I have been asked this question before by commenters pushing hard-line racial theories of IQ. From which it's clear that they really do believe in an innate theory of intelligence, because there is, after all, an extensive literature on the subject with which none of them seems to be familiar.
Yes, Asia had a colonial regime, and Africa had a colonial regime, but that doesn't make them the same continent. Asian colonization was nowhere near as extensive as African colonization, and my understanding is that it tended to rely much more on co-opting existing power structures than building entirely new ones. That's because Asia had existing power structures to co-opt--local imperial barons that controlled large amounts of land. Moreover, much of Asia was not, in fact, colonized: the biggest Asian success stories right now (China, Japan, Korea) had repeated incursions by Western interlopers, but were never colonized in the formal sense that Africa was. It's worth noting that the bits of Asia that were colonized tend to be in worse shapes than the bits that werent.
At any rate, there's a whole, very large literature on why Africa is particularly screwed up. The awful climate under which most of it labors. The bad maritime geography: apparently one of the two coasts offers extremely little scope for building ports, the rivers don't go where you want them, and when they do happen to meander near something interesting, they are hard to navigate. The huge patchwork of ethnicities. The bad borders--in Asia, borders were drawn somewhat along ethnic power lines, whereas in Africa, they were drawn mostly to suit the convenience of whatever western country wanted to do business there after the colonian powers left, and there is an emerging literature indicating that border that cut across ethnic lines are a recipe for conflict, and thus poverty. The unique medical problems of Africa--what with us having emerged there, the local bugs have had longer to develop a taste for us than elsewhere, and there are lots of reservoirs of new disease in our near genetic cousins. And that's just scratching the surface. Africa has a lot of unique factors that we've identified causing huge problems in other places, all squished together into a toxic cocktail.
It's not that it's impossible that IQ varies by race--but we've got a lot of other variables that can account for our problem, so why look to race first, last, and only?
Update Yup, those were typos; one Asia changed to Africa, and one India to Korea. Next time, coffee before blogging, not the other way around . . .
so why look to race first, last, and only?
Because it gives us the excuse to essentially shrug our shoulders and say "there's nothing anyone can do", which is more palatable to most of us than "there's nothing we're willing to do".
Tom Sowell puts a lot on this explanation. Almost all the great cities in the world are on natural harbors or year-round navigable rivers. Africa just doesn't have much of that. Europe has more miles of coastline than Africa, because its irregular.
Yes, Asia had a colonial regime, and Asia had a colonial regime, but that doesn't make them the same continent.-MM
Hmm... This could be a deep metaphysical insight--something along the lines of Heraclitus's "One can never step in the same river twice."
This would put Ms. McArdle in the same grand philosphical tradition as Hercalitus, Nietzsche and Heidegger. There is no being--only becoming. Everything is in flux. Nouns are self-delusions, etc...
Or maybe one of the Asia'a was supposed to be "Africa."
India was never "formally colonized"? That's news to me. I would think it would be a lot easier to argue that India was formally colonized for a LONG time, whereas most of Africa was colonized briefly and haphazardly.
Maybe the important thing is that if you colonize a place, breaking down its social institutions, the colonial power has to stick around long enough to put something in its place.
"It's worth noting that the bits of Asia that were colonized tend to be in worse shapes than the bits that weren't."
Singapore. Hong Kong.
To say nothing of Australia and New Zealand.
Japan is in pretty good shape, to be sure. Of course, they got that way largely by internalizing the values and institutions of the West without being colonized in the first place: to say nothing of being nudged into the right orbit by America's imperial proconsul, Douglas MacArthur.
Most of the places in Asia that are in the worst shape are so largely because of the disfigurements that Communism (another Western import, alas) brought them over the last sixty years.
"It's worth noting that the bits of Asia that were colonized tend to be in worse shapes than the bits that weren't."
Singapore. Hong Kong. South Korea. Japan. Malaysia. India. Australia. New Zealand.
All of these countries were intensely influenced by Western Colonization and yet they are all among the best that Asia has to offer.
China may be currently in vogue as the next world "superpower" but lets see how the ChiComs handle the larger stage before we hand them the title.
I agree with David Hecht and Jamie Lockett. This sentence couldn't be further from the truth:
As Tom Sowell put it, borrowing from the great development economist PT Bauer:
As Bauer showed, the parts of Asia and Africa that had the most contact with the West did the best. So the idea that colonialism caused poverty there is just myth. There is no evidence to support it. I suggest anyone interested read Friedman and Sowell discussing Bauer's work.
Even in Africa, the most intensely colonized nation on the continent would probably be South Africa. I also think it is the considered the most modernized nation on the continent, but I hear that from my friends who have emigrated from there. Maybe it's a biased opinion?
I think a more likely explanation of the post-colonial Asia-Africa difference is that much of pre-colonial Asia had sophisticated agrarian and urban societies, with enduring formal institutions of culture and governance, written literature, bureaucracies, &c., and most of Africa had not. Colonialism probably isn't a big part of the explanation. A more interesting question would be why were Africa and Asia already so different before colonialism?
