Industrialization Disparities Debate

This mostly has to do with the gap introduced by the Industrial Revolution the second half of the 19th century. If you follow the rise of Germany leading up to World War I, you will notice that the country was steadily becoming richer as industrial machinery was introduced from Britain (where most of the early inventions took place). Something similar occurred in the United States as well. India, on the other hand, is in many respects still a pre-Industrial country (nevermind that the government

Luck has absolutely nothing to do with it. If you attribute America industrializing before China/India as luck, then I will lose trust in anything else you say.By 1915 America had higher GDP per capita than most of Western Europe - BEFORE WW1. Western Europe had higher GDP per capita than China/India by like 1200 AD. You are so so far off the mark.Also, India's population only started exponentially growing in the late 1800s. By that point America had already industralized an

The high standard of living of Europe and the US is a very recent achievement. If you look at the last 3000 years, India and China had the technological edge for most of that period. Looking at the future, China will probably get back to the first position. Latin America seems to be finding its own model and will soon reach a pretty decent standard of living. So I think it was too narrow a period of time that was analysed to reach such grand conclusions.

The now fully industrialized countries of east Asia were poor a half century ago, and the newly independent countries of Africa were in several cases less poor. But later the countries in Asia grew and prospered much faster, resulting in the huge gap we see today.

Why not? China is ~200 years late in industrializing, mostly because of centuries of colonial plunder (And a few decades of communist misrule).There's a very simple formula for getting your country caught up to the rest of the world. Steal as much as you can, until you pull yourself up to the level of your neighbours. Every developed nation has either done this, or piggy-backed off a bigger neighbour who has.Just because we've already gone down this path, doesn't give us any

I am not saying that they were not exploited. But they went from being among the richest to being among the poorer not because of that but because Europe (and the US) progressed and industrialised while they didn't. It's not a loss of wealth, it's absence of growth.They would not have fared better in that respect without colonisation/aggression when you look at the political and social state of India and China at the time, and they would probably have stayed the way they w

Mostly it’s lack of investment in industrialization and at fist finding a niche and growing from there.The US was heavily regulated and oppressed by the British and we endured wars against world powers and fought an internal civil war, yet we still came ahead. Russia could have, China could have (and now are catching up).You can be an empire and colonize and extract and do all kinds of bad things to your enemies but it doesn’t guarantee success (Portugal, Spain). It’s a complicated thing

The hole in your sarcastic premise, is the fact that the US was once a developing nation, dealing with vastly more powerful colonial powers. It was the colonial powers and their capital that provided the seed capital for the US to become what it is. Just as China was / has been a developing nation and is graduating from that status, built up by foreign developed nation capital. Just as South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada were all developing nations at one time.Japan and Germa

There is a big difference. The US was led astray due to its economic ideology. There was a concerted effort to move industry to other countries, so that salaries in the US would be depressed for lower income classes and the owners of industry could realize larger profits for a generation. Now the country is finally realizing that this is a losing proposition, while China saw the opportunity and based its economy on industrialization and scientific research.

China missed the industrial revolution, but didn’t lose 5000 years of development in the process. Look st how fast Germany and Japan bounced back from being bombed into oblivion? Once development is in your DNA, recovery is much easier, it’s not like starting from a mostly undeveloped country in SE Asia or Africa.