(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best development & growth economics books

I'd start from reading Economics Help blog. I find it fairly objective and Tevjan writes very clearly. Econlib has very useful library of articles, but overall that website is fairly libertarian in its views. (Not that I'm saying it's bad, but it's useful to know where they are coming from).

As for books, I'd recommend firstly some basic textbooks - you can buy them for cheap used. As for pop science books, I find Naked Economics the best one I've read. It covers the orthodox economics fairly well. As for heterodox Economics and criticism of neoclassical economics, I'd read first Economyths and then How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor. Of course you can read the classical literature of Economics, such as Keynes, Hayek and Friedman, but I wouldn't dwell on them too much as the research has progressed a lot since them. Nobel Prize website has all the nobel prize of economics lectures on their webpage and all of them are worth reading (though some of them are more about finance, than economics) - here are couple of them worth reading.

There are several academic articles (usually working papers) that you can find online easily as well. Best one I can think of currently is Behavioral Economics: Past, Present and Future which summarises the field of Behavioral Economics very well. Joseph Stiglitz keeps a lot of his academic papers on his website for free download as well, so they are worth reading. There is a free e-book online too, that's more so about politics than economics, but still a great read; Dean Baker's Conservative Nanny State.

I'll try add some more resources when I have time.

Edit: P.S. If you are interested, I have a bunch of papers and articles on my computer as well that I can send.
Edit2: IDEAS keeps a list of academic articles on their site, but that will require some effort from your part because you essentially have to use search.

Edit3: If you are into something more specific there are good books about Evolutionary Economics and Complexity Theory, Economics of Knowledge, Economics of Strategy, Economics of Information Age and Economic and Technological History. All of these are excellent books that I recommend and quite beginner-friendly.

>Sure you aren't a trump supporter, you just post constantly in defense of him and happen to think the russian interference is all a big lie despite all the evidence for it. But no definitely not a trump supporter. I'm not interested in reading your smug pseudo-intellectual rants about misapplied theories, and neither are the refugees fleeing Syria, they just want a safe place to go rather than dying in the rubble of their country.

I mean, I defended Obama against the birther shit and Muslim accusations too. I'm sorry if I can't let bullshit slide. But lets step back...What does it matter? Really. What does my affiliation matter? Does it change my arguments? I'm not asking you to believe me based on who I am, I'll gladly defend my positions with arguments and citations.

So why try to push me into an allegiance just so you can ignore me? Isn't that troubling that you're prone to do that? How much information are you missing out on because you label people and toss away information that doesn't fit your world view? Meanwhile, you've insulted me numerous times and I've read every word you said, and responded in good faith.

>There's no evidence that the refugees that manage to escape were the 'best and brightest' and no matter how much you want to keep ranting about the pareto principle and try to twist it into supporting any half baked assertion you make, there's no reason to think the women and children that made it out alive weren't mostly just the lucky ones. The best and brightest family could have been killed by a random artillery shell instead.

Well, you didn't ask. But migration and "brain drain" have been a major policy topic at the IMF and in economics for decades now. We have plenty of evidence illustrating that even under duress, migratory conditions favor those in the upper eocnomic bands. In fact, the worst hit for brain drain are usually under the most duress--either due to poorer than the "developing" world economic conditions or war. That's because countries that are "developing" have such significant amounts of people with tertiary educations that the drain only typically pulls about 5-10% of them. Meanwhile though, countries that have collapsed? Brain drain will pull nearly all of their "best and brightest" (Second paper goes over this.)

>The best and brightest family could have been killed by a random artillery shell instead.

This would be anecdotal, among large populations the idea of a single case being a theme is the sign of...well, someone that doens't know how large populations work. Yes, clearly the "best and brightest" could be killed, and people in the mid and lower band can get lucky. But the averages won't support this, for numerous reasons. The biggest being that the hurdles OUTSIDE the country are just as big as within it. I think, genuinely, some people have a hard time grasping just how long, difficult and complex the journey from Syria would be.


>I'm certainly not willing to tell these families to go die in Syria instead because you're worried they might be contributing to a brain drain there.

Oh there is no need to do that. The most effective method of saving these people has been studied pretty extensively, and our laws are actually set up around it. Quite simply refugee status is restricted to the first safe country you pass through. If the West truly wanted to help refugees, then the goal would be to send money and material aid to those camps, and prepare for the end of the war so they can return and prepare to build.

You should really read the Bottom Billion, so you can know more about what you obviously feel passionate about. Because it seems like you're all emotion with this, without a lot of actual knowledge. Which is fine, its a very emotion issue--but there is a ton of good research on it.

>Oh did you know that 80% of your karma is from the 20% of non-bullshit posts you make? It must be true because the pareto principle is thing.

Well, 80% of my Karma is from 20% of my posts, that's actually true. I'd say "bullshit' is a qualitative quantifier here. But you're absolutely right that the Pareto principle applies to my posting as well. Stochastic distributions that wind up under this principle don't care about your feelings or barbs son--this principle accurately describes the fact that 20% of the population has more than everyone else both globally and then within those global nations there is another split, it describes how citations come from small amounts of work while most papers have zero, its shows that the NBA point distribution per game, the number of championship wins per team in every sports league follows this pattern. Always.

There is only fact, and what's not fact. Your emotions in this are meaningless.

From the book description on Amazon : ""This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination."

The standard grad school text these days for dynamic macro is Ljungqvist & Sargent's Recursive Macroeconomic Theory. You won't need to go through the whole thing necessarily, but to be able to tackle the Woodford book, I would think chapters 1-4, 7-8, 12-13, 16-17 and 24-26 would be quite helpful.

There's also Simon & Blume's Mathematics for Economists, which is a good reference book should you need it. For example, the discussion and motivation of Lagrange multipliers and the Kuhn-Tucker optimization conditions is very good.

One noteable omission from both of those books which you will likely encounter at some point is continuous-time optimization/optimal control. This topic is often covered in the appendices of various grad-level macro textbooks, but perhaps the best I've come across is Chapter 7 of Daron Acemoglu's Introduction to Modern Economic Growth. The appendix to Barro & Sala-i-Martin's Economic Growth also has some pretty good coverage.

By the way, if you hunt around, all of these textbooks can be found online for "free".

Did the New Deal end the Great Depression? No. Did it make things worse? Absolutely not. Did it help millions of Americans avoid poverty and starvation? Emphatically yes. The period from 1933 to 1937 remains the fastest period of peacetime growth in American history. GDP growth averaged approximately 10% per year. You can see the full range of data here. Also, the PWA and WPA created the infrastructure the United States to grow for decades to come. The former completed projects in all but three counties of the United States such as the Triboro Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams; the latter built 78,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, 6,000 schools, 67,000 miles of city streets, and 572,000 miles of rural roads (among a ridiculous number of other projects).


Additionally Roosevelt's monetary policy was probably more successful than his fiscal stimulus. First, the bank holiday restored the confidence of American savers and investors more so than probably any other action. Banks were closed on March 9, 1933 and began to reopen only after thorough auditing. When the banks opened on March 12, depositors, despite the suspension of gold convertibility, began putting their money back in the banks. Within a week, $1 billion had been put back into the banking system that had fled during the runs on banks prior to Roosevelt's inauguration. On March 15, the New York Stock Exchange opened for the first time in 10 days and the Dow jumped 15%, which was the largest single day movement in its history. By the end of the month of March, 2/3 of all banks were reopened and $1.5 billion had returned to the banks.

The second major act of monetary policy was the suspension of the gold standard. That action was overwhelmingly supported by financial and consumer markets. It removed a major deflationary burden from the American economy. Keynesian bias or not. On the day the change was announced, the NYSE jumped 15%. Within three months, wholesale prices had risen 45%. This lowered the real cost of borrowing significantly and investment began to flow into the private sector—orders for heavy machinery rose 100%—and into consumer markets--auto sales doubled. Overall industrial production rose 50%. By early 1937, overall industrial production had returned to its 1929 peak. Unemployment, moreover, had been halved from 25% nationally in 1933 (with certain cities and demographic groups even worse off--75% of black women in Detroit were unemployed) to about 12%-14% in early 1937 (Unemployment statistics prior to 1940 are always best guesses as the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't collect them until then).

In 1937, FDR faced a growing conservative coalition in Congress and had his own misgivings about spending and reduced relief funding which caused a minor recession. Unemployment jumped to around 17%. GDP fell slightly in 1938, but was above its 1937 levels in 1939. Had this small recession not happened, the US may have left the Depression before military spending for WWII began to pick up. As it is, the combination of war production and the draft is what wiped out unemployment by 1942. So the New Deal didn't end the Depression, but it most certainly did not make things worse and was responsible for helping millions of people. There's a reason why FDR was elected four times and the Democrats only lost control of Congress once between 1930 and 1952.

Here's some light reading for you.

• Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H.W. Brands, Professor of History, University of Texas, Austin
  
  
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by Alan Brinkley, Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University
  
  
• The Crisis of the Old Order: 1919-1933, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume I, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., one of the most prolific historians of the 20th century
  
  
• The Coming of the New Deal, 1933-1935 The Age of Roosevelt, Volume II, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  
  
• The Politics of Upheaval: 1935-1936, The Age of Roosevelt, Volume III, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
  
  
• Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956, by Jason Scott Smith, who was a fellow and assistant professor of history at Harvard and Cornell and is now at the University of New Mexico.
  
  
• "Lessons from the Great Depression for Economic Recovery in 2009," Christina D. Romer, Council of Economic Advisers
  
  
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, by Liaquat Ahamed, who worked at the World Bank and for several investment management groups. The book won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in History.
  
  
• Stayin' Alive: The 1970's and the Last Days of the Working Class, by Jefferson Cowie, assistant professor of labor history at the Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
  
  
• Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, by Lizabeth Cohen, Howard Mumford Jones Professor American Studies at Harvard
  
  
• Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and a professor at Columbia
  
  
• Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (Director of the Institution for Social and Public Policy Studies at Yale and the Avice Saint Chair of Public Policy at UC Berkley, respectively)
  
  
• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Esther Duflo (Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT)
  
  
• The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, by Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and a professor of economics at Princeton
  

> There are absolutely no indicators that US hegemony is in decline. In fact, every indicator is that the US is more powerful today than ever. Only whiny types like Chomsky seriously suggest American power is fading in favor of China.

You're joking right? Like, that's sarcasm?

