(Part 2) Best development & growth economics books according to redditors
We found 1,224 Reddit comments discussing the best development & growth economics books. We ranked the 336 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
One economist who has studied this a fair amount is Amartya Sen. In Poverty and Famines he argues that the principal cause of famines is not so much a lack of food production as inefficiency and inequalities in food distribution.
To give an extended quote from a description of his work by the Nobel Foundation (he won the prize in 1998)
> In Poverty and Famines, Sen challenges the common view that a drastic decline in the supply of food is necessarily the most significant explanation for famine. But he does not claim to be the first to perceive that numerous other factors can cause famine in large groups of a population; nor does he maintain that a shortage of food cannot trigger famine. According to Sen, the conception which prevailed when the book was published, known as FAD (food availability decline), cannot explain phenomena observed during many famines, such as: (i) famine has occurred in years when the supply of food per capita was not lower than during previous years without famine; (ii) food prices increased considerably in some years, although the supply of food was not lower as compared to previous years; (iii) in all cases of famine, large groups have not suffered starvation; and (iv) in some case, food has been exported from famine-stricken areas.
>Sen shows that a profound understanding of famine has to be based on the factors which affect the actual opportunities of different groups in society. Starvation occurs when the actual opportunities available to groups of people do not include sufficient access to food, and there are many social and economic factors which limit such opportunities. For example, part of his explanation for the Bangladesh famine of 1974 is that flooding throughout the country that year significantly raised food prices, while the work opportunities for agricultural workers declined drastically as one of the crops could not be harvested. Due to these factors, the real incomes of agricultural workers declined so much that this group was disproportionately stricken by starvation.
Sure. Simply help them out economically, get them out of the poverty trap and birth rates will go down. The End of Poverty and Common Wealth go into the trend in good detail. My copies are lent out so unfortunately I'll have to do hand waving around figures and which countries have had successes here. If you are more interested than just a snarky comment I highly recommend reading both books.
Short summary: Families in countries with poor overall health and economies get caught in a poverty trap. In most of these countries the parents need to depend on their children to provide for them later on. The odds are quite high of any individual child dying before they are in a position to be able to help out so parents would prefer to double up. In societies where women are not considered able to provide such the families average about four children - they want two boys and need on average 4 children to get there.
Due to the bad economic conditions the larger family is almost always poorer than the previous generation. Fewer resources to go around and no available infrastructure to grow what they have. Also, the larger family is harder to provide for. Schooling typically gets neglected in everyone but the oldest boy and there isn't enough food to go around.
The solutions? One tends to be increased women's rights so they are viewed to be able to support a family and help support the parents. Getting to that point reduces the average family size to a little more than 2 per family. Reducing mortality rates has a similar effect in reducing family sizes and allows families to invest more in the children in terms of food and schooling.
The average family size tends to fall below 2 after lowering mortality rates, providing contraceptives and increased women participation in the workforce.
These transitions in family size take place over the course of some years of course.
Edit: Want to help?
Microloans are a great way to do so. They are small zero interest loans to poor entrepreneurs. These help people invest in themselves and have helped raised the status of women in many countries (most notably Bangladesh through the Grammeen Bank). This happens because women repay much more reliably than men and tend much more to use the money earned from the investment towards helping the family and community rather than gambling or drinking it away.
The NY Times had a nice article of one success story. You can make a microloan at Kiva.org (my profile). When the debt is repaid in full you get the money back and can either recycle into a new loan or withdraw it.
Another good organization to give to is Millennium Promise - they focus on trying to break the poverty trap in targeted villages within Africa since the poverty trap affects almost all of the continent and we as a culture tend to dismiss them as lazy breeders without addressing the real causes.
Impossible to name one. Books only had significance for me when they addressed a particular lifecycle that the business was in.
EDIT: Lots of requests for more books as they relate to 'business lifecycle'. Also, linked all of these on Amazon. Here ya go:
It's a good question to ask. Part of the reason is because the World Bank and the IMF have a history in Africa of making these sorts of pie-in-the-sky, pyramid scheme-type recommendations that don't actually work in real-world conditions (for example, telling multiple countries to grow the same crops which then floods the market and causes all involved to suffer from the subsequent price crash of an oversupplied commodity), then when it doesn't work out will offer the countries loans to get through hard economic times--but only if they meet their structural specifications for creditworthiness (which often means cutting a lot of government services and programs to free up capital because they consider it wasteful spending), and then when they default on those loans will demand even further austerity measures that cripple the country's ability to maintain a stable economy and a workable government without outside intervention, thus essentially effecting a soft power takeover and ensuring that country's continued subservience to Western economic needs (often in the form of cheap resource extraction or markets for Western exports that more or less keep them from developing their own manufacturing capabilities).
If you want to know more, Globalization and its Discontents is a great place to start. Don't take my word for it. It's written by Joseph Stiglitz, a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He also won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001.
Stiglitz here actually does make the argument that children in Pakistan and Bangladesh would be child prostitutes if they were not garment workers. In other countries, the argument is that they would be farmers if not factory workers, but Bangladesh and Pakistan are special exceptions.
I think you should start out doing this after you have eliminated your debt and built up an emergency fund. Do not forget to work out a budget for yourself. Get an idea of where you are spending your money and where you can eliminate nonessentials. However, you should also put money aside to further diversify your holdings - maybe real estate, REITs, something along these lines. You do not want everything tied to just the stock market.
Make a goal for yourself to read some money books, gather info on investing, minimizing risk and maximizing your returns.
If you do not know what to read then I recommend starting with any one of these 3 books:
Your Money or Your Life: http://www.amazon.com/Your-Money-Life-Transforming-Relationship-ebook/dp/B0052MD8VO/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=8-1&qid=1420819430
The four pillars of Investing: http://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfolio-ebook/dp/B0041842TW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420819486&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Four+Pillars+of+Investing
MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom: http://www.amazon.com/MONEY-Master-Game-Financial-Freedom-ebook/dp/B00MZAIU4G/ref=pd_sim_kstore_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=12D5S57JYCVNH5C0FX99
Use the time you have now to start building your nest egg and save muuuch more then 10% a year - something like 50% or higher if you can and you can choose to stop working much sooner then the 67 they have us pegged for.
https://www.amazon.com/Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393334805
the synopsis /vomit
The world is moving from anger to indifference, from anti-Americanism to post-Americanism. The fact that new powers are more strongly asserting their interests is the reality of the post-American world. It also raises the political conundrum of how to achieve international objectives in a world of many actors, state and nonstate.
You wouldn't happen to have read this book? https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482767189&sr=8-1&keywords=second+machine+age
They talk about exactly that, capital vs. labor and the effects it's having on society that all wealth gain is going to capital. They also talk about median wages being stagnant since 1979 and falling since 1999. Pretty interesting. It also makes a lot of sense, every time a robot replaces a worker then the value that the robot creates doesn't go to the worker's family but rather to the owner of the robot. That's a huge driving factor behind the wealth inequality we see today and there's more to come. All the wealth generated in transportation will go to Uber instead of being spread across many companies and independent contractors. We'll see that pattern again and again...
You shouldn't, because as best I can tell this statistic is a bald-faced lie meant to tug at your heartstrings. The only source is a quote from Ban Ki-moon at a meeting in Italy. Hunger is nowhere in the top 10 causes of death worldwide, as measured by the WHO. As the brilliant development economist Amartya Sen noted, in democratic countries people do not die of starvation even in conditions that would otherwise generate a famine. This phenomenal map of the Horn of Africa famine demonstrates that clearly. Despite equivalent weather and crop conditions, the Kenyan and Ethiopian governments have prevented wide-scale deaths due to starvation by distributing money and food to potential victims.
Your heart is in the wrong place but we do the world no favors by repeating sensationalist lies like this one.
My earlier writeup for The Bottom Billion:
I'd humbly suggest The Bottom Billion as the first submission. I chose it because it was touted as the balanced perspective on development economics by the /r/economics sidebar, and I think it represents this subs focus.
The premise is that, since the 1960s, where 1/6th of the world was rich and the rest poor, real strides have been made worldwide, with some 4/6ths of the world being lifted out of poverty to middle income. At the turn of the millenia, this gives us 1 billion rich, 4 billion middle income and 1 billion that has been left behind, with incomes stagnant or falling in this period. Collier than examines why this is, and offers solutions.
I think this is a title worthy of the audience of /r/globalistshills because a) it is heavily evidence-based, but more importantly b) it represents the twin premise of this sub, that the (((neoliberal))) consensus has worked for the betterment of billions of people, but there are still problems in the world, and we need evidence-based policy to solve them.
Obviously we can use another text if of the powers that be prefer, butI think this would be an excellent start.Caveat that I've not actually got very far in it yet, but I want to discuss it with people when I'm done.
http://williameasterly.org/
http://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Quest-Growth-Economists-Misadventures/dp/0262550423/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318643614&sr=1-1&tag=acleint-20
There are also a ton of peer reviewed academic studies available but those you can find yourself if you're interested enough.
