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Comment by nsns | Hacker News Reader

Amazing, not one word about colonialism.

"by the late 1700s, England had embarked on the largest sustained period of economic growth since the Neolithic age"

Right, and many countries in the world still try to resurrect themselves from that "economic growth" (hint: it was based on pirating their national and human resources). The other "thriving" European countries followed suit (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa).

After less than six decades since the abolition of explicit colonialism, it's still quite early to say why some countries recovered quickly while others didn't.

While I'm a great believer in democracy, I think we should be aware that a lot of these approaches are nothing but self serving democratic propaganda (propaganda, not science).

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This article doesn't mention it, but the book itself does discuss colonialism quite a bit. To simplify, it argues that "bad" institutions are those that are extractive, in that they primarily benefit a small elite, and that such institutions tend to perpetuate themselves. They do blame colonialism for the existence of such institutions in much of Africa, arguing that the institutions there were originally set up as extractive by the European powers (since the goal was to extract wealth for the colonial power), and after independence they tended to perpetuate themselves, but extracting wealth for a new African elite instead.

The authors were also involved in an earlier, quite influential, paper that showed a statistical correlation between European settlement and post-colonial institution quality (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2677930). Their causal hypothesis (which is harder to prove) is that colonized countries with extensive European settlement were forced to set up institutions that were less extractive (since they politically had to serve at least these settlers, who demanded things like basic infrastructure) than those that had only a small group of administrators living there and no settlement, which were run completely on a basis of extracting wealth for the remote power.

Thank you. After posting my comment it occurred to me that I was only criticizing the article ,not the book, which I haven't read. So thanks for the clarification.

> hint: it was based on pirating their national and human resources

And why was England capable of pillaging whole continents? It's not like it was significantly larger, and it's not like they could do that in Europe (they tried that with the French for centuries).

European countries were already superior, at least in the sense of more military capable, than their African counterparts. There was nothing stopping African rulers from doing the reverse and subduing Europe. If anything, they had more time.

Add to this current monetary system which favours the US dollar and is backed with tons of gun power. Not exactly the ideal world of free trade I'd say.

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