• This dude wrote a book about the decline of the US imperial power in the face of Iraq
  
• Fareed Zakaria wrote a book in detail describing the modern decline of US hegemony
  
• Jeffrey Garten wrote an article about the decline of US hegemony:
  Is American Decline Inevitable?
  World Policy Journal
  Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1987/1988) (pp. 151-174)
  
• Michael Cox wrote an article about "the failing american empire":
  Is the United States in Decline -- Again? An Essay
  International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-)
  Vol. 83, No. 4 (Jul., 2007) (pp. 643-653)
  
• Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent wrote an article about possible retrenchment strategies to delay the inevitable american decline of hegemony:
  Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment
  International Security
  Vol. 35, No. 4 (SPRING 2011) (pp. 7-44)
  
• Timothy McKeown wrote an article about the likely future decline of US policy in the wake of the Cold War - academics predicted an end to the American Empire even before it had begun:
  The Foreign Policy of a Declining Power
  International Organization
  Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring, 1991) (pp. 257-279)
  
  Here are some more articles on the subject:
  
  
  
• This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana
  Christopher Layne
  International Studies Quarterly (2012)
  Vol. 56, 203–213
  
• Hegemony, Liberalism and Global Order: What Space for Would-Be Great Powers?
  Andrew Hurrell
  International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs), Vol. 82, No. 1,
  Perspectives on Emerging Would-Be Great Powers (Jan., 2006), pp. 1-19
  
• After Pax Americana: Benign Power, Regional Integration, and the Sources of a StableMultipolarity
  Charles A. Kupchan
  International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 40-79
  
• Hegemonic overreach vs. imperial overstretch
  Dennis Florig
  Review of International Studies (2010), 36, 1103–1119
  
  Some html friendly articles:
  
  
  
• A review of Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition
  
• The Decline of US Helmed Global Hegemony: the Emergence of a More Equitable Pattern of International Relations?
  
• The Decline of U.S. Hegemony: Regaining International Consent
  
• Visions: America after Hegemony
  And here's a really good forum thread on the very subject of US hegemonic decline
  
  
  I just wrote my thesis on this subject, so I have some sources..
  The theme of all these articles varies, some are about the future, some are explanatory, but the overarching theme is that the US is definitely in decline. Academia is mostly over the hump debating whether or not the US is actually in decline, and is now focused on what we can do about it to make transitions smoother.
  China has been growing tremendously faster than any other state on the globe the past few decades. At this rate, China will overtake the US in terms of gross product by (most estimates) about halfway through the mid-21st century. The reality is that in many ways, there are more economic opportunities in China than the United States - that's why many expats like the ones in this subreddit are there. As /u/hittintheairplane pointed out, it's not so much that the US is declining from it's 1990 level of economic, political, and military power as much as all the other nations are catching up. Relatively the United States is losing power, and that's all power is, relativity to others. You take any international relations course and invariably the topics include the structure of the 21st century, most professors would describe it as a shift from unipolarity to bipolarity in that while China is growing the fastest, there is no real contender to overtake the US and replace our hegemony. Rather, we're more likely to see a state structure of power like this than the bipolar political forces of the Cold War or the unipolar political power the US has today.

Okay, I didn't want to have to come in here, but I just received my 6th dan in art-karate, and I feel like any good counter argument comes with a counter counter argument.

1. Nothing is ever a direct copy because the "copy" uses different atoms. Even if the atomic structure of the copy is identical to the original, there is still meaning in the specific atoms chosen.
   
2. If you only see 8 shading values you should consider further training in shading-value vision. I see 256 shading values, and I could see even more if I used an unsigned integer.
   
3. Words? Interpretations? These are meaningless sequences of sounds to which people who speak English have arbitrarily attached meaning. You could instead say that the syringe is awful so that the artist has a specific area of the piece to work on, but can interpret for himself how to improve it.
   
4. If you look at the dark area under an electron microscope, you will see that it is, in fact, an entire second piece of art. Art is like ogres, which are in turn like onions.
   
5. Welcome to r/gaming. They upvote things with pictures from games they like.
   
6. Assumptions != opinions
   
   What I feel is a bad thing for the world in general is that a lot of people just say nice things to everybody to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. However, people need constructive criticism in order to get better at what they do. You could read a nice book about economies around the world which is called The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, but it won't help you do good art or good art critiques.
   
   In short: stop writing flowery bullshit encouragement to every Tom, Dick, and Harry that you encounter in your life. Save the philosphy-major prose about "the will to thrive and create" for your support group.

Ha-Joon Chang, The East Asian Development Experience: The Miracle, the Crisis and the Future (2007)

This title isn't entirely about South Korea, but it is written by a well-know Korean-born Cambridge economist and offers a non-Marxist heterodox perspective on East Asia in general and has a lot about South Korea. Might be worth checking out for you. But you may already know about this one, since Chang is fairly famous. He has more works that specifically focus on South Korea, but I'm not sure if they're translated into English.

Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (2005)

This one is more about general history of the Korean peninsula, but it still has a fairly extensive section devoted to the post-war economic development of the Korean peninsula, especially the similar yet ultimately divergent economic paths of the two Koreas. For all its detractors, it is definitely a classic in Korean historiography written in the English language, so if you haven't heard of it yet, it is definitely worth checking out.

Atul Kohli, State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery (2004)

This one is also a comparative historical study, but it devotes almost a third of its length on South Korea, and provides a very good overview of the link between colonization and economic development in South Korea, in addition to covering the latter years of modern Korean history. It is written by a Princeton political scientist that has extensive knowledge of comparative economic development, so it would be worth a look as well.

One note of caution though is that, if you really want to understand the post-war South Korean economic history, you also have to have some background on the economic impact of Japanese colonization (and this topic is a very, very, very, very contentious one in modern Korean history). The last one may be of help on this count.

Welcome to futurology. No offense intended, but I think it would be in the best interests of you and our community if you would lurk more before posting to this sub, as subreddits exist for a reason and are each separate communities that are best served by people who have an understanding of it.

Now the reason I asked you about technological unemployment is because universal basic income, as it is discussed on this subreddit, is intrinsically tied to the rise in jobs lost due to automation. People here view basic income at least as a stopgap measure to prevent societal upheaval during a time when wealth is becoming increasing concentrated at the top due to automation technology.

If you want to get a better understanding of this issue, I recommend this talk by Brynjolfsson and McAfee (authors of The Second Machine Age, probably the best book on this issue).

Bereft of personal responsibility? Look, tell yourself what you need to in order to sleep at night, but voting for the government to do things is not personal responsibility. It is the complete opposite. It takes things that you should feel personally responsible for, and puts it on the government to make sure it gets done. I feel personally responsible to help make sure the people in my area are well fed, so I am constantly raising money in order to buy food for a food drive that takes place every six months, and then volunteering my time for the food drives themselves. That is personal responsibility. There is nothing personal about the government doing things for you.

As for naive and short-sighted, I'll point you in the direction of a book studying many naive and short-sighted actions taken by governments in the 20th century. It is called Seeing Like a State, and it explains how and why certain well-meaning government actions have failed. It's written by a Yale University professor, so I hope you'll give it more than just a cursory glance.

But this comment embodies what I see as the biggest flaw in Liberal thought: you are very condescending towards those of us who question whether those in government know enough about the world to intervene and create positive outcomes on a reliable basis. You seem to have the mind set that "if only they knew as much as I know, they couldn't possibly reach a conclusion different than my own." Liberals seem to focus solely on what we know about the world, and how much knowledge we have accumulated over the centuries, and use that knowledge to argue for wide-reaching changes in our daily life. What you forget is that what we know only scratches the surface of all there is to know about the world. In other words, "what we don't know" is a huge blind spot in Liberal ideology. So when people like me say "well, that isn't necessarily true," I get accused of relying on faith, because I can't prove why catastrophe won't occur in 30-50 years even in the absence of government intervention. But on the flip side, you also can't prove that it will happen, and neither can the climate scientists. All they can prove is that anthropogenic global warming exists, which I don't dispute.

My main argument is that for Liberals to make the interventions they want to make, and achieve the outcomes they promise from those interventions, they would need more information about how the world works than they are capable of knowing at this period of human development. There are two aspects of intelligence: knowing what you know, and knowing what you don't know. I would argue that many Liberals don't know enough about what even our most advanced experts don't know. If they did, they would be more skeptical towards these far-reaching policies.

Be glad you're not learning at a university. One reason digital marketing has not worked as well as it should is that education and training ends up being all about silos ("social media" or "mobile") rather than having a foundation in strategy. By being self-taught, you can avoid that trap.

It will be hard to get a job in digital marketing without experience or a degree, especially if you just respond to job listings. Instead, pick an emerging area of interest (VR, AR, Blockchain, whatever) and write things that are genuinely helpful and illuminating -- don't cheerlead or parrot the existing POV. Find an angle that's interesting enough to get the attention of industry leaders.

Where to Start

1. "The Art Of War" by Sun Tzu Free and very worthwhile.
   
   
   Why read a book about war from a guy who died in 496 BC? Because he's the most famous strategy thinker in business. He is still admired because his thinking is very smart and very clear.
   
   
2. "The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization" by Peter Drucker
   
   http://www.amazon.com/Five-Important-Questions-About-Organization/dp/0470227567/ref=pd_sim_b_1?ie=UTF8&refRID=0J3SSMAE3DF0P381FFYK
   
   
3. "The Essential Drucker"
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Drucker-Management-Essentials/dp/0061345016
   
   Peter Drucker is probably the second most famous strategy thinker in business, One of my favorite quotes from him: "There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.”
   
   Note: After you read Sun Tzu and Drucker, it will make so much sense to you that you will assume business naturally works strategically and that things are pretty logical. Distressingly, the opposite is true, because businesses are run by humans and all humans are a little crazy.
   
   Continuing Education
   
   Technology
   
   Videos:
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPaf9YGz6Es
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWvfOhWYwi8
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE
   https://www.l2inc.com/video/scott-galloway-at-dld-2017
   
   The Lights In The Tunnel (Grab the PDF eBook and pay whatever you like for it.)
   http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/
   
   The Second Machine Age
   http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/1480577472
   
   Automate This: How Algorithms Came To Rule Our World
   http://www.amazon.com/Automate-This-Algorithms-Came-World/dp/B00D9T9IQG
   
   On Reddit, read Futurology and Singularity
   
   http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing_and_strategy
   http://www.prophet.com/thinking/publications
   http://blogs.hbr.org (sign up for a free account)
   
   Ad tech = Ad Exchanger
   AdWeek, AdAge, Cynopsis, eConsultancy, DIGIDAY
   Mobile = MobileMarketer, MMA Smartbrief
   Search = MarketingLand, SearchEngine Watch
   Research = eMarketer, BizReport, Marketing Charts
   Social = SmartBrief on Social Media, Social Media Today
   Agency = Mediapost MAD, ClickZ experts
   http://www.mediaredefined.com/
   
   Hope this helps. Don't freak out about how long the list is -- the foundational stuff is really in the four books under "Where To Start". And the ad tech stuff is well covered by Ad Exchanger.
   

Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.

Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.

Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.

Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.

For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea

For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.

Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Enjoy!

Well having spent some time over in the areas (North and South Africa), Africa is honestly one of the most maleficent places I have ever had the displeasure to be in. So much unwarranted hatred and misaligned belief. Gotta love a civilization of today that accepts the likes of Mugabe and Blahyi with open, loving arms. AIDS is running rampant throughout the country with Billions of AID dollars lining the pockets of the Warlords who own the biggest guns at the moment. Africa is a never-ending funnel of despair. Good read for those who really want to get caught up

And here

And your odds are even worse if you're a child - Here

So my answer to the question is about the humanity thing, not the skin color thing.

Plus This is a great documentary to watch NSFL Especially Fergal Keane's interview.

And another great documentary [here]
(http://youtu.be/-nqDTxQVSlk)


So yeah, by my personal experiences from that part of the world I stick by my original answer. Don't agree with me, go there, live there and formulate your own insights and paradigm on the matter?

Lastly this was a family: a small boy, small girl, a mother or some grand parents (NSFL)

and it STILL continues today.

Which are the last two? Assuming capitalist development and codes...

By far the most famous geographer studying global capitalism is David Harvey. He recently wrote The Enigma of Capital which is a pretty easy introduction to his work. I think his Spaces of Global Capitalism is a more useful summation. He's very famous for a few other books, but I think the most important work he's done is in The Limits to Capital. The last one is a tough, meticulous book. Also worth checking out is his protege Neil Smith, either his Uneven Development or for a focus on cities The New Urban Frontier.

There really are not many books that take up housing and building code specifically, though Ben-Joseph's The City of Code is a useful introduction. If you're looking for a good rant (and a reliable one) on how we got to the less-than-stellar spatial arrangements of American cities, James Howard Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere will get your blood pumping. If you're more interested in the cultural politics of place, one of my all time favorites is Landscapes of Privilege by the Duncan's.

Thanks for the response and book link. I've heard about Keynes mistaken prediction and will definitely check out the book.

There's no doubt that in the present, most people see work as something you just have to do. But if our employment system is propped up by nothing more than force of habit, by the baseless assumption that high unemployment is "bad" and low unemployment is "good" and that each of us individually has some sort of responsibility to go get a job, then why not change our way of thinking?

It's not just cashiers and order-takers who are under threat from kiosks that will soon do their jobs better and cheaper. High-wage professionals like accountants and lawyers are also being displaced by software and automation, and I don't think our present employment system--or our way of thinking--is ready for the shock.

Of course, some people will always work. Clearly we need some lawyers, some accountants, and even some order-takers, and certainly we need the software engineers who write the code that does these peoples' jobs (just look at software engineer salaries for proof of these).

Automation and software are bringing us into uncharted territory. In the next 50 years we're going to need to invent a new employment paradigm as more and more people, not just low-wage but high-wage too, become unemployable, and we're going to need to break away from the old-fashioned idea that everyone needs to work. Really, the function of human beings in the modern economy is not to work: I don't think most of us create a lot of value at work. Our function is to consume. A Piketty-style tax on capital redistributed into a UBI that gives people the choice to either (a) work if they so choose, or (b) follow a passion, start a company, or even be idle, seems like the most sensible solution to me.

Though I admit the economics of it still needs to be worked out :)

This book for more info: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies-ebook/dp/B00D97HPQI

OK, fine.

Cost to end extreme poverty worldwide, according to this UN report and Jeffery Sachs (Professor of Economics, Colombia), $175bn/year over 20 years.

That's using proven techniques (don't have Athens on hand? here's an article discussing the same in less detail)

The US alone has 540 people worth more than a billion. Worldwide, there's 1810 of them. If we spread it over all of them, that's a shade under $100m/year per person, or $2bn each in total. That much might have an impact on some of the people towards the bottom of the list, so maybe let's restrict this to the top 500 richest people on earth, the poorest of which has a mere $3.3 billion

So that's $350m per person per year. Jeff Bezos, admittedly somewhere near the top of the list, made $296m in the last 24 hours alone. If you bias the payments so the richest pay more and the "poorest" pay less, it's hard to imagine a single person having to remotely tighten their belts.

The question of "not even notice" is a little more difficult. At what point do you think you stop noticing spending money? When you have $3.3bn in the bank, it's hard to imagine $350m a year isn't going to hurt too much. I mean, assuming you have no income and you're not getting much return on your investments (and that's a huge assumption) you'll definitely have less money at the end of the year than you started with, but it's not going to stop you doing anything. I don't know how much money is enough that you can never spend it all, but Brian Chesky (no 500 on the list) could hand over his $2bn right now, then spend $87,000 $71,000 (edit, whoops, misplaced a digit) a day for the next 50 years and still have money left at the end. Again, that's assuming no income at all, and I'm fairly sure AirBNB isn't going to stop making money right away, and Chesky has his money somewhere safe and profitable.

Although with a sliding donation scale, it might not even be that much. For reference, Gates (again towards the top of the list) gives away $1.4bn a year, on average.

So yeah, I think it's feasible.

>Are we obligated to accommodate other countries even if that means diminishing the quality of life in the United States for people of all races, not just white, and violating our laws?

Yes, but I don't understand what you mean by "and violating our laws"

> Do you believe that other countries lack the capacity to improve the lives of their citizens while respecting the laws, rights, and liberties of our land?

They don't inherently lack the capacity, but they often suck. I recommend this book and this book. Again, I don't understand the "while respecting the laws, rights, and liberties of our land" part again.

The link works just fine for me. Here it is again: http://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2017/04/is-chinese-growth-overstated.html

Note that one of the authors is Sala-i-Martin, one of the leading authorities on growth (the guy coauthored one of the best textbooks on the subject)

>Some groups might do well while others don't. If we are good across the board with only John Citizen and his five cousins not doing well, sure than perhaps we could say "the economy" is doing well.

You need to show me some indication that you've read at least the Bernanke piece and skimmed the Jones Klenow piece. I refuse to converse unless you show me some indication that you can ask some intelligent and interesting questions about the material that you were shown.

You have posted question after question on inequality piketty, etc and I have even responded to some of the threads. However, what I have not seen from you is any indication of good faith effort. Unless I see that and you start asking more intelligent/interesting questions about the material presented, our conversation is finished.

>Shouldn't we rather discuss which parts of the population do well and which don't?

We do. All the time. People are tearing their goddamn hair out over ADH. Economics has always concerned itself with winners and losers.

Again, you need to show me some evidence that you have digested some material and show me that you aren't here simply to preen, because, frankly, that's all I've seen you do.

We never should have let teachers pretend to be responsible for our children so that we could pretend they were ok and we were good. The teachers are threatening to stop playing along with this game.

​

Yes. At first it was about society. You cared about children because you cared about citizenship or at least posterity. Then it used to be think about the children themselves - as in there used to have to be children present. You cared about teachers because you cared about children and we projected good qualities upon teachers. Then it became being a teacher was hard work because (the kids were bad, the parents were bad, the government was mean). Now being a teacher (in America) I infer is an implication that our priorities are off. People are getting snippy at teachers because they are scolding us as adults.

​

Being a teacher is an easy job almost anyone can do. The reason this is hard to talk about is that the same is true for almost every job including that of the reader. Being a good teacher is a hard job almost nobody can do, which mutatis mutandis is also true for the reader - where we generally know in our heart that we're not doing our best in life and it is easy to project incompetence, sloth and entitlement upon others when we actually all share in these qualities.

​

Or perhaps the terminal decline in prosperity is finally hitting home. This is a good book about how you will die:

​

https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/153661825X

​

​

This is a very contested area of economics. I liked this book, though:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Rich-Countries-Poor-Stay/dp/1586486683

It sort of states that the rich countries are ones that set up protectionist policies to support infant industry and subsidized them heavily. Policies that promote free trade for developing countries may end up harming them. Hence, they should follow the development models of the West in using government support to create industry then later open up to free trade.

Sure. Simply help them out economically, get them out of the poverty trap and birth rates will go down. The End of Poverty and Common Wealth go into the trend in good detail. My copies are lent out so unfortunately I'll have to do hand waving around figures and which countries have had successes here. If you are more interested than just a snarky comment I highly recommend reading both books.

Short summary: Families in countries with poor overall health and economies get caught in a poverty trap. In most of these countries the parents need to depend on their children to provide for them later on. The odds are quite high of any individual child dying before they are in a position to be able to help out so parents would prefer to double up. In societies where women are not considered able to provide such the families average about four children - they want two boys and need on average 4 children to get there.

Due to the bad economic conditions the larger family is almost always poorer than the previous generation. Fewer resources to go around and no available infrastructure to grow what they have. Also, the larger family is harder to provide for. Schooling typically gets neglected in everyone but the oldest boy and there isn't enough food to go around.

The solutions? One tends to be increased women's rights so they are viewed to be able to support a family and help support the parents. Getting to that point reduces the average family size to a little more than 2 per family. Reducing mortality rates has a similar effect in reducing family sizes and allows families to invest more in the children in terms of food and schooling.

The average family size tends to fall below 2 after lowering mortality rates, providing contraceptives and increased women participation in the workforce.

These transitions in family size take place over the course of some years of course.

Edit: Want to help?

Microloans are a great way to do so. They are small zero interest loans to poor entrepreneurs. These help people invest in themselves and have helped raised the status of women in many countries (most notably Bangladesh through the Grammeen Bank). This happens because women repay much more reliably than men and tend much more to use the money earned from the investment towards helping the family and community rather than gambling or drinking it away.

The NY Times had a nice article of one success story. You can make a microloan at Kiva.org (my profile). When the debt is repaid in full you get the money back and can either recycle into a new loan or withdraw it.

Another good organization to give to is Millennium Promise - they focus on trying to break the poverty trap in targeted villages within Africa since the poverty trap affects almost all of the continent and we as a culture tend to dismiss them as lazy breeders without addressing the real causes.

Hello,

I know what you're saying, foreign aid DOES HELP people. It does, I am not arguing that at all.