Here's a basic video you can show anyone.
Here are books:
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America
The Open Veins of Latin America. Here it is for free.
Failed States
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
War is a Racket This one is from the most decorated Marines in US history.
Occupy Finance. This one is (indirectly) about dependency theory on a national scale. The people of the US have become victims of capital. They go into debt for their health, transportation, education, housing, and daily activities with credit cards. They then put their pensions at the whim of the stock market, as it is plundered by Wall Street. When capitalism can no longer expand geographically, it needs to plunder the lives of people to maintain itself. In this case, the first source of capital to exploit was the lives of the people of the US. Unlike Europe, the US populace was left defenseless in the wake of the attack because of a history of active repression of the left (like COINTELPRO).
The financialization of the US populace is discussed in this essay from the Monthly Review, Monopoly Finance Capital. Here is a book on the topic.
If I remember any more resources, I'll make sure to throw them your way.
Epic content marketing might help you look at content from your blog to provide you with alternate methods of presenting it (infographics, videos, slide share presentations).
I liked the ideas found in Blue Ocean Strategy towards the beginning, but for whatever reason was never able to go past chapter 5.
Books and the blog of Seth Godin or alternatively Basecamp (formerly known as 37 signals) are usually fun, quick reads.
Blogs by KISSMetrics, Zendesk, Hubspot, and following Growth Hackers threads are all good options too.
What does your SaaS do?
Lastly, something that can provide guidance is taking an hour or two to draw your message map. Essentially, it's a list on one side of your target audience at each stage of purchase, what you want them to takeaway from your message and what are the main barriers to them understanding that message.
Best of luck!
Edits: Was on phone; added links for the lazy.
It's literally a factor in determing what "world" country it is, (such as Human Development Index), in the study of developing countries.
I suggest you read Amartya Sen's book. He's a Nobel winner for Economics.
Read a book called China's Second Continent, believe me it's all part of the plan. The Chinese are smart, global domination without war. The Americans have gone about it all the wrong way.
https://www.amazon.ca/Chinas-Second-Continent-Migrants-Building/dp/0307956989
Oooh goodie. OK. So. This is a pretty good list. From the Mankiw Blog:
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers
Paul Krugman, Peddling Prosperity
Steven Landsburg, The Armchair Economist
P.J. O'Rourke, Eat the Rich
Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk Down Wall Street
Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff, Thinking Strategically
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Freakonomics
John McMillan, Reinventing the Bazaar
William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, Lives of the Laureates
If you have specific interests in economics, like global poverty or behavioral economics, then I can give more recommendations.
Edit: I found out about another good one today, called The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why it Matters. I haven't read it yet, but the reviews make it sound like exactly the kind of book on modern economics I've been looking for.
It's fine if you think I'm wrong, it's another thing alrighty to think that established economic knowledge and Nobel laureates are wrong.
If you have any evidence to support your claims, please present it now. Otherwise, stop posting here.
Did the New Deal end the Great Depression? No. Did it make things worse? Absolutely not. Did it help millions of Americans avoid poverty and starvation? Emphatically yes. The period from 1933 to 1937 remains the fastest period of peacetime growth in American history. GDP growth averaged approximately 10% per year. You can see the full range of data here. Also, the PWA and WPA created the infrastructure the United States to grow for decades to come. The former completed projects in all but three counties of the United States such as the Triboro Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams; the latter built 78,000 bridges, 1,000 tunnels, 6,000 schools, 67,000 miles of city streets, and 572,000 miles of rural roads (among a ridiculous number of other projects).
Additionally Roosevelt's monetary policy was probably more successful than his fiscal stimulus. First, the bank holiday restored the confidence of American savers and investors more so than probably any other action. Banks were closed on March 9, 1933 and began to reopen only after thorough auditing. When the banks opened on March 12, depositors, despite the suspension of gold convertibility, began putting their money back in the banks. Within a week, $1 billion had been put back into the banking system that had fled during the runs on banks prior to Roosevelt's inauguration. On March 15, the New York Stock Exchange opened for the first time in 10 days and the Dow jumped 15%, which was the largest single day movement in its history. By the end of the month of March, 2/3 of all banks were reopened and $1.5 billion had returned to the banks.
The second major act of monetary policy was the suspension of the gold standard. That action was overwhelmingly supported by financial and consumer markets. It removed a major deflationary burden from the American economy. Keynesian bias or not. On the day the change was announced, the NYSE jumped 15%. Within three months, wholesale prices had risen 45%. This lowered the real cost of borrowing significantly and investment began to flow into the private sector—orders for heavy machinery rose 100%—and into consumer markets--auto sales doubled. Overall industrial production rose 50%. By early 1937, overall industrial production had returned to its 1929 peak. Unemployment, moreover, had been halved from 25% nationally in 1933 (with certain cities and demographic groups even worse off--75% of black women in Detroit were unemployed) to about 12%-14% in early 1937 (Unemployment statistics prior to 1940 are always best guesses as the Bureau of Labor Statistics didn't collect them until then).
In 1937, FDR faced a growing conservative coalition in Congress and had his own misgivings about spending and reduced relief funding which caused a minor recession. Unemployment jumped to around 17%. GDP fell slightly in 1938, but was above its 1937 levels in 1939. Had this small recession not happened, the US may have left the Depression before military spending for WWII began to pick up. As it is, the combination of war production and the draft is what wiped out unemployment by 1942. So the New Deal didn't end the Depression, but it most certainly did not make things worse and was responsible for helping millions of people. There's a reason why FDR was elected four times and the Democrats only lost control of Congress once between 1930 and 1952.
Here's some light reading for you.
Political scientist Mancur Olson described and formalized this problem in his 1984 book The Rise and Decline of Nations.
I haven't read it, but I'll throw this your way: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Hancock is the man. Oh, and he's even been a truther since well before his ancient history research:
The Lords of Poverty: the power, prestige, and corruption of the international aid business [Graham Hancock, 1989]
The irony is that Africa is filled with centrally planned, statist authoritarian economies, ruled by left wing tinpot tyrants who are idolized by useful idiot hipster liberals who see them as enemies of imperialism and racism (zimbabwe, libya, ethiopia, somalia until the early 90's), and that the government seizure and redistribution of the land of productive farms, price controls on food, and food tariffs are some of the causes of starvation in Africa. Free markets also cannot be blamed for obesity; the rube goldberg complex of subsidies, price supports, tariffs, and tax credits that make up America's sovietized agriculture sector make sugar and healthy foods expensive while encouraging the overproduction of corn.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Elusive-Quest-Growth-Misadventures/dp/0262550423
http://www.amazon.com/Africa-Unchained-Blueprint-Africas-Future/dp/1403973865/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374259470&sr=1-2
See the book Race Against the Machine, by two economists at MIT, who argue that technological unemployment really is a serious problem, and provide data that it's already happening. (There's also a sequel, which I haven't read yet.)
>Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty side effects.
Ugh. Free trade is a good thing, people! The US is just doing it wrong because of hyper-protectionist attitudes like this.
I would strongly recommend Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World to anyone. The main point I took from it is that the problem with the US today is that we globalized the rest of the world without globalizing ourselves. As a result American society as a whole is selfish and pretentious. People complain about outsourcing, but think about it from the point of view of the foreigners: they need the income too! What makes an American job more valuable than theirs? Aside from "Herp derp MURKA FUCK YEAH"
American society needs to wake up and realize we are not inherently the best at everything just because we have a military that can push everyone around.
My parents were aid workers.
They made me read this when I was 14.
There are two books that I want to recommend:
The Great War for Civilisation by Fisk
https://www.amazon.com/Great-War-Civilisation-Conquest-Middle/dp/1400075173
The Bottom Billion by Collier
https://www.amazon.com/Bottom-Billion-Poorest-Countries-Failing/dp/0195373383
These two books changed the way I view the Middle East and we have never learned our lessons from the past.
Disclaimer: I'm mid20s guy with less invested in shares than I have in my super. The following is what I did to get started in investing which sounds like you're about where I was a year or two ago.
First of all; depending on your circumstances be aware that ING Direct's or ME Bank's savings accounts are currently giving 3.00% interest which might be better than your term deposit if you don't want to go whole hog into shares right away. (ING Direct also does $50 bonus referral codes so expect a flood of PMs now that I've mentioned this)
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As for books:
/r/FI's wiki makes some good recommendations from what I've read of them
>Investing
>* The Bogleheads Guide to Investing
The lowest barrier to entry would be that "acorns" app but I strongly recommend taking the couple days to make a CMC account or some other online brokerage with low fees and buy ETFS through that instead so that you're actually learning how it all works and not just pressing buttons on an app. Link it up with free Sharesight account for pretty graphs and easy tax reporting and that should teach you more about "having a share portfolio" than the majority of the population.
