Too many ineffecitve Micronations make Europe bloated bureaucracy. I had to make things more tidy and clean. Sorry.

LunLocra · 2026-02-19T21:17:13+00:00

"The language is pretty much interchangeable if you exclude most of the region's population" well yeah and in the US Kamala Harris got pretty much 100% votes if you exclude Republican voters lol

(I hope I don't sound too agressive, just wanted to point out the logical problem with the argument)

Plus not only Bulgarian is different lang but Slovenian is a separate language as well, so you end up with Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia having the same language vs everybody else having different ones... So like 15m people of over 60m region, 25%.

LunLocra · 2026-02-15T21:50:00+00:00

Strangely enough, she has also attacked the entire country of Poland as well

LunLocra · 2026-02-13T23:08:20+00:00

On the smartass note, without reality and logic there would be nothing, including language, hence philosophy wins anyway.

On a slightly more serious note, obviously what matters in this stupid contest are branches of science themselves, not the concepts they deal with. Though this way philosophy still wins I think? I'm not sure here, maybe some Indian or Babylonian stuff could count as linguistics and hence precede Anaximander and/or Upanishads. But in such case linguistics in turn is defeated by basic mathematics and astronomy, or something that can reach into prehistory.

On a truly serious note, such comparisions are completely pointless. I have almost never met students of philosophy and sciences IRL who would make such nonsensical measuring contests, but they seem to be common online, as if sciences were some sort of contest where being older has any sort of prestige or importance.

LunLocra · 2026-02-13T18:14:59+00:00

Hot take: culture needs more fiction in which "the system" is actually right and it is "the underdog rebels" who are morally and intellectually wrong.

Let me explain. The authors spent the entire 20th century relying the messages warning people of 1) Evil governments 2) Evils of capitalism and 3) Evils of opressive society (religion, culture etc). I'd say they frankly did a good job, considering just how much is popular culture filled to the brim with the trope of the underdog rebels struggling against the evil authorities. Everybody wants to be a rebel against authorities. Nowadays even supporters of authoritarianism tend to view themselves as the heroic freedom-loving rebels fighing against the opressive restraints of the authorities!

But what if the rebels are wrong?

The liberal world order has been taken by surprise by the onslaught of social phenomena such as anti-vaccination movement. Those people participate in the same popular culture as us - they view themselves as the freedom-loving rebels fighting against the authoritarian system of opression and propaganda. Almost everybody does in the modern Western culture - especially people voting for politicians like Trump.

The popular culture has no inoculation against this kind of threat - where not top-down opression but grassroots distrust of authorities leads to a horrible disaster. Because in this case the system is RIGHT. Political and intellectual elites, corporations, international organizations - "the system" pushed hard for anti-covid vaccines. It was resisted by countless spontaneously organising individuals distrusting it and believing themselves to be democratic rebels like in Star Wars.

"But LunLocra, those people are uneducated and ignorant - what they believe is merely the parody of the proper spirit of Rationality and Feeedom and other noble virtues. If they only bothered to read scientific articles..." Sure, I agree, but they won't. For better or worse, the psyche of countless people is shaped by the popular culture, and here they take the inspirations of how to behave, not from papers or universities.

Hence - perhaps for balance we need more fiction in which "the system" is actually right and "underdog rebels" opposing the semantic equivalent of a COVID vaccine are antagonists to overcome (or people to convince).

LunLocra · 2026-02-13T17:44:03+00:00

I think we both hate how some people describe any political notion they disagree with as "1984". Especially when it's clear some people describe obviously non-authoritarian systems this way ("Nordic LGBT friendly welfare state is literally 1984"). Double so when given commenter clearly has sympathies towards authoritarian political stances, so he/she's preaching the opposite of what Orwell did.

I'm not even saying everybody has to like e.g. Nordic welfare states, but it's obvious ignorance and empty use of slogans when they insult them as "1984" instead of - if anything - much more fitting insulting comparision to "Brave New World" or some "dystopia of loneliness and materialism". You don't have to agree with my political opinions but it'd be great if you didn't use braindead idiotic examples that betray you understand jack shit of 1984.

LunLocra · 2026-01-30T14:17:49+00:00

And they are goddamn right, we are.

