With Bidenomics we are driving at high speed on the highway to Ghana ourselves.
Manhattan Contrarian ping
My experience with poor people is that most lack the skills to view money as a tool to build something. They can only think in terms of its immediate usage to buy personal bodily needs. They do not think in terms of using it towards the next step of building something.
Some say evolution.
Continuing its’ leftwing socialism (or other brand names) will continue their failed economic system.
The only acceptable answer is the US caused the poverty. It doesn’t matter that the US has probably transferred more wealth to these countries than the sum of total wealth created natively since the beginning of humanity.
Corruption
Nearly all are “countries” solely as legacies of European colonial rule with borders drawn up on maps in wood paneled rooms thousands of miles away. They were happily spearing and chopping each other to bits before the pale strangers arrived and in most cases have or will revert to tribal slaughter and caste and once they’ve left. Some which were unified and functioning like nation states before the Europeans arrived and avoided being colonized (China, Thailand, and Japan for example) are doing rather well.
BECAUSE....The people. Take out the natives and put them in a rich place and take them rich people from there, and put them in the po’ place. Come back in 20 years or so and the formerly rich place will be the po’ one, and the po’ one will now be rich.
Mostly low IQ populations.
IQ.
Interesting read; thank you for posting it.
Reflecting on it I started thinking about whether the premise applies on an individual or personal level and whether it can be applied to enduring poverty in some people in thriving countries. I think it can. The LBJ war on poverty of the 60s to dole out money to groups and individuals that can never be repaid, deepened the poverty of the group. Affirmative action, minority set asides, high levels of easy welfare, and other “free” money puts one into a cycle of being in a whirlpool that can’t be escaped. Now we have huge amounts of college loan defaults that only supported and bailed out the higher education sector of our economy.
Hmmm. Still thinking.
Gwjack
Dysfunctional cultures breed dysfunctional habits.
Note the pattern of Asian, African, Latin American, and Eastern European nations.
They live like hell for the most part.
If you want some examples of Western society - see Chicago, NYC, Left Coast and all Democratic governed cities/states.
The funny thing about the bad luck of sub-Saharan Africa is that it seems to afflict all 49 countries at the same time
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Consult the Bell Curve for a clue to the answer.
Ghana has problems, but it has moved, as a nation, from low income to lower middle status.
GDP per capita, ppp-basis, has approximately doubled since the 1990s.
https://tradingeconomics.com/ghana/gdp-per-capita-ppp
Ghana has now had several changes of government via elections. It scores well on Freedom House’s index of freedom in the world.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/ghana/freedom-world/2023
Ghana is a little better than the world average on corruption (and one of the least corrupt African countries).
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/ghana
There is, in fact, a tendency of countries that embrace democracy, free market and the rule of law to grow relatively fast and to catch up to the well-developed countries. Singapore is maybe the most famous example of this. But, think about Chile, Estonia and - today - India.
Don’t be so negative-minded that you deny progress where we are achieving progress, albeit at what may appear to be a slow rate. Instead, remember the old adage, slow and steady win the race. Also, it takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight success.
Hernando deSoto explained the problem in definitive detail years ago in The Mystery of Capital. Rule of law, enforcement of contracts, deeds to land for a start. But you can’t graft these western principles on to closed minded tribal thinking. Same as Haiti, btw, not just black Africa.
Government corruption!!
Because the people are unequal and just not up to the task of getting any better
Brains rule
Let me take a WILD guess... "Because their political leadership INTENTIONALLY keeps them in that position, so they can STEAL from the "public purse" and continue to make themselves WEALTHY!
Geography.