Obviously this subreddit and /r/fiaustralia in the sidebar are worth keeping an eye on for insight from people with more skin in the game than me.
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Now, the other option is you want to ACTIVELY trade that $1k. If you've read some of Bogle's explanations on why that's a bad idea, realised you'll be competing against people with much bigger budgets and a full time job anaysing these things and understand that even at CMC's low $13 flat fee you're losing 1.3% of your $1k packet with every trade then you'll need advice from someone other than me.
Personally the best investment I think I have made so far was my $1k of "beer money" that I threw into bitcoin. Not because it made a good return, but because after months of careful analysis, frequent trading and keeping an ear to the ground on new alt coins I turned my 3.5 bitcoin into 1.05. I didn't end up losing a cent thanks to other factors but seeing how badly my "high risk, high gain, actively managed portfolio" went I'm ecstatic that I learned my lesson with $1k and not with my self-managed super fund at 57 y/o like several people I know.
TL;DR: Anything by John Bogle
I don't know who is doing PR for this book but they are amazing. It's not a good book.
My review on Amazon:
> The most interesting thing about this book is how Bostrom managed to write so much while saying so little. Seriously, there is very little depth. He presents an idea out of nowhere, says a little about it, and then says [more research needs to be done]. He does this throughout the entire book. I give it two stars because, while extremely diluted, he does present an interesting idea every now and then.
Read this or this or this instead.
There is money to be made on a failing economy, Hell Mogg's dad wrote the book on it: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sovereign-Individual-Survive-Collapse-Welfare/dp/0684810077
Great book here. The first chapter is a real eye opener.
I'm glad you've become interested in such a fascinating topic. However, it's pretty expansive, so here are some links to books and topics in terms of broad, global, and more specific studies related to the issue of income equality:
Broad Topic/Global:
In the US/more specific:
This is just a list of the more well-known, discussed, and publicized works on the broader subject of income inequality and poverty. There is a plethora of information on this topic from different perspectives and analyses (e.g. political economy, neoclassical, marxist, etc...), as well as in different countries and time periods, so while you're reading remember to take the context of how it is being written and who is writing it into consideration. Hopefully this list gets you started though!
Some of my favorite (non-textbook) economic books:
And this last one isn't necessarily economic, but it should be required reading for anyone going into any mathematic or scientific field:
> There are absolutely no indicators that US hegemony is in decline. In fact, every indicator is that the US is more powerful today than ever. Only whiny types like Chomsky seriously suggest American power is fading in favor of China.
You're joking right? Like, that's sarcasm?
Is American Decline Inevitable?
World Policy Journal
Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter, 1987/1988) (pp. 151-174)
Is the United States in Decline -- Again? An Essay
International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-)
Vol. 83, No. 4 (Jul., 2007) (pp. 643-653)
Graceful Decline? The Surprising Success of Great Power Retrenchment
International Security
Vol. 35, No. 4 (SPRING 2011) (pp. 7-44)
The Foreign Policy of a Declining Power
International Organization
Vol. 45, No. 2 (Spring, 1991) (pp. 257-279)
Here are some more articles on the subject:
Christopher Layne
International Studies Quarterly (2012)
Vol. 56, 203–213
Andrew Hurrell
International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs), Vol. 82, No. 1,
Perspectives on Emerging Would-Be Great Powers (Jan., 2006), pp. 1-19
Charles A. Kupchan
International Security, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 40-79
Dennis Florig
Review of International Studies (2010), 36, 1103–1119
Some html friendly articles:
And here's a really good forum thread on the very subject of US hegemonic decline
I just wrote my thesis on this subject, so I have some sources..
The theme of all these articles varies, some are about the future, some are explanatory, but the overarching theme is that the US is definitely in decline. Academia is mostly over the hump debating whether or not the US is actually in decline, and is now focused on what we can do about it to make transitions smoother.
China has been growing tremendously faster than any other state on the globe the past few decades. At this rate, China will overtake the US in terms of gross product by (most estimates) about halfway through the mid-21st century. The reality is that in many ways, there are more economic opportunities in China than the United States - that's why many expats like the ones in this subreddit are there. As /u/hittintheairplane pointed out, it's not so much that the US is declining from it's 1990 level of economic, political, and military power as much as all the other nations are catching up. Relatively the United States is losing power, and that's all power is, relativity to others. You take any international relations course and invariably the topics include the structure of the 21st century, most professors would describe it as a shift from unipolarity to bipolarity in that while China is growing the fastest, there is no real contender to overtake the US and replace our hegemony. Rather, we're more likely to see a state structure of power like this than the bipolar political forces of the Cold War or the unipolar political power the US has today.
I'll give you some books to use as a starting point. You want to start out as generally as possible and then follow what interests you. Someone can give you a list of top books, but if they don't fascinate you enough to really dig in deep and reflect on them to sate your own curiosity, you'll just be scratching the surface. I don't care what it is, you can make money anywhere in the markets. So starting generally will help you find out what direction to go.
So, that said, these are the ones I'd recommend starting out with
https://www.amazon.com/Market-Wizards-Updated-Interviews-Traders/dp/1118273052
https://www.amazon.com/Reminiscences-Stock-Operator-Edwin-Lef%C3%A8vre/dp/0471770884
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400063515/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684840073/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809045990/
Some less conventional ones I really liked
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1578645018/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422121038/
Chaos theory describes some properties that pop up again and again in markets. I really liked this one.
https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Simplicity-Bringing-Order-Complexity/dp/140006256X
I also highly recommend finding a few good books on behavioral investing, just to get acquainted with the common mistakes investors make (how you can avoid them, and how you can exploit them). I don't have a lot here because the books I read are outdated and you can find better. So one example:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470067373/
But in general reading about psychology will help you understand the world better, and that's always a good thing.
https://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061339202
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for our Time
by Jeffrey Sachs
An economic adviser to the United Nations, Sachs wrote this book in 2025 to present nine steps as to how we could eliminate the world's worst poverty by 2025.
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When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Yourself by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
This book talks about the causes of poverty and the misconceptions Christians often have.
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Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: Moving from Affluence to Generosity by Ronald J. Sider
Sider first wrote this book in 1978, but came out with this latest edition in 2005, exploring the causes of global hunger and the different viewpoints (both conservative and liberal) on poverty.
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Too Small to Ignore: Why the Least of These Matters Most by Wess Stafford.
Stafford grew up in West Africa and discusses the importance of investing in the futures of children, especially those who are less fortunate.
china's been trying to develop in / help develop africa for longer than you probably think
http://www.amazon.com/The-Dragons-Gift-Story-Africa/dp/0199550220
http://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Second-Continent-Migrants-Building/dp/0307956989
That's like saying that Broken Window Theory is what has caused the reduction in violent crime. Sure, it seems that way at first glance, but it's giving one factor way too much credit.
The IMF is behind water privatization. Through their structural adjustement programs are behind privatization of energy, education, all kinds of necessary parts of a healthy society that you take for granted, sold off to private industry.
and
In July [2001], the World Bank approved a new $110 million structural adjustment loan for Ghana. Before disbursing the loan, however, the Bank forced the government of Ghana to implement seven “prior actions,” including a requirement to “increase electricity and water tariffs by 96 percent and 95 percent, respectively, to cover operating costs.”
The first order stochastic dominance test suggests that not only the
absolute poverty incidence but also the intensity and severity of poverty increased
significantly by all poverty lines and poverty measures over the period of adjustment.
Structural adjustment created new poor in urban areas amongst the low income groups
(mainly Clerical and Sales workers) whose real wages were eroded over the period.
These are not a progressive values. The human cost of top heavy globalization is not something that progressives should be willing to sacrifice in the name of higher GDP's.
I recommend reading anything by Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank.
Stiglitz argues that IMF policies contributed to bringing about the East Asian financial crisis, as well as the Argentine economic crisis. Also noted was the failure of Russia's conversion to a market economy and low levels of development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Specific policies criticised by Stiglitz include fiscal austerity, high interest rates, trade liberalization, and the liberalization of capital markets and insistence on the privatization of state assets.
For a more human look, I recommend the work of Arundhati Roy, but there's really so much out there critical of the IMF/WB and the WTO/FTAA/NAFTA approach to globalization.
I know you want to win the election. And I know that progressives are big force in this election (Finally!), but please don't be a chameleon and pretend that war crimes and privatization and western hegemony are in any way compatible with progressive values.
Your basic argument seems to be a shift in capital from a scarce resource (e.g., money) to a post-scare resource (e.g., Von Neumann machines). I have a hard time believing that the people currently in control of the vast majority of our current capital will allow this to happen in any calm and reasonable way. Here's basically how I see this playing out in the US:
It's that middle bit, stages 4-6, that I'm worried about. I'm excited for stage 7, but I don't see how we're going to get there without a big fucking mess. Here are some other people who agree with me that, unless we do some things now that the hyper-rich don't seem into, we're going to have a lot of "fun" with stages 4-6:
And the problem is that the hyper-rich are controlling US leadership, and, again, it is against their personal (short-term) interest to prevent this problem. Seriously, watch that TED talk.
