Does helping the Third World become efficient hurt the First World?

[MadRat]

But by the same token by Third World labor lowering production costs so that now you selling your product cheaper do you really benefit? Just because the product is cheaper doesn't mean the demand increases linearly with the supply. Seems to me that sucking value out of the product is an indirect result of lower cost labor.

 

[JS80]

Look what US imperialism did to South Korea! They are waaay worse off!

 

[HombrePequeno]

Yes, colonialism did screw over quite a few states. The European imperialist nations made these countries focus on economic industries that didn't compete with the home country. This largely meant the only industries that developed in the colonies were cash crops and mining. The educational system never really developed because the Europeans didn't want the colonies competing for the same jobs. So when independence started happening for many of these nations, there were very few educated people to run things.

Many African countries though were better off economically under the colonial system. That's because corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency has robbed from many of those countries the possibility of decent growth. There's really only so much you can blame colonialism for. Many African countries have been independent for 50-60 years and there are still very few of them that have functioning democracies. It's not like these countries have had no time to fix the problems colonialism created.

 

[MadRat]

Seems like civil war is the only way countries stabilize themselves. Any more the do-gooders interrupt them, too.

 

[SickBeast]

I chose the first option but a simple "yes" would have been my answer.

The Cold War was WW3, and the first world masked it by telling the populace that we were "helping" them. Tell that to the millions of people who died. :thumbsdown:

Truth be told, we've done little to nothing to "help" the third world, and just about everything to stomp all over them. I sometimes feel guilty about the droves of people in China manufacturing what we use every day, for a salary that (to us) amounts to slave labor. To me that's how it feels.