Those free houses, and free pumps and cans of food helps people and hell it probably saves many lives.

I don't argue that.

But you said that you benefited from foreign aid, have you ever stopped and wondered "how much does foreign aid cost?" "what are the side effects of foreign aid?" "in the long run, does foreign aid really help a country?"

They saved your life, foreign aid did...but at what cost?

I recently read a book Dead aid and there are many many many more books on the subject from many authors from many different walks of life. I highly suggest you give this stuff a chance.

How much is the life of one little boy worth? save one boy from hunger and the effect is 10 little boys within the next generation dying of hunger...where is the sense of that?



have you ever wondered what foreign aid is? where it goes? who receives it? accountability?

Capital in the Twenty first century actually lays out a 200 year record that the rate of return on capital is always greater than the growth of the overall economy, always concentrating wealth in the hands of oligarchic/dynastic wealth unless acted on by redistributive forces. Robotics massively accelerates this process as noted in the Second Machine Age. When you look at both books you get a picture of the rapid and accelerating transfer of wealth from everybody to a small few. The only way that i see to deal with this is Makerspaces like Technocopia that are build distributed community accessible automation of thier own.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is a very good look at macro-economics. At least, as a non-economist, I thought so.

As already mentioned, The Map that Change the World is an excellent introduction to the early stages of geological science. Simon Winchester is a very successful and well regarded popular historian.

These ideas are discussed in great detail in David Landes' book
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393318885/ref=cm_lm_fullview_prod_3/104-7880136-1164720?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155


There are three major reasons for Wealth/Poverty: Geography, Infrastructure, and Culture.

Economists disregard culture as a economic artefact because it can't be quantified and its politically incorrect. The reason Economists distrust culture is because it is such a 'one size fits all' argument.

Nations are developed not because they are more intelligent but they 'work' better as a society - meaning the co-operate better in the macroeconomic sense (not corrupt, socially responsible, etc). Its cultural traits and values, rather than resources are what make or break a country.

Read "The Beautiful Tree" by James Tooley. It's gripping, enlightening and fascinating, and it could really change many of the things you think you know about education, just like the experiences described in it changed everything for JT himself.

Oooh goodie. OK. So. This is a pretty good list. From the Mankiw Blog:

Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom

Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity

Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist

P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich

Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics

John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar

William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates

If you have specific interests in economics, like global poverty or behavioral economics, then I can give more recommendations.

Edit: I found out about another good one today, called The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why it Matters. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews make it sound like exactly the kind of book on modern economics I've been looking for.

If you have the time, Robert Gorden's book, "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" is pretty eye-opening. [1] He also talks about inequality as a major headwind to growth, and makes a compelling argument that the data show that biggest transformation – unmatched even by the personal computer and IT revolution – was bringing electricity and plumbing into the home.

Then there's the Princeton study that shows money can make people happier, but that the effect levels off at around $75k a year.

I think it was while reading Bill McKibben's book "Eaarth" [3] that I was surprised to discover that back in the 1970s, polling showed that Americans were actually pretty open to a different economic model – one more about sustainability and well-being than growth.

​

1: https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-American-Growth-Princeton/dp/153661825X

2: https://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/deaton_kahneman_high_income_improves_evaluation_August2010.pdf

3: https://www.amazon.com/Eaarth-Making-Life-Tough-Planet/dp/0312541198

Books on the subject:

In the slums of India, homeschooled education outdoes the private education
The Beautiful Tree
(http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1933995920)

Literacy rates went down since public education was introduced and much much more (written by an award winning teacher who left the system)
Weapons of Mass Instruction
http://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Mass-Instruction-Schoolteachers-Compulsory/dp/0865716315

http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2010/100707/commnews_homeschool.html

Here is the difference we see in our homeschool:

Class size: Most teachers I've talked to say the ideal class size is about 6 kids. That's the maximum we allow in our homeschool (mini-school, as we take in neighbor kids at times). With 6 kids, they all get independent attention.

Curriculum: Instead of a massive one-size fits all, we can tailor the message to each student. One kid loves dance, so she gets math problems related to dancing. Another loves car engines, so they get car engine math. Both care about math.

The big one everyone will bring up: Socialization
I know this may be hard to believe, but we don't lock our students in the basement and teach them about jezzus all day and the evils of evolution. We do co-ops with many other families in the area. Other home schooled kids are used to being treated like adults and making decisions. The result, my kids have never yet had their heads flushed in a toilet. They don't struggle with making friends, and they look at bullies as bizarre and rare things that they can walk away from.

How socialized are the kids in school really? They only interact with kids in their grade (home school kids often learn along side teenagers and little kids and see that everyone has valid opinions. My kids don't discriminate based on age with who they play with in the neighborhood, making them popular).

Time benefits: We don't have to wait in lines, fold our arms and put our heads on our desks while each child brings their test up to the front. The result is that we can teach in 4 hours what regular school does in 8.

Field trips: Public schools can only afford about one or two a year. We do one or two a month. Including private interviews with restaurant owners, ballet dancers, and leads in plays. The Zoo specially arranged so my daughter could see the cougars fed (she loves cougars).

Hall-Pass: My kids can make up their own minds when they go potty, and no one stops them. The concept that an adult would remove your right to a basic biological function is just bizarre to them.

The only real problem with private schooling is a parent needs to stay home and want to teach, but as long as you have that, there is no reason in the world that kids couldn't learn way more with a little support than in a false, forced environment where conformity and factory-like working conditions are the norm.

I understand not everyone has the luxury to do this and that makes me sad, but the idea that public school is superior than a caring, attentive adult and a small class size is bizarre to me.

Good post. If you want thought-provoking material relating to the inherent connection between the State and surveys of land ownership ("cadastral maps"), check out Seeing Like A State. Not necessarily RPG-relevant, but very interesting stuff for understanding how many elements of the modern world (including seemingly unrelated things like family surnames) came to be so ubiquitous we forget completely that they are inventions. Still some good worldbuilding takeaways and fodder for creating narrative background.

Ooh, this is a sub, good to know.

I wasn't wanting to influence those doing the reading, but here's my initial pitch for The Bottom Billion:

> I'd humbly suggest The Bottom Billion as the first submission. I chose it because it was touted as the balanced perspective on development economics by the /r/economics sidebar, and I think it represents this subs focus.

> The premise is that, since the 1960s, where 1/6th of the world was rich and the rest poor, real strides have been made worldwide, with some 4/6ths of the world being lifted out of poverty to middle income. At the turn of the millenia, this gives us 1 billion rich, 4 billion middle income and 1 billion that has been left behind, with incomes stagnant or falling in this period. Collier than examines why this is, and offers solutions.

> I think this is a title worthy of the audience of /r/globalistshills because a) it is heavily evidence-based, but more importantly b) it represents the twin premise of this sub, that the (((neoliberal))) consensus has worked for the betterment of billions of people, but there are still problems in the world, and we need evidence-based policy to solve them.

> Obviously we can use another text if of the powers that be prefer, but I think this would be an excellent start.

> Caveat that I've not actually got very far in it yet, but I want to discuss it with people when I'm done.

I've read the book now, so I'm happy to answer any questions about its content and recommendations. I'm not an expert in the field, though, with this being the first work I've read directly dealing with this topic.

I don't know who is doing PR for this book but they are amazing. It's not a good book.

My review on Amazon:

> The most interesting thing about this book is how Bostrom managed to write so much while saying so little. Seriously, there is very little depth. He presents an idea out of nowhere, says a little about it, and then says [more research needs to be done]. He does this throughout the entire book. I give it two stars because, while extremely diluted, he does present an interesting idea every now and then.

Read this or this or this instead.

If you want to find out more about this read "Poor Economics" by Esther Duflo and Abhijitv Banerjee. Both are MIT Professors in Development Economics and both are likely future Nobel prize winners. They have done a lot of empirical work in developing communities looking at how the poor actually live their lives as opposed to how people assume they do. You'll be particularly interested in Chapter 8: "Saving brick by brick". It's a really really fascinating book and I really recommend it.


Amazon UK link

> the rise of Asia via capitalism red in tooth and claw

which Asian societies are you referencing here?

Most of East Asia advanced economically via the Developmental State, so I don't think scholars of the region would agree with your characterization as 'capitalism red in tooth and claw'. See, for example, Chalmers Johnson on Japan's boom led by conscious technocratic planning and active industrial policy, or Ha-Joon Chang on East Asia's peculiar developmental path that put it at odds with the 'Washington consensus' about free trade, liberalized capital flows, etc.

I agree with your argument that old leftist impulses about common interests between workers does not work today, if it ever did. But this divergence needs to be couched in terms of a proper reading of the political economy of the region, which most scholars recognize involved a fairly novel model that can't easily be reduced to the capitalism v. state-socialism axis.

It's actually quite the opposite. Studies in developing countries show that when parents are responsible for their children's education, they go to great lengths to fulfill their responsibilities (see, for example, The Beautiful Tree) even when doing so represents a substantial portion of their income. The problem we have in the US is that education has been outsourced and parents no longer feel that it is their responsibility to educate their kids, they think it's the government's job and that their neighbors should be responsible for paying for it. Until that responsibility is placed back where it belongs, we aren't going to see any improvements.

This reminds of a focal area in the book Seeing Like a State, which looks at why and how the maturation of state administration depends upon better data, developed through standardization of measurement and abstraction. Good book if you're interested in that sort of thing, and a beneficial view of history when discussing policy today.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00D8JJYWA/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

There is a lot of literature about it. Do your own research.

Koffi Annan said that "And yet research is also clear that when girls reach their full potential, through improved status, better health care, and education, it is the most effective development tool for society as a whole. As a country's primary enrolment rate for girls increases, so too does its gross domestic product per capita." It also has to do with being able to control population growth, etc etc.

Of course "better income distribution" is a way of fighting poverty (srsly?). The point is that microfinance, and more specifically microfinance programmes that target women, have shown to be the most effective method of reducing poverty in communities where it is endemic.

In tandem with Ben Anderson, James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed is a pretty interesting read.

There's a concept in economic development that if you give something out for free people may not value it. So sometimes instead of giving out free condoms in Africa, you charge a small fee so people don't blow them up as balloons at soccer games. (Source is this book: https://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Quest-Growth-Economists-Misadventures/dp/0262550423).

Look I don't care if I didn't solve this non profit's every wish, they said they wanted certain features in the app and we made. The fact that someone couldn't spend 5 minutes to promote an app I personally spend 120 hours of my time making shows that they really didn't need a mobile app, or we should've charged them so they'd value it.

