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The Cargo Problem
If there was ever a more complicated place in the world it’s Kenya. I just got back from my third trip there. It made me think about why they are so poor and we are so rich.
There are 42+ million people in Kenya and most of them are poor. The government says they are expanding at 4-5% per year. Annual GDP is only $71.4 billion. Apple had $156 billion in revenues in 2012. 40% of the workforce is unemployed. Per capita income is about $900 per year making one of the poorest countries on the planet. Yet the media there are brimming with optimistic reports of economic progress.
The capital, Nairobi, is a growing, sprawling city with an official population of 3,500,000 but it’s really much, much larger. There are large slums on the outskirts. While there is an emerging middle class and a top tier of 5,000 millionaires, most Nairobians are struggling.
It is not as if there has been no progress. There has been a lot of construction in and around Nairobi and real estate is in a boom phase. New shopping strip malls and housing developments serve the growing middle class. And many people (60% of the “poor”) have cell phones. More cars, more jitneys, and more buses clog the roads. And more inflation which robs people of their savings.
There are two foundations of their economy: agriculture and tourism. Tourism by far is the most important since it brings good jobs and foreign exchange. Tourism accounts for more than 50% of the economy. Half of farming is subsistence level only.
It makes you wonder. If things are so good, why are things so bad?
It isn’t the people. Many speak English and are well educated. But their talents are wasted because of a lack of opportunity. I discussed politics with a waiter who had wanted to be a biologist. A safari guide who speaks 3 or 4 languages, who is a trained and certified wildlife expert is paid $30 a month and relies on tips from generous tourists to get by. It is considered a very good job.
There are many explanations for poverty. One popular idea is Jared Diamond’s theory espoused in the book, Guns, Germs and Steel. He takes an historical look at why some parts of the globe thrived and some didn’t. His explanation for success was: the rise of grain agriculture in temperate zones, the decimation of non-temperate zone populations from diseases spread by temperate zone invaders, and the technology of advanced weaponry. Cultures living in temperate zones of the planet thrived and those elsewhere failed to grow beyond subsistence levels.
Diamond’s book was a response to a question from a New Guinean who asked him, “Why do you have so much cargo and we so little?” “Cargo” being pidgin for material goods. I believe that Diamond’s answer only goes so far. Those factors can explain many things in the dim historic past, but it is not as applicable today. It leaves out one really important thing: ideas. Or, to be more accurate, the right ideas.
For example, another question one can ask is: “Why do some societies in the temperate zones thrive and others fail?” Or, “Why do some societies in tropical zones thrive and others fail?” It’s not because technology isn’t known to poor societies. Everybody (almost) everywhere has access to this knowledge. The thing missing in Diamond’s theory are the sociological factors: the methods of human organization. Here I am talking about economic and political systems. These are the ideas the make us or break us.
The formula for success anywhere on the planet isn’t that difficult to discover. You need freedom. That is, solid property rights, a just legal system that protects property rights and the enforcement of contracts, and limited government and low taxation. Add in the personal freedom to do what you damn well please as long as you don’t abridge someone else’s rights. If you do these things, capital (wealth from savings) and an entrepreneurial spirit will rise and drive human progress. These are the ideas that emerged from the Enlightenment and culminated in the founding of the United States of America. It has worked everywhere it has been tried.
These are the things that Kenya and most African countries lack.
Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Kenya took the socialist path and the economy stagnated. Bad roads, bad communications, state owned industries, rising poverty, corruption. Basically they just spent the capital that had been accumulated during colonial times. Colonialism was bad but so were and still are the successive socialist-kleptocratic regimes that suck the country dry and keep them poor. They just raised the national sales (VAT) tax to 16% and everyone is complaining because prices have shot up. In 1989 impoverished China took a different road and now they are building roads in Kenya as part of their foreign aid (with a commercial ulterior motive, of course).