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Footnotes:
There are three books I'd like to add as suggestions:
For reference, the site I used says World Order by Henry Kissinger, the book we read previously, takes 6 hours to read. So these books a bit shorter.
Development as Freedom:
This book proposes a relatively new theory for public policy based on free agency. Amartya Sen's thesis is that the objective of governing and developing a country is to provide freedom to its citizens. He does a pretty good analysis of how a country works policy-wise and he makes a proposal to reach this free agency goal. I think this book would broaden perspectives on how to view a government's labor, on what development is, and what it should be.
The Dictator's Handbook:
In this book, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alistair Smith decompose multiple historical situations both in governing and in private enterprises in order to define the universal dynamics of power. It is a great book and it explains, with sufficient evidence, what a leader needs to capture and retain power in any system imaginable by redefining how we view government systems.
Making Globalization Work:
I have read a bit of the previous books, but only a single chapter of this one, so instead I'm going to quote a review on amazon:
> Three years ago, I was a little freshman economics student at a small college. My World Politics professor assigned me this book to read halfway through the semester, and I am quite happy that I read it. Stiglitz is blessed with both brains and writing ability, something that too many economists do not have [...] Stiglitz does an exceptional job of summarizing much of the baggage that international policy makers carry from their past mistakes.
>The largest criticism that people have of the book is that much of what he says has been said by other people. This is true. But those other people can't write and aren't remotely as accessible as Stiglitz is. If you're looking for a good jump-in, read this book.
Pues depende del tema.
Pero este es uno de mis favoritos.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Origin-Wealth-Remaking-Economics/dp/1422121038
Trae temas de pensamiento sistémico, economía, tecnología, y los trata de manera coherente.
They are compatible.
It is basically a question of when you want access to the money.
You create a regular account, and IRA or a Roth IRA (assuming you make less than $193k)
The regular account you put you after tax money in, and you can take it out whenever you want. You pay taxes on the income and when you sell you will pay capital gains on any appreciation.
​
The Iras are accounts meant for retirement so you can't take money out until retirement age. With the IRA you put Pre tax money in with the Roth after tax money in. IRA deferes the taxes on income and gains. Roth you can take out without tax. but again at retirement age. There is a lot more info on here about the differences but that is the TLDR version.
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Now that you have picked the TYPE of account (Regular/IRA/Roth) you have a choice of what to invest in. you can invest in many many things almost anything. but a solid simple and many would say best choice over the long term is the simple index fund with low fees. <.1 %
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In summary you would buy the index fund in your roth IRA account if that was your choice. There is a done of good summary info tagged in here so that is a good place to start learning more or can pick up a book or two at the library this is a good one.
https://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfolio-ebook/dp/B0041842TW
https://investor.vanguard.com/index-funds/?WT.srch=1&cmpgn=PS:RE (Vanguard was the industry leader in pushing down costs for their investors so a very reputable company, though others have caught up on the low fee idea. )
Hope it helps!
Africa has a rich history and experience with Marxism, especially the Maoist inspired anti-colornial revolutions. It is interesting to see the neo-liberal ideological turn of many parties such as the South African Communist Party.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa - Marxist analysis of how Europe underdeveloped and exploited Africa
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters - This book covers the Second Congo War which was the deadliest conflict since World War 2. It occurred between 1998 and 2003 and shockingly few people are even aware it happened at all. Definitely worth reading up on.
This is a pretty good explanation
In addition, as govts grow larger they get spread thinner and as a result anything that is contributed by the individual does not see a tangiable marginal benefit in the long run. Even economist Mancur Olsen's (not a libertarian or anarchist in the least) Rise and Decline of nations explains collective action and its poor outcomes when scaled.
If you want more examples there are more than enough sources out there to credit.
Read his fathers books to understand a bit of what makes Rees-Mogg the younger who he is.
It actually has been compared to those things, quite often. One book that does it extremely well is The Second Machine Age - highly recommended. It's easy to read, timely, and fascinating.
I recommend [Blue Ocean Strategy](Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant https://www.amazon.com/dp/1625274491/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fNpJybKTNDM86). It's a great marketing book but is especially relevant for entrepreneurs. It's one of the only required readings I held on to from college (marketing major). Really makes you think differently about innovation.
Well, then, we're screwed. Reasonable duplication is already here, it's just a matter of cost right now. We are already in the Second Machine Age.
I encourage you both (eta_carinae_311 and cloake) to read these books:
When Bubbles Burst
Origin of Wealth
Especially Origin of Wealth, because it walks you through all the classical economics, tells you why those theories are not quite right, and then explains complexity economics.
As cloake said, the market is fundamentally unpredictable because it's a lot of game theory being played all at the same time.
Looks like you picked up the torch ;) I'll head over to r/StateofTheUnion - but since you took the time to put down a thoughtful perspective, I'll try to return the favor.
The role of government. I find myself thinking in 21st Century terms rather than either 20th Century or 19th Century and in this, I find that Paul's libertarianism (albeit still rough hewn) is much closer than classical Liberalism or the Neo-Liberalism of the Republicans. Perhaps this is why Paul is the only candidate of either Party who seems to connect in some way with the #OWS folks (who are themselves a part of the formation of 21st Century politics). The key principle here is to recognize that bureaucracy in general - be it government or corporate or non-profit is disempowering and corrupting. Consequently, it should be avoided wherever possible and where necessary should be designed to reboot on a periodic basis (a deep reset that can clean out all of the self-reinforcing structures that tend to accumulate). Of utmost import is to avoid situations where corporate and government bureaucracy can connect and co-evolve (e.g. the FCC, the FDA, the DOD, etc.). IMHO, in the 21st century - so long as we can keep the Internet free and open - the edge (the individual) is dramatically empowered. 20th Century top-down hierarchies were largely formed as a result of the discovery of the efficiency of these kinds of bureaucracies during the 30's and, particularly, the War. But this was in a very low bandwidth environment when a real premium was on span of control. Nowadays, bandwidth is wide open and our ability to monitor and police non-mutalistic/maladaptive behavior from the edge is much higher. As a surprisingly illuminating example, consider the music industry vis a vis MP3 and P2P. But for the increasingly intense intervention of government, people at the edge would have completely mopped the floor with these huge media companies. And that's just in the area of music where the human interest is relatively trivial (but the corporate interest - money - is identical to any other corporate interest). Expect individuals to fight harder in more existentially important areas like journalism, health and education; but expect the alternative corporate interests to have roughly the same capabilities and intensity. If corporations were not able to control government, we'd already have broken their control.
We still need some architecture to put it all together of course, but the key is that 20th Century approaches are anachronistic and new more distributed approaches to pretty much everything (education, banking, healthcare, environmental protection) are absolutely necessary.
While Paul is most certainly not the guy to build this 21st Century architecture - he seems the only guy capable of (interested in) getting the obsolete machinery the heck out of the way. Everywhere I look, I see inordinately bloated and delusional (i.e., unresponsive to reality) institutions that are increasingly incapable of either executing on their original raison d'etre or engaging in any form of plausibly adequate reformation. We are in need of a complete enema - from which we can perhaps begin a redesign that is adequate to modern realities.
As for economics and monetary policy - you are right, the gold standard is the wrong answer. If you have an interest in complexity - check out Eric Beinhocker's work. We need to go beyond the 19th Century model of the gold standard, but equally clearly late 20th century fiat currencies are a terrible answer. I'm largely convinced that a mixture of reputation currencies and decentralized digital currencies are likely the right answer. Ron Paul might not be in a position to get this - but again, none of it matters if the Fed is in charge. I'll count on Paul to nix the Fed and then allow people to figure out the solution without getting too much in their way.
Thanks for listening.
Barbara Tuchman was brilliant writer of history.
Albert Camus was a brilliant absurdist philosopher and novelist.
Jared Diamond has written some brilliant books at the intersection of anthropology and ecology. Another good book in this genre is Clive Ponting's A New Green History of the World.
Gwynne Dyer is an acclaimed military historian turned journalist on international affairs who has written a number of very engaging books on warfare and politics. His most recent book Climate Wars is the ONE book I would recommend to someone, if so limited, on the subject as it embodies both a wonderful synopsis of the science juxtaposed against the harsh realpolitiks and potential fates of humankind that may unfold unless we can manage to tackle the matter seriously, soon. Another great book on climate change is Bill McKibben's Deep Economy.
For social activists interested in ending world hunger and abject poverty, I can recommend: Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom; Nobel Prize winning micro-financier Muhammad Yunus' Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism; UN MDG famed economist Jeffrey Sach's End Of Poverty; and Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea
For anyone of Scottish heritage, I heartily recommend Arthur Hermann's How The Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
For naval history buffs: Robert K. Massie's Dreadnought.