I'm glad you've become interested in such a fascinating topic. However, it's pretty expansive, so here are some links to books and topics in terms of broad, global, and more specific studies related to the issue of income equality:

Broad Topic/Global:

• Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
  
  
• The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs. This is more of a look into global poverty, but has elements of income equality between countries tied into it.
  
  
  In the US/more specific:
  
  
• Inequality: Growing Apart is a short article by The Economist on the topic of growing income inequality in the US
  
  
• The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph Stiglitz
  
  
• Income Inequality in the United States: 1913-1998 an empirical study by Thomas Piketty and Emanuel Saez
  
  This is just a list of the more well-known, discussed, and publicized works on the broader subject of income inequality and poverty. There is a plethora of information on this topic from different perspectives and analyses (e.g. political economy, neoclassical, marxist, etc...), as well as in different countries and time periods, so while you're reading remember to take the context of how it is being written and who is writing it into consideration. Hopefully this list gets you started though!
  
  

David Landes provides a good comparison of the effect of different European colonial masters in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations.

Critics decry some of his comments re cultures, and point to Guns, Germs and Steel, but IMO this book picks up where Jared Diamond finishes, and also provides interesting commentary on the Japanese and Chinese situations too. The two make good reading together.

However, the main point here is the analysis of effects of the different European empires on their colonies' later economic development.

Edit: Also, please see here.

Taking a break today to catch up on lecture slides, file files, and work on my reading list.

Reading right now:

• Mark Blaug's (1980) The Methodology of Economics
  
  
• Jason Barr's (2016) Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan's Skyscrapers
  
  
• The overview of Roland Fryer's work just published in the JEP
  
  
• This on the current JBC medalist
  
  
• The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations, whcih I recommend along with Goldin's A Grand Gender Convergence and Vox's The Truth About the Gender Wage Gap
  
  Still mulling over my long response to a /r/badeconomics post which claims that theories can be refuted. Channeling Dani Rodrik soon enough.

> I'm actually looking to hear what everybody else is interested

I never had a good history class so I spend much of my time reading books that explain why the modern world is the way it is. I'm slowly working my way through the foreign service suggested reading list

Some of my favorite non-fiction books were those about the Japanese sarin gas cult, unique overviews of countries such as China Road and the publisher twelve books puts out some pretty fun works.

It actually has been compared to those things, quite often. One book that does it extremely well is The Second Machine Age - highly recommended. It's easy to read, timely, and fascinating.

Oh boy, this is a biggie. It's kind of a combo of a lot of factors.

David Landes wrote a good book on the subject, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Some of it can be due to government leadership, some due to actual availability of natural resources. It's really a case by case basis, and some countries that are poor may actually be successful with some minor changes, or if certain things happened years earlier.

If you have a case you are interested in, ask away.

Fair enough, but I believe the third paragraph is the most easily supported. Just off the top of my head I think OP is citing Neil Smith and his theories on capitalism, urban development etc .http://www.amazon.com/Uneven-Development-Nature-Capital-Production/dp/082033099X

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa

Mastering the Machine Revisited: Poverty, Aid and Technology

Dead Aid Wikipedia

The true size of Africa

I think we really need to get away from helping Africa in regards to helping the countries of Africa. As per link to the size of Africa one can see its *ucking huge. However I would rather that we the US would spend more time cultivating our relationships within our own region instead which is more close to home than the middle east.

Example: Syria should be a problem handled by the Europeans and not by us and we should be doing more in regards to Mexico. Getting involved in Mexico not by military intervention but reaching a conclusion in regarding the legalization of marijuana. I am pretty sure if marijuana was legal in Mexico, Mexicans would have less of a reason to work in the US.

Edit: I didn't explain my links. I read "Mastering the Machine" I thought it was a good read in regards too is the aid to Africa actually working or is it making it worse. Dead aid was published just a couple of years ago and makes the same point. Historically I don't think any country on this planet was improved by charity. Look at Haiti it was a wreck before the earthquake how many millions were sent?

erik s. reinert examined medieval Venice and Renaissance-age Holland in his book "How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor"

According to him, it historically had to do with the synergetic effects spawned by a huge diversity of trades and businesses trying to share the same dense business space. The policy focus was on fostering the business diversity

On a slightly related tangent, if anyone is interested in an engaging read that does an excellent job of conveying the feeling of modern China, I highly recommend the book China Road, by Rob Gifford.

It conveys a sense of place other than the faceless, monolithic entity so often presented as China in the West.

RI:



[If you don't want to read it all, I've marked my specific criticisms with bolded brackets below.]

This is bad methodology of econ, not bad econ per se. I hope this is allowed. I am posting this because the methodological debate this user is referencing is important to understand for young economists and laymen alike. I will first develop his argument and then attack it.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional economic methodologist. I have not taken fields exams in methodology (they don’t exist). I have only studied the topic beyond Friedman’s Essay on Positive Econ. Econ methodology is the study of the philosophical principles underlying economic reasoning. It is related to philosophy of science and philosophy of economics. See here for more info. I don’t claim to be a good philosopher. Criticism is welcome. Post me to /r/badphilosophy if you have to.



The linked user argues that mainstream economists compose economic “laws” which are not intended to hold throughout space and time, regardless of context, but rather are intended to hold only in specific time-space contexts (e.g., Stagflation in the 1970s U.S., industrialization in 19th century Japan). These “laws” (we would call them models) are only meant to describe the specific contexts for which they were developed, and so are not much use beyond that. Further, the user argues that mainstream economists base this view of contingency of economic “laws” on empirical evidence; it can be demonstrated with data that the critical assumptions of one model do not apply to contexts outside of the one for which the model was built.

The linked user contrasts this view with those of certain Austrian economists who believe in immutable econ laws which apply to all space-time contexts, and that empirical evidence can only illustrate, rather than support or contradict, these laws which are developed via some deductive framework. If the premises are true, and if the premises entail the conclusion, then the conclusion is also true. The conclusion need not approximate what we observe, only the assumptions. The fundamental axiom, “humans act,” is seen by this user and some other Austrian economists as undeniably true, and so conclusions derived from this and other minor premises must then also be undeniably true, regardless of empirical evidence to the contrary (I develop this argument with more nuance later). See Rothbard’s article in Southern Econ Journal for more on this view. By the user’s own admission, “This does indeed limit how much can be done and shown with Austrian Economics quite a bit, although nowhere as much as mainstream economists think.”

The user believes that the mainstream method produces models “which, by their own admission, will one day be false and useless.” He means, again, that mainstream models are meant for only the contexts for which they were originally built and are “useless” in other contexts.

***

Now that I’ve hopefully faithfully expounded the user’s argument, I can now criticize it.

First, let’s be clear about terminology. Mainstream economists are no longer interested (for the vast majority of cases) in constructing immutable economic laws. Gone are the days of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Malthus was right about the pre-industrial era, but failed to recognize mechanisms through which his own “law” would become inapplicable to the industrial era. See Acemoglu and Robinson (2015) for more on the rise and fall of general laws in economics. Social behavior is contingent on context. We as economists must always be conscious of the external validity of our models.

Modern economists work with, speak in, and think through models, which are contingent on time and space, but which are not “useless” outside of the space-time contexts for which they are originally developed. [Criticism 1:] Models are, by definition, logical constructions and thus follow the same assumptions-conclusions structure as praxeological reasoning. Models are tautologies whose implications are dependent entirely on the assumptions. The user seems to believe that mainstream models are not deductive. This is just plain false. (I retouch on this criticism later, in case this is a bad portrayal of what the user meant.)

Rather, we develop deductive models and then test whether both the critical assumptions and the conclusions approximate reality. Critical assumptions are those which, if relaxed, would change the substantive results of the model. Friedman (1953) failed to consider these, which I explain in more detail here.

Dani Rodrik, IMO, captures the practice of modern modeling in his latest book, saying that economics is a library of models which apply to certain contexts based on how well their critical assumptions approximate reality. If a model is determined to apply appropriately to a certain context, and if its conclusions are shown to not match reality via empirical analysis (data, statistical analysis, qualitative methods, what-have-you), then the model is determined unable to explain reality in this particular context, and we’ll need a new model with appropriate critical assumptions but with a focus on different causal mechanisms. [Criticism 2:] A model is not “useless” in all contexts other than its original context; rather, it’s applicable to a certain type of context.

The user argues that mainstream models have no external validity. [Criticism 3:] Actually, the external validity of a model is limited by what its critical assumptions say about reality. Our library of models is a toolbox. If we have a nail, we need a hammer. If we have a screw, we need a screwdriver.

Further, Rodrik argues that economics progresses by expanding its library of models. The user admits that certain Austrian economists develop models which they believe apply to all contexts, and that this then limits the scope of their discipline. Thus, this variant of Austrian economics is actually practicing the same method as mainstream economists, but are limiting their library of models only to those with critical assumptions approximating all possible contextual realities (if such a thing is possible). The number of “praxeological models” or “economic laws,” as the user would describe them, is thus obviously very small, if not zero.

The user does not deny social contingency, but rather advocates a form of economics which only studies contexts which our model’s assumptions will approximate every time. [Criticism 4:] This has been determined by mainstream economists to not be a worthwhile endeavor, or even a possible one. Context matters. <-- This is a fundamental principle of several fields of economics, most famously institutional econ.

[Criticism 5:]**As for his criticism of econometrics, it’s clear he has no idea what quasi-experimental methods are. That is all.

This is an interesting question and comes with many answers depending on how you define certain things like "poverty". IMO, the best answer is given by Jeffery Sachs in this book. He says that if we used $175 billion per year for 20 years, we could end extreme poverty.