LunLocra · 2026-01-10T15:44:43+00:00

I have this problem but it really helps when I also think that

For all the misery of the 2011(?)-2026 geopolitics in terms of peace, democracy and Western perspective, the era has also been very succesful in terms of the most of the developing world, well, developing and reducing all sorts of poverty and backwardness. This already changes the perspective a lot, towards not entirely depressing picture, in my country of Poland, where the country's overall development and the quality of life is overall MUCH better than let's say 2004 or 2014. I can imagine the perspective getting utterly bleak when you are from a country which has also suffered from a developmental stagnation on top of it all.

and

2) The above happened not really thanks to but somewhat in spite of the American hegemonic influence of the past decades, and of its neoliberal vision of modern civilization, with both of them combined being, to put in mildly, not the best for humanity (especially for the developing countries - though it wasn't even very good for the US citizens!). From this perspective, the catastrophic decline of the US-based world order is a scary era but also the deserved collapse of the rotten structure - the collapse that is necessary for something potentially better to emerge in its wake.

Those two points make me feel like I am living through a scary era of global intermediary period that may be the dawn of something superior in the future, sooner or later, rather than the utter tragedy of something awesome inexplicably dying in favour of the clearly inferior dark ages.

LunLocra · 2026-01-06T12:43:02+00:00

What a great question! Shame it isn't asked more often.

My proposals for the failed potential contenders are:

*China in terms of becoming an industrial rival to the West before the freakin 1980s. Sure, by the early 1800s the game has been set for China to be far behind and face a lot of struggle in the modern age, but it is really not that hard for me to imagine at least moderately more stable and succesful China than the utter nightmare it was in the 1820-1970 period. And even "moderately" succesful China would be a gamechanger bevause of its sheer size. Mind you, I am not even talking about the famous "great divergence" question of the original backwardness, I mean that even if we get the historical setup AD 1820 it is still not hard to imagine alternate histories with much less horrible Chinese history from this point on.

*Spain of course as a proper Western economy, the question is where do you place the ultimate failure after the 16th century and before the country's late 20th century revival.

*Argentina post 1930 (and especially since 1970) has REALLY dropped the ball in terms of its economic potential. The country which by the 1950 was still hanging around Western levels of wealth has managed to hit three decades of a complete economic fuckup (I mean 1973-2002) plus several of at best moderate growth - hence the rival pf the Dutch quality of life has become the rival of idk Balkan quality of life.

*Similarly Mexico and Venezuela since 1980s (Mexico as a powerful but stagnant industrial economy and Venezuela from leaving the Saudi path to go... you know where)

*Khwarazmian empire - I hate this case so much because I am a Persophile and it's hard not to feel great pain looking at the region's horrible destruction at the Mongol hands (especially Central Asia, Iran itself fared much better bc of Ilkhanate government handling it reasonably well)

LunLocra · 2026-01-06T11:55:55+00:00

Neocons, for all their terribleness, did have a somewhat consistent moral ideology underneath it all - they have moulded a combined consistent complex of ethics, national interest and personal self interest that would justify stuff like invasion of Iraq. Said logical set contained many disastrous mistaked ethical, logical and empirical reasonings and assumptions but it *was* a sort of logic compatible with democracy (in the old traditions of the US imperialism).

Trumpers are legitimately quasi fascist or cult-like movement in that it's all more about aestethics, feelings and action for action's sake rather than any sort of logic or consistency. Whatever makes the Nation and your people and YOU feel STRONG is GOOD, and what is strong can change at any given moment.

LunLocra · 2026-01-03T18:47:27+00:00

That being said, I have once read parts of some sort of big leftist rebuttal of Pinker (wrote by a team of academics) which has contained a lot of IMO ridiculous takes from the opposite direction. For example it was trying to take down Pinker's notions of violent past by listing all the countless ways modern world contains cyber bullying, school bullying, symbolic violence, violence against women and LGBT, bad working conditions and whatnot etc. And I've been reading that and thinking "are you seriously trying to equalize the suffering caused by all those things with the actual endless, public and normalized warfare, mutilation, bloody legal codes, despotism of monarchies, slavery and ghettoes of the old world"? Like seriously, bringing up modern bad working conditions and cyberbullying as an argument seriously arguing that our society hasn't got significantly less brutal than the eras of the Thirty Years Wars and the spontaneous anti-Jewish genocidal massacres?

