending, and we wouldn't look at her earnings at all. But what you want to avoid is doing both.

Thanks!

Saudi Arabia's population is 38.5 M.

Nigeria's is 225 M.

That's the denominator difference.

Kagame being genocidal is news to me.

Mistake...was thinking of someone else. I stand corrected.

Building institutions and culture takes centuries and can be lost quickly. Take heart that the West is burning its cultural capital quickly and becoming low trust as people start to realize they're in a reputation poor environment.

Note this was written in 2017. A lot has happened since the which affirms what GP is saying about the degradation of cultural capital here in the west.

Such as? From what I can see the most important parts of Western cultural capital are still in place and operating correctly (peaceful transition of power through elections, rule of law, freedom of speech)

More than just that, it takes a lot of luck. You need people in power at key moments who can rise to the occasion and then peacefully pass along power. You need leaders who build institutions and not networks of patronage. You need people in place who are willing to accept the constraints of rule of law, and to establish that norm.

I didn't downvote you but you can't really call it all luck, because if that were the case you would see a random smattering of countries becoming successful and others failing, however what you see in the real world is continents either being successful or failing. Unfortunately I think some of the major actors at play here are too politically sensitive to talk about, but I don't think there's much luck involved at the end of the day

I wonder what South Korea would become if tomorrow morning China invaded NK and SK and made them into a single country with North Koreans in charge.

I said it also requires luck.

> in the real world is continents either being successful or failing

Hardly. Chile is quite successful while Argentina is kind of a mess and Bolivia is worse. Uruguay is doing well also. Brazil is doing reasonably well, all things considered too. Venezuela is an absolute mess.

Europe is a really mixed bag as well.

Why is that something to take heart in? It sounds ugly and spiteful to me.

Is schadenfreude not your favorite flavor of ice cream?

No I genuinely derive joy from seeing others, be it individuals or entire nations, do well.

I’m not perfect of course, so sometimes I do feel schadenfreude. But I never mistake it for a good thing, but rather a sign of my own imperfection.

This is happening in the west for precisely the same reason it happens in africa - because the portion of the population with an IQ insufficient to maintain western techno-social standards is growing.

Meritocracy seems to be looked at with derision by some these days. It's a worrisome trend.

I blame hacker culture, were to gain with little input effort, aka a parasitic existence is cherished. Its prevalent in lots of places now, including the financial sector, were leveraging is more important then long term investment. The good thing though is, its self destructive, and the resulting riots will know who they want to take it out on.

Even if you have notional meritocracy, you're still screwed long-term if migration and reproduction patterns are dysgenic.

Meritocracy is biased for people with money, especially if you were born with significant sums.

Still it seems to have better results than outright aristocracy or primitive tribalism.

IQ is the wrong term IMO.

IQ is attempting to measure intelligence, and generally (but not always) ignores things like education, ongoing mental load (except for during the test), etc.

Intelligence is generally innate ability, but not what you would see day to day ‘under load’.

What we’re seeing is somewhat different IMO. It’s a decrease in the available executive function/free mental capacity of the population.

Executive function is the ability to synthesize the available information (past and present), and create a plan which produces the best outcome - and then follow it successfully.

Someone can have a very high IQ, and low executive function for a number of reasons - disorder (ADHD), bad nutrition, stressful or distracting environment, having too high a workload, or too much bullshit being thrown at them all the time.

Corruption makes it worse because it means it’s impossible to directly reason about how long something will take, or what resources it will take, without going through a bunch of opaque and situational hurdles. It also means tests and validation can’t be trusted, and it’s more likely the water system will be dangerous/cause disease despite everyone saying it’s ok.

It burns executive function and decision making ability.

Extra complexity of all kinds does, but bullshit is one of the worst.

SA had an evil, but competent gov’t so for folks ‘within the system’, things were relatively straightforward and worked as expected. That freed up a lot of executive function to do even more things that worked effectively.

With corruption and BS (aka say one thing, the other thing happens) everywhere, it burns more executive function and everything starts to rot everywhere else too, because everyone starts to get more and more expensive on the executive function side, just to stay alive.