Last, but not least: Robert Pirsig's classic Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Enjoy!
Not development, but underdevelopment. Worth a read.
http://www.amazon.com/Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-Walter-Rodney/dp/1574780484
The reviews should tell you everything:
>My impression from the book is as follows. Mr. Rodney is clearly a communist and has bought into the whole manifesto. Colonialism and capitalism are evil while communism is the only way forward. As the title suggests, he focuses on how capitalism has destroyed Africa.
Reminds me of a discussion I had with a guy who believed colonialism was good for Africa. Not "not bad", but "good" for Africa.
Thanks for the response and book link. I've heard about Keynes mistaken prediction and will definitely check out the book.
There's no doubt that in the present, most people see work as something you just have to do. But if our employment system is propped up by nothing more than force of habit, by the baseless assumption that high unemployment is "bad" and low unemployment is "good" and that each of us individually has some sort of responsibility to go get a job, then why not change our way of thinking?
It's not just cashiers and order-takers who are under threat from kiosks that will soon do their jobs better and cheaper. High-wage professionals like accountants and lawyers are also being displaced by software and automation, and I don't think our present employment system--or our way of thinking--is ready for the shock.
Of course, some people will always work. Clearly we need some lawyers, some accountants, and even some order-takers, and certainly we need the software engineers who write the code that does these peoples' jobs (just look at software engineer salaries for proof of these).
Automation and software are bringing us into uncharted territory. In the next 50 years we're going to need to invent a new employment paradigm as more and more people, not just low-wage but high-wage too, become unemployable, and we're going to need to break away from the old-fashioned idea that everyone needs to work. Really, the function of human beings in the modern economy is not to work: I don't think most of us create a lot of value at work. Our function is to consume. A Piketty-style tax on capital redistributed into a UBI that gives people the choice to either (a) work if they so choose, or (b) follow a passion, start a company, or even be idle, seems like the most sensible solution to me.
Though I admit the economics of it still needs to be worked out :)
This book for more info: http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Machine-Age-Technologies-ebook/dp/B00D97HPQI
Interesting AMA thus far. I'm a former Peace Corps volunteer in Central Africa, and I worked pretty extensively in aid elsewhere on the continent afterwards. Never been to Malawi, but I'm familiar with a lot of the issues there, as they're typical of many countries in that region.
First off, good for you - getting off your duff and going into the world to throw yourself at a problem you see. I'm glad you're doing this. That said, I'd like to offer some advice, both from someone who cares about global poverty a lot, and as one who's worked in the field and wants to save you some headaches. There's a lot of issues with "orphanages" in developing countries. I suggest you read all the articles here - the gist being that in a cultural context you don't understand, meddling with children and families is fraught with peril.
Before you get yourself into something you don't understand yet, please listen to these concerns:
You've moved into a completely alien society with a culture you don't really understand and language you don't speak. You're on a tourist visa, for god's sake! That's not okay! It sounds like you've inserted yourself into a number of situations - economic transactions, the "briefcase orphanage" scam - that you just do not fully grasp yet, and by doing so you could be putting yourself in danger. You may think you understand a lot more about these things than you do. The longer you live there - give it a year or two at least - the more you will see how little you actually understood when you first got there (that is, now), and how little you actually understand then. Societies are complex that way.
Think of the opposite - an African from some tiny village somewhere who came to live in, say, downtown Manhattan, and how long it would take him or her to actually grasp the finer points of our culture and society. And that's assuming they already speak English. Until you can converse intelligently in Chichewa, you're really just guessing about what's going on around you based on what the very few who can speak English are willing/know how to say to you.
The broad generalizations you're making here - China is ruining Africa; Africa depends on food aid, otherwise everyone would starve; the tobacco trade is bad and destructive - are tell-tale signs of a shocked, fairly naive white person who has just arrived, and who has not yet taken the time to learn deeply about development, global poverty, and African history and economics. Read about the history of Malawi and what the Banda regime was like (reference for redditors interested here. Read Jeff Sachs, and then for the love of god read Bill Easterly, since he's got his head screwed on a little tighter. Read de Soto, and Ayittey and Collier. There is a whole constellation of development and aid blogs out there, all of which you will find instructive. The bottom line being - there are best practices and lessons to be learned out there, because lots of people have done what you're doing and are doing it now. This business you're up to in Malawi should not be about you. It's about them. And when you begin working in aid, it's very important you remember that, because frankly, a lot of folks forget it.
So, finally, my question: what's your endgame? That is, what goal are you trying to accomplish?
I ask because you're presumably not going to live in Malawi for the rest of your life, so you must eventually (1) get this new orphanage sustainably funded and (2) find competent/honest people to run it. That's very, very difficult. Are you applying for grants? Hoping you'll find a church somewhere in America that wants to take on permanent responsibility for funding this? The Malawian government?
>* What is the best advice you have ever been given (in and out of finance)?
>* So, it’s you last day. Everything you have ever done, written or saved for your children has been deleted. What advice or teachings would you give to your children or wife about finance in the hopes of them achieving more freedom/time (assume you only have a short time to explain)?
>* What is the best lessons life have taught you so far?
>* What quotes do you live by or think a lot about?
>* If you could have every 30 year old read/watch/consume 1 - 3 things, what would you prescribe?
Hello hackpro,
Couple things I would initially suggest. Read these 2 books:
1.) The Blue Ocean Strategy: A "red ocean" is a market where a product or service is already manifested, aka saturated or even oversaturated. A "blue ocean" is walking into that market and changing the game. This book has a TON of great tips and mindset pointers when trying to do what you do. Here is the Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontested/dp/1625274491/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1459345146&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=blue+ocean+strategy
2.) Growth Hacker Marketing: This book is just plain awesome. I have read it 3 times. It goes through quite a few tactics to get your product/service visable and has some great case studies (dropbox, evernote etc.) showing how they made it with little to no marketing, but rather pushing their products via exclusivity and making smart calculated moves. Here is the amazon link for that:
http://www.amazon.com/Growth-Hacker-Marketing-Primer-Advertising/dp/1591847389/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1459345183&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Growth+hacker+marketing
Post the above 2 books - I would really try to niche market your product. If you do not have a budget for paid search or media, I would focus on finding small to medium communities, join those communities and talk about your product, get sugggestions from community members, offer free beta tests (not sure what your product is, but you mentioned dropbox so I am assuming its software related) etc. Then, move up to larger communities/bloggers etc.
Content is king. Make TONS of content about your product (articles, video, etc.) and get it in cycle in your focus niche. I would focus on a message that sets you apart. You mentioned that the competition is mediocre, so in a creative "non bashing way" just highlight your strong points.
Just my initial $0.2 cents. If you have any deeper questions feel free to let me know.
-Rob
The Bottom Billion
Dead Aid
Neither deal directly with sweatshops but the subject is related.
And you can google some other information, written by people who study this stuff professionally, in defense of them if you want a better understanding of why they exist, their benefits and their faults, etc.
https://www.amazon.com/Lords-Poverty-Prestige-Corruption-International/dp/0871134691
It's a great read, prompted some.big changes at the time. I'd consider it a must read for anyone interested in how global charities work
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sovereign-Individual-Survive-Collapse-Welfare/dp/0684810077
A good book I enjoyed from my Global Economy graduate class was The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. This covers a lot of what you're interested in learning.
> It’s different this time.
It bugs me when people cite earlier technologies disrupting the labor market saying that the scale of automation we're faced with isn't going to be a problem. We're making machines that can think now (edit: made exaggeration, but machines are getting smarter at a much faster pace) , it's completely different now.
Also, I recommend this book.
There's a concept in economic development that if you give something out for free people may not value it. So sometimes instead of giving out free condoms in Africa, you charge a small fee so people don't blow them up as balloons at soccer games. (Source is this book: https://www.amazon.com/Elusive-Quest-Growth-Economists-Misadventures/dp/0262550423).
Look I don't care if I didn't solve this non profit's every wish, they said they wanted certain features in the app and we made. The fact that someone couldn't spend 5 minutes to promote an app I personally spend 120 hours of my time making shows that they really didn't need a mobile app, or we should've charged them so they'd value it.
That's exactly what I had in mind. After reading Muncur Olsen the world makes a lot more sense.
Enjoy the decline!
The big 2 are:
The End of Poverty
and
The White Man's Burden
Which conveniently, disagree on most particulars. Also read every paper written at
JPAL
In Defense of Globalization is a great book.
Which developing economies were you interested in? Asia has a rich literature because of its stratospheric growth in the past half century. But when finding a good book for something like development economics, it's good to find a book that caters to a region of your interest. The development experiences of some nations are so varied.
You might want to check out Amartya Sen's work.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. I can't recommend this book highly enough.