Singapore is a city-state which was essentially created by Britain; it has no indigenous population. To say it was "colonized" is paradoxical. Hong Kong is like Singapore except it's not a country and never has been.
Let's restrict this to East Asia for simplicity's sake. Taking countries which were colonized by Western powers, we have the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and to some extent China, or parts of it. Then we have Taiwan and Korea, which were colonized by Japan and then, in Taiwan's case, by Nationalist China, essentially. Countries not colonized by anyone: Japan and Thailand.
All of the countries colonized by Western powers on that list are, in various ways, a mess, except for China, Malaysia and to some extent Vietnam.
It's easy enough to be persuaded that Africa's problems have very little to do with race. You just have to spend a little time in Cambodia, Burma, and/or the Russian provinces.
Even if black people do have an inherited intelligence deficit, it has little to do with the persistent wretchedness of most of Africa. Africa is screwed up mainly because the overwhelmingly dominant form of social organization there is still tribal barbarism. This is the same reason the Middle East is so screwed up, despite decades of oil wealth. As a social form, tribal barbarism simply doesn't scale up well; certainly not to the level of large nation-states. Admittedly, the fact that the colonialists managed to make the poisoned meme of socialism their long-acting parting gift to their former possessions on their way out didn't exactly help matters. But to understand the difference between the profound dysfunction of Africa compared to say, the less profound dysfunction of much of Latin America - which has also evinced a long-standing, self-destructive tropism toward left-statism - it is necessary to note that Africa is dominantly tribal, whereas Latin American societies are peasant cultures. This distinction tends to explain the differential successes of various areas of Asia too. The more tribal a place is, the more Hobbesian are the circumstances of its modal resident.
how about the legacy of slavery? i became aware of this paper at brad delong's place. rather than wading into the nonsense of iq and intelligence studies, how about some actual empirical economic history?
here's the abstract and the paper: "Can part of Africa's current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa's slave trades. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from a country and current economic performance. To better understand if the relationship is causal, I examine the historical evidence on selection into the slave trades, and use instrumental variables. Together the evidence suggests that the slave trades have had an adverse effect on economic development."
http://www.nber.org/papers/w13367
Looking at some of the comments above: it's ludicrous to place Australia, New Zealand, or Singapore in one category with Vietnam or Nigeria and term them all "colonized countries". Australia and New Zealand consist of nothing but colonizers (and a few leftover indigenes). Colonies which completely slaughter their indigenous populations, and colonies like Singapore which overwhelm them with immigrants (Indian, Chinese etc.), are completely different from countries which are ruled and exploited for a long period by a small colonial class, like Vietnam, the Philippines or Angola.
One big distinction is that arbitrary border-drawing is not such a damaging exercise if all of the indigenes are dead. It's rather different for the US and Canada to demarcate their border along an arbitrary parallel, cutting off perhaps a few Ojibwa from their hunting grounds, than it was for the British and French to decide that the border between Nigeria and Benin should cut through Yoruba country -- the Yoruba being a people who now number at least 30 million.
When accounting for Africa's problems, "Colonialism" has extraordinarily weak explanatory power.
If colonial occupation in Africa was such as destructive force, why did the lot of African countries start deteriorating so markedly once the colonists left. Surely the removal of those oppressors should have made things better? But the post-colonial Egypt, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia, South Africa, Congo are surely worse places than the colonized Egypt, Rhodesia, South Africa, and (perhaps even) Congo.
Moreover, your description of Asian colonialism does not align with any reality I know. The British colonized India for 200 years, and were in Hong Kong until quite recently. The list goes on -- Australia New Zealand remain colonized to this day. Certainly in Indian subcontinent started going downhill rapidly as soon as the British left, and the countries where the colonists have not left (Australia, NZ) seem to be doing quite well. The fate of Hong Kong depends on how China will decide to treat it.
But based on the actual, on-the-ground reality of pre-and-post colonial existance for countries in Africa and Asia, I don't see how you can say that Colonialism is why Africa is in bad shape *today*.
Singapore is a city-state which was essentially created by Britain; it has no indigenous population. To say it was "colonized" is paradoxical.-Brooksfoe
That's not correct. To borrow from Encarta:
So Singapore did have a small indigenous population. But British rule made the place so much more attractive that people flocked there from all over Asia to share in the prosperity. Since then Singapore has been enormously succesful economically because it has largely eschewed the sort of statist policies that brooksfoe tends to support. The Heritage Foundation ranks Singapore # 2 in the world in economic freedom.
"Singapore is a city-state which was essentially created by Britain; it has no indigenous population. To say it was "colonized" is paradoxical. Hong Kong is like Singapore except it's not a country and never has been."
That is just completely and utterly wrong. Singapore was part of Malaysia until 1965. Yes it was colonized by the British East India Company in the early 1800s. Still it had previously been colonized by both ethnic Chinese and Indians - and has a native population of Malay decent. The ethnic makeup of Singapore makes it a STRONGER case for debunking the "colonization causes poverty" meme because the fractured racial groups were eventually brought together into one of the most thriving economies in the world, let alone Asia.
