> No the argument that the poverty of the south has nothing to do with
> the wealth of the North is the Protestant ethic extended to its
> global perfection. "We here in the North are so rich cause we work
> so damn hard."
>
> No empirical evidence? The very countries we are sitting in once
> belonged to others--you may have heard of them. They would be
> included included in the definition of th south.
>
> No empirical evidence? Must explain why Egyptians have to travel to
> London to see their own history. Or that global monetary flows just
> happen to flow through London, NewYork or Toronto... Nope nobodies
> getting rich off managing global savings there...spread around by
> lottery actually. Nope the IMF has nothing to do with ensuring the
> South pays even though it already paid in spades with slaves, and new
> world gold-just to name a few- from the 17th, 18th, and 19th
> centuries. Hey you all should read Fogel et al's "Time on the Cross"
> they "prove" there was no exploitation involved in slavery
>
> By the time this thread is done you all are gonna have it that the
> two Anglo-Saxon Empires that have dominated the globe for some time
> now are just big Victorian charity schemes.
Bravo!
But your opponents here argue that all this is mere history. There once was history (perhaps), but that's all over now. The timeless truth of _today's_ terms of trade between center and periphery is...well, self-evident - aren't markets efficient? The century of vast tribute (Bagehot's word) extracted from India has nothing to do with the power and prosperity _today_ of where it was invested, nor with the grinding poverty _today_ of more Indians than the total population of Euroland and the USA. The problems the Vietnamese have _today_ are the result of their own excessive bureaucratized lazy inefficiency, & certainly have nothing to do with the colonization and subsequent "back to the stone age" bombing they suffered - wasn't it centuries ago? Historical materialism is so 70s.
john mage