Everyone I talked to at “ground level” in Kenya said the number one problem is corruption. When you get down to the detail of what they really mean by that is that they lack the above mentioned freedoms needed for success. The courts are corrupt. The politicians are corrupt. The police are corrupt. The bureaucrats are corrupt. Crony capitalism is rampant. While they espouse the philosophy of “democracy”, that usually means the winners get to distribute political spoils to their cronies and fellow tribesmen.
How do you change that? Can you just change the system and expect human behavior to change overnight? Well, you’ve got to start somewhere. It won’t happen overnight, but if freedom breaks out in these countries, I believe things and people will change for the better. I believe that stripped down to our essentials, human beings behave pretty much the same. It’s all the crap that’s piled on top of us starting at birth that is the problem.
Free market capitalism is what I have been talking about here. It is what is called an emergent system, that is, a spontaneous social organization that emerges when the right conditions (freedom) are present. It is a ground up mostly self-regulating system. It’s not something that government invents (a top down system), but it’s the system that most closely matches human nature and allows individuals to reach their potential. Before you get too excited, recall the conditions of freedom I mentioned above require government to protect and enforce our human rights. It’s not easy; it takes time. And it’s not perfect, but as history has shown, it sure as hell beats anything else.
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Good points, bank guy in Brussels! However, while certainly parts of Africa overwhelmingly, as a whole, lead the way in utterly unsustainable exponential population growth, lots of other cultural groups are still doing that too, for instance Hispanics and Islamics. Overall, the richest people are committing suicide through their too low reproduction rates, while the poor are declaring war on everybody else, by their too high reproduction rates. Meanwhile, the richest of the rich appear to be planning to resolve that problem through all the various methods, both hard and soft killing, whereby those growing populations could be more genocidally wiped out in the future. My view is that the world's population by 2100 will probably be less than 1 billion, rather than more than 10 billion then.
Meanwhile, back to the article above. This author relies upon the magical word "freedom" without any reference to the real historical, environmental conditions which did exist, or will exist in the future:
"You need freedom. That is, solid property rights, a just legal system that protects property rights and the enforcement of contracts, and limited government and low taxation."
I regard all those kinds of "legal system ... property rights," and so forth, as being a relatively benign balance between the different rates which operated the systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies. Western civilization was able to develop a delicate balance between the hypocrisy of Christianity, and the military power of the states, which enabled its conflicts to come to a kind of historical set of compromises, that took the form of its legal and governmental systems. It helped that Western civilization that it then had enough advantages thereby to conquer almost all the rest of the world, by invading with a gun in one hand, and a Bible in the other. However, those relative historical advantages are mostly gone now.
I totally agree with the basic notion that IDEAS count. However, I disagree with the old-fashioned ideas which this article promotes, especially in the context which you mentioned, bank guy in Brussels, that "If Americans themselves have now lost these items, and can't manage to get them back, how are desperately poor Africans with little means to fight their overlords, supposed to accomplish such grand fantasies?"
My view is that the IDEAS which we need are profound paradigm shifts in the philosophy of science, which then are applied within political science, and especially to militarism, because it is impossible for places like Kenya to ever fix any of their problems without different death control systems. The PROBLEM is that the real path we are on now is for the exponential growth to overshoot, and then severely collapse into chaos. It does not help that the global ruling classes know that perfectly well, and appear to be planning to make that happen, in various and sundry ways, using all the different methods of both hard kill and soft kill techniques.
The history of colonialism has overall been that those who benefited the most from the systems of organized robbery, backed by killing, became the richest people, while those who lost the most by being robbed are now the poorest. However, there are no miracle cures for that now. Only new murder systems, operating different death controls, could develop some new dynamic equilibria between the different systems of organized lies, operating organized robberies. The kind of old-fashioned impossible ideals advanced in this article above are based on false fundamental dichotomies, which are guaranteed to continue to backfire badly, rather than miraculously start to work. That applies just as much to North Americans, as it does to Africans.