Yeah, Singapore had a native Malay population like Manhattan had a native population of Manhattoes or whatever. They were overwhelmed by immigration created by international trade. The chief impetus for that growth wasn't the gradual growth of trade by Islamic merchants oriented towards India and the Arabian peninsula through the 17th and 18th centuries; it was Raffles's establishment of the Singapore colony and the explosion of trade in the 19th century. Look, nobody in their right minds would argue that "contact" with Western powers, in the sense of trade and business, was harmful to East Asians. What was harmful was colonial rule and the monopoly corporate power of companies like the EIC and the Dutch VOC; these were harmful sometimes in economic terms (as in Britain's destruction of the Indian textiles industry) and always in political terms (as in the creation of Burma's police state under the British, the evisceration of Vietnam's ruling mandarin class and its replacement by a class of French-loyal quislings which led to a catastrophic 30-year civil war, the fusion of Java, Sumatra, Bali et al into one country under the Dutch, a country which could only be governed through brutality as it lacked a coherent governing class, the instrumentalization and hollowing out of the Cambodian monarchy which left the country as a tottering weakling after the French left...and so on).
It's just ridiculous to compare the effects of colonialism on Singapore with those on India or Congo. Singapore is a city. There are a lot of cosmopolitan cities around the world which were run as colonial city-states; that's a reasonable project. Colonizing large countries full of huge numbers of inhabitants with long-established societies and their own governing hierarchies, political traditions, religious worldviews and so on is a completely different affair, and there isn't a single example that's worked out very well. Among other things, I am unaware of any large-scale massacres or famines committed or induced by a colonial power to maintain control over a city-sized colony. I am unaware of a single large country ruled by a colonial power in which the colonial power did NOT oversee large-scale massacres or politically induced famines.
"the bad borders--in Asia, borders were drawn somewhat along ethnic power lines, whereas in Africa, they were drawn mostly to suit the convenience of whatever western country wanted to do business there after the colonian powers left, and there is an emerging literature indicating that border that cut across ethnic lines are a recipe for conflict, and thus poverty."
These are not mutually exclusive. For example, Lebanon was hacked off from Syria in order to give the Maronite Christians majority power over a state--reinforcing their power led to a favorable environment for the West to do business with them.
Oh yeah, last time I checked, Indian subcontinent, which is located in Asia, was colonized for a longer time and more pervasively than any other area.
I think that the original post suggested that the borders of China (unlike those of African countries) don't "cut across ethnic lines."
Not so fast! Khazaks, Kirgyz, Tibetans, and Mongols are a few of the ethnic groups that the borders slice through.
I don't think China is a very good example.
Also, may I bring up what Theodore Dalrymple has written? This is pretty similar to what Dick Eagleson says above about "tribal barbarism." Dr. Dalrymple explains the cntrast between the kindness, dignity, and decency he has often found in ordinary Africans with the appalling corruption and brutality of many African governments thus: People in Africa are loyal to their families, including their families extended to tribes, rather than their artificial states or to abstract principles of justice. The more money an African obtains, the more he is expected to do for a large circle of relations. In many African societies, a public official who failed to extort and embezzle every cent he could would be seen as a traitor to his own kin.
There is very little that one can add to Meagan's (final) statement, which is expressed as a rhetorical question:
"It's not that it's impossible that IQ varies by race--but we've got a lot of other variables that can account for our problem, so why look to race first, last, and only?"
We know why. Because many whites have rather small..
Colonization and the CAP of the EU alone...
Might want to take a look at La Griffe's article on Smart Faction Theory II to see how verbal IQ correlates with economic success.
"The motives for this war are, Roland-Gosselin says, drenched in dollars and euros and uranium. "The overarching goal is to take African resources and funnel them towards French corporations," she says. "The CAR itself is a base from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is why it is so important. They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad, the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium, which the French badly need because they are so dependent on nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but the CAR is their back-up plan." So this is, in part, a war for nuclear power? " Yes, but also a lot of this money has been funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French political process. Say somebody needs a road built here in the CAR. The French government will insist on a French company – and the French company back home donates a lot to the 'right' French political party."
This neo-imperial war reached its psychotic apogee in 1994, when the French government used the CAR as a base to fund and fuel the Rwandan genocide, the most bloody since the death of Adolf Hitler. Vincent Mounie is a leading figure in Sur Vie, a French organisation monitoring its government's actions in Africa. He explains: "The French were totally complicit in the genocide. There were French troops there before, during and after the genocide, backing the most extreme Hutu forces as they murdered the Tutsis. You know the identity cards that divided the Rwandan population into Hutus and Tutsis in preparation for the slaughter? They were printed in Paris."
ht tp://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/article3030349.ece
People the talk of Africa's 'colonialism' in the past tense are out of touch.
