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Comment by flanked-evergl | Hacker News Reader

> What does "warn them" even mean?

Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.

Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.

I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.

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Some people think that the west (and others) are doing similar things, for example: focusing on some migrants rather than tackling climate change. This too will have a catastrophic human toll in my opinion, I think people are warned, and still the focus is on basically anything else.

To be honest, I would have a different issue with "the civilized countries" (whatever east/west/etc.). They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.

So, probably, rather than worry about how bad has it someone hundreds of miles away, try to improve something in the local vicinity.

> They should be a role model, and while they are a bit better than some on the list, they are quite far from what they could be.

The endless stream of illegal aliens put the lie to this claim.

Illegal immigrants will go to "the better" at probably any difference between two countries. Is that all that "the west" aspires now to?

And the level of hypocrisy in many countries is astonishing. A lot of companies in said countries take advantage of illegal immigrant labor, but nobody thinks about blaming them for the huge number of illegal immigrants.

But I think this discussion is in favor of "some elites". Rather than asking also for industrial development, redistribution, environment protection people are "encouraged" to blame everything on the immigrants. Look at UK. They wanted out of EU to "control their borders", and check how well it went for them in living standards... Probably now they complain their neighbors don't fix the problem for them.

To circle back to the start, everybody has a different opinion about what others should do, so doubt someone telling country X something will improve a lot the outcomes.

I don't think that Brazil is on its way to a humanitarian catastrophe.

What makes you say that?

Brazil has been experiencing de growth since about 2011. The GDP per capita has been decreasing, unemployment has been increasing, corruption has been increasing, and governance has been getting worse.

If this continues the people of Brazil will necessarily be much more at the mercy of forces of nature than if they had a stronger economy and were well governed.

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