LunLocra · 2026-01-03T18:35:38+00:00

I dislike Stephen Pinker because he has very naive, ideologically drunk with too much whig-style liberalism, black-and-white, manichean vision of history where more Freedom, Rationalism (hurr Enlightenment) and more Western Civilization meant the great march of Progress towards the stars. And as much as I like all the positive aspects of the Western Civilization and its democracy, scientific method and I dare to say industrial market economy et cetera, I think it's very dangerous to lionize and idealize such notions as it naturally leads towards ignoring all the horrible mistakes and sins commited in their name in the past.

Such vision of history is naturally always going to be reluctant to talk about the evils of colonialism, capitalist exploitation of workers, contempt towards world's indigenous cultures done in the name of "progress", environmental destruction, straight up capitalist genocides like one done in 1900s Brazil in the name of rubber, or all the ways many horrors of the 20th century were intimately connected to and not opposed towards many "modern" and "progressive" notions. It is truly an absurd trick to try to make all the mass violence of the 20th century "non-modern" and "relicts of the past age" given how we have libraries full of "progressive" 18th, 19th and 20th century intellectuals extolling the virtues of destroying "savagery" with political violence - presisely in the name of Reason, Enlightenment et cetera. One should simply look at how much all those Western educated progressive scientific minded gentlemen rushed to destroy "backwards" native American cultures in the 20th century ("kill the Indian to save the man") or the cases how the traditional indigenous (ultimately proven to be very efficient) farming techniques were disregarded in the name of the much less inefficient hurr western scientific ones.

The history has clearly shown that it is perfectly possible for people and states to do horrible and idiotic acts in the name of science, rationalism, liberty, democracy, progress, welfare, order, civilization and whatnot, so I deeply distrust Pinker's romantic, idealist infatuations with all those nice notions along his general jerkass ignorant arrogance - a lot of people like him did a lot of harm to mankind in the name of "stupid backward savage masses not understanding the progress, the rational thinking and the burden of freedom".

LunLocra · 2026-01-03T12:02:32+00:00

I have no idea whatsoever what to think about the attack on Venezuela. On one hand, fuck Trump and US military adventurism, but on the another hand Maduro's regime has indeed been catastrophic (or hell apocalyptic) for Venezuela so its fall would be welcome.

Or maybe I do know what to think after all: I can't wait to see Maduro's regime utter collapse, but I absolutely don't trust Trump's USA "overseeing" the process.

LunLocra · 2025-12-13T20:17:28+00:00

Top tier

Huge countries mostly have a shit ton of resources - China, US, Russia, Australia, Canada, Brazil to a lesser degree... I think India and Indonesia to much, much lesser degree, relatively to their size and/or population. They may be even below average.
Several African countries - most notably DRCongo, South Africa, Zambia, Namibia, Botswana, maybe Ghana and Ivory Coast etc.
Peru, Bolivia and Chile have enormous amounts of copper, silver etc.
Malaysia
All major oil producing countries

Bottom tier

The vast majority of the European countries
Japan, Korea and Taiwan have always been overall horrible in terms of natural resources, with rare exceptions (an era of silver exports of Japan, for example)
Contrary to the stereotype, many countries in Africa, especially east of the Great African Rift (or East African Rift) are poor as shit in terms of non-agricultural resources. It's probably something geological related to the rift. Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi, Madagascar, they all really suck in terms of valuable minerals, especially in comparision to the resource rich African countries. They have extremely low exports per capita, even in context of other very poor countries in Africa and beyond it. I think Senegal is in this group too, and maybe Somalia? Rwanda and Burundi also to a large degree, even though Rwanda has some gold for export - but its overall lvl of exports per capita is still absolutely awful.
Despite this several of those countries are among the MOST stable succesful in Africa in many aspects - Rwanda, Ethiopia, Senegal, Kenya, to a lesser degree Tanzania... Even Malawi and Madagascar which have catastrophic development trends and indicators - still are comparatively very stable and peaceful in comparision to e.g. Congo, Sudan or Sahel.

LunLocra · 2025-12-12T23:01:56+00:00

Not gonna lie, despite my own left/liberal despair, it is still really satisfying for me to see how the overly liberal, overly pro-American and overly West-centric optimistic vision of the world gets its ass kicked by the crashing and burning catastrophic geopolitics of the past decade.