Articles like the one above I regard as the kind of work done by classic reactionary revolutionaries, who do good analysis of the real problems, up to a point, but then collapse back to the same old bullshit "solutions" at the end. As you point out, bank guy in Brussels, if the masses of Zombie Sheeple in America can not save themselves from being destroyed by the best organized gangs of global pirates (the international banksters), then those in Africa surely can not either.
My main point is merely the theoretical IDEA that the central concept in human ecology is the death control. The history of the world was primarily directed by its murder systems, upon which was built its monetary systems. The ONLY theoretical solutions which might be better are better death control systems. That continues to be correct, even after whatever the degree the current ruling classes act to resolve these problems in their ways, through the mass murder of those populations which are problematic threats to the on-going dominance of the ruling classes.
My main IDEA is that what needs to be done better is what the ruling classes actually covertly do, which is operate the death control systems that back up the debt control systems. Clearly, Africa was one of the worst hit places in the world by the Western invasion, EXCEPT, as Jared Diamond pointed out, most of Africa did NOT become colonies of settlement for Europeans, due to the diseases already there in most of Africa.
Everywhere in the world has basically the same problems, only varying by degree. Most of the places in the world appear to me to be already basket cases, which will be written off by the global ruling classes allowing, or provoking, massive genocidal depopulations to occur there in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the ONLY theoretical solutions to the problems that Kenya has are that some ways that MUST happen that stop the exponential population growth, sooner or later. The ONLY sane ideas would be debates about how best to do that. However, given the degree to which the established global ruling classes already dominate the world systems, and what their real plans appear to be, the only practical IDEAS might be about how to recover from the genocides and democides which appear must inevitably happen in Africa ...
Meanwhile, the pie in the sky "solutions" offered in this article above should be reinterpreted, so that they are framed in ways which are consistent with radical understanding of natural energy laws, rather than based upon the magical, floating ideals about "freedom." Since we are living inside of a Bizarro Mirror World, where everything is seen in ways which are proportionately backwards, and distorted, the solutions which I propose will appear to be inverted to those who do not already understand that they are looking at a Mirror, and so fail to comprehend everything they see is backwards.
The REAL solutions are better death controls, because those are the REAL problems. Therefore, my IDEAS are radical revolution in the philosophy of science, applied to political science, then applied to militarism, then applied to the monetary systems, so that the human and industrial ecologies evolve within natural ecologies. My IDEAS are NOT discontinuous with what the ruling classes are really going to do anyways, but rather are an adaptation to facing those facts, and attempting to work with and through them.
Nature has devised its own death control systems in the form of ice ages, and occasional asteroid strikes. The common element in these events is replacement of one dominant life form by another. The Planet still has a lot of miles left on it before it faces the ultimate solar crisis, but whether we're along for the ride to me seems doubtful. Post the next Ice Age, my money is on the bears. They can walk upright, have the beginnings of opposed thumbs, and are already quite smart by comparison to most humans. All they need is a language and it's game on.
I'm not joking, in fact I think we ought to prepare for that possibility by encoding and preserving all that we've learned so it can be passed on, across the Ice Barrier, so to speak. If enough remains of human culture to give the bears a head start, they might even succeed in overcoming their own Ice Barrier, in which case a whole new game is afoot.
Da bears!
Many creatures have language, including bears. In bat colonies, for instance, each bat has an individual name. Our concept of the "dumb beast" comes from our exposure to them after they have been stripped of their society and imprisoned by humans. Since animal language has to be learned from the parents (they do not write), once you remove them from their natural habitat and social structure, the language dies after one generation.
The Fed has its own language also... lets talk about that Batman.
The book that explains it all better than Guns Germs and Steel is Why Nations Fail. It describes the difference between properous and poor nations in the modern world.
http://whynationsfail.com/
Vampyroteuthis, the BANKSTERS are the "extremist group" that have already achieved "monopolization of political power!"