Why is the third world poor?

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Non-north Africa has plentiful of resources, it's probably the most resourceful continent on the planet.


Actually, if you take a look at the globe, you will notice that the most historically advanced, aggressive and expansionist civilizations who dominated others were born from areas having harsh conditions and lacked food from nature: Egypt (Harsh desert), Phoenicians/Carthage (lack of fertile lands, had to go seafaring), Roman empire (harsh winter, lack of lands, hundreds of pre-Rome enemy states inside Italy), Arabian empires (Harsh desert), Mongols (severe droughts) , European empires (Harsh and long winters), Japanese empire (narrow lands, earthquakes, warring feudal states)...etc

Of course some of these civilizations were defeated/conquered by stronger civilizations and became third world.

While peoples living in amazonian or african jungles had easy access to food and water from the jungle itself, they didn't need to progress more, they didn't have to innovate or to expand into further territories.

Of course it this pattern doesn't apply on all, like the Inuits for example - but the Inuits probably had access to plenty of animal food in their environment.

Isn't Angola the country where the Presidents daughter became a billionaire because he sold her the countries resources for peanuts? That suggests corruption is the problem there.

It doesn't help that malnutrition and disease keep a large number of people in sub-saharan Africa from reaching their intellectual potential, of course.

VisualPolitik EN on Youtube had a special on how Angola was the most expensive place to live in the world, and it's mostly because of that wealth differential between the European, Chinese, and other companies invested in their resources and the people outside of town living in huts. I get the impression that when you have no middle class or no meaningful spectrum of income between top and bottom everything becomes incredibly expensive for the rich - I think that's yet another incentive for why they'd be really foolish to squash the middle class in the west or let automation be a winner-take-all game. If they make their bed they do have to lie in it.

I just thought of something. What if we gave the president of Haiti and IQ test? Would he score high or low?

You may be right when you say that IQ is connected to success, though you may be confusing cause with effect.

Mikah mentioned only the correlation. You're projecting all over the place regarding his unstated conclusions regarding cause and effect. Nor did he suggest there was a causal link between the two.

Is IQ a hard marker of intellect, or is it a measure of the ability to solve specific types of problem?

If the latter, it might be presumed that low average IQ and poor outcomes stem from the same shared root problem, e.g. lack of education or technological deficiencies. How many TVs, smart phones and computers are there per household in those nations compared to countries which perform better? How about nutritional diversity? Are there vitamin or protein deficiencies caused by cultural behaviours that are detrimental to good health?

The really sad part about this is that's already been resolved. In the US both Republicans and Democrats were trying to pour money into Head Start thinking that education could raise the IQ of children in inner-city schools and break the success deficit. It turned out that it did at least from first grade to third cause a significant jump but that jump was gone by fourth grade and while these kids had better habits and were more likely to go to college it didn't raise IQ. This is part of why it's a third-rail issue and people like Charles Murray, who even want to make compassionate sense of it, get zapped.

I know you weren't making your own point there and that was related to DMK's comments but I'd offer the above to him as well - ie. that ship has pretty much sailed and, despite what anyone wants to think, it's not environmental short of environmental assaults on development in some cases from heavy metals or malnutrition which is ultimately a biological concern.

Indeed not, and it's gratifying that at least one person on here is capable of recognising (or perhaps willing to recognise) the difference between use of metaphor and hypothesis in order to better frame or represent a position vs the position itself.

However, they *did* find that nutritional supplements can help. Given that nutritional deficiency is widespread in Africa, that's probably a significant contribution to the IQ gap. Since African-Americans have IQs of 85-90 (didn't they renorm the tests a while ago?), and their ancestors weren't taken from the cognitive elite of West Africa, I think it's safe to say the IQs of those countries would at least that high if their childhood environments weren't so bad.

That was my second paragraph and yes, I think we'd be fixing a lot of problems if we worked to broad-base nutrition and safe potable water along with education improvement. Even if there is a ceiling we can't move past, which may or may be the case (we at least don't know how to get around it right now and conventional methods don't work), I think we're obligated to decrease the number of occasions where a person is forced to start below where they should have been at - especially considering those factors are beyond their control whether as a child or even as a developing embryo or fetus.

I also can't help thinking about the issue of world peace, how much we spend on defense in the US, how much complexity gets added to the world due to external threats, and if we could have as much of the world as possible finding itself capable of first-world living conditions we'd probably see a significant drop in the kinds of problems that create these massive sinks of money and human energy.

It seems you are aware of the correlation of success and IQ, are you aware of the correlations between low IQ and all sorts of ... how to put this ... sub-par behaviours? The problems of social and family dysfunction, employability, impulsive behaviours, criminality, promise-keeping (forming and keeping to contracts) and more. Imagine that on a much wider scale compared to what is seen in other countries.

There's also the problem of modern infrastructure. Anyone with a basic understanding of mathematics knows that a country's low average IQ doesn't mean it can't produce smart people, it's just the number produced is lower. You need a good chunk of 110+ IQ people to maintain a modern economy's critical infrastructures so imagine if your country can't produce enough competent people to run its basic infrastructures like power plants or modern agriculture, hospitals, finance etc... A problem made even worse by the fact that the smarter ones run away to Europe or America as soon as they have a chance.

So the theory goes anyway. Even if foolish Western governments started doing the right thing in Africa, there is only so much a great leader can do.

They're poor due to corrupt and bad government. The leaders/rulers of those countries aren't poor by any means.

This is going to be a bit of a digression, but I want to make another important point.

In several "third world" countries, Christians and Muslims get along with almost no conflict. Cameroon is like this. Tanzania is like this. Iran is like this.

Fun Fact: The Iranian government grants Iranian Christians the right to sell non-halal foods. Additionally, Iranian Christians celebrate Christmas with Santas and everything. The Iranian Muslims are okay with this.

This busts the myth that people in "third world" countries are a bunch of barbarians, as well as the myth that Christians and Muslims cannot peacefully coexist.

Although these countries are very right-wing, the people of the book seem to get along just fine.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Most Muslims aren't violent. The vast majority of Muslim people are similar to Christian conservatives in terms of worldview and lifestyle. The problem emerges when Muslims and Christians cannot see their similarities.

Of course, Muslims seem violent to us Westerners because the Muslims that come to the West are usually victims of war-torn countries ... though you get a much different picture of Islam when you examine the more peaceful Muslim countries. There are several.

I agree with the OP. Religion is the problem. Religions teach things that cannot be proven and illogical ideas, which I believe leads to irrational thinking. Take any country, look it up on Wikipedia, and go to the Religion section. See what percent of the population is "No Religion". The higher the number the more developed the country will be. If the country has high religous affiliation the more likely it is to be poor/corrupt.

I actually think that capitalism is the decisive factor. I brought up religion because American conservatives tend to hate these countries even though these countries are often Christian.

Countries with a socialist economies tend to be atheistic because religion is the heart of a heartless world.

Poverty leads to religion, not the other way around.

I think it's due to a lack of resources and educational opportunities that the third world countries struggle the way that they do.

New Zealand