Book I generally recommend as a 1st book: https://www.amazon.com/Four-Pillars-Investing-Building-Portfolio-ebook/dp/B0041842TW
As far as more diversity. Foreign and value are the biggest holes. FNDA, FNDC, FNDE, FNDF would be good additions. SFREX I don't think you can get this one at M1 so 1/2 and 1/2 VNQI and VNQ would work as an OK replacement (check yield and consider where to put them generally non-taxable on these guys).
Well, neoclassical is mainstream. It's useful to understand, in part just to get an idea of why people arguing against neoclassical are doing so.
If you're interested in economics, I'd suggest...
The distinguising thing about Austrian Economics is its reliance on an axiomatic system (Praxeology), and the rejection of experimentation/hypothesis testing. While I said I don't see a rational reason to distinguish between methods in the other thread - well, let's just say I'm an empiricist at heart.
Four Pillars of Investing is a great introduction to index investing and how to build consistent lifelong returns. If you start at your age with even the smallest consistent investments, you have the potential to build solid wealth. Once you understand compound interest (rule of 72, etc), you'll see that time is a critical variable that is often overlooked.
erik s. reinert examined medieval Venice and Renaissance-age Holland in his book "How Rich Countries Got Rich . . . and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor"
According to him, it historically had to do with the synergetic effects spawned by a huge diversity of trades and businesses trying to share the same dense business space. The policy focus was on fostering the business diversity
If anyone is interested in further reading on this topic, we read The Elusive Quest for Growth for my economic growth class. It's a solid read but, unfortunately, is more a list of the many, many things we've tried that have failed, rather than any key plan for success.
From the book description on Amazon : ""This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings, biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially international problems. How should the United States understand and thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination."
Yes,
Think about how far human development has come over the last 100,000 years or even the last 100.
Great book that dives into this idea, I had to read it for Economic Gardening
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Economics/dp/157851777X
Poor Economics for a great discussion on the many small, incremental steps that add up and could help alleviate poverty.
The Bottom Billion for a nice discussion on the various poverty traps a country can get stuck in. This book focuses more on the bigger macro picture, and less on the incentives and lives of individuals.
Why Nations Fail - I'll admit I haven't read this yet, but a lot of people seem to rate it highly. It looks at the broad picture of what determines the wealth of nations, and especially the nature of extractive vs. inclusive institutions.
I haven't heard of anyone advocating that a central bank play a key role in ending poverty. Central banks are there to help smooth output fluctuations, by keeping unemployment near its "natural" level and inflation low and stable. There's nothing in their tool-set that could bring a country out of poverty. Though they're certainly very important as bad monetary policy can destroy a country.
To describe it another way: poverty alleviation is about creating a long-term upward trend in output per person. But there are unpredictable variations the economy experiences around this long-term trend (recessions). The central bank's job is to prevent or minimize these deviations from trend, by preventing recessions. But it does not determine the long-term trend itself.
There's lots of useful information at The Boglehead's Website, especially The Getting Started Guide.
I've also found the following books incredibly helpful as well:
OK, fine.
Cost to end extreme poverty worldwide, according to this UN report and Jeffery Sachs (Professor of Economics, Colombia), $175bn/year over 20 years.
That's using proven techniques (don't have Athens on hand? here's an article discussing the same in less detail)
The US alone has 540 people worth more than a billion. Worldwide, there's 1810 of them. If we spread it over all of them, that's a shade under $100m/year per person, or $2bn each in total. That much might have an impact on some of the people towards the bottom of the list, so maybe let's restrict this to the top 500 richest people on earth, the poorest of which has a mere $3.3 billion
So that's $350m per person per year. Jeff Bezos, admittedly somewhere near the top of the list, made $296m in the last 24 hours alone. If you bias the payments so the richest pay more and the "poorest" pay less, it's hard to imagine a single person having to remotely tighten their belts.
The question of "not even notice" is a little more difficult. At what point do you think you stop noticing spending money? When you have $3.3bn in the bank, it's hard to imagine $350m a year isn't going to hurt too much. I mean, assuming you have no income and you're not getting much return on your investments (and that's a huge assumption) you'll definitely have less money at the end of the year than you started with, but it's not going to stop you doing anything. I don't know how much money is enough that you can never spend it all, but Brian Chesky (no 500 on the list) could hand over his $2bn right now, then spend
$87,000$71,000 (edit, whoops, misplaced a digit) a day for the next 50 years and still have money left at the end. Again, that's assuming no income at all, and I'm fairly sure AirBNB isn't going to stop making money right away, and Chesky has his money somewhere safe and profitable.Although with a sliding donation scale, it might not even be that much. For reference, Gates (again towards the top of the list) gives away $1.4bn a year, on average.
So yeah, I think it's feasible.
I remember a stat in the (fantastic) book The Second Machine Age that showed similar levels of automation in factories in China as the US, so it's really something that goes well beyond the cost of labor.
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Good article, thanks for sharing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0262550423/ref=tmm_pap_new_olp_sr?ie=UTF8&amp;condition=new&amp;qid=&amp;sr=
To go along with the theme of development from the perspective of a world bank and NYU economist
This is an interesting question and comes with many answers depending on how you define certain things like "poverty". IMO, the best answer is given by Jeffery Sachs in this book. He says that if we used $175 billion per year for 20 years, we could end extreme poverty.
I posted more links to you last night. Here they are again:
> Ah yes you’re right David Autor is the chap. Fascinating work! This is what I call structural technological unemployment, though it would be more accurate to call it UNDER-employment. Of course, if these trends continue in the same direction or amplify because of technology in different ways, things could go very badly.
> This is why adaptation to Human-Centered Capitalism is so important
> https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.29.3.3
> These papers are starting to get rather old to me at least! Here’s also The Race by Man and Machine, by Acemoglu and Restrepo
> https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/aer.20160696
> These two are experts in the technological impacts on economies. Check out The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. I’d bet you could find some good papers by them if you search for it:
> https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649/ref=nodl_
> Another good one about post-scarcity economics might be Abundance by Peter Diamandis. He’s not an economist but check out all those boards he’s on!! Guy knows his stuff
> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance:_The_Future_Is_Better_Than_You_Think
> Really was trying to find a good paper for you by Young Joon Kim, Kyungsoo Kim, and Su Kyoung Lee in 2017... shucks. Published in the journal Futures. In any case you can find a good related article here: http://earchive.tpu.ru/bitstream/11683/52262/1/jess-62-288.pdf
> This last one was very much a clincher study, so enjoy! Behold: Technological innovation and employment in derived labour demand models: A hierarchical meta-regression analysis
Mehmet Ugur, Sefa Awaworyi Churchill and Edna Solomon! So much glorious MATH
> https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16035/1/16035_Ugur_Technological%20innovation%20and%20employment%20%28AAM%29%202016.pdf
Btw I’ll let you know more how to persuade me after I finish breakfast but check them links out
Ooo I really wanted to find this one for you but can’t find a non-paywalled link. This would show you a lot of the data for manufacturing
Technological prospective of manufacturing for the year 2030 by Miguel Alfaro, Manuel Vargas, et al
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8609728
This one was great as well, but also pay walled. This one suggests that the US workforce is incredibly lacking in higher skill sets and so will be more susceptible to automation-caused job losses. “Problem-Solving Skills of the U.S. Workforce and Preparedness for Job Automation” Sorry couldn’t find a way for you to access it for free.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1045159518818407
This one isn’t pay walled! You should definitely take a look, they mention UBI, but it was published from a law school, not an economics institute or think tank. “Technology, unemployment & policy options: Navigating the transition to a better world” by Gary Marchant, Stevens, and Hennessy which appeared in the Journal of Evolution and Technology
https://jetpress.org/v24/marchant.pdf
This one was incredibly informed, shows more figures and evidence in an easily-understandable way than I’ve seen elsewhere. “The impact of technological change on jobs and workforce structures” by Chandon Bezuidenhout, published by the Gordon Institute of Business Science
https://repository.up.ac.za/bitstream/handle/2263/64525/Bezuidenhout_Impact_2018.pdf?sequence=1&amp;isAllowed=y
EDIT: so how will you persuade me that technological unemployment isn’t a problem??
I need evidence that shows conclusively that other factors are more important than automation in causing job losses and depressing wages since the 1970s. Or evidence that shows more jobs were created since the 1970s than phased out because of new technology.
Not sure how you could calm me down about Artificial Intelligences since they aren’t exactly around to test yet. Perhaps you could send me evidence for why the AI industry will not face accelerated technological research and development? Could you send me evidence for why the labor replacement potential of AI is overblown, maybe because their advancement has some kind of natural ceiling or impediment somehow?
The historical precedent of new job creation following technological destruction of jobs doesn’t seem to have kept up since the 1970s and 1980s, and seems like enough evidence for why we should be skeptical it’ll pop up some time in the future but because it popped up in the 1950s and earlier in the century. What conclusive evidence is there that Artificial Intelligence isn’t a game changer for our economy? Obviously you can’t use evidence from before there were computers for such a rebuttal. There’s no good comparison for AIs in history to use for economic predictions other than computers. It’s a tough road to persuade someone that machine intelligences will always be inferior to humans. That’s a nice story but it’s entirely based on treating Hollywood movies like real life
"They were farmers with 5 ha large farms. Those are small farmers. Their revenue was ~3600 USD/year, that's poor enough for you?"
