Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

This is stupid thinking indulged in by westerners who were born in the lap of luxury. The market is incredibly moral. When my dad was born in a village in Bangladesh, 1 out of 4 kids didn’t live past age 5. Thanks to market reforms and the resulting economic growth, child mortality in Bangladesh has plummeted. Bangladesh’s under-5 morality rate is better today than America’s was at the same time my dad was born.

If India and Bangladesh hadn’t fucked around with socialism for decades after independence, we could have reached the same point many years ago. Millions of children would have been saved. Talk about immorality.

View on HN

Bangladesh has done well, in difficult circumstances

Market reforms helped. But those reforms could not have happened unless the state did sensible things

Those same market reforms impoverished the entire middle class in New Zealand, where the state did not do sensible things (the reverse)

Markets are good at fully allocating resources, which feudalism and central planning is not. But they also concentrate wealth into the hands of very few (that is what wrecked New Zealand's middle class) and it takes deliberate government policy to avert that.

> Market reforms helped. But those reforms could not have happened unless the state did sensible things

The state did almost nothing sensible! Bangladesh’s government, and the culture of the people more generally, is one of the most dysfunctional in the whole world. We just overthrew our government again! The free market is just a hardy plant growing in inhospitable ground as long as you don’t completely strangle it.

> Thanks to market reforms and the resulting economic growth, child mortality in Bangladesh has plummeted.

I agree that market reforms have been great for most countries that adopt it, provided they have stable and competent institutions.

However, it doesn't make sense to attribute decrease in child mortality to "market reforms". Cuba, Russia/USSR, North Korea all have seen huge declines in child mortality since 1960.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?end=2006...

Why don't you ask noted anti-socialism state Pakistan (pre and post-1971) how that's going?

We have A/B comparisons in India and Bangladesh keeping the underlying culture constant. Pakistan’s problem seems to be a Pakistan thing.

So..."Pakistan's problem is a Pakistan thing", unrelated to markets....

...but Bangladesh's success is purely attributable to markets? It's not "a Bangladesh thing"?

You might want to check your prejudices there.

There’s a Civilization-game style “tech tree” for cultural and social development. Some societies are further along in that development than others.

Pakistan faces the same cultural problem as Afghanistan and parts of the middle east: in large parts of the country, extended kinship groups dominate society, precluding the development of civic institutions and functioning government. That’s not true for the whole country. Parts of Pakistan are culturally like India or Bangladesh: it has a long history of governance by central institutions, even if that governance is dysfunctional. Imagine if 50% of the U.S. population was Appalachians. The U.S. would be a much less successful country also.

> There’s a Civilization-game style “tech tree” for cultural and social development.

...I'ma stop you there.

There really isn't.

And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.

> And you'll get a lot farther in life if you stop thinking of real people and their development and culture as video game abstractions.

Oh, it’s far too late for that. As the kids say, he’s cooked. He’ll be complaining about hypothetical Appalachians invading New England or New York or the United States (all actual examples, see below) in the nursing home.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I don’t understand. Do you (1) think Appalachia is great, or (2) you agree that Appalachia lags the rest of the U.S., but think that has nothing to do with how Appalachian parents socialize their children to behave what they teach their kids to value?

Pakistan spent quite a bit on education in East Pakistan up until 1971. and I've even pointed you to the article in Prothom Alo where Bangladeshi experts admitted that but you do you. It's not like Ibn Khaldun didn't hit on similar points with asabiyya but saying we have A/B testing here is wild.

Incredible false dilemma that has nothing to do with my observation on your weird rhetorical fixations.

Nursing homes are too American by his lights.

The opposite is true! You’ll get farther in life when you realize that how groups of people are socialized to behave matters a lot—and that’s true whether you’re talking about corporate culture or a country’s culture.

People whose brains are as soft as their hearts sell false equality, but its harmful. It’s like telling the obese person they’re great and that their problems are due to “bad genetics” or factors outside their control. It’s a polite lie and it is damaging.

Understanding that culture is just a type of technology is how you get miracles like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923. He thought culture was destiny, and he harnessed that realization to make his culture rich.

You mean the Socialism that produces higher quality of life in Scandinavia as compared to to say the US where the oh so moral market decides if you weren't born into the upper end of society you deserve to die of disease and conditions that can be treated?

The market is not moral, it is amoral and it serves those with the money to direct it.

> You mean the Socialism that produces higher quality of life in Scandinavia as compared to to say the US where the oh so moral market decides if you weren't born into the upper end of society you deserve to die of disease and conditions that can be treated?

Scandinavian countries have highly market oriented economies. Denmark and Norway are in the top 10 in Heritage Foundation’s economic freedom index and Sweden is #11. Capitalism is what generates the surplus to feed the socialists in Scandinavia.

Every single one of those economies are highly regulated to prevent 'the free market' deciding peoples lives.

Without it, you get the US. You get the life your wealth dictates, if you're not wealthy, you didn't deserve life.

Sweden's costs for insulin are over 10 times lower than that of the US, because the US let the free market decide and Sweden has a socialist political system.

At a place I lived earlier, my neighbour got out of the hospital after heart surgery with a $100k medical bill that they never recovered from. My dad had heart surgery in Canada and left the hospital with a $150 parking bill.

But no, please lets continue to try and argue the free market is moral and just.

> than that of the US, because the US let the free market decide and Sweden has a socialist political system.

Sweden doesn’t achieve lower prices for insulin through “socialism” or regulation. In Sweden, middle class people tax themselves heavily to pay for insulin for poor people. It has nothing to do with free market versus socialism. It’s free-market capitalism with very high taxes on individuals and low taxes on capital and corporation.

> But no, please lets continue to try and argue the free market is moral and just.

It is just and moral. Before Sweden had the free market, it was poor as shit and one quarter of the population of Sweden came to America. Whatever socialism you think Sweden has now, it got only after becoming rich through capitalism.

I know a number of people who have immigrated from Scandinavian countries to the US, generally for high-prestige or high-paying work. If quality of life in Scandinavia was consistently higher than in the US, they wouldn't be doing this.

How are you extrapolating overall quality of life from some anecdotes of high-prestige or high-income workers? Seems like a fallacy of composition slipped in somewhere.

People also immigrate in the other direction. And more generally, it obviously happens sometimes that people move from one country to another with a lower average quality of life.

My understanding is that a large portion of Scandinavian socialism is paid for by sovereign wealth funds, ultimately backed in their oil production and reserves.

I know they’ve gotten a lot else right of course

Amazing that advancements in Bangladeshi quality of life is due to only market forces! What an incredibly unique geopolitical phenomenon.

It’s not unique at all! When my dad was a kid in the 1950s, Singapore, China, South Korea, and Taiwan were poor—all under $1,000 GDP per capita. They were a little ahead of Bangladesh but less than a factor of 2. The U.S. at the time was around $10,000.

Today, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are rich, and China is getting there. Multiple dirt poor Asian countries getting rich within a few generations thanks to One Simple Trick!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com