Alternative R1:

> The reason economists use mathematics is typically misunderstood. It has little to do with sophistication, complexity, or a claim to higher truth. Math essentially plays two roles in economics, neither of which is cause for glory: clarity and consistency. First, math ensures that the elements of a model—the assumptions, behavioral mechanisms, and main results—are stated clearly and are transparent. Once a model is stated in mathematical form, what it says or does is obvious to all who can read it. This clarity is of great value and is not adequately appreciated. We still have endless debates today about what Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, or Joseph Schumpeter really meant. Even though all three are giants of the economics profession, they formulated their models largely (but not exclusively) in verbal form. By contrast, no ink has ever been spilled over what Paul Samuelson, Joe Stiglitz, or Ken Arrow had in mind when they developed the theories that won them their Nobel. Mathematical models require that all the t’s be crossed and the i’s be dotted. The second virtue of mathematics is that it ensures the internal consistency of a model—simply put, that the conclusions follow from the assumptions. This is a mundane but indispensable contribution. Some arguments are simple enough that they can be self-evident. Others require greater care, especially in light of cognitive biases that draw us toward results we want to see. Sometimes a result can be plainly wrong. More often, the argument turns out to be poorly specified, with critical assumptions left out. Here, math provides a useful check. Alfred Marshall, the towering economist of the pre-Keynesian era and author of the first real economics textbook, had a good rule: use math as a shorthand language, translate into English, and then burn the math! Or as I tell my students, economists use math not because they’re smart, but because they’re not smart enough.

https://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rules-Rights-Wrongs-Science/dp/0393246418

The criticism (pros and cons really) of modelling have been addressed here ad nauseam.

Not sure if the author is really from Oz, but if he is it explains a lot.

> Mad Max is an Australian uni student hiding out in his mother's basement waiting for the singularity to arrive.

This explains his socialist view of things. Socialist meaning trying to force his own values onto a group as a whole.

According to the sidebar, darkenlightenment envisions a series of city states. Each city state would have its own rules and culture. So inevitably this would lead to competiton among city states to have the best culture. People who fail to follow the rules of that city state for most offenses would just be thrown out of the city state. The reason is that it is expensive to jail people.

What is interesting is this City State type structure is envisoned by other people like Fareed Zakaria. His book "The Post American World" explains how the re-emergence of India and China as economic powers is effecting the rest of the world. The author questions whether or not India and China will become super powers in the conventional sense.

The city state type structure is already starting to happen in both India and China. The problem is that in a rapidly changing world it is impossible to effectively run a federation.

www.amazon.com/The-Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393334805

But it would be the best choice for timeframe to stop people from dying in the short term, while working to fix the structural barriers.

Read the book Dead Aid. Great info on this topic.

>I'm good with math

U Wot Mate?

I'll bash your fookin head in, I sware on me mum I wiill.

Barro and Sala-i-Martin might actually be best read first.

I have you listed as a "friend" because generally I pay some heed to the ideas you express in your posts, that being said your comment reads like a shotgun blast of irrelevancies.

To start off I lived in SK for two years and never experienced any hatred of Americans... so I guess I'll take my anecdote over yours.

>Past a certain point does it even matter?

To the extent we're on a rock that will be consumed by the sun in X billion years, maybe not. To the extent it helps us understand alternative policies' consequences for the billions of humans in developing countries during the mean time - of course it bloody matters.

>The whole socialism vs capitalism or more or less efficient is a red herring.

Socialism and capitalism weren't even on the table; how is this anything other than your own red herring? Efficiency matters for reasons which I assume are obvious.

>different from each other drawing comparisons or trying to find similarities between them is probably a waste of time

I read this as "examining how economic growth occurs or does not occur is a waste of time," is this accurate? Why have social science at all? "There's too many variables, fuck it!" You need some Barro & Sala-i-Martin.

>Starting a business is never a rational decision at least by economic standards

I would love to see your model!

The irony is that Africa is filled with centrally planned, statist authoritarian economies, ruled by left wing tinpot tyrants who are idolized by useful idiot hipster liberals who see them as enemies of imperialism and racism (zimbabwe, libya, ethiopia, somalia until the early 90's), and that the government seizure and redistribution of the land of productive farms, price controls on food, and food tariffs are some of the causes of starvation in Africa. Free markets also cannot be blamed for obesity; the rube goldberg complex of subsidies, price supports, tariffs, and tax credits that make up America's sovietized agriculture sector make sugar and healthy foods expensive while encouraging the overproduction of corn.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elusive-Quest-Growth-Misadventures/dp/0262550423

http://www.amazon.com/Africa-Unchained-Blueprint-Africas-Future/dp/1403973865/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374259470&sr=1-2

There's a pretty good read on this called Dead Aid.

There's a good book supporting that view.

The Bottom Billion

Dead Aid

Neither deal directly with sweatshops but the subject is related.

And you can google some other information, written by people who study this stuff professionally, in defense of them if you want a better understanding of why they exist, their benefits and their faults, etc.

> Yes, there is a lot of progress to be made, but technological advancement is very much part of it, and the problems aren't with the fact that technology renders human labor obsolete, the problem is with how we handle the new situation.

I agree with this very much. We are already seeing employment suffer as a result of a lack of imagination. It's going to get worse as robotic technology gets better. I've read several books on this sort of thing, but the one I think gave the best high level picture was this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/1480577472 (Don't worry, it's not too pessimistic. :))

RE: Repairing democracy. I truly hope you are right...I have kids.

Interesting AMA thus far. I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer in Central Africa, and I worked pretty extensively in aid elsewhere on the continent afterwards. Never been to Malawi, but I'm familiar with a lot of the issues there, as they're typical of many countries in that region.

First off, good for you - getting off your duff and going into the world to throw yourself at a problem you see. I'm glad you're doing this. That said, I'd like to offer some advice, both from someone who cares about global poverty a lot, and as one who's worked in the field and wants to save you some headaches. There's a lot of issues with "orphanages" in developing countries. I suggest you read all the articles here - the gist being that in a cultural context you don't understand, meddling with children and families is fraught with peril.

Before you get yourself into something you don't understand yet, please listen to these concerns:
You've moved into a completely alien society with a culture you don't really understand and language you don't speak. You're on a tourist visa, for god's sake! That's not okay! It sounds like you've inserted yourself into a number of situations - economic transactions, the "briefcase orphanage" scam - that you just do not fully grasp yet, and by doing so you could be putting yourself in danger. You may think you understand a lot more about these things than you do. The longer you live there - give it a year or two at least - the more you will see how little you actually understood when you first got there (that is, now), and how little you actually understand then. Societies are complex that way.

Think of the opposite - an African from some tiny village somewhere who came to live in, say, downtown Manhattan, and how long it would take him or her to actually grasp the finer points of our culture and society. And that's assuming they already speak English. Until you can converse intelligently in Chichewa, you're really just guessing about what's going on around you based on what the very few who can speak English are willing/know how to say to you.

The broad generalizations you're making here - China is ruining Africa; Africa depends on food aid, otherwise everyone would starve; the tobacco trade is bad and destructive - are tell-tale signs of a shocked, fairly naive white person who has just arrived, and who has not yet taken the time to learn deeply about development, global poverty, and African history and economics. Read about the history of Malawi and what the Banda regime was like (reference for redditors interested here. Read Jeff Sachs, and then for the love of god read Bill Easterly, since he's got his head screwed on a little tighter. Read de Soto, and Ayittey and Collier. There is a whole constellation of development and aid blogs out there, all of which you will find instructive. The bottom line being - there are best practices and lessons to be learned out there, because lots of people have done what you're doing and are doing it now. This business you're up to in Malawi should not be about you. It's about them. And when you begin working in aid, it's very important you remember that, because frankly, a lot of folks forget it.

So, finally, my question: what's your endgame? That is, what goal are you trying to accomplish?

I ask because you're presumably not going to live in Malawi for the rest of your life, so you must eventually (1) get this new orphanage sustainably funded and (2) find competent/honest people to run it. That's very, very difficult. Are you applying for grants? Hoping you'll find a church somewhere in America that wants to take on permanent responsibility for funding this? The Malawian government?

Seeing as I'm replying to you directly I should state that I am usually a big fan of your work, so please believe me that I'm giving this feedback in good faith. And I apologise for implying you ripped off someone else's video.

Bringing this up correlational data (at around 4:18 in the video) immediately begs the question why countries like Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Austria, Switzerland are all very prosperous countries with high percentages of mountainous land and very limited arable farmland. Further, Japan (73% mountains) and South Korea (70%) are the most prosperous countries in Asia. Chile (80% mountains) is the most prosperous country in South America.

The section on temperature was also really problematic for me. The way you brought it up appears to be to create distance between Greece and the other prosperous mountainous European countries, but you then dismiss the theory of how climate effects economies is "massively complex, controversial, and not yet well understood". Why bring this up at all if you're not going to flesh out the argument and then dismiss it? There are valid arguments to be made about climate but it adds no value to the video in its present form.

If you had just limited the scope of what you were saying, ie left it at how Greece's mountainous terrain and climate creates challenges for Greece alone it wouldn't have created these problems with correlation=/=causation.

Both geography and climate effect economic development. But economies are insanely complex and you do the topic a disservice by leaving viewers with the takeaway that you can simply explain it through these correlations between geography and climate. You don't need to paint yourself into that corner if you just focus on how it effects your subject country rather than the rest of the world.

For a more complete look on this subject I would recommend he book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Harvard economic historian David S. Landes. It covers how geography, climate, culture, education economics and history effected the economic development of the world. It's also a treasure trove of content ideas.

Moyo explains pretty well and there's this

The comment does exist, and hasn't been moderated. Reddit's servers may be having an issue.

Here's the reply again:

"This is really somewhat hilarious. You're dismissing the plurality view of the academic field because I "haven't posted evidence of it" (even though the research we're discussing actually supports that conclusion, if you read the paper), and it hurts your feelings.

Fine, here are some citations. Since you don't even know what "literature" means, I'll leave out things behind paywalls:

Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson

Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? by William Easterly

The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly

Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson

Coffee and Power by Jeffrey M. Paige

The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto

The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson

Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth by William Easterly, Jozef Ritzen, and Michael Woolcock

African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis by Nicolas Van de Walle

Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen

Doing Bad by Doing Good by Christopher Coyne

From Subsistence to Exchange by Peter Bauer"

As a note, several of these are ones that one of the mods posts when asked about good books on development.

History isn't a gradual incline though. There's this book I'm reading called The Second Machine Age, really good read by the way, which has this graph in its early pages. Now I don't know how they source that information and am not claiming it to be fully accurate, but as an illustrative example it shows that total societal upheaval is a pretty rapid thing that compounds earlier periods of change. What we think of as tremendous periods critical to social development were, in this era which is the only one you can really form comparisons in as the dissemination of information is so radically different from what it was prior to the industrial age, as short in duration as the span between Pokemon Red and Pokemon Black.

Two decades is a lot when your society is literate and informed.

There are two books that I want to recommend:

The Great War for Civilisation by Fisk

https://www.amazon.com/Great-War-Civilisation-Conquest-Middle/dp/1400075173

The Bottom Billion by Collier

https://www.amazon.com/Bottom-Billion-Poorest-Countries-Failing/dp/0195373383

These two books changed the way I view the Middle East and we have never learned our lessons from the past.

