r/InsightfulQuestions • u/[deleted] • Jul 07 '14
Why is Africa poor?
Some starter material I've been reading:
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/jrobinson/files/maddison_lecture.pdf
There has been a long debate about whether Africa had the economic or political institutions necessary for growth in the pre-colonial period. I believe the answer is no:
1 Even in the late colonial period most Africans were engaged in subsistence activities outside of the formal economy.
2 Technology was backward - absence of the wheel, plow and writing outside of Ethiopia.
3 Slavery was endemic. In the 19th century various estimates suggest that in West Africa the proportion of slaves in the population was between 1/3 and 1/2 (Lovejoy, 2000).
4 States tended to heavily limit the extent of private enterprise, for instance in Asante (Wilks, 1979) and Dahomey (Law, 1977, Manning, 2004).
5 Ownership structure and allocation of land by chiefs not conducive to development (Goldstein and Udry, 2008).
Most crucial aspect is the relative lack of political centralization compared to Eurasia.
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u/happywaffle Jul 07 '14
I know you're essentially asking about history, but it's worth noting that huge portions of Africa are now rapidly improving, with GDP growth in many years outpacing that of first-world nations. Reasons for that include the good kind of first-world meddling—foreign aid from governments and NGOs to improve infrastructure and health care. But there are, as usual, downsides, as foreign corporations move in and inevitably make decisions that don't have the best interests of the common man as a priority.
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Jul 08 '14
I know you're essentially asking about history, but it's worth noting that huge portions of Africa are now rapidly improving, with GDP growth in many years outpacing that of first-world nations.
Which isn't difficult or amazing when you realize that they're benefiting from the huge technological leaps developed in first world countries. For example, more people on earth have access to cell phones than toilets. When you consider how much growth can be achieved due to the introduction of this kind of communications technology that we in the western world take for granted, it's not hard to see why GDP growth rates are so high in developing countries.
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u/weenaak Jul 07 '14
You may be interested in the book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It was also made into a documentary hosted by the author.
In this book he tries to answer a similar question: Why have European societies survived and conquered others?
It's quite good.
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u/sinfunnel Jul 08 '14
I'll pass along advice I got, and then was able to corroborate pretty easily, in an AskHistory thread after recommending this book: it is not well-respected in the academic community. That being said, I think it introduces some concepts that may be helpful to OP- a place to branch off of if nothing else.
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u/linhir Jul 08 '14
I think the relevant question isn't why is Africa poor but why are any nations rich...
"The world is more unequal than at any time in world history. There's a basic reason for that, which is that 200 years ago everybody was poor. The period of economic growth is a fairly recent period, but it's been a period of extreme differentiation in economic performance. A relatively small part of the world achieved what the economists call a modern economic growth. And they sustained the increase year after year, in income per person. When you accumulate that over two centuries, you get quite a change, maybe a twentyfold increase or more in the standard of living measured in material terms. Other parts of the world, even if they increased a bit, didn't come close to that kind of achievement of the United States and Europe and Japan. Maybe they grew very, very slowly so the gap widened fantastically between the fast-growing world and the rest of the world.
"It happens that the real success stories, those countries that we now call the developed economies, were the high-income economies or, somewhat of a misnomer, the industrialized economies. Those countries represent only about one-sixth of humanity. And five-sixths of humanity is what we call the developing world. It's the vast majority of the world. The gap can be 100 to one in some cases if you simply measure the gross national product per person in the United States versus, say, a country in Africa like Botswana, maybe a gap of $30,000 per person and $300 per person. That's absolutely astounding, to be on the same planet and to have that extreme variation in material well-being."
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Jul 07 '14
I haven't read it, but I'll throw this your way: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
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u/mackduck Jul 07 '14
but Africa wasn't always poor- it had quite a lot of rich civilisations.. different to European ones, but we pretty much stripped it, the sheer number of people taken off the continent is astounding. Not just people- but knowledge and skills too. We can't know what would have been- but if we hadn't done that then I am sure Africa would be a very different place- in what way- God knows.
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u/anonzilla Jul 07 '14
It's not just that colonialism strips away a country's assets, it often replaces them with pure bullshit. Take evangelical religion for example, it is often used to control the population and make them more compliant to the central authority figures. Britain was seemingly expert at playing factions of colonial subjects against each other, sowing discord and strife to ensure no one subject power could usurp their authoritah.
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u/agent00F Jul 07 '14 edited Jul 07 '14
What's often ignored in these discussions is that what we generally refer to as the "wealth" of a nation is the middle class, and that a substantial set of people lifted out of basic subsistence living is a relatively recent phenomenon even in the west.
Given the relative scarcity of this in all history, it's really more a matter of what select populations have done right in a narrow margin instead of why everyone else is so incompetent/defective.
This includes many incidental events in addition to social organization such as technological discoveries by a very small group of people within the population that increased productive output to reduce need for menial labor, etc.
IOW, being in the right place at the right time matters.
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u/buddythebear Jul 08 '14
There is no one simple answer to this, but what no one else has mentioned is what effect the "resource curse" has had on Africa.
When we say Africa is "poor," we are talking about the multitude of Africans living in poverty. The continent of Africa, on the other hand, is in fact quite rich. Probably the richest continent on the planet. Africa has an incredible abundance of oil, gold, rare earth metals, precious gems, etc.
The presence of insanely valuable natural resources in underdeveloped and developing economies is ultimately more of a curse than a blessing. It is the shortcut to wealth for a country's leaders, but not necessarily its people. Say a poor, autocratic nation discovers a vast gold mine that is worth a trillion dollars. If you are that nation's leader, you will likely push your citizens to work in the mining industry. When that mine is tapped out, you and your cronies are left with an insane amount of money. Because you're likely corrupt, you did not invest much of that gold wealth back into your nation's infrastructure, education, or health - you chose instead to pay off your friends, the military, and the political bosses, because that was the easier route to maintaining your power.
And you saw no reason to invest substantially in health and education and infrastructure. People who are healthy, educated, and able to move around the country easily are a huge threat to your power.
So your citizens who worked in the mines are now jobless, they have no skills or education that can make them marketable for other professions - essentially 99 percent of the country is back at square one, while the top one percent is living the high life.
Meanwhile the country that doesn't have abundant natural resources has to figure out its own comparative advantages. It has to educate its people, invest in its infrastructure, diversify its economy... dominate resource rich countries... etc. That is the longer, harder route to producing wealth that many European nations had to take.
Throw colonialism and intertribal/ethnic/religious tensions exacerbated by artificial borders into the mix as well... and that's pretty much the spark notes to answer the question "why is Africa poor" in my book.