I think it might be better to instead of using coloniation you divide it into different types of colonization and work from there. There is the more ancient practice of coloniation by exporting your citizens to form colonies (Cathage) and the more prevalent in 18th/19th/20th century Africa process of colonization without a major export of citizens. North America seems to have done quite well despite being even more extensively colonized than Africa and having equally capricous borders and even less involvement of the native power structures than was true in Africa. If you remove the type of China and India cooptions of local governments from colonization and consider them instead to be the same type of conquest as the Romans performed your analysis might be much simpler, otherwise you need 3 types of colonization.
My uneducated guess is that Dick Eagleson is right and its the social structure that is the primary culprit in Africa's failure.
As for colonialism, that's something of a chicken-egg problem. Is Burma worse off that Japan because it was colonized, or was Burma vulnerable to colonization because it was worse off than Japan to begin with. Most of the stuff I have read about pre-colonial Africa (Ibn Khaldun, various pre-colonialist traveller's guides) is not encouraging about the state of pre-colonial society in that continent.
I tend to agree that innate intelligence is not necessary to explain the continent's situation, and that the situation is therefore not strong evidence of an innate intelligence gap. Similarly, however, colonialism is not necessary or even helpful to explain the situation.
Megan begs the question when she argues, in effect, that the east and south asian countries were less harmed as a result of colonialism because they had established social structures before the colonialists came. If they had better established social structures before colonialism and better established social structures after colonialism, maybe colonialism isn't the key problem.
I think that the original post suggested that the borders of China (unlike those of African countries) don't "cut across ethnic lines."
Not so fast! Khazaks, Kirgyz, Tibetans, and Mongols are a few of the ethnic groups that the borders slice through.
China is more than 90% Han. All of these "ethnically sliced" groups are relatively small. In much of Africa, the disconnect between political boundaries and ethnic territories is much more pronounced.
Is Africa screwed up?
Africa rates well in cross-country happiness polls, Africa growth rates have picked up quite a bit in this decade largely due to a commodity boom, and Africa has not shown itself to be nostalgic for colonial rule.
These IQ studies have such a horrible track record of predicting economic outcomes.
In 1950, most of Africa and India had higher per capita GDP than China.
Scandinavia and the British Isles were barbarian outposts when Rome traded with the wealthy East.
Read articles regarding poverty written in the 1980's and many economists worry about Japan turning away from a poverty-mired Asia.
Economic events change faster than genetics, making me skeptical that genetics based IQ is the driving force behind the wealth of nations.
Sorry for the longwinded post.
Japan was one of the most thoroughly colonized societies in Asia, if not in the world. The native people and their culture were all but exterminated by foreign aggressors. Today, we call those aggressors "Japanese."
It's still colonialism if the colonists aren't from Europe, isn't it?
Colonial Africa. And, India only went independent in 1950.
W, your point is? If what you say is true (and I don't know enough Japanese history to dispute it). that isn't colonialism so much as extermination and transplantation. That's certainly the case with North America, Australia and New Zealand.
NOTE: I'm not Ward Churchill - I don't think descendants of colonists need to apologize for the sins of their ancestors. But facts are facts.
As Bauer showed, the parts of Asia and Africa that had the most contact with the West did the best.
Civilisation centred in Asia for centuries – European exploration brought Europe into contact with the rest of civilisation, not vice versa.
Africa, on the other hand, was hard to reach and somewhat cut off from the rest of the world. In theory, after 1450, when the Portugese reached it, West Africa had much better contact with the rest of the world, and could import innovations like the printing press. In practice the death rate of Europeans in West Africa – a 1 in 2 chance of surviving 1 year – meant that no one was likely to come with it to tell people how it worked. Or what it was for. So Africa was still effectively cut off from the flow of goods and ideas around the rest of the world.
East Africa was also cut off from the West during the sailing ship era because ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope were blown towards the Bay of Bengal, and away from Africa by monsoon winds.
Most of Africa therefore remained cut off from most of the world until the availability of quinine, steamships and railways in the late 19th century.
Africa has therefore had about 100 years to catch up with everything invented in the previous couple of millennia outside Africa.
Things take time, especially the construction of reliable political institutions.
It's worth noting that the bits of Asia that were colonized tend to be in worse shapes than the bits that weren't.
Hong Kong, for example?
Whereas Afghanistan, which strenously resisted colonization, has always been an economic and political example for the rest of the continent.
Lets forget IQ as a bottomless pit of an argument. More importantly, super high IQs are not necessary for rudimentary societal stability and success. One thing that is pretty interesting is that the same people who would use the existence of institutions as the explanation for wealth formation and thus for taxation in this country [ie Elizabeth Anderson, etc from the now defunct Left2Right] would be loathe to argue that cultural or political institutions in unsuccessful parts of this country or other parts of the world are responsible for bad outcomes there. It's weather, disease, rivers [!], borders and whatever else I guess.