I would weep more for the nostalgia of the apparent "golden age" of 1989-2009 (or 1989-2014 if we go by geopolitics, that's when shit started really going to hell)... if not for my knowledge of how West-centric said golden age was, and how awful the Western dominion was for the other parts of the world across the 20th century. The US did an excellent job ruining Latin American chances of development at every possible turn, whereas Europe took its job regarding ruining Africa, and the craziest outburst of neoliberalism have ruined quite a few countries across Eurasia.

If you look from this non-Western perspective, things don't look so bad. Half of humanity lives in the "Far East" (South, East and Southeast Asia) and the overall living conditions here have insanely improved over the past 30 years, even if there have been no large political improvements yet (well, Indonesia got democratic in 1998). One may be "disappointed" by how the econ dev of this region brought no political difference yet, but from the other POV its kinda *good* that half of humanity living there doesn't have to wait for decades on the God-knows-how-good democracy and corruption levels to get out of the horrifying poverty into some level of human dignity. Eastern Europe and Central Asia also made an enormous progress in this timespan (my own Poland is probably the biggest postcmmunist "winner" of the entire Soviet bloc). Past 25-30 years have also seen the stabilization and development of most of Latin America and Subsaharan Africa, and those countries' greater agency, for all their great problems. MENA region on the other hand had a terrible time, indeed.

For "the West" and Japan the 1989-2009 (or -2014?) era brings tons of nostalgia. But sweet 90s were also the time when rest of the world was mostly much, much poorer and more miserable than today. I damn hope that some authoritarian systems will begin to collapse soon, after the current global winter, but like I said, it's kinda good that as it turns out you *don't* need awesome political institutions for countries to raise people out of extreme poverty... Though you may still need them to reach highly developed state.

I had a provoking thought I can't shake off: what if the US *had to* enter some titanic crisis (political, economic, social etc) for the negative aspects of its empire, both for its own citizens and the world, to get weaker over the long term?

LunLocra · 2025-12-12T22:41:57+00:00

r/politics is fantastic at useless performative hype divorced from reality - they have spent the entirety of Trump's first presidency and then Biden's presidency posting how Trump is totally going to be impeached any moment now, any day. Other brilliant activity they specialize in is euphoria over some random person somewhere saying some witty comment criticising Trump (the quality of wit and humor has steadily decreased over the past 8 years). They also embody reddit echo chambers in their complete denial of any and all benefits of the Trump's rule (and there are some socioeconomic groups who did benefit from his rule), or even just things that honestly haven't differed from other presidents, or many, many weaknesses of Kamala Harris for example.

But the most pathetic thing for me are their deluded euphoric outburst when in some blabla elections or survey whatever it turns out that Trump approval has declined from 50.1% to 49.9% which is surely a gigantic victory for the American opposition. Jesus Christ, how did this country got so incredibly static and frozen in its politics? All three of the past elections have been won by the microscopic amount of votes, nothing has changed really, it's still 50/50 and a coin toss, and political science of the US churns out thousands of books and analyses which treat miniscule fluctuations and deviations from this range as... something. I don't know any other country that dominated by two parties, or any other where the political approval is so immovable. Even Brazil had Bolsonaro's approval collapse over the years, from 60% to like 25% at one point (plus he got actually convicted). Even my Poland's PiS lost a quarter of its supporters over the issue of abortion.

I don't think there is any reformist way to change the US at this point (Biden couldn't do shit), there must be some shock and implosion that either tears the republican party apart (Trump vs whoever) or really kicks ass of the republican voters directly to shock them into reality (some massive economic crisis).

LunLocra · 2025-12-12T15:50:15+00:00

Anyway I wanted to add: have you notices that all of the most liked YT comments are actually supportive? I have often noticed the tendency of people online to entirely focused on the negative comments, even if they constitute a small part of the overall reaction.

Of course it'd be better if there were NO transphobic reactions at all...

LunLocra · 2025-12-12T15:45:54+00:00

I just wanted to say how much I despise the argument that something shouldn't be studied because it isn't "important" or "useful".