I thought this was an excellent paper that lays out an intriguing and surprisingly achievable plan for a vote-less democracy. Well worth the read.

However, I worry that futarchy doesn't adequately account for the distorting effect of trying to measure and optimize specific metrics. Even if the metrics are a good measure of the thing that we want to maximize, the process of trying to maximize them will cause them to become less effective proxies.

To take a blatant example, taking out advertisements to convince people to rate their lives highly would be extremely favored by the system, even if they did nothing to actually improve the lives of the people. The cost of the advertisements could easily be outweighed by even a small percentage of citizens bumping themselves up to "1". There's no mechanism by which the DAO can oppose this: even if it sees the danger in advance, it can't prefer to prevent such behavior, because such behavior would be "good" for its goal of maximizing the metric.

More subtly, maximizing (primarily short-term) subjective welfare is likely to have a lot of undesirable effects. For instance, whistleblowing would likely be heavily punished in a democracy DAO: evidence of corruption has an immediate negative effect on the subjective well-being of citizens, and any long-term effects caused by more trustworthy government are likely to be overwhelmed by the short-term unhappiness.

You can try to use more and better metrics, but I suspect this is the sort of problem where any proposed solution has isomorphic failure modes. Would love to be proven wrong, however, as there's a lot to like about this sort of system!

(The above analysis borrows heavily from Seeing Like A State, which I regard as required reading for anyone trying to build new social systems.)

The Second Machine Age, by McAfee and Brynjolfsson.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Rifkin.

Ending Aging by De Grey.

Although I would personally argue that you get a good understanding of their material from the numerous talks they give, and learning the background science is probably more important for assessing their claims than simply reading their books.

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, attempts to answer the same questions as Guns Germs ans Steel, different conclusions, interesting to look at together and compare (took an entire course that did just this).

• Robotic Nation and Robotic Freedom - Tenth Anniversary Edition by Marshall Brain
  
  
• The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing
  
  
• Money for everyone: Why we need a citizen's income by Malcolm Torry
  
  
• The Failed Welfare Revolution: America's Struggle over Guaranteed Income Policy by Brian Steensland
  
  
• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson
  
  
• Our Money: how to shrink government, boost business, eliminate poverty and make the economy work properly for everyone by Malcolm Henry

SECTION | CONTENT

--|:--
Title | The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time
Description | Automation in the Information Age is different. Books we used for this video: The Rise of the Robots: http://amzn.to/2r0rtDS The Second Machine Age: http://amzn.to/2r6xt28 Support us on Patreon so we can make more videos (and get cool stuff in return): https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt?ty=h Robot Poster & Kurzgesagt merch here: http://bit.ly/1P1hQIH The music of the video here: Soundcloud: http://bit.ly/2sfwlJf Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2r17DNc Facebook: http://bit.ly/2qW6bY4 – Study ab...
Length | 0:11:41






****

^(I am a bot, this is an auto-generated reply | )^Info ^| ^Feedback ^| ^(Reply STOP to opt out permanently)

everything he says makes sense to me. I like his explanations better than the alternative, which are culture based (which is a typical conservative argument).

here's another book with different ideas, more cultural arguments:

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Nations-Some-Rich/dp/0393318885

There are more modern financial reasons as well. See Dead Aid.

A good book I enjoyed from my Global Economy graduate class was The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. This covers a lot of what you're interested in learning.

As far as the continent of Africa is concerned, there are some books on thge subject: http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346529409&sr=1-1&keywords=african+aid

Foreign aid (from the U.S.) won't cease as long as other countries have stuff we want. I forget who said it and what the exact context was, but there's a saying: "A nation has no friends, only interests."

The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, is a popular approach to the topic but they are both academics and their research is quite sound.

If throwing money at problems solved them then the Baltimore and DC school system would be the best in the country.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Elusive-Quest-Growth-Misadventures/dp/0262550423

That book is all about how foreign aid money does not actually cause economic benefit. Throwing money at things usually doesnt work and can cause certain unintended negative consequences, some of which are quite terrible, ie keeping corrupt politicians in power.

To help stop the downvotes:

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

If anyone is interested in further reading on this topic, we read The Elusive Quest for Growth for my economic growth class. It's a solid read but, unfortunately, is more a list of the many, many things we've tried that have failed, rather than any key plan for success.

Some people predict that cheap housing for the retired and unemployed will be built en mass in the near-future USA, particularly in areas with a low cost-of living. This could very well be the South 15 minutes into the future (with a bit of artistic liberty).

Misschien leest hij zelfs relevante boeken! http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/1480577472

Het komt steeds meer in de aandacht van de media tegenwoordig. Zie bijvoorbeeld de Tegenlicht aflevering van vorige week over het basisinkomen: http://tegenlicht.vpro.nl/afleveringen/2014-2015/gratis-geld.html

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seeing-Like-State-Condition-Institution-ebook/dp/B00D8JJYWA

The Second Machine Age

Read this book and get back to me.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies/dp/1480577472

Relevant

Read this

Hace poco terminé una vuelta más a How Asia Works, que es uno de mis favoritos. Ahora estoy releyendo The Elusive Quest for Growth y empezando con Stages of Economic Growth

Also good:http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376694770&sr=1-4&keywords=dambisa+moyo

stillandonly32 wrote:

The Middle East didn't develop at the same rate as other countries because of Islam. This is economic fact. Read about it here. Also read about it here.



-------
Deleted

I didn't know about this book.

http://www.amazon.ca/China-Road-Journey-Future-Rising/dp/0812975243

Now it's on my list.

Do you know anything about this book?

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0374139563

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0262550423/ref=tmm_pap_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&condition=new&qid=&sr=

To go along with the theme of development from the perspective of a world bank and NYU economist

Two parts, one is Gladwell's herders vs farmers ethnic theory (the descendents of scottish herdsman in the south are an honor based culture because if you didn't stand your own, you'd lose prime grazing spots and possibly your life & livlihood, vs descendents of English & Irish farmers who, despite disagreements, could always go back to their land and self-sustain.)

Second, a lesser known history book by Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, where he includes rice vs wheat as cultural indications of temperament (wheat farmers able to leverage vast swaths of land with scaling labor meant more free time, more aggressive attitudes and more resources to contribute to war efforts, i.e. the turbulent middle ages of Europe, vs Japan & southern China's rice cultures, where labor does not scale well, and maintaining a surplus crop is a dedicated task requiring disciplined and meticulous cooperation, creating cultures that were comparatively less hostile and confrontational than their Western counterparts.)

"Dambisa Moyo - Dead Aid" was great if you haven't read it yet

Read Dead Aid. Bono is not helping Africa.

At which point I know they haven't read the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. It goes into good depth about what happened when Algeria, an African country, socialized all their businesses and due to that are still in a shithole.

https://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393334805

the synopsis /vomit


The world is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism. The fact that new powers are more strongly asserting their interests is the reality of the post-American world. It also raises the political conundrum of how to achieve international objectives in a world of many actors, state and nonstate.

sorry for not replying sooner, I was on vacation. A simple and quick explanation can be found here (you can skip to 2 minutes if you're only interested in the rich/poor part)

I also recommend this book, which goes much more into details of the vicious cycle poor countries are stuck into.

Actually Islam is the main problem. Read about it here and here.

The big 2 are:

The End of Poverty

and

The White Man's Burden

Which conveniently, disagree on most particulars. Also read every paper written at
JPAL

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. I can't recommend this book highly enough.

Argumentum ad sittingnexttoanaccountantum, that's a new one.

Unless knowledge translates through osmosis, that doesn't actually help, you do realize that? I don't become an expert on human digestion by making a comment while sitting next to a doctor.

>this "topping off everyones salary" money still has to come from somewhere

This indicates you have misunderstood the concept at its root. Basic Income is not about 'topping off everyone's salary'. It's about replacing the vastly inefficient current welfare system with something more streamlined, while at the same time providing for people who in the very near future are going to need to be provided for in a way the system as it is is not designed to handle.

Yes, this likely requires more capital. No, it is not as much as you think it is. Part of the gains are in a reduction in future liabilities (ounce of prevention v. pound of cure.)

Yes, this likely means taxes go up. It also means tax loopholes close.

>Before you go trying to insult someone trying to defend your right to paint pictures all day and get paid to do it

Cute. That would be what we call a 'strawman argument', you see, where you ascribe traits to me that have not come out in my actual statements based on a preexisting stereotype or prejudice.

I'm actually a law student studying for an internship position at a major corporate law firm. I'm one of the people who would absolutely not want to live on basic income. I'd go nuts. I do however recognize that it would stop others from starving in the streets - and that 'painting pictures', or more likely 'futzing around with those damn computers in the garage' actually has value, and was something people like Bill Gates, Steve(s) Jobs/Wozniak, and Sergei Brin did. Then they founded Microsoft, Apple, and Google respectively.

Imagine someone else who might do the same, butfor they spend 40 hours a week asking people if they would like fries with that, since the alternative is their family starving to death.

I'm not exactly the first person to think about this:

>We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian- Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

-Buckminster Fuller


Ironically, people can actually make reasoned arguments for points that might not directly benefit them. I'd likely pay more taxes under a basic income system, especially as someone who actually can read the tax code (which, dear god is painful. Props to your sitting-next-to-you-Accountant for sticking with that.)

If you want a better explanation of how a basic income or negative income tax can work (put in a much more succinct and well sourced manner than I can likely put it) I'd suggest taking a look at "The Second Machine Age", written by Erik Brynjolfsson, a Professor of Management at MIT Andrew McAfee, associate director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT.

It's a good read in general.

A lot of those people are being fed by misguided food aid programs. Populations in Africa in particular (where birth rates are the highest in the world) are pushed beyond the carrying capacity of the local economies by perpetual food socialism. It's sort of like the opposite of the Ukrainian famine: instead of too little food, it's too much food, signalling abundance when the local conditions are actually those of severe poverty.

For more on this, books like Dead Aid and the White Man's Burden are great at explaining this phenomenon.

>I've heard of people advocating an "Ideal and stable population size" but I can't see how this would be implemented without the state. So basically, What do you think will happen in the future with regards to the growth of population and the demand it will cause?

This is complicated. One one hand, the people guided by Harvardprincetonyale dogma believe that it's their secular-sacred duty to feed the poor in Africa and to provide advice on how to manage and finance their affairs through the network of international financial institutions, NGOs, and UN-affiliated groups.