Colonialism seems like a poor explanation to me. Ethiopia, Liberia (sort of) and Thailand all avoided colonization, but they don't seem to be all that different from their neighbors. Furthermore, Africa seemed to be far behind well before it got colonized in the first place. Jared Diamond set out to answer why in GG&S why it was Eurasia (he never gave a satisfactory explanation for why western Europe rather than the Middle East or Asia surged ahead) that colonized the other continents, and if you don't think his question has anything to do with Africa's current state I don't really know what to say.
Colonialism does not go very far towards explaining Africa's poverty. The types of explanations Jared Diamond offers are much more powerful: crap soil, no harbors, difficult rivers, a north-south alignment inhibiting the spread of like technologies and agricultural advances. It's worth noting that the areas with an east-west distribution -- Ghana to Egypt, roughly -- were not far behind Europe as of the late Middle Ages.
That said, many of the commenters here have been busy claiming that colonialism was good for Africa, and for Asia. That's ridiculous. Africa began to deteriorate sharply after colonialism ended for sort of the same reason that if I stab you with a fire poker, you're likely to experience a sharp degradation in your condition when I pull it out.
"Might want to take a look at La Griffe's article on Smart Faction Theory II to see how verbal IQ correlates with economic success."
Wow. Thanks for posting that. The correlation demonstrated between having a high "smart fraction" of citizens with mean verbal IQs over 106 and economic success in market economies is impressive. From the link:
Disease burden is a very big problem with getting work done in Africa, because a lot of people are sick a lot. Also, until recently, competition from elephants and other big animals that co-evolved with us and knew all our tricks. There's an island in Lake Victoria that has no sleeping sickness and no wild animals and the way of life there sounds more like Southeast Asia instead of Africa: densely populated with industrious farmers.
To pretend that Korea and Taiwan were not victims of colonialism because they were colonized by the Japanese instead of the "West" is ludicrous. They were colonized by an industrialized, imperialist-capitalist power in the late 19th Century. Said power believed loudly in its own ethnic superiority, suppressed the natives under colonial officials for decades on end, and did not swamp the native.
Similarly, both South Korea and Taiwan are cuts across ethnic lines, cuts that caused significant political and military turmoil. (Internal ethnic tensions? Look at the still-visible tension between the "native" Taiwanese and the post-1945 mainlanders who held dictatorial power for decades.)
No, the major difference is economics. African nations had leaders who were educated in European universities where the political spectrum ranged from pink Social Democrats to deep red Communists; they further were bribed to be socialist by the Eastern Bloc. Further, "real" socialism was a point of differentiation for them from their former colonial masters.
South Korea and Taiwan, on the other hand, were dependent on the United States, and were more concerned with distinguishing themselves from North Korea and mainland China (respectively) than former capitalist overlords. So they went with capitalism, and prospered.
And the sufficiency of the economic systems explanation is easy enough to demonstrate, because we got the next best thing to a controlled single-variable experiment in the case of Korea, divided into North and South.
Africa would be substantially more prosperous if the men worked as hard as the women.
In Africa, feminist groups don't protest that men don't let them do work, they protest that men leave them most of the work. One feminist organization estimated that women do 80% of the work in Africa.
The problem for your thesis, Oildrilling Lunatic, is that the differentiation you observe between socialist and capitalist economies doesn't help explain much in Africa from the '60s to the '90s. Obviously, 100% state-owned Communist economies suck. They do even worse when they try to be completely self-sufficient, as with "juche" North Korea, rather than relying on trade. But Zaire, Liberia and Nigeria have been capitalist from the get-go. Why did they fail even worse than socialist Tanzania and Ghana? Because they were weak, corrupt states composed of a tiny class of ex-colonial administrators, with little national cohesion, not rooted in the sustainable economic interests of local constituencies. And, in fact, ex-socialist Tanzania, Benin and Ghana are now doing better than never-socialist DR Congo and Nigeria, partly because they built a relatively non-corrupt national patriotic governing class. This is similar to the way the Communist Party laid the groundwork for capitalist success in China and Vietnam, unifying the country and establishing effective governance, a sine qua non for development.
Jeffrey Sachs observes that African countries exhibit a "growth deficit" of about 3%. That is, all other things being equal in terms of resources, education, and good economic policies, African countries seem to grow about 3% slower than might be expected if they were in Asia, Eastern Europe or Latin America. Afro-socialism certainly did a lot of economic damage. But it's not a sufficient explanation for African underdevelopment, because much of the continent wasn't socialist during the Cold War; it was dictatorial and capitalist, like South Korea and Taiwan. Yet even Ivory Coast never got anywhere near Taiwan's growth rates.
"it was dictatorial and capitalist, like South Korea and Taiwan. Yet even Ivory Coast never got anywhere near Taiwan's growth rates.-brooksfoe
What about Botswana, Mauritius or South Africa? These are the freest economies in Africa (though noe is as free as Taiwan) and all have experienced robust growth. Botswana in particular had growth of something like 9% per year for decades.
And your assertion that Congo and Nigeria have been free economies that have underperformed is just not correct. Again, look at The Index of Economic Freedom. Congo and Nigeria are not even free by Sub-saharan Africa's low standards. You might as wel call Zimbabwe capitalist.
