So I’ve seen conditions in some poorer nations in Asia be described as similar to slave labour, but we’re talking about Taiwan and South Korea aren’t we? These are high-income countries, so I’d be really surprised if they had such conditions.
I could believe EU has some stricter environmental regulations than both, though
South Korea is the worst example of free market spontaneously leading to great outcomes through sweatshops. The amount of government cental planning and protectionism is I think unparalleled there for a success story.
It would greatly explain the performance of East Asian countries. They share the same environmental challenges whereas in the US the challenges are vastly different depending on which coast you are near. Of course China had less red tape (no pun intended) in some regards for development than the other East Asian countries so it executes even faster than its peers. I think its more of a slam dunk than comparing Europe with the US in these terms, which is commensurate with their ability to churn out infrastructure.
There seems to be a lot more cronyism in governments that don't do a lot of useful things. I'm sure there's favoritism in South Korea but at the same time their industrial policy is first rate.
"The rest of the world outside China has remained at the same or worse poverty levels, largely."
This largely is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Specifically, many countries in southeast Asia, geographically close to China but using different societal models, have grown much, much richer since 1950.
South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia have nowadays much higher living standards than they used to have.
Yes, but South Korea is leading the pack. Something unusual since they only industrialized in the 1970s and were poorer than North Korea until the 1980s.
Lots of Asian countries have a high standard of living too.
One of the biggest differences is functioning institutions. As bad as some first world governments can seem from our perspective, they’re way better than the kleptocrats and warlords who rule some parts of the world. And yeah, when you have functioning institutions, you do end up with smarter and more productive populations because children can go to school instead of slaving away in the cobalt mines.
It is unbelievable how much more developed most east asian countries are compared to the west. While poverty, corruption and crime are rampant in western europe and the us, countries such as japan, south korea and singapore are thriving.
China has raised a billion people into a comfortable standard of living by doing exactly this.
Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam all have developed at substantial rates via this method as well.
Maybe you're thinking of countries which are based around resource extraction? Because building a ton of factories and putting people to work making gadgets for other countries is pretty well proven.
East Asia is the only region which was certainly 'poor' but now can be described as somewhat 'rich', and they are all more or less followed the same pattern:
- low wage, high volume, light industry for export
- lower wage, high volume, heavy industry
- multi-decade protectionism to raise global competitive domestic champions
- no democracy, if you can help it to ensure political stability to execute multi-decade strategy
Idiosyncratic caveats:
- Japan got its boost particularly by becoming the arms manufacturer for the US in the Korean War
- Singapore / Hong Kong also had financial liberalisation / international money laundering for the Brits
- Korea / Taiwan / Hong Kong also had shipping
China has followed clearly the same trend (note the irrelevance of the political system, main thing is to avoid democratic instability), simply becoming more massive than any before because it is inherently massive, and has therefore even greater economies of scale to leverage.
Ah the multipolar dream: the Philippines, Japan, Taiwan, the baltics, Armenia, the kurds, they all try to wake up from that nightmare. Turns out gradual improvement in enslavement is preferable to actual enslavement..
I could believe EU has some stricter environmental regulations than both, though
reply