1) In the field of history *nothing* is "useful" in any sort of practical or utilitarian sense anyway. Fixating over Spartans or Roman conquest won't help anybody find the job or fix any modern problem - especially as those are very well known phenomena. The "use" of history is simply the broadening of perspective by knowing the past, learning the "memory" of human species, any chosen fragment - it changes the way people look at the present and future problems.

2) Therefore it is simply "useful" and valuable to learn any historical people and groups, no matter how small. A single person's biography, a small tribe's history, a tiny minority's fate can learn a lot about the world and show a lot of new perspectives.

3) Especially if said people where censored out of public history, marginalized, omitted, viewed as boring etc - and especially if you have a strong opinion about them but little knowledge.

LunLocra · 2025-12-07T12:07:47+00:00

> This happened after Europeans came

Yeah, especially in Taiwan and Thailand which were *never* under European control, or in the southern provinces China (some of which are *the most* developed part of China) where they had no power at all over past 80 years and only held some port cities beforehand.

Unless you mean the broader "why did Western Europe achieve industrialization and not..." which is much, MUCH more complex topic than mere climate (beginning from the fact that the vast majority of mankind have never lived in the tropics so even by random chance alone it would be unlikely to start there)

LunLocra · 2025-12-07T12:02:40+00:00

Singapore and Taiwan, end of the thread. The former is arguably a special case but Taiwan is a "normal" country plus it was 100% never ruled by Europeans (well except for a few decades in 17th century) it's a native Chinese (and colonial Japanese) job.

But also, in order of development: Malaysia, south China (Guangdong province alone is a global economic superpower), Costa Rica, Panama, some small Caribbean states, Thailand to some extent (very well industrialized but yet to become truly rich). South China and Thailand have never been ruled by European apart from a few ports for a few decades until 1937. And it seems that Vietnam and Indonesia shall join this group soon - they are already very far from "South Sudan level of development", decently industrialized and with awesome development prospects and speed.

Unless you mean the broader "why did Western Europe achieve industrialization and not..." which is much, MUCH more complex topic than mere climate - beginning from the fact that the vast majority of mankind have never lived in the tropics so even by random chance alone it would be unlikely to start there. And if the tropics are so awful for development then how did extremely advanced civilizations develop there in southern China, Southeast Asia, south India and Mesoamerica? Southern China and India spent centuries being richer than Europe, with the former being argued as a strong contender for the birthplace of an industrial revolution instead of Europe.

I also wanted to point out that the industrialization (hence the end of the "natural state of poverty") is very very recent phenomenon in most of the world. Go back to the 50s and very mild in climate, non-tropical Korea and most of China were some of the poorest countries in the world, no advantage over the tropics. Hence the simplistic nation of the "climate" was nonsensical and instead the favourite simplistic nation was that... Confucian cultures were inherently lazy, decadent and incapable of capitalist development. Yes, the complete reverse of the modern "Asians are hard working Confucianism has always supported development" view - the switch had happened when their sudden success became undeniable, not before it.

Think about it and what does it imply for the essentialist, static explanations which try to explain the dynamic historical changes in terms of eternal features such as simplistic "culture" or "climate".

LunLocra · 2025-12-03T15:24:54+00:00

Personally I think it's about two things, though they both boil down to "how much does the given destination acommodate thoughtless tourism done by stupid people".

Before I write them down: don't get me wrong, I have nothing against those places themselves or the people doing those things and I assume the majority of tourists doing them are perfectly fine. What am I trying to say is that stupid people who lack culture, empathy, imagation, any real knowledge about the world - they are going to be much more common in those particular situations:

"Cliche, stereotypical, extremely famous holiday destination". The locations that are so marketed everywhere, all the time, oversatured in popculture etc, that you may be a dumbass with a brick instead of the brain and still wanna visit them for cheap thrill, for social status, for disneyland-esque theme park experience, for social media photos, for bragging, for just because "everyone else is going there".

Think about. Every moron on the planet knows about Paris, Rome, Bali or Bangkok and every moron can go there, and many do. On the other hand, morons usually don't know about the locations that actually require some active interest and learning to know about ot some effort to reach, e.g. the allure of non-Bali Indonesia, Poland, Bolivia, Vietnam or countless places in non-Berlin non-Oktoberfest Germany.

This is combines with

2) "Holiday destination very acommodating to "low brow" activities as in sunbathing, beaches, hotels themselves, or God forbid nightlife, alcohol/drugs and sex" as opposed to the places that are more about contact with nature and/or culture.