Also, noone doubts that poitical stability is important for economic growth. Obviously even countries that have implemented free market policies will run into trouble if they experience civil wars.
Here's my three variables explaining the tragedy of Africa:
1) Corruption on a massive scale, perhaps encouraged by tribal culture (I'm not sure it's relevant: growing, safe cultures have a way of fixing all that).
2) NOT being consistently colonized over the long term by a Judeo-Christian, capitalistic culture.
3) Prolonged massive injections of foreign aid poured into the economy at the top of the government, destroying markets and further fostering corruption.
Capitalism begins at the bottom: property rights and the entrepreneur. It can't get started with corruption, violence and consistent economic foreign aid tsunamis coming in from the top. This has been the story there since the 1950's.
Two examples:
1) What would happen to the agriculture industry and its ripple effect on the economy in the USA if the equivalent of half the crop production for the year was regularly dumped into the country at 20 cents on the dollar?
2) The smartest guys in Africa are not entrepreneurs. They are in a Suburban acting as taxi driving interpreters for the IMF and the UN.
Our foreign aid does more harm than any socialist agenda could ever accomplish; it tramples eminent domain and becomes a market goal all itself. No wonder the little guy hates capitalism; his only exposure to it is some weird aberation: he gets kicked off his land to build a dam to power an aluminum mine and he can't afford to feed his family anymore.
If our goal is fostering growing countries to trade with, it seems we really don't understand capitalism after all.
Injected with some capital in the right places, and western support for honest transaction efficiency, I believe Africa could grow at double digit rates. But we have to stop the aid meddling.
Brooksfoe --
Capitalism is not a synonym for property being in private hands. Feudalism has lots of "private" ownership, yet is distinguished by most people who really consider the issue, like Marx did. The key is not that Africa was socialist, it is that it was not capitalist.
Liberia is a major example of this, with an Americo-Liberian "nobility" that shared much of the plantation culture of the antebellum South (the poorest part of the U.S.)
Feudalism is pretty much the ground state of human society, and many countries who rejected socialism never moved past it; thus all the non-socialist states with lousy Index of Economic Freedom scores.
So, why did South Korea and Taiwan do real capitalism instead of feudalism? Because they were influenced by the United States more than Europe, while Africa was the other way around. Capitalism's apologetic defenders in Continental Europe are the Christian Democrats, an ideology that originated in the application of the medieval Christian -- feudal -- view of social obligations to industrial society by the monarch of a feudal organization.
"I am unaware of a single large country ruled by a colonial power in which the colonial power did NOT oversee large-scale massacres or politically induced famines."
That's hardly unique to colonialism. What communist countries (large or small) haven't resorted to large scale massacres and/or politically induced famines? Pol Pot didn't come close to Mao's numbers, but proportionally he did more than his share. Perhaps Castro didn't rack up quite the same scale of massacres as most communist "leaders", but overall colonialism hasn't come close to communism on this measure.
As others have pointed out, colonialism doesn't explain much, if anything, regarding which Asian countries have been successful, whereas overall government policies explain a lot. The countries that simply avoided communism/extreme socialism escaped the worst outcomes, and those that protected private property did the best.
Hong Kong is very similar to Singapore as an example - it has virtually no natural resources except for a large port, but the port didn't draw anyone except a few pirates before the British brought the rule of law. Hong Kong doesn't have enough drinking water for even a small fraction of its population, much less land for agriculture or natural resources of some sort, but it has thrived because the British put in good government.
And look at the deterioration of Zimbabwe. Was that because the resources suddenly vanished? No, the tragedy of Zimbabwe is only explainable by the governing policies of Mugabe.
Colonialism and lack of natural resources don't explain country development over the last hundred or so years, whereas government policies explain almost everything. We should stop looking for excuses for countries that refuse to modernize their political, legal, economic and financial systems, and instead focus on drumming home to them that they're choosing poverty by choosing obsolete, inefficient technology.
"China is more than 90% Han"
China needs the 'ethnic minorities', because compared to Tibetans, the various ethnic groups of Han Chinese seem more similar. There are many divisions, and it was only colonialism (the Mongols) that forced them all together.
In fact, three of the largest countries - China, India and Russia - exist because they were united forcibly by the Mongols, who ruled such incredibly large areas that they had to arrange them in pretty large administrative regions.
I've learned a lot about Africa from this thread, and what Oildrilling Lunatic said makes sense. It's not just avoiding socialism that matters, it's adopting capitalist democracy - allowing people to create wealth without the government siphoning off too much of it, and with all people being guaranteed certain basic rights including the right to property. Corruption destroys incentives, whether it's institutionalized corruption (as in communism) or rampant petty corruption.