-No it's not, that's middle class in India. Poverty is defined as $2USD/Day according to the World Health Organization, which is what 2.4 Billion people live under. http://www.who.int/topics/poverty/en/
"That was the question. I am happy, that you agree with me, however then why are you bashing GMOS?"
-I agree with you 100% that GM crops are more stable and have higher yields. I'm arguing that the implementation of GM Crops end up hurting the poor in developing countries, because large factory farms rely on capital intensive production methods instead of labor intensive methods (which is what developing countries have a comparative advantage in).
"It would be nice to measure the amount of other GM-crops in poor farmers, however only GM-cotton was allowed to be planted, so only cotton farmers could be sampled."
-Cotton is a cash crop because it is grown to be sold. If you present me with evidence from a study using a subsistence crop that farmers under the poverty line grow in order to feed their families, that's another story.
Data:
Amartya Sen's book "Poverty and Famine"
http://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Famines-Essay-Entitlement-Deprivation/dp/0198284632
If you read the speech that I sent you, you would have come across these gems:
"Food production is one influence on food entitlements, but there are other influences as well. Nor is food production necessarily the most important influence on entitlements. Indeed, a famine can occur, or new hunger can emerge, without there being any food output decline whatsoever"
"In my first book on famines, Poverty and Famines, I presented several examples of famines that had occurred without any substantial fall in food output (such as the Bengal famine of 1943 or Ethiopian famines of 1973), and even of examples of famines that took place in years of peak food availability (such as the Bangladesh famine of 1974). The possibility of the occurrence of famines or starvation or general
undernourishment even in the absence of food production problems is particularly important to emphasize, since public policies and popular discussion are often geared entirely to food production problems, and this can distort policy as well as confuse prevalent debates. The penalty of that confusion and misdirection can be very high in human lives and sufferings."
Also, here's an article by Terri Rany, a former economist at the Food and Agriculture of the United Nations.
In the abstract: "... institutional factors such as national agricultural research capacity, environmental and food safety regulations, intellectual property rights and agricultural input markets matter at least as much as the technology itself in determining the level and distribution of economic benefits."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0958166906000346
Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:
Link: http://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Famines-Essay-Entitlement-Deprivation/dp/0198284632
|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|UK|amazon.co.uk|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Italy|amazon.it|
|China|amazon.cn|
This bot is currently in testing so let me know what you think by voting (or commenting).
I don't know if you've read Joe Stiglitz's book on the subject. It is a fairly short read. It chronicles the IMF's several missteps in Russia, and other places, during the 90s (shock therapy, etc.).
They have made some serious mistakes. No reader can come away from reading that without thinking that the organisation needs reform. It is a fairly old book, and things have changed since then though I wouldn't be as eager as you to jump on the IMF train. They do good research though.
According to economist Mancur Olson societies stagnate as elites gain control over the state and use it to enrich themselves.
Since Germany and Japan had their power elites wiped away, their economies could restart without any such dead weight.
The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities,
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Development-as-Freedom-Amartya-Sen/dp/0192893300/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1404836233&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=amartya+sen
www.amazon.co.uk/Poverty-Famines-Essay-Entitlement-Deprivation/dp/0198284632/ref=sr_1_14?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404836233&sr=1-14&keywords=amartya+sen
If you type into google 'amartya sen famines', you can also find out a bunch.
If you want to find out more about this read "Poor Economics" by Esther Duflo and Abhijitv Banerjee. Both are MIT Professors in Development Economics and both are likely future Nobel prize winners. They have done a lot of empirical work in developing communities looking at how the poor actually live their lives as opposed to how people assume they do. You'll be particularly interested in Chapter 8: "Saving brick by brick". It's a really really fascinating book and I really recommend it.
Amazon UK link
Probably this: https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649
As far as targeting is concerned, I would recommend focusing on a single niche. This will help you to modify and change your sales message and offerings to be catered to the very specific needs of your niche, which can only help you to get more consultations within that niche, and even raise your prices considerably.
The reason niche-ing down works is because almost no one else actually markets to a niche, and they end up competing with so many other people that have the exact same message they usually have to compete on price to get clients to buy from them over others.
If you'd like to learn more about this principle, read the book called, "Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant", by W. Chan Kim
The one that's making the rounds at work is The Second Machine Age. I haven't read it yet but that might be more up your alley
Not sure if the author is really from Oz, but if he is it explains a lot.
> Mad Max is an Australian uni student hiding out in his mother's basement waiting for the singularity to arrive.
This explains his socialist view of things. Socialist meaning trying to force his own values onto a group as a whole.
According to the sidebar, darkenlightenment envisions a series of city states. Each city state would have its own rules and culture. So inevitably this would lead to competiton among city states to have the best culture. People who fail to follow the rules of that city state for most offenses would just be thrown out of the city state. The reason is that it is expensive to jail people.
What is interesting is this City State type structure is envisoned by other people like Fareed Zakaria. His book "The Post American World" explains how the re-emergence of India and China as economic powers is effecting the rest of the world. The author questions whether or not India and China will become super powers in the conventional sense.
The city state type structure is already starting to happen in both India and China. The problem is that in a rapidly changing world it is impossible to effectively run a federation.
www.amazon.com/The-Post-American-World-Fareed-Zakaria/dp/0393334805
>Except, empirically, it shows otherwise.
Actually, minimum wages have been shown to cause job losses: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/business/economy/seattle-minimum-wage.html
The Berkeley study covered restaurant workers only. A different University of Washington study compiled data from all sectors in Seattle, and showed far worse results:
The University of Washington researchers found that the minimum-wage increase resulted in higher wages, but also a significant reduction in the working hours of low-wage earners. This was especially true of the more recent minimum-wage increase, from as high as $11 an hour to up to $13 an hour in 2016. In that case, wages rose about 3 percent, but the number of hours worked by those in low-wage jobs dropped about 9 percent — a sizable amount that led to a net loss of earnings on average.
Yeah surely the rents don't help, but if you make the minimum wage $100/hour, you will have fewer jobs. This is econ 101 stuff.
As for the automation replacing jobs thing, the experts on AI/robotics are mostly in agreement on this. Check out:
The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and one of the most cited scholars in information systems and economics, and Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at MIT,
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, by Martin Ford.
High-Skilled White Collar Work? Machines Can Do That Too NY Times article
It's not really a question of when, it's already happening.
Consider how:
Turbotax and automated payroll systems have replaced a significant % of accounting positions
Wall St firms need fewer employees because most trading is now automated
Highly automated Amazon warehouses means fewer employees are needed for retail and malls shut down
Law firms now need fewer new associates and paralegals due to legal software
Universities can hire fewer teaching assistants due to educational software
In the ports of NYC and worldwide a few engineers controlling robotic cranes have replaced tens of thousands of longshoreman unloading and loading ships
Many newer behemoth companies like Facebook and Google are worth far more than old guard firms like GM or Walmart but require only a few hundred to a few tens of thousands of human employees...
And technological progress isn't slowing down, it is speeding up. Think of the approximately 20 million drivers who will be almost surely out of a job within the next 2 decades as self driving cars and trucks hit the roads.
Yes there will still be jobs, but a surprising number of them are being and will continue to be automated, at an ever increasing rate. One cashier watching 10 self-checkout scanners replacing ten cashiers is a good example of the jobs that might still require humans... until you replace her too with a robot.
Neither tariffs nor high minimum wages will change this trend. UBI is really the only long term solution.
What are you looking for exactly. This is a link to Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Second-Continent-Migrants-Building/dp/0307956989
Could you please rephrase your question in the form an Edwin Starr song? :)
So war does, or can, have benefits, and some of them can be big. But in my opinion wars in the real world are almost never worth the costs.
Edit: Added polygamy bit.
https://i.redd.it/srac5hqa0ji21.jpg (Thomas Sankara) What exactly is the West's intention?
&#x200B;
Edit: Further Reading https://www.amazon.com/Europe-Underdeveloped-Africa-Walter-Rodney/dp/1574780484
Seeking political power is the antithesis of moldbuggian thought. A better alternative looks like this.
I hear "race to the bottom dollar" a lot and I recommend reading the book Blue Ocean Strategy. It helped me find uncontested marketspace.
Second, I think video is going towards virtual and augmented reality. Editing footage in 360 degrees is my prediction for the future. Good luck with everything!
>Sure you aren't a trump supporter, you just post constantly in defense of him and happen to think the russian interference is all a big lie despite all the evidence for it. But no definitely not a trump supporter. I'm not interested in reading your smug pseudo-intellectual rants about misapplied theories, and neither are the refugees fleeing Syria, they just want a safe place to go rather than dying in the rubble of their country.
