So we've got 3000 words eulogizing a metric that tells you more about financialization than flourishing. Look at life expectancy, infant mortality, or caloric intake and you'll find a more interesting story -- with some poor countries doing very well, and increasingly so, whereas others are on a fairly grim trajectory.

Or is it the wealthy exploiting the poor through low wages?

Outsourcing worked while we didnt have AI to the level we needed

It was always gonna be a temporary stopgap. Sorry, the global community doesnt have enough empathy for humans THAT far away to actually share wealth w them. At least we graduated to having social safety nets within nations.

It’s a graph of regional GDP per capita as a percentage of the U.S. Latin America was around 40% around 1950, but has declined to around 25% by 2018. Sub-saharan africa has slowly lost ground since 1950. Southeast asia has gone from almost as poor as Africa in 1950 to almost as rich as southern europe (50% of US GDP per capita).

What makes some countries rich and some countries poor? In the modern era, I think political dysfunction explains a lot. Developing countries with neoliberal governments that started out authoritarian (Singapore, Korea, Taiwan) have done well. Countries that can’t maintain a stable government have suffered.

In my home country, they were experiencing 5-6% per capita GDP growth for about 15 years. But then a motley coalition of idealistic students and Islamists overthrew the government. I suspect that will lead to a lengthy period of slow growth, because who wants to invest in a country where people regularly overthrow the government?

It's made even worse by the great bias towards "everything about globalism and capitalism is obviously fantastic for the world!".

This case is such a prime example of both of the above. Firstly, the one-off China event having such a big impact on its own that general theories are entirely irrelevant. Second, of course

> "Now that those were swept away—they were, he said, merely a “temporary phenomenon”—the catch-up growth that economic theory predicted had finally arrived. Globalization was working; development was succeeding; the gap between rich and poor countries was closing.

Consider this: if you take 'countries' as given (questionable), and some become rich whereas others remain or become poor, by induction you'd expect those trends to continue. A country that has remained poor for decades is likely to remain poor for decades, etc. "Bad governments" and other conditions that create poverty are not some kind of mean-reverting aberration.

The economists will carry on though, and thanks to their connections with finance and government, their prestige will never truly wink out.

The fundamental thrust of the article is that poor countries only "converged" for a short while due to the Chinese-driven commodity boom, and I think this argument is very compelling. Worse, as history has shown tons of times, commodity booms often end up being bad for a country in the long term because they don't lead to meaningful investments in other productivity-improving endeavors (e.g. Dutch disease that the article mentions).

And I think a subtext of this article is that the economic profession in general has a ton of soul searching to do. Too often economics has depicted rosy outcomes for a host of activities where it has just been flat out wrong. This article goes into detail about how "convergence" almost never happened except for a short "sugar high" driven my Chinese commodity demand. Similarly, I've seen a few mea culpas over the years arguing that the once orthodox view that globalization would be great for everyone failed to take into account how it could contribute to destabilizing democracies as the "economic losers" in rich countries started to demand more political power, one aspect in the rise of populism and some of its dangerous effects.

Prosperity and growth come from free markets. The correlation is very strong. Poor countries are poor because they eschew free markets.

Perhaps that sort of thing could be useful enough to justify the extra bytes?

[1] https://techliberation.com/2009/05/28/on-measuring-technolog...

The obvious omission here is well developed in Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism: it's hard to accumulate capital when all of the productivity growth from foreign "investment" by the rich world is captured by the "investors".

Even if that had turned out true, so what? The gap between rich and poor countries closing is not the same thing as the gap between the rich and poor closing!

Around 2000-s the West switched into the "whatever you do, we don't care as long as you stay inside your country" mode. Moreover, the West made it easy to expatriate money. You could earn your fortune in Russia by stealing money from schools via various corrupt schemes, but once you crossed the border of Russia, you instantly became a respected businessman who should be treated with respect.

The last year's Nobel in Economics was awarded to Daron Acemoglu for his work on extractive versus inclusive institutions ("Why Nations Fail"). And the West unwittingly (?) recreated the same conditions that resulted in development gaps during the early colonial era.

And yes, the West is to blame here. Not China. Pretty much nobody in, say, Congo is abusing child labor to get money to emigrate to China. But I bet that quite a few people from Congo now have very nice properties in London.