On the other, because central planning has a lot of trouble providing for growing populations (it's another variable to account for), they want to control that population growth at least somewhat. The same population growth that exceeds the capacity for those societies to provide for the new people caused by the foreign subsidies creates a problem that the same inept bureaucracy to manage through the promotion of population control programs.

There's no real way to 'solve' this problem in a clean manner. Billions of people are unfortunately reliant on the Harvardprincetonyale Axis of Ultimate Goodness for their continued survival.

Market signals provide critical information to people about whether to expand their families or to not expand them. When those market signals become distorted, people may either fail to produce sufficient children to maintain the prosperity of the society, or they may produce too many for the existing social structure to support to a general level of satisfaction.

The Soviet-Harvard delusion is that by providing food and by suppressing large-scale warfare, 'development' will proceed apace. What has resulted is that populations have exploded beyond the capacity of local economies to provide for them, and the same provision of welfare-food has empowered various dictatorial entities while preventing the emergence of local markets to help genuine society to flourish. Meanwhile, religiously-motivated armies threaten to break up some of the largest states (like Nigeria).

Unfortunately in their attempts to do good, the Axis of Ultimate Goodness has created a fragile series of powderkeg-countries where long-suppressed conflicts threaten to explode into horrific global warfare (see: Egypt). Modern humans in many parts of the world (including the developed world) have been cut off from accurate market information for a very long time, leading to distorted patterns of societal development that are ill-adapted to real conditions in the world.

My speculation that's not a prophecy at all is that three factors will prevent these population projections from being achieved:

1. The US will be incapable of maintaining its global hegemony. Other states, to the extent that the nation-state structure survives at all, will need to provide for their own security. Suppressing warfare between groups, like the US has done after WWII, is like artificially suppressing forest fires. It leads to more severe fires than nature herself could ever permit. The mass death from these wars will check the unending growth in population.
   
2. Extracting fossil fuels will continue to require more intensive technological development to achieve. Nationally owned resource companies running off of expropriated reserves and expropriated technology will not be able to compete with private firms (see: Venelolololzuela).
   
3. Antibiotic resistance is becoming a more significant problem, and no solution has yet been developed, nor is one obviously on the verge of occurring. Mankind's most efficient predators will eventually climb their way back up the food chain. Whatever solution will be devised for this will probably be more technologically intensive, expensive, and probably customized to particular genetic patterns, at least in the beginning.
   
   These projections rest on a lot of ridiculous assumptions and naive math models. They're best understood at pitches for more funding. "If we don't get another billion dollars to promote condom usage, we're gonna have a big problem!" The problems are much more significant, severe, and inherently political in nature.
   
   Population growth is neither a problem nor an unmitigated boon. It's just another factor for humans to calibrate with their desires and real conditions on Earth and within societies. Distorting price signals prevents humans from coordinating with one another in an effective way. The larger the society becomes, the more important that accurate market signals are to its continued functioning.

>Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects.

Ugh. Free trade is a good thing, people! The US is just doing it wrong because of hyper-protectionist attitudes like this.
I would strongly recommend Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World to anyone. The main point I took from it is that the problem with the US today is that we globalized the rest of the world without globalizing ourselves. As a result American society as a whole is selfish and pretentious. People complain about outsourcing, but think about it from the point of view of the foreigners: they need the income too! What makes an American job more valuable than theirs? Aside from "Herp derp MURKA FUCK YEAH"

American society needs to wake up and realize we are not inherently the best at everything just because we have a military that can push everyone around.

For me, one of the most eye opening books was The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor - it really thought me to look at the less fortunate people in this world with the understanding of the root causes of their misery. It also explained the rise of America, failure of Argentina etc... A scholarly work...

Nope. 100% have a B.A. in history a B.A. in education and a B.S. in health science. Currently in graduate school.

I didn't respond to your "facts" because you didn't list any. You went on some schizophrenic rant about race. You've completely failed to understand how geography influences the success and failures of societies. If I had handed in a paper with your line of reasoning my professor would have handed it back and said "start over, this is trash."


I'd suggest you read the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond or the "Wealth and Poverty of Nations" by David Landes

You're going to have to go into reading those books with an open mind, because they might not fit your predetermined narrative that societies are only successful because of skin color.

Because it doesn't work. That is to say, foreign aid has not helped developing nations develop, and foreign aid tends to make the problems worse.

Read this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

and visit the author's website:

http://www.dambisamoyo.com/books/?book=dead-aid

It really couldn't have. It was far away and had no ability to figure all that stuff out. It was hard enough for the other countries and they were right there and actively trying to get in on the action. France and other countries spied heavily and the Brits did whatever they could to deal in their knowledge advantage. I'm reading a book on it now: https://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty-Nations-Some-Rich/dp/0393318885

Indian colonization was horrible. To the extent anyone thinks it wasn't, its because the Brits could have been worse colonizers. They weren't Belgian foot choppers for example.

Still, the idea that railroads or, even more laughable, "civilized society" were contributions that made it all a wash, is some sacred cow level bullshit ;)

For starters, it may seem counterintuitive but all of the money, aid and especially food developed countries send to Africa actually makes the problem worse because it depresses their domestic economies. (Unlike how things are often projected in those tear-jerking commercials from aid organizations, African countries do have economies -- Nigeria, for example, has the one of the largest movie industries in the world.)

Economist Dambisa Moyo explains this problem better than I ever could in Dead Aid, highly recommended read

But the poorest faired worse under public education, and they continue to fair worse all around the world. Even in poor countries there are for-profit schools that provide cheap education that is substantially better than public schools.

A good book on the subject, written by people who actually visited poor countries all around the world and tested students:

http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Tree-Personal-Educating-Themselves/dp/1933995920/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420508055&sr=1-1

See the book Race Against the Machine, by two economists at MIT, who argue that technological unemployment really is a serious problem, and provide data that it's already happening. (There's also a sequel, which I haven't read yet.)

More money isn't going to do anything.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123758895999200083.html

http://dartmouthfreepress.com/2010/04/16/cah-hurts-africa/

http://www.globalenvision.org/2009/04/20/foreign-aid-helping-or-hurting-africa

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

Aid is actually hurting Africa because it makes Africans reliant on Aid. People no longer want to work to enrich their own lives. The cultural roles in many African countries have switched and work is even seen as a girly activity. So people literally just sit all day and do nothing because that's what "men" do.

tl;dr: More money is not going to fix Africa's problems and pull people out of poverty.

Poor Economics for a great discussion on the many small, incremental steps that add up and could help alleviate poverty.

The Bottom Billion for a nice discussion on the various poverty traps a country can get stuck in. This book focuses more on the bigger macro picture, and less on the incentives and lives of individuals.

Why Nations Fail - I'll admit I haven't read this yet, but a lot of people seem to rate it highly. It looks at the broad picture of what determines the wealth of nations, and especially the nature of extractive vs. inclusive institutions.

I haven't heard of anyone advocating that a central bank play a key role in ending poverty. Central banks are there to help smooth output fluctuations, by keeping unemployment near its "natural" level and inflation low and stable. There's nothing in their tool-set that could bring a country out of poverty. Though they're certainly very important as bad monetary policy can destroy a country.

To describe it another way: poverty alleviation is about creating a long-term upward trend in output per person. But there are unpredictable variations the economy experiences around this long-term trend (recessions). The central bank's job is to prevent or minimize these deviations from trend, by preventing recessions. But it does not determine the long-term trend itself.

I think the basis of Hubbell's argument is the experience in Food Aid to Africa.

Aid organizations bought food in the Western world (mostly from the United States), and gave it away to starving people in Africa during droughts and times of political turmoil.

The result was that African farmers could no longer compete with free food: local farms collapsed, local economies collapsed, and the food shortages actually became worse.

Additionally, since aid was often distributed through local governments, their dictatorships and corruption became more entrenched.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374139563

(1) Africa is fucked up mainly because of 30+ years of war among Marxist/Socialist governments. http://www.amazon.com/The-Shadow-Sun-Ryszard-Kapuscinski/dp/0679779078

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Americanism-Jean-Francois-Revel/dp/159403060X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1343531715&sr=1-1&keywords=revel+anti-americanism



(2) in general, aid is a waste of money because it does little or nothing to fix underlying structural/social problems that prevent Africans from caring for themselves.

http://www.dambisamoyo.com/books-and-publications/book/dead-aid/

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Aid-Working-Better-Africa/dp/0374139563

(3) IMHO, aid is often subtly racist and paternalistic, with an underlying message of those-darkies-can't-do-it-without-us. many Americans would prefer poor black people living off handouts than wealthy black capitalists creating their own wealth.

The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs

An economic adviser to the United Nations, Sachs wrote this book in 2025 to present nine steps as to how we could eliminate the world's worst poverty by 2025.

---
When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.

This book talks about the causes of poverty and the misconceptions Christians often have.

---

Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider

Sider first wrote this book in 1978, but came out with this latest edition in 2005, exploring the causes of global hunger and the different viewpoints (both conservative and liberal) on poverty.

---

Too Small to Ignore: Why the Least of These Matters Most by Wess Stafford.

Stafford grew up in West Africa and discusses the importance of investing in the futures of children, especially those who are less fortunate.

That's a monster of a question. Hell, development economics is an entire academic field, you might as well ask 'ELI5: Physics'. Anyone who seriously thinks they can give you an answer here is lying to you, and probably to themselves as well.

That being said, for my money there are three books that are really required reading on the topic of how countries end up poor, plus two books that are required reading on why it's so hard to fix. I'd call them the bare minimum to call yourself literate on the subject.

1. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Jared Diamond. Essential reading on the big (i.e. several millennia) question of how the world ended up broadly split between rich and poor. I think they made it into a documentary, that's probably worth checking out.
   
   
2. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. If you only read one of these, make it this one. Perfect blend of big picture history and modern policy analysis.
   
   
3. Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Much more micro-focused, this one is about poor people more than it's about poor countries. I mainly include it because Esther is a beast, and this is one of my favourite books of all time. Definitely worth the read.
   
   Two that you should read on why it's so hard to fix global poverty (Poor Economics sits at the intersection).
   
   
4. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time, Jeffrey Sachs. Jeff Sachs is one of those names that everyone in the world should know. Read this book, end of story.
   
   
5. The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, William Easterly. Easterly is another name everyone should know. To be honest, I don't agree with him on a whole lot of things. But pretending the other side of the debate doesn't exist is utterly moronic, and you can always learn a lot from people you disagree with.