I mean, I defended Obama against the birther shit and Muslim accusations too. I'm sorry if I can't let bullshit slide. But lets step back...What does it matter? Really. What does my affiliation matter? Does it change my arguments? I'm not asking you to believe me based on who I am, I'll gladly defend my positions with arguments and citations.
So why try to push me into an allegiance just so you can ignore me? Isn't that troubling that you're prone to do that? How much information are you missing out on because you label people and toss away information that doesn't fit your world view? Meanwhile, you've insulted me numerous times and I've read every word you said, and responded in good faith.
>There's no evidence that the refugees that manage to escape were the 'best and brightest' and no matter how much you want to keep ranting about the pareto principle and try to twist it into supporting any half baked assertion you make, there's no reason to think the women and children that made it out alive weren't mostly just the lucky ones. The best and brightest family could have been killed by a random artillery shell instead.
Well, you didn't ask. But migration and "brain drain" have been a major policy topic at the IMF and in economics for decades now. We have plenty of evidence illustrating that even under duress, migratory conditions favor those in the upper eocnomic bands. In fact, the worst hit for brain drain are usually under the most duress--either due to poorer than the "developing" world economic conditions or war. That's because countries that are "developing" have such significant amounts of people with tertiary educations that the drain only typically pulls about 5-10% of them. Meanwhile though, countries that have collapsed? Brain drain will pull nearly all of their "best and brightest" (Second paper goes over this.)
>The best and brightest family could have been killed by a random artillery shell instead.
This would be anecdotal, among large populations the idea of a single case being a theme is the sign of...well, someone that doens't know how large populations work. Yes, clearly the "best and brightest" could be killed, and people in the mid and lower band can get lucky. But the averages won't support this, for numerous reasons. The biggest being that the hurdles OUTSIDE the country are just as big as within it. I think, genuinely, some people have a hard time grasping just how long, difficult and complex the journey from Syria would be.
>I'm certainly not willing to tell these families to go die in Syria instead because you're worried they might be contributing to a brain drain there.
Oh there is no need to do that. The most effective method of saving these people has been studied pretty extensively, and our laws are actually set up around it. Quite simply refugee status is restricted to the first safe country you pass through. If the West truly wanted to help refugees, then the goal would be to send money and material aid to those camps, and prepare for the end of the war so they can return and prepare to build.
You should really read the Bottom Billion, so you can know more about what you obviously feel passionate about. Because it seems like you're all emotion with this, without a lot of actual knowledge. Which is fine, its a very emotion issue--but there is a ton of good research on it.
>Oh did you know that 80% of your karma is from the 20% of non-bullshit posts you make? It must be true because the pareto principle is thing.
Well, 80% of my Karma is from 20% of my posts, that's actually true. I'd say "bullshit' is a qualitative quantifier here. But you're absolutely right that the Pareto principle applies to my posting as well. Stochastic distributions that wind up under this principle don't care about your feelings or barbs son--this principle accurately describes the fact that 20% of the population has more than everyone else both globally and then within those global nations there is another split, it describes how citations come from small amounts of work while most papers have zero, its shows that the NBA point distribution per game, the number of championship wins per team in every sports league follows this pattern. Always.
There is only fact, and what's not fact. Your emotions in this are meaningless.
You should read the Origin of Wealth. The premise is that human cooperation is the foundation for industrial wealth, but selfishness. It's a brilliant book that strikes a great balance between the power of the market and its intrinsic weaknesses.
This is a very contested area of economics. I liked this book, though:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Rich-Countries-Poor-Stay/dp/1586486683
It sort of states that the rich countries are ones that set up protectionist policies to support infant industry and subsidized them heavily. Policies that promote free trade for developing countries may end up harming them. Hence, they should follow the development models of the West in using government support to create industry then later open up to free trade.
Relevant
http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Wealth-Evolution-Complexity-Economics/dp/157851777X
Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics [Hardcover]
Eric D. Beinhocker (Author)
4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (70 customer reviews) | Like (5)
Hace poco terminé una vuelta más a How Asia Works, que es uno de mis favoritos. Ahora estoy releyendo The Elusive Quest for Growth y empezando con Stages of Economic Growth
sorry for not replying sooner, I was on vacation. A simple and quick explanation can be found here (you can skip to 2 minutes if you're only interested in the rich/poor part)
I also recommend this book, which goes much more into details of the vicious cycle poor countries are stuck into.
Since you're enlightened on this subject, I wonder if you've read this book? If so, what are your thoughts on it? Its part of what got me thinking about the subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649
This is really somewhat hilarious. You're dismissing the plurality view of the academic field because I "haven't posted evidence of it" (even though the research we're discussing actually supports that conclusion, if you read the paper), and it hurts your feelings.
Fine, here are some citations. Since you don't even know what "literature" means, I'll leave out things behind paywalls:
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth? by William Easterly
The Elusive Quest for Growth by William Easterly
Institutions as the Fundamental Cause of Long-Run Growth by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson
Coffee and Power by Jeffrey M. Paige
The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto
The Anti-Politics Machine by James Ferguson
Social Cohesion, Institutions, and Growth by William Easterly, Jozef Ritzen, and Michael Woolcock
African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis by Nicolas Van de Walle
Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
Doing Bad by Doing Good by Christopher Coyne
From Subsistence to Exchange by Peter Bauer
Devil Take the Hindmost - fun, readable book about the history of investment https://www.amazon.com/dp/0452281806/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_xIpbBbSMEKR7X
The Boglehead's Guide to Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JUV01RW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_gKpbBbSYVVXS7 has a lot of practical info on wealth maximization through minimizing taxes, long term consistent debt such as frequent new car purchases, and general buy and hold investment strategies
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0041842TW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_t1_6LpbBb1PVZEMX solid, classic book about foundations for building wealth
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0470918136?pc_redir=1409928287&amp;robot_redir=1
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0041842TW?pc_redir=1409887984&amp;robot_redir=1
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Title | The Rise of the Machines – Why Automation is Different this Time
Description | Automation in the Information Age is different. Books we used for this video: The Rise of the Robots: http://amzn.to/2r0rtDS The Second Machine Age: http://amzn.to/2r6xt28 Support us on Patreon so we can make more videos (and get cool stuff in return): https://www.patreon.com/Kurzgesagt?ty=h Robot Poster & Kurzgesagt merch here: http://bit.ly/1P1hQIH The music of the video here: Soundcloud: http://bit.ly/2sfwlJf Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2r17DNc Facebook: http://bit.ly/2qW6bY4 – Study ab...
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Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom takes this idea and applies it to developing countries. Great book.
I just bought the book Ryan X Charles recommended, (related to your username and what you are talking about):
https://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2owj55/welcome_drew_ryan_mike_daniel_joe_dave_david/cmratzl
$3 dollars in Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0684810077/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&amp;psc=1
I highly recommend reading China's Second Continent to gain a glimpse of the situation. China certainly has their finger in almost ever resource rich pot in the continent. Although anytime African nations are involved, it is shady as hell. I wouldn't invest in China in Africa.
> Lol, veto powers Russia and China
You know who else has veto power?
Yep, the US. Which means: the UN can never be used against the US.
Can China and Russia stop the US from using UN resolutions for its own nefarious ends? Yep. That means that on occasion, it is a tool that the US cannot use. But in cases where Russia and China can be made to acquiesce, or bought off, it is an excellent tool with which to fool the damn fool internationalist liberals of the sort that fill the Donkle party.
See e.g. the use the US made of UN resolutions against Iraq.
And that is not even the worst of it. Even UN aid agencies are suspect, western corporate interest-influenced cats paws:
http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Poverty-Prestige-Corruption-International/dp/0871134691
Sorry bub, but the dumb, uninformed, brainwashed fool here is you.
Read this
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technologies/dp/0393350649
To anyone interested I can really recommend China's Second Continent by Howard W. French. It talks about Chinese people in Africa, and it's written by a journalist who's fluent in Mandarin and travelled across Africa to get inside the communities.
That's a monster of a question. Hell, development economics is an entire academic field, you might as well ask 'ELI5: Physics'. Anyone who seriously thinks they can give you an answer here is lying to you, and probably to themselves as well.
That being said, for my money there are three books that are really required reading on the topic of how countries end up poor, plus two books that are required reading on why it's so hard to fix. I'd call them the bare minimum to call yourself literate on the subject.
Two that you should read on why it's so hard to fix global poverty (Poor Economics sits at the intersection).
Not trying to make a judgment, but this may not be the best thing for Africa
If throwing money at problems solved them then the Baltimore and DC school system would be the best in the country.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Elusive-Quest-Growth-Misadventures/dp/0262550423
That book is all about how foreign aid money does not actually cause economic benefit. Throwing money at things usually doesnt work and can cause certain unintended negative consequences, some of which are quite terrible, ie keeping corrupt politicians in power.