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bogus comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (192)
South Korea and Taiwan had no problem with Malaria killing children in which the society invested resources.
I don't understand why Van der Vossen thinks that there is clear evidence that the difference between what happened in a country like South Korea and what happened in subsaharan Africa has nothing to do with genes. Of course that's the politically correct belief. But standing there and saying that development economics proved it beyond all odds seems strange to me.
The rule of law does happen to be an important ingridiant to producing wealth but I don't think you get rule of law directly through buying iPhones.
To the extend that you believe that the rule of law is very useful in helping third world countries the next question would be whether there are cost effective interventions to increase it. That's a standard EA question.
That seems like something nice to say, but politically it's very hard to imagine that a First World government gives up the ability of the First World country to feed it's own population without being dependent on outside forces.
Politically it's easier to ship excess grain from Europe to Africa than burning it but the excess grain doesn't get produced with the goal of feeding African's at all but to have European farmers that provide Europe with a food supply that also can supply in times of crisis.
Well, let's see. It's quite convenient for us that there's a country right next door to South Korea, called North Korea. North Korea has the same genes as South Korea, and yet its economy is much more similar to the economy of Sub-saharan Africa than South Korea. Sure, that's just N=1, anecdotes are not data and all that, but I'd call that pretty good evidence.
The fact that the bad policies of North Korea lead to bad economic outcomes is no evidence that all bad economic outcomes are due to bad policies. It simply isn't.
Nobody in the EA camp denies that policies of countries matter and that the property rights and the rule of law aren't important. I haven't seen Peter Singer argue either that putting Embargos on other countries to put economic pressure on them instead of engaging in trade is bad.
Most African countries on the on the other hand don't suffer under strong embargo's. They are in the sphere of the IMF who preaches property rights for decades and tries to get the countries to respect property rights.