Lumifer comments on Taking Effective Altruism Seriously - Less Wrong

2 Post author: Salemicus 07 June 2015 06:59AM

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Comment author: Lumifer 07 June 2015 02:23:56AM *  5 points [-]

This is not obvious to me; should it be?

Yes, catch-up growth is easier -- there are lots of studies. The reason is a combination of several things like starting from a low base and not needing to discover anything: all you need to do is implement well-known technologies and policies.

This should not mean that generating growth is easy for undeveloped countries -- lots of them are unable to. But those countries which manage to get to a lift-off and into a positive feedback loop do generate very high catch-up growth rates for a period of time. The obvious current example is China.