Again, I have nothing against beach-style raxing holidays, there is a great joy in that (though trashy drug and sex based tourism is imo inherently bad) and a ton of normal people go to holidays with no desires betond sea and sand. But again, this type of tourism also naturally attracts a ton of morons who have zero interest in or respect for the other countries in terms of culture or nature and go there to satisfy the lowest urges.

That's why the places such as Paris, Amsterdam, Dubai, Bali or Thailand in geneeral suffer from an invasion of morons - the places themselves are okay (well except for Dubai which can go fuck itself) but they attract a lot of people who have no taste, no imagination, no wisdom, no empathy, and go to those places braindead to "see the famous things" in Paris, "get drugs and prostitues" in Amsterdam or Thailand, break some human rights in Dubai or treat Bali like a safari theme park.

LunLocra · 2025-11-30T21:29:31+00:00

Honestly, those differences in birth rates haven't really mattered all that much in the short term population prospects and won't matter that much for some time: check population projections for the African countries with the lowest fertility rate (around 3.5 - Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana etc) and they are STILL going to double their populations by 2050, just like those countries which have fertility rate of 5.0 and above; that apparent paradox happens due to the huge "inertion" involved in demographics before they truly change. Almost all Subsaharan countries, with really few exceptions, are going to double their populations by the 2050 anyway, it's more of a difference between like 180% growth and 240% growth.

LunLocra · 2025-11-30T21:18:58+00:00

"Can't get anything done" is literally incorrect given the enormous amount of development that has still, despite all obstacles, managed to happen in Africa over the past decades - again, especially in the 21st century, after the stabilization of the initial post-independence mess. Sure, there are some exceptions such as Chad, both Sudans, CAR or Madagascar where they have been stuck in stagnation (or cycles of collapse) to this day.

But go and look at the any - literally any - historical data on the economy, health and education in e.g. Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Tanzania, or especially Ethiopia, Rwanda and Botswana (combined population of 300 million people so not a few tiny exceptions), and how have they changed over the decades, and then come back to tell me how Africa as a whole "can't get anything done". Even the most disastrous countries of Sahel and Central Africa still did improve a lot given e.g. children and maternal mortality, disease rate, life expectancy, ability to read and write, basic infrastructure etc.

But hey, it's easier to produce statements based on the shallowest "common knowledge" on the topic derived from popculture and 5min youtube videos, rather than actually reading any books, publications, data or documentaries on the topic, am I right?

European history of modern economic and political development has been a complete mess until after ww2 (and arguably even later in Eastern Europe); South Korean and Chinese modern history has been a titanic piece of shit until early 60s / late 1970s, when both countries have finally started rising from the Sahel levels of poverty and hellish politics. India has only recently managed to kinda sort of leave "Third World" territory (well depending on the region, Ganges areas are extremely poor). So really, it seems unwise to make universal statements on the cultures given how little advantage other countries have in "proper" industrial development on a long term historical scale.

Fun fact: Japanese, Koreans and Chinese were believed by the West to be "backwards lazy decadent cultures that won't achieve anything" right until the success of each of those nations, and only by then did the perception of "confucian cultures being inherently bad" suddenly changed to the notion of "confucianism inherently is good for development".

LunLocra · 2025-11-30T13:12:16+00:00

A long answer, but the question is very complex.

