.i'd washed my hands off sajha for the time being - especially since i needed to rest and enjoy the apparent victory of the people. but here is this topic and i couldn't resist. so...here goes nuthin'
i think it is nice to look at developed countries and praise them, implicitly or explicitly, overtly or covertly. i like that because it is reflective of positive thinking, which makes life so much better. at the same time i don't know if positive thinking makes you richer. i am not saying that positive thinking and wealth are mutually exclusive - all i am saying is they are not necessarily two sides of the same coin. some people may have positive thinking because they are rich and vice versa or positive thinking by some might lead them to not believe in wealth. ok, to the topic at hand.
it is too simplistic (and indeed, dangerous) to boil down the fate of nations, at least the economic fate, to a few points - "bare essentials". looks great but it dangerous. let's see, there are 9 in the original post. even before i go into whether they are valid avenues of development of nations, i would start by asking the question:
is it correlation or causation or reverse causation? in other words, did ethics, integrity, responsibitlity, respect of the law, respect of rights of fellow citizens, workaholicism, savings and investment, will for super action and puctuality cause growth and development or is it the other way around or are they merely moving together without a causal link in either direction?
again, to see the names of colonized (current or former) countries as examples is interesting. i have to admit what i am going to say here is not totally original. my views on this have been heavily influenced by Daron Acemoglu, an up-and-coming Turkish economist, i think he is currently at MIT. he contends that when we talk about colonialism and subsquent fate of colonized nations, it is important to look at the
institutional legacy of colonialism. he basically argues that there were two modes of colonialism - one that focused on
extraction and another that focused on
deeper involvement. india would be an example of the former while america would be an example of the latter. let me clarify - heck, i'll just say it in story form. so when the british came to india, they saw that it was already a big country with plenty of
civil infrastructure in place. so they decided, they were not going to bring in wholesale changes in that country as that would be too expensive. besides, to control and tell a whole bunch of people to start living differently would meet much resistance. so the institutions they set up in india was designed to extract - send in a few people, few troops and extract the resources, and collect tributes etc. when the british came to america however, they saw that there weren't many people there but there was a lot land to be developed. so what they started doing was bring in people and start a system of institutions of what they knew best at the time - things like "rule-of-law" and "property rights" - things that one could almost consider to be accidentally chosen were it not for the experience they'd already had with them in europe. of course, this meant dismantling whatever existing infrastructure (civil or otherwise) these places had. hence the destruction of the native americans. "guns, germs and steel" in short. but of course, this they did for themselves, mind you not for this new country they were building. [ok, i know i wasn't accurate when i said the british came to america, but that was just a story, you get the idea.] acemoglu's claim is that colonialism had a drastic effect on the wealth of nations. formerly wealthy nations who were colonized became, and are still poor, while formerly not-so-rich countries became, are are now, richer when we carry out a cross country comparison. the reason lies in the the different institutions cultivated by the colonizers - and i like that idea.
{the swiss have always been great at being neutral. no offence, all power to them, but that has turned out to be quite favorable. swiss-land has been the haven for several fleeing aristocrats from time immemorial. most recently, i guess you could talk about nazi gold and other riches being stuck there. of course, that is not enough to get rich but it certainly helps!}
now to the more controversial issues: ethics, integrity etc. i would just say one thing and one thing alone - hunger for money, plus the ability to compromise one's beliefs (or the ability to be unscrupulous) for that supreme being - money - certainly helps a lot. other than that, there are things that
seem to help like hard work - but think of all the hard working people in nepal. savings - look at america, low savings high growth (at least in the last coupla decades). again helps and causes are very different.
other than that, i really don't think we are up to the point where we can say, yes this causes growth and development and that does not. if we'd known, and assuming we all want that, wouldn't we be there already or close? and certainly there are a lot of political and geo-political factors at play.
i would like to assert that the original post is not truth, at least not
the truth. i am not even sure there is such a thing as truth, but if there is, this is not it. i think we can begin with asking what is development - does wealth cut it (in terms of defining development)?