Ann,
You are ignoring IQ. Ethnic Chinese have high IQ and succeed in all market economies -- as majorities in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and as market-dominant minorities elsewhere (e.g., Malaysia). Africans have low IQs, and are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder in every multi-racial country outside of Africa (U.S., Brazil, etc.). They do worse in all-black countries (e.g., Haiti). Zimbabwe's extraordinarily productive agricultural sector was run by whites, not black Africans. Now the former 'breadbasket of Africa' teeters on famine after its whites were dispossessed.
The impact of colonialism is incredibly inflated and given a miracle-like power. European rule in Africa was short, superficial and basically unknown by most of its subjects. Most of Congo, a country without roads larger than Europe, was not even explored by the handful of European who had the bad fortune of living there. There never lived in Congo more than 1 European for each 20,000 natives. And half a century has already passed from the last colonial to leave. Or Nigeria a country of 140 million. There were about 5,000 British civil servants at most and no colonial ever worked very hard. Five years after independence the framework they established and manned had already vanished as if never was. I had lived long enough to meet the last colonial British, and many of them were lazy, drunken, unambitious not-too-brilliant civil servants. All in all they were unfit for a middle class job in Europe. They had no dreams of controlling anything, they dreamed of vacations in Europe and hated being in Africa. I always am amazed of the tremendous power and impact they are attributed to have exerted, preventing the advance of local peoples (for ever?) and causing social diseases - 60 years after - like corruption and violence. One thing colonials were not, that is corrupt. They left a legacy of honesty and decency, if anything. I would love if someone explained me a sensible cause-effect case of some European colonial employee doing something bad and the current chaos, corruption, violence, etc. that describes all African countries.
"Ethnic Chinese have high IQ and succeed in all market economies -- as majorities in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and as market-dominant minorities elsewhere (e.g., Malaysia)."
There's obviously a huge selection bias there - the ethnic Chinese that ended up in Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia were the ones smart enough to get the heck out of China when it was falling apart, or with enough drive and initiative to spot opportunities elsewhere. [Taiwan and South Korea, on the other hand, are countries that deserve more attention regarding their transitions from dictatorial regimes to thriving capitalist democracies.]
I don't know and don't care about whether IQs really vary all that much. Yes, they probably matter if they do vary, but Mugabe's mistakes in Zimbabwe go far beyond driving out whites. And IQ can't explain the differences between China in the 1950s and China today. When Mao was repressing and persecuting and murdering, economic growth (if it had been measured properly) was negative. Now China is growing at a tremendous rate, due to policy changes.
China's high growth rates have been in part because it had so much room simply to catch up after such enormous set-backs (Hong Kong companies used to give cast-off, obsolete equipment to mainland Chinese companies, thus allowing them to leap forward a decade or two from the even more obsolete equipment they had been using), but Africa also could make incredible strides by simply becoming slightly less far behind than they are.
Africans don't have to be geniuses in order to come closer to catching up. Once they've taken the most basic, most promising steps towards less dysfunctional economies, then people can debate about whether they're likely to end up being world leaders. But it's silly and distracting to focus on minor factors like IQ, colonialism or geography, when their legal, political, economic and financial systems are wildly obsolete.
I forgot to mention that Oildrilling Lunatic gave another excellent example - North vs. South Korea. Differences in IQ and geography are second order, relative to the effects of good vs. bad government.
Of course the problem is implementing good government when there are vested interests trying to prevent it, as Steve Parente and Ed Prescott have pointed out (in Barriers to Riches and in What a Country Must Do to Catch Up...).
Steve Sailer - What you said about women doing most of the work in Africa is interesting. I read recently on Michael Totten's website about men doing little in Arab cultures, with the women doing all the agricultural work as well as running the household. Totten said that he'd never been in such a 'masculine' environment as in the military, but that our troops in Iraq sounded downright feminist when talking about gender roles in Iraq, particularly in Anbar Province.
Japan was one of the most thoroughly colonized societies in Asia, if not in the world. The native people and their culture were all but exterminated by foreign aggressors. Today, we call those aggressors "Japanese."
It's only a contender for "most thoroughly" if this process has been repeated several times. E.g., what we now call England was once overrun by Celts, who exterminated the original natives. The Celts became colonial subjects of Rome, which harshly exploited their subjects but only replaced the top 1% of the population. The Romano-Celts were overrun and nearly exterminated by Germanic Angles and Saxons. The "Danes" (which the Anglo-Saxons called all Scandinavians) first started trying to colonize England around the 9th Century, and were partially beaten back by Alfred the Great but retained control in the northeast. Finally, Frenchified Scandinavians called "Normans" successfully colonized England again in 1066 - and their descendants still occupy the royal palace.
And most of Europe has an even bloodier history than England, which had the advantage that no one could just walk there.
Sailer is correct. Women in Africa do the vast majority of the work. Men sit under trees and talk while their wives do all the farming, housework, child-rearing, and run any roadside stands or market stalls the family might have. To add insult to injury, women don't have property rights, so when their husbands die (which is very common) all of their property is reverted to the husband's family, and the wives have to hope that their in-laws will support them and their children(many don't).
