This seems so obvious and rude, frankly, but I don’t understand how I am able to sit in my apartment with my own food to make and job to go to when some men, women, and children are living in extreme poverty with no clean drinking water. How did this start and how did it continue to cycle to where we are now?
In: Economics
A lot of ahistorical nonsense being peddled here. Please ignore anyone talking about ‘colonization’ – the European nations were already more productive per capita when the Age of Colonization began (which is why they colonized foreign lands rather than the reverse).
The actual reason is that they had the right resources and the right culture at the time to develop further. Other places were either too unstable, too stable (stultifying) or lacking in necessary resources.
In terms of why inequality persists, perhaps the best way to understand this is to consider building an automobile.
Automobile production is a complex process, requiring strong general infrastructure and many tiers of skilled labor. As a result, it is linked with nations that can provide all of that.
But let’s say you’re not one of those nations and want to build your own cars. Where is the incentive to do so when you can simply buy a car from a nation that already has those features? The result is that developing nations tend to *stay* developing – because it’s always more expensive to do it themselves than have others do it for them.
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