> Low pay is partially a reason why people have off-shored their industries there.
Exactly. That is precisely the financial imperialism I'm criticizing. Instead of gunboats, it is capital that puts the Global South into servitude.
> Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
This is an example of survivorship bias that is structurally limited to a few places. By the very nature of the system we find ourselves in, you will always need somewhere to exploit, somebody to do the shit work for shit wages.
The pitch you're making is basically "if you're lucky, you can become an exploiter, too!". No. We have to end the exploitation.
> Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
Yes, now that Britain is rich enough, they make poorer people's kids work for them [0] [1]. That's exactly what people mean when they talk of colonialism as a form of capitalism, it's exactly why what you're proposing can only ever perpetuate exploitation, not solve it.
> It's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
Treating these as neutral axioms is an attempt to smuggle in ideological positions without any critical examination. Furthermore, the victim blaming frame of "it must be their own fault if they're exploited" ignores centuries of actual, old school guns and ships type of colonialism that set the stage for present conditions.
I agree with your concerns, but there's not a lot of economical systems that could quickly make poor societies reasonably wealthy in a short, or sustainable period of time.
I can only really see here, 2 fairly good types of government-economical ties in this world, and both of which are fleetingly rare, with only one type actually growing consistently.
I would say they are, in no particular order, the "East Asian Values" model as created/noted by Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and the Mondragon Corporation by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta.
The "East Asian Values" model is often used for Singaporean or Chinese style state capitalism, but the Japanese and Koreans have also had a similar economies, and Taipei has flirted with some part of it through TSMC (although they don't own the company outright). This model is pretty good for getting a country rich somewhat quickly, but it does implicate a strong central government. They also tend to have a more Georgist type of tax system (which I think is generally not a bad idea to allow more wealth creation).
The Mondragon Corp on the other hand, while technically a private sector business, it's a full Co-op owned by the workers themselves and has a lot of relations with the Spanish Government. This arguably is the less "exploitative" type of government-economical system, but it also implicates a semi-homogenous society, at least one high trust enough to reasonably and responsibly manage a co-op, even in the most rural areas of Basque Spain. The only other similar economies, perhaps are the Ayllu system in Peru, tequio in Mexico, or other often informal collectivist (but certainly not communist) systems. (This could also pair well with general Neo-Distributism, and Georgism).
It should be noted however, that although the Basques were extremely poor, Spain was still a European society, and as such, did commit a lot of gunboat exploitative economies, most notably the conquest of the Americas.
Wealth creation, by definition, is somewhat exploitative. The good news, is that this type of exploitation therefore, unlike colonialism, actually gives a lot of power to the exploited over time as wealth is created.
My (mostly indigenous) grandparents were lucky to have worked in factories in order to escape farm life, but there were multiple close calls. I imagine it's something similar with all Industrializing societies, wherein a nation commits to an almost Faustian bargain of getting wealth at the cost of brutal working hours. But at some point, "Fordist" thinking prevails, where people either through protests, unions, and also to increase overall economic consumption, people get paid more, they start to live more comfortable lives as many begin to focus on skilled labor and intellectual work. It's not a simple overnight process, but wealth creation does imply first-world like living conditions might come fairly soon to a lot of nations, especially those that started in mass production based factories.
Exactly. That is precisely the financial imperialism I'm criticizing. Instead of gunboats, it is capital that puts the Global South into servitude.
> Like Japan in the 80s, or Korea in the 2000s, Poland currently. It's a slow and painful process, but given a good enough government such as Singapore, it's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
This is an example of survivorship bias that is structurally limited to a few places. By the very nature of the system we find ourselves in, you will always need somewhere to exploit, somebody to do the shit work for shit wages.
The pitch you're making is basically "if you're lucky, you can become an exploiter, too!". No. We have to end the exploitation.
> Remember that not too long ago, children worked in factories in Britain and other developed countries, but they got rich enough to ban children from working so they would study for higher paid, intellectually challenging jobs.
Yes, now that Britain is rich enough, they make poorer people's kids work for them [0] [1]. That's exactly what people mean when they talk of colonialism as a form of capitalism, it's exactly why what you're proposing can only ever perpetuate exploitation, not solve it.
> It's possible to grind your way into a fairly well developed society given punitive laws, good infrastructure and public services, and a massive emphasis on intelligence.
Treating these as neutral axioms is an attempt to smuggle in ideological positions without any critical examination. Furthermore, the victim blaming frame of "it must be their own fault if they're exploited" ignores centuries of actual, old school guns and ships type of colonialism that set the stage for present conditions.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=3tf6qc51Kbw
[1] https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/latest-news/ghana-br...