A great article, but maybe too much emphasis on "the impending catastrophe". Short of epidemics, fire and the like, the city is in permanent stasis: the conditions devolve to the point where there is an equilibrium with the arrivals from the country side.
It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.
There is no catastrophe looming, just the slow grip of poverty following people around and slowly suffocating their lives, absent coordinated social organization and coherent politics to end it.
> It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.
Lagos and all of Nigeria suffers from the same plague that is consuming the West: extreme inequality. There's economic growth but when the rich capture the overwhelming majority of the new wealth then, combined with population growth, you can get a population where many people are actually worse off as time goes on. This is why even as the economy grows the number of people living in poverty is actually increasing [1][2].
It's highly unlikely the government will/can/wants to address the inequality [3]. At some point the only "fix" to this problem will be, as it has been in the past, war. The growing regional and ethnic divisions just need another decade or so (by that time we'll probably see as many as 120m living in poverty) and then, suddenly, the water reaches a boil.
Ironically, if you speak to many Nigerians they'll tell you that inequality isn't a problem at all. If you work hard and smart enough you can make it. Sound familiar?
I won't downvote you but I think people are because it's a pretty perfunctory claim, not to mention inflammatory, that 'extreme inequality' A) applies to the West or B) is plaguing the West (for whatever we mean by 'West' which itself is pretty broad strokes). But you seem to be mainly making a point about Nigeria, and to be fair, the trend in Nigeria is really bad. But also, to be fair, it's also an aberration as far as global poverty is concerned. The % of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 44% in 1980 to < 10% today.[1]. Nigeria seems to be a rare exception where absolute poverty is increasing rather than decreasing.
But there seems to be an assumption baked into your point that inequality is the problem to optimize for, rather than actual poverty alleviation. And of course wealth inequality doesn't correlate very well with absolute outcomes in economic wellbeing. Cambodia has very low income equality (Gini index of 30.8%) and very high percentage of people living in extreme poverty (6.15%). Brazil, on the other hand has very high Gini index (51.3%) and very low percentage of people living in extreme poverty (0.5%). Those numbers are just from Wikipedia but there are plenty of studies done on how useless 'inequality' is as a measure of real world outcomes.
That definitely isn't true. I don't have the data on hand but I believe poverty in almost every country has dropped dramatically in the last few decades.
I don't see that inequality is the primary problem when 45% of the population survive on less