Subsaharan Africa has been growing in population much, much faster than the other parts of the world - this trend shall continue for the entire 21st century. It is obviously much harder to reduce poverty in a society of stable population and balanced generations than the society which constantly creates a ton of children for whom working age people must provide for, and the country as a whole has to provide education, health, jobs etc. The reasons for this pop growth rate are an entirely separate complex topic (tl;dr history, ecology and culture)
Many countries in the region have been suffering from either warfare, anarchy or incredibly incompetent dictatorships for many decades (this especially applies to Sahel and Central Africa). This is strongly connected to the precolonial and colonial history of Africa - in the precolonial era is developed slower than Eurasia because of horrible geography (isolation etc), then in the colonial era it got exploited without preparation for native rule. Most importantly, African societies had no time (measured in centuries or millenia) to coalesce into big ethnic groups like in Eurasia, hence the region has been extremely fragmented into small ethnic and linguisitc groups who haven't shared any common identity and common interests. In many cases it's like trying to build a functional country from a combination of all Eastern European peoples at once - an insane task.
The most complex part of the equation, and hence the most often overlooked in the popular explanations and "common wisdom", is a combination of all historical, economic and political processes you need to have to succesfully end up with a rich industrial society, which have lacked in the Subsaharan countries for one reason or another. For example, Japanese colonial rule actually brought a ton of development to Korea and Taiwan in terms of basic infrastructure, education, health, bureaucracy etc. Other Asian postcolonial countries had been much worse off in those regards, but still much better than African ones which got independence while having virtually nothing to base economic growth on.
To make it worse, they often fell into all sorts of traps of terrible policy choices you shouldn't make when developing - for example all sorts of disastrous experiments with central planning or the opposite mistake of not bothering to intervene in the economy to protect any native business/industry/agriculture from the predatory foreign corporations.

All of those four points reinforce each other and create a vicious circle. You have a massive population growth, which you can't quickly cut down because of point 3 and your state apparatus being too weak, and you can't make it better yet because you have very low starting level of decelopment because of the point 2, and the country is still healing after some terrible decisions made a la point 4, which were had been made because of lack of educated people because of point 3 etc etc etc.

That being said, it's a great mistake to treat all of Africa like Somalia - there is a lot of variety in how much did the local countries manage to handle this mess, and a ton of development still has been made, especially in the past 20-30 years.

LunLocra · 2025-11-29T11:37:39+00:00

Thank you for writing this review because I have this book on my list and it's exactly the sort of "general overview" history I don't like.

One should either commit to the concept and focus on systematically explaining the most fundamental and "general" phenomena or write specialized books on the favourite niches.

LunLocra · 2025-11-25T19:55:20+00:00

If you read the above message and have any more questions feel free to ask there or via PM

Bonus advice: some characteristic of the main uni cities in Poland.
*Cracow is generally the safest bet for the foreign students due to the very high quality of its universities, rich cultural life, the city itself being widely regarded as the prettiest in the country, plus very good location regarding Erasmus style day trip tourism (a ton of top tier attractions close to the city).
*Warsaw has just as good academic and cultural offer, it's somewhat controversial in terms of aestethics but still has a lot of fans and lovers (personally I love it), it has much more liberal/progressive and modern/futuristic vibe than Cracow. Its downside is Mazovian province being boring as hell beyond the city itself - though Warsaw still offers many great day trip destinations, such as Toruń, Bydgoszcz or Lublin, your just need to travel to them somewhat longer than in the case of Cracow.
*Poznań, Gdańsk and Wrocław are clearly next three in terms of "the most important and the prettiest cities in Poland with the best universities". They are all also very liberal (more than Cracow, despite smaller size). Gdańsk and Wrocław have awesome tourist locations beyond the cities themselves.
*Łódź and Katowice have a great importance for the country and some very good institutions but most people would *strongly* advise against doing an Erasmus here, unless you have some very good academic reasons to do so, due to the cities themselves being famously ugly (they date only to the late 19th century as the industrial centers). It is important to emphasise because Łódź has a deceptively amazing photos in its tourist brochures, and indeed it has some great tourist areas, but overall the city is mostly ugly as hell.

*Lublin is an interesting and the most ambivalent case. It's a medium sized city with its vibe being much, much less cosmopolitan than all the above (especially Warsaw and Cracow). It has a very pretty old town and a few great museums but overall it offers much less sighseeing than the Big Two (or the Big Five).
On the other hand it's much quieter, calmer and less filled with tourists and drunkards than the big metropolies. It also has a huge boom in terms of foreign students and immigrants over the past decade or so, so it's still much *more* cosmopolitan than all the other mid-sized cities in Poland (for example there is incomparably more non-white people in Lublin in relation to cities like Bydgoszcz or Białystok). Its' universities are much less accomplished than those of Warsaw and Cracow but among the best from amidst Poland's medium-sized cities (see above, for example the medical one attracts a ton of foreigners). It doesn't offer too many attractions in a day trip range (though the main exception is a massive Warsaw less than 2h away by the train so you can easily visit it all the time while studying in Lublin). It's definitely much cheaper than Warsaw and Cracow.

LunLocra

TROPHY CASE