If I were Jeff Sachs or some other do-gooder for Africa, this would be one of my biggest issues. But I guess it's a lot easier to shovel money than deal with underlying cultural pathologies.
you guys are soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo wrong black people are very smart and africa is not screwed up you guys forget about the blood diamonds and no that is not just a movie. and that looking at race first and last is a bunch of BS
you guys are soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo wrong black people are very smart and africa is not screwed up you guys forget about the blood diamonds and no that is not just a movie. and that looking at race first and last is a bunch of BS
you guys are soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo wrong black people are very smart and africa is not screwed up you guys forget about the blood diamonds and no that is not just a movie. and that looking at race first and last is a bunch of BS
If you ran a Sub-Saharan African economic and social regression analysis, you would likely come to the conclusion that some of the simplest answers are the correct ones explaining the problems there.
After researching the evidence, my opinion is the problem with Africa is mostly cultural and seemingly lack of intellect/ability of those that make up the majority of the populations. Virtually all societies made up of majority of Sub-Saharan African immigrants are not much better off than their relatives back in the Old Country. Take Haiti and Jamaica for example. Even those nations in Africa spawned by expatriate slaves like Liberia are economic basket cases.
Hypothetically, if you were to de-populate any Sub Saharan African country and replace them with people from most European or Asian nations, who would argue that the resultant society would be light years ahead of what it replaced? I realize this comment will probably offend some people, but perhaps the time for frank talk is warranted.
I am not suggesting Africans are nations of morons, but CULTURALLY it seems that there is very little economic dynamism, political maturity and ambition. Furthermore, The rampant sexual promiscuity and irresponsibility has lead to largely avoidable epidemics like AIDS (at least in their severity).
If it can be intelligently argued that there is no cultural/ethnic link to sub -Saharan Africa’s failings, I would be interested to hear it. There is a lot of politically correct noise out there that tends to blame everyone and everything but the Africans themselves for their failings. Probably the biggest obstacle to solving the chronic lousy performance is the intellectual dishonesty and fear of frank discussion
Africa would be better off if Europeans never set foot on the continent.
Half of the "Nations" there wouldn't exist, a lot of the technologies introduced by the West would be absent, and people likely wouldn't be voting their leaders into office.
But before the Europeans came, people just took what they needed from the land (no conservation problems--that problem came along with colonialism and remained). Oh, and people (like the indigenous Americans) were content to share resources instead of battling over private ownership. Communities were important; individualism less so. Simple people, simple lives. And if no one from the outside came in and decided to take over, things might be the same as they had in the centuries before colonialism. Because you certainly don't hear about all of these genocides and political corruption and famines and disease in pre-colonial African societies. Yes there were conflicts, but weapons of mass destruction are another western import.
If colonialism had such a minor effect on the continent, why was Africa in better shape BEFORE and not after? By that, I mean people had enough to live on and were able to live together relatively peaceable, not that X percent graduated from a university and live the sort of lifestyle valued by people in the West.
Read the journals and books written by colonialists to get a picture of how bigoted and cruel these people were. They never had the right to take any of the land or resources in the first place. Why did they? It’s simple—raw greed and/or entitlement.... So what if there are people here...”they’re not as good as I am”, or “they’re hardly even human”, or “I’m doing them a favor by civilizing/enslaving them.” Right.
Look at the remnants of Native American culture in the Americas today. Then think about all of the species that have been killed off, pushed out their natural habitats, the forests that have been burned or cut down.
Then, let's think about the fact that most of the world's pollution is produced by industrialized nations or modern technology. How many "less developed" nations have been raped by the West and then, by corrupt home-grown “leaders who proceed to their bank accounts every step of the way. Colonialism paved the way for these excesses of power. So what makes the West so superior? In many ways, all of this “progress” (and greed)--is destroying the planet.
Perhaps, it was never wise to try to transplant Western political, social and economic systems onto African soil. Maybe that's another reason why Africans are struggling now--they've been trying to acquire Western education and Western values without even stopping to examine what they're giving up.
Wealth? Some say that Africans are better off because of colonialism. Yet, Europeans still own or control the diamond and gemstone mines and many of the natural resources. Also, does it matter if you make a higher per capita income than the people of some other nation if you’ve been forced to leave your ancestral lands so that some foreign “farmer” could take it over?
To the person who mentioned Christianity (I think you implied that more places should have been colonized/Christianized), there have been Christians in Ethiopia and Egypt since the furst century—before even some places in Europe were Christianized. St. Augustine, one of our church fathers, was born in Africa. When St. Paul told the Ethiopian about the messiah, he was simply sharing the Good News. Many of the missionaries who came to Africa in the middle ages and beyond had very different motives.
It is wrong to convert people in order to control them, which has happened in many colonial societies around the world.
Much of North Africa has, because of geography, been subject to invasion/colonization by Europeans, Arabs, etc. Now that the entire continent has been carved up, and everyone is trying to get their piece of the pie, I hope that it’s still possible to preserve something of the beauty of Africa’s people and the resources that they have been blessed with.