Why is Africa so backwards still?

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I know that this sounded very smart inside your mind. However, problem with typing such thing is that they begin to sound quite dumb the second you publish them.

I think yon man (ruveyn) has a point you know.

He has plenty of points.

But when you connect the points, they look like this:

When it comes to explaining why African poverty persists, it's important to consider that the world has only a finite number of resources that is not distributed equally across the world. If you take one of those "ecological footprint" tests, you'll find out that if all seven billion people lived like affluent First Worlders, the planet's resources would be exhausted to nothing. What this implies is that the reason people in the Third World are poor is because people in the First World are consuming a ridiculously high chunk of the pie, leaving the Third Worlders with only the scraps. As to how some places came to be First World and others Third World, that's when the environmental and historical (specifically colonial) explanations come in.

I don't buy predominantly cultural explanations for African poverty. Not only do they have racist undertones and generalize about a huge continent full of diverse cultures and peoples, but even if we accept that African cultural values in general are not conducive to Western-style democracy and prosperity, they have never been the only people in the world to have different sociopolitical and economic values from the modern West. Indian culture has never been more progressive, secular, or capitalistic than African cultures as far as I know, yet India today is doing better than Africa.

I should also add that Western meddling in Africa isn't completely over yet: http://libcom.org/library/war-dr-congo- ... rests-ibrp

Instead of asking why Africans are so "backwards," perhaps we should be wondering why Americans and Europeans are so darn forwards? Always bragging about how great they are, no sense of decency. It's rather embarrassing, really.

You are joking?

From a lot of what I've seen, while it's a little more high-brow than it was in the colonial era its still enough of an issue. Computer parts graveyards, people buying up land for investment and not doing the right things with it, etc.

I think that's where our dollar votes come in. I actually did find a really good charity out of the UK who's spread throughout Africa, not the most high budget one but one that goes to small villages and teaches modern day agricultural tricks as well as helping to sustain food and water supply. Yes, AIDS/HIV and other vaccines are necessary but to really bring things on the upward it takes first resolving hunger from within Africa, then great infrastructure, then steady electrical supply. With any luck once the basic staples are well resolved and when machinery even further eases the need for sustenance farming and puts the populace in a better position for education, innovation and discovery, etc. Right now, aside from several quite modernized areas on the western lobe, the South Africa region, and the south-eastern seaboard it seems like a lot is needed, as well as to connect the dots and help the African Union have better (and safer) international commercial traffic flow.

There are backwoods in every country

Why? If you got it, flaunt it.

ruveyn

That is not what he meant. It is correct despite (not because of) its politically correct analysis.



Psychometric testing was in its infancy when WW1 broke out. The Stanford-Binet IQ test was not available at the outset of WW1, and was never used to test army recruits. The army used some other test and it was not a random sample of the population. Nevertheless, while Jews apparently scored below the national average (whatever that means) at some brief point in history, blacks have always lagged behind other groups (not just whites, whom they are usually compared to) in every measure of intelligence: SAT scores, IQ tests, grad school admissions tests, Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals, Turing Prizes, etc. The question Sowell doesn't raise is why Jews surpassed "the national average" while blacks didn't.



That assumes the discrepancy is caused by past discrimination. The cartoon attempts to show this by proposing an untestable hypothesis. If slavery, Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory practices are the cause of the IQ discrepancy, there is no way of empirically verifying it. How would a social scientist set up an experiment to empirically verify whether the source of the IQ difference is slavery and segregation without begging the question? It is impossible. If this cartoon is meant as anything other than humor then spare us the talk of pseudo-science.

The Jews of ages past were slaves in Egypt. That did not stop them, once they were free.

ruveyn

so after all that the conclusion as to "why africa is so backwards" is that they are 'a bit slow'(?) Hmmm, bearing in mind that i know next to nothing about PPR I'm gonna stick to heat and overpopulation

I think they are less technologically advanced cause they didn't need the technology to begin with.

I would argue that right now it's people interfering with their cultures on a daily basis that is actually hurting their cultural devolopment.

Are you suggesting that former slaves should proceed to kick some ass and win themselves a homeland via genocide (with God's approval, of course)?

Lol, the last option went out of style a couple hundred years ago (ie. genocide, God's approval perhaps started waning a few hundred years farther back). I think his argument was more with the notion of slavery doing as much violence a people's hereditary reserve of intelligence as previously claimed.

The greatest civilizations were born on the harshest lands with hostile surroundings: ie. Egypt (Desert) , Europe (harsh winters, wars), China (harsh weather, enemies), Mongolia (dry lands, lots of enemies), Japan (earthquakes, mountainous lands, civil wars), Russia (extreme winter), Arabia/Babylonians(desert, wars, invasions), Persia (surrounded by enemies), the lands of Canaan (forced to pirate and sail to get resources like Phoenicia, Ancient Israel, Philistines...) ...etc
Each of these civilizations went through ups and downs but they all became great and advanced at some point.

The populations of those lands were forced to develop progressively agriculture, sailing, storage ways and war tools in order to survive.


The need creates innovation and invention, innovation creates progress, progress creates power..

While in Africa the land was mostly fertile, the forests there were rich enough to provide enough food and water all the year for its small populations (without even the need of agriculture). They didn't develop because they didn't have the need to develop.

North America is the same, that's why the native Americans stayed primitives for too long.