I think about this question a lot. I’m from a third world country (my dad was born in a village in Bangladesh). I think it’s tremendously important for academia to study what factors have allowed certain countries to develop stable, prosperous democracies.
Unfortunately, I think we will see no progress in this area for political reasons. I was browsing the “racial literacy” curriculum used by my daughter’s school. Most of it is fluff, but the fourth grade unit is a doozy: https://secureservercdn.net/50.62.198.70/b51.f3f.myftpupload.... It chalks up the differences in development between countries to “geography” giving some countries a “head start.” This is absurd to anyone who has studied a little history. Countries like Bangladesh had a huge head start. In Bangladesh, food just jumps into your basket. Meanwhile Europeans were hacking away at soil that freezes for large parts of the year. And that doesn’t explain why certain countries became rich in the 20th century. How about a unit on how Singapore went from poor to rich in a single generation? The effect of colonialism, etc., can’t be ignored. But Bangladesh had been rich relative to Britain in the past. Yet by the time the British East India company came to India, Britain was more than twice as rich per capita as India, and the Netherlands more than four times as rich. I want to know how that happened. The British will never write a $42 trillion check for what they allegedly siphoned off from India. But understanding how the British (themselves the victims of repeated invasions) came to have the economic and military advantage that allowed them to do that would be valuable.
Unfortunately, there is no politically correct answer to this question that allows study of what Bangladeshis could have done or could do differently. We’re raising an entire generation of kids who will be socialized to believe that the challenges facing the third world are due to factors outside the control of those people, and that the only route to development is paternalistic aid from the first world.
Unfortunately, I think we will see no progress in this area for political reasons. I was browsing the “racial literacy” curriculum used by my daughter’s school. Most of it is fluff, but the fourth grade unit is a doozy: https://secureservercdn.net/50.62.198.70/b51.f3f.myftpupload.... It chalks up the differences in development between countries to “geography” giving some countries a “head start.” This is absurd to anyone who has studied a little history. Countries like Bangladesh had a huge head start. In Bangladesh, food just jumps into your basket. Meanwhile Europeans were hacking away at soil that freezes for large parts of the year. And that doesn’t explain why certain countries became rich in the 20th century. How about a unit on how Singapore went from poor to rich in a single generation? The effect of colonialism, etc., can’t be ignored. But Bangladesh had been rich relative to Britain in the past. Yet by the time the British East India company came to India, Britain was more than twice as rich per capita as India, and the Netherlands more than four times as rich. I want to know how that happened. The British will never write a $42 trillion check for what they allegedly siphoned off from India. But understanding how the British (themselves the victims of repeated invasions) came to have the economic and military advantage that allowed them to do that would be valuable.
Unfortunately, there is no politically correct answer to this question that allows study of what Bangladeshis could have done or could do differently. We’re raising an entire generation of kids who will be socialized to believe that the challenges facing the third world are due to factors outside the control of those people, and that the only route to development is paternalistic aid from the first world.