World Bank to boost climate financing share to 45% | Hacker News Reader

World Bank to boost climate financing share to 45%

reuters.com

20 pointsBrajeshwar8 comments

Sounds like I should increase my climate / sustainability consultantcy fraud by 45%

This is not rational. Developing countries will be hit by climate change, but they have much more serious concerns. In Bangladesh, climate change impact was estimated to be about 9% of GDP this year due to particularly adverse conditions: https://www.newagebd.net/article/219027/climate-change-deple.... That’s less than two years of GDP growth. By 2050, it might be up to 20% of GDP: https://www.reuters.com/world/climate-change-putting-4-globa.... Mitigating that would be a far less valuable investment than investing in more roads and bridges, or healthcare programs and education to keep the GDP growing at current levels.

Every few years I turn back to this article from 2001, where some crunchy hippy Dartmouth professor opined Bangladesh should ignore World Bank guidance and stay poor: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/alternative-pro.... The World Bank has always been a bulwark of helping developing nations progress the same way developed nations did. And it’s worked. Bangladesh is a completely different country than it was in 2001. It’s disheartening to see the World Bank fall prey to hippy thinking now.

Ah, a rational thinker! Let’s dig into your rational thinking.

Do you know how climate change affects Bangladesh? People in the coastal area lose their homes and livelihoods. These people are generally farmers, living off the land, providing food for rest of the country, but not adding that much to the “GDP” otherwise.

Do you know how GDP growth happens in Bangladesh? We open more sweatshops for H&M and fast fashion, providing labor for cheap so people can look fancy. These are largely in the urban area, with workers mostly living in slums, and working 12 hour days 6 days a week.

So your “rational” solution is to let some people lose their homes and livelihood so they have no choice but to become refugees in their own country so that in America there is an abundant supply of twice-worn T shirts? Because that’s how you maximize GDP while increasing inequality and totally destroying the stability and peace within the country.

Hope you can think a bit more “rationally” with the added context, but maximizing the sum of any utility value has never been an ultimately good thing, including GDP/GDP growth.

Reminds me of the RFK (Sr) speech on the limits of GDP.

“measures everything except that which is worthwhile”

https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/may/24/robert...

My dad is from a village in Bangladesh, and I myself vividly remember rolling blackouts on hot summer nights living in the capital city, so yeah, I know those things.

Flooding is bad, and sweatshops aren’t great. But the only way to overcome those things is GDP growth. My dad went back to his village this year and was shocked to see how much it has changed, thanks to the World Bank-led GDP growth that’s happened in the last 20 years. (After decades of fucking around with socialism, which is another plot by bleeding heart first world types to keep other people poor.)

The best foreigners are the ones that invested in those H&M factories. By contrast the bleeding heart types who glorify third-world poverty have done exactly jack shit to make anything better. Bleeding heart hippies aren’t going to come help build flood control systems. And relying on foreign generosity is suicidal. GDP growth is the only way to protect the country.

> My dad is from a village in Bangladesh, and I myself vividly remember rolling blackouts on hot summer nights living in the capital city, so yeah, I know those things.

Oh really? I was born and raised there, so please tell me more. Also, did you know that the blackouts are back? Was there during this ramadan, and power is in shortage ever since the Ukraine war. Probably your daddy didn't tell you the whole story?

> My dad went back to his village this year and was shocked to see how much it has changed, thanks to the World Bank-led GDP growth that’s happened in the last 20 years. The best foreigners are the ones that invested in those H&M factories.

I am sure H&M would like you to believe that, LOL. One of the largest driver of Bangladeshi GDP is remittance, which comes from people dying while bringing luxury to the oil-rich like the Fifa world cup [1]. But yeah, US ultracapitalists paying cents on the dollar to the garments workers [2], most of which are then again stolen by the local polticians is what's causing the "development", sure.

If you would genuinely like to know more, find a Bangladeshi person living in Bangladesh instead of reading Marc Anderssen's memo and posting everywhere pretending to be Bangladeshi because you visited Bangladesh once 20 years ago. If you can't do that, then please, for the sake of the millions of people currently in Bangladesh, stop spreading propaganda and misinformation online about Bangladesh. Thank you.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/23/r...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rana_Plaza_collapse

I would love it if Bangladesh had been like Singapore and suppressed the socialists instead of losing decades (and millions of dead babies to poverty) fucking around. We would’ve never left. Thankfully, the majority of the country has wised up: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade.... Unfortunately, lots of people still have the left-wing poverty mindset, hoping either that European and American leftists will help them, or alternatively, hoping that leftist ideas that never made any poor country into a rich country—and certainly wasn’t how Europeans and Americans themselves got rich—will somehow work.

Half my family still lives there. It’s completely different than it was even 20 years ago. What’s remarkable to see the degree to which the impetus to emigrate has declined among my younger cousins, compared to my parent’s and my generation.

By the way, remittances is under 5% of GDP in Bangladesh, about the same as Mexico. Nothing to be ashamed of—many rich countries today, ranging from Italy to Japan to Ireland, had a similar history of poor workers leaving to work abroad.

Is there anybody more clueless than Bangladeshi and Indian leftists? At least these coddled American kids have an excuse—they are completely insulated from how the material prosperity they enjoy was achieved. But Bangladesh went from being a perennial basket case in the decades after independence to being one of the fastest growing economies in the world after following the World Bank guidance. You can look over at China doing the same thing, or at South Korea or Japan or Singapore. How do you tie your shoes? (By the way, I had a Bangladshi passport until high school so I’m not sure what flex you’re trying to pull.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com