
Why is Africa still poor? - antman
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2015-06-16/plunder-africa
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obrero
Here's a video from 1990 -

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6eE9BIUfBg&t=16m43s)

Note how he says to Mandela - "the assets of the white people - I have worked
for my banks, my mines, my businesses, and my farms". The sense of entitlement
he has that the mines and farmland of South Africa are "assets of the white
people" is incredible. Also, who was working on those farms and down in those
mines? Not Koos van den Merwe, I can tell you that.

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GutenYe
Because of the politics, image a country runs by a company like Google,
Facebook or Apple.

~~~
icanhackit
> image a country runs by a company like Google, Facebook or Apple

I believe at sufficiently large scale, i.e. the company's product is the well-
being and utility of the population of a country, it doesn't matter whether
it's run by the state or a private enterprise - It'll require a huge
administrative body to communicate with only a fraction the efficiency of a
smaller entity. Big things with lots of moving parts are slow and cumbersome.

I'm sure Apple and Google are feeling this already - having tens of thousands
of employees to manage is hard. Now scale it for running a country. I don't
want to ignore that there are plenty of optimizations that could be made by
eliminating political cruft, but a non-trivial level of complexity would
remain.

That said, in some significant ways the companies listed above will be
influencing how a population functions by providing the frameworks for
communicating with each other. I wonder if it's a path to self-governance by
way of facilitating our policing of each-others actions, interactions and
morals while regulating the information that we have access to.

~~~
bko
I don't think what makes companies like Google, Facebook and Apple run better
than most public entities has to do with scale or administration.

Private businesses have all the same challenges with building an empire and
expanding scale and scope of what they do. The difference is that they have to
do this or cease to be. It's a lot easier to push a private entity to the
point of irrelevancy when it falls out of favor with its users. Unfortunately,
we don't have that same power with governments. Sure, you can vote but the
system is designed to greatly benefit those already in power and skirt direct
responsibility, whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally
a lot stronger.

Peter Thiel explains it well when talking about the DMV:

> Consider a political analogue using this framework. Say you have to go to
> the DMV to get your drivers license. In some sense, you, as a voter, control
> the government, and the DMV is a part of the government. Voters elect
> government people. Those people appoint other people. Presumably you had
> some indirect control on who becomes the head DMV bureaucrat.

> But that head bureaucrat isn’t who you talk to after you wait in line. You
> have to talk to the people in possession: the window clerks and managers who
> actually run the DMV. They are the people who possess the ability to help
> you or not. You can tell them they suck. You can remind them that, under the
> theory of representative government, you are their boss. But that may not
> work very well. There is a misalignment between control and possession. It
> may not be a catastrophic one, but it is representative. Misalignment often
> happens when dealing with bureaucrats in government or, say, senior managers
> in the business world.

[0]
[https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887](https://gist.github.com/harperreed/3201887)

~~~
icanhackit
_The difference is that they have to do this or cease to be._

Right, I understand the principal. Though I'd argue that it's not that black
and white - the market is not a natural force like the waves in an ocean.
Companies seek initial investment for growth, which can boil down to how
strong your PowerPoint or people skills are, not on the strength of your
ability to produce a decent product or service. The strength of your shares
are often tied to public perception and professional market manipulation. The
public's perception of the product itself often has little to do with reality
but how well you've manipulated them into believing you add value to a
(sometimes non-existent) void. And when you buy a product you can't see the
organizational bickering between product/service divisions and executives -
you don't see the sometimes horrendous failure rate because QA has hopefully
pulled them off the line before they reach stores.

Businesses don't need to open the kimono for all to see how, despite being
somewhat dysfunctional and disorganized, they can still churn out a product.
Businesses are made up of people, like governments, and so there are many
parallels.

 _whereas the power a consumer has with his dollar is generally a lot
stronger_

In principal, yes. Though when we examine consumer choice let's look at, say,
the mobile industry - despite starting with many different platforms and
manufacturers, the market has naturally gravitated towards two primary
platform choices and two primary hardware manufacturers. Humans are quite good
at condensing complex options into binary choices.

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x5n1
why is most of the world still poor?

~~~
Rhapso
Because the bits of "not poor" exist via leveraging the cost efficiency of
employing the poor.

~~~
mateuszf
Without employing the poor, they would be even poorer.

~~~
collyw
I was reading the Lonely Planet guide while in Nepal (another extremely poor
country). Apparently many of the people in the country farm, and the farms are
owned by absent landlords. So basically these people are working the land and
having to pay 50% of they produce to people not even there. Do you think they
are grateful for the "employment"?