Rather than just driving to a place, for instance, everyone has to figure out if it is going to go through a place that will get them killed (and /or kidnapped and raped).

Rather than just have working water, they have to spend effort figuring out if they need their own supply, how much to keep, when it needs to be rotated or treated so they don’t get sick, etc.

Same with power now, etc.

Often, societies end up stratified into layers based on available executive function. Being rich allows someone to help educate their kids and shelter them during key years, so they learn how to protect and grow that executive function, and aren’t exposed to as many of the traumatic effects that can hurt it. There is also a genetic factor that clearly shows up (not along race lines, but along family lines - it’s pretty clear).

Eventually, folks lose the plot or get pushed down a level due to external factors or mistakes. People with particular behaviors that fit well to the environment can also move up (unless suppressed) using wealth they’ve accrued due to effective function to continue to perpetuate what they think is important to have more executive function, hence class turnover/mobility.

Having a large swath of oppressed folks (who have had their ability to progress or sustain things that give them high executive function systematically broken for generations) take over for the folks previously maintaining it just for themselves, when those folks also disappear, is going to be a shitshow every time, for at least several generations.

We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. As the site guidelines explain, that's not ok here, regardless of which ideology you're fighting for or against. Race/IQ flamewar is just about the worst of the worst btw.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>You can't literally point to a single African country that's developed and successful

/me lifts hand and point finger to Botswanna.

yep. It's a small country but it's the oldest democracy on the continent, ranks quite highly internationally (30th on the democracy index, ahead of Italy), and has a gdp per capita only slightly lower than the baltics (20k). By most accounts a pretty tremendous success.

Any obvious reasons why it has enjoyed this success while its southern neighbour hasn’t?

Competent forward-looking leadership.

There's plenty of factors that helped, I can think of a dozen right off the top of my head, but the one that made a crucial difference is in my opinion really the above.

And this: https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...

It's a tiny country (population 2.3 million, vs South Africa's 60 million), mono-ethnic, rich in diamonds, strong culture of law and order.

South Africa also props Botswana up via a customs union.

https://www.tralac.org/news/article/6931-surge-in-botswana-s...

> has a gdp per capita only slightly lower than the baltics (20k)

Your numbers are not even close.

> In 2019, the GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power parity) was $36,701 in Lithuania, $35,853 in Estonia and $30,830 in Latvia.

Source: https://wedc.org/export/market-intelligence/posts/strong-gro...

Botswana has a $7,347.55 GDP per capita according to Google (in 2021).

That's at least 75% lower than the worst Baltic nation, not "slightly below."

Hasn't really developed, it just has a tiny population while also having a lot of diamonds. Its economy is still almost entirely extractive.

It's probably best compared to something like Qatar, where the hope is it'll be able to use the diamond wealth to found another industry.

i tend to disagree. Africa has some countries with very good GDP growth over the past 20 years, higher than some developed countries (Japan) that are struggling with debt and demographic collapse.

Please name some...I really want to have hope. Most times, the countries people name like Rwanda are definitely improving but still far behind on a global development scale. Sure, Japan is struggling, but Japan's struggles seem like paradise to the average African country's struggles.

Ethiopia was having a rapid growth before covid.

I am not sure after covid and the war in Tigray how it's doing at the moment

Been outstripped by population growth. The trajectory of Ethiopia is bleak again.

No African country has ever done a "Japan" and come even close to catching up with the West. Hell, I don't think any has even been able to catch up with middle income countries. I am starting to doubt it can even be done.

GDP growth by percent, For 2021

Botswana - 12 Rwanda - 10 Ethiopia - 8.6 Kenya - 7.2 Burkina Faso - 6.9 Benin - 6.5 Zimbabwe - 6.3 South Sudan - 5.3 Uganda - 5.0 South Africa - 4.9

Compare: Japan - 1.6 USA - 5.6 Germany - 2.8 Korea - 4.0 Norway - 3.9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_real_GDP_...

> Africa has some countries with very good GDP growth over the past 20 years

The key question is: just how much of that nominal growth ended up back at the population, and how much ended up in anonymous Swiss accounts or shell companies belonging to autocrats and their families/friends?

im not going to criticize other countries when in my own country the USA, the middle class has been shrinking for 40 years and life expectancy is actually going down.

when i grew up it was rare to see a homeless person, now there are tent camps all across the city. and i live in a red state where almost every local and state wide office is run by republicans.

Going from mud huts to imported plywood might represent 3000% GDP growth, but they're still tapping out well below the west, E asia, etc. Their theoretical maximum technological and economic capacity is strictly bounded by demographic factors like population intelligence distributions. The Chinese are aware of this, I think, and are working on colonization efforts, which will eventually cause Africa's economic load-bearing population to increase.

Imperialism has a lot to answer for.

Yeah, kept china, japan, south-korea and Hong Kong down. 3 generations later, they still suffer. The atrocities were real, the explanation power for current day missery diminishes rapidly.

My prefered theory is that human capital stays valuable even through crisis and that it pays of to be the direct cold conflict zone for two super powers, who then prop you up.

China, and especially Japan were never colonized the way Africa was. You clearly don't know what you are talking about.

Except when Mongols took over in China or the "century of humiliation".

Japan is also example for itself. They voluntarily isolated themselves for centuries and fell back in everything. They were shocked when Americans forced them to trade in steam ships. But instead of finding excuses and blaming Americans for waking them up, they started Meiji restoration.

> Except when Mongols took over in China or the "century of humiliation".

It's simply not the same thing.

Sure, China was forced to humiliating concession by the European.

But it's not the same. The borders of countries in Africa were drawn by Europeans.

For hundreds of years large parts of the continent was dominated by European colonialism.

If trade rights and relatively minor land concessions were considered humiliating by the Chinese... Just imagine

What about Korea or Singapore? They were colonised for much longer or in Singapore's case were built up from nothing.

Reality is that no African majority country has ever been able to reach even middle income status. I suspect culture is the issue personally but until that fundamental fact changes all the people setting the bar at "Africa should develop" are making an assumption with no basis in reality.

China has always had a bureaucracy. A system for schooling. Even in the times of European colonialism, even during invasions of Manchurians and Mongols etc etc. During much of history it was the world's richest and most technically advanced society. That changed basically late 18th century. By that time African countries had already been colonialized for 200 years.

The comparison is absurd.

Most African countries weren't colonised by Europeans until after the 1880s. Africa's time spent in empires was very small compared to their histories.

It sounds like you even agree on this, Africa has never been a place with any degree of modern state capacity. It isn't surprising that it is still failing to achieve this.

Singapore was a jungle with a few docks some 60 years and now it's one of the most developed country in history.

Everyone in this thread is dancing around an extremely obvious but also extremely taboo point.

Singapore has been a major trading port and wealthy (by regional standards) for over a century.

The PAP government loves to play the “we built this from nothing” story, and while they did do an amazing job of developing the country, they started on 2nd base.

In most other countries this same problem is solved by raising prices. Which is better seems a subjective question - the zavway at least gives low income people access to some reasonably priced electricity.

The answer is incredibly straightforward - the population (heritable) intelligence distribution is vastly lower for most African populations than for populations in europe, european-colonized south american regions, most Asian regions, etc. Anyone who can dispassionately perform bayesian reasoning here will settle on this as the most likely hypothesis, by a wide margin. It's unfortunate because there's not a straightforward fix like "give them better schools", so for this and other (mostly religious) reasons, people don't like to believe it.

That is some pretty disturbing comment.

lol. I just love casual racism on HN.

> I've always wondered what's wrong with my continent.

It's a source of raw materials for powers outside of your continent, who pour money and arms into the hands of the cliques most willing and able to get those materials out of the country at the lowest price.

Any hint that a resource-cursed country wants to reign in its elites, regulate its environment or labor, or negotiate better prices is replied to with a torrent of funds directed to the people most willing to murder the reformers.

I don't believe every country in Africa have lots of resources.

I think it's hard to build institutions, credibility and trust in a society.

What's wrong with your continent?

This whole thread is making me feel like I'm in an alternative reality...

The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.

And of course, in the best traditions, divisions were sown where one set of Native people were marked as better than another set, in a move that takes many generations to heal.

My country (Ireland) was colonised, we lost half our population to famine and emigration. We, almost, lost our language, out culture. We still have sectarian conflict. We didn't have one quarter the shit that was done to many parts of Africa. And, without Europe's money, we would still be a state completely dependent on our former colonisers.

Healing will take time, but to not mention the damage done, and still being done there is nonsense.

The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!

> The continent was raped, looted and pillaged by Europeans and Americans. Complete populations were enslaved. Natural resources were stolen, cultures were destroyed.

Our species is a violent one. The same can be said of other continents. Africa had the same problems long before America was hardly even a thing.

You could just as easily give counter examples of say gunboat diplomacy cracking open Japan and hurling it out of stasis and into modernity.

> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!

You are not doing the people you purport sympathy for any favors with such an attitude.

Trains need to run, electric grids need to work. The observation on competency in no way implies endorsement of the previous government.

People are objectively worse off now, believe it or not (look into it before arguing), while you get to moralize from far away. Nobody is arguing for a return to the previous regime obviously.

What you're doing simply isn't helpful.

> The top post on this thread is saying the apartheid government was bad yes... But they made the trains run on time!

I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties with reading comprehension, but if you're suggesting that I'm an Apartheid apologist for trying to explain how things got the way they are and how it's completely on-brand mismanagement from the ANC government, you've got completely the wrong guy.

Look at a map of how alphabets spread and literacy rates. I think a more productive question would be not what is wrong with Africa but what was right with Europe.

Religion played a part. The best selling book after the printing press emerged was the Bible and majority of book sales revolved around religious texts. There was money to be made from this so it spread.

The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_literacy_campaign

  Before the campaign, the rate of illiteracy among city dwellers was 11% compared to 41.7% in the countryside

Present day Nigeria is still somewhere around 50%, somebody correct me if I'm wrong.

Without universal literacy a country can't escape corruption, it is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to move to to the next stage. Not so long ago most everyone most everywhere was an illiterate peasant, the first places to grow out of that got first mover advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

> The great leap forward didn't come during the renaissance as many people imagine but as late as the 19th. The 20th for communist countries.

Actually it is more like 18th century in Austria-Hungary where compulsory school attendance (6 years long - just read, write, count) was established in 1774 School Reform under Empress Maria Theresa and the elementary school as I know it was established by The Imperial Elementary School Act (Reichsvolksschulgesetz) of 1869 standardized compulsory schooling as a whole and increased compulsory schooling from six to eight years.

Which is very nice history lesson, but does not answer the question of "why did European rulers even bothered with compulsory education at all".

It's tribal and there is in most of Africa, no culture for rewarding merit or excellence.

But there is always willingness to blame everybody else.

I can think of a few that seem to be developing nicely: Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Rwanda, and Namibia.

Europe, America, China and even Russia have mercenaries corps (e.g. Glencore) that help African countries choose the right rulers, and when the ruler isn't right he gets replaced. The right ruler needs to be a chaotic plutocrat who cares only about himself and looks the other way when his home country is looted. As for IQ, it's a side effect of the above: NK and SK are the same people who live under different rulers for less than a century, but NKs are already much shorter. My guess is that in a hostile environments, the smarts and height genes stay dormant.

Height difference between Koreas is not a genetic thing, it simply reflects the differences in child nutrition.

I suggest reading Guns Germs and Steel for some context

> You can't literally point to a single African country that's developed and successful...

Botswana. If you want to count the island nations, Cape Verde, Seychelles as well too.

Relevant:

There Are No Successful Black Nations | And the indignity and helplessness of blacks in America won’t end until we have a first-world African nation to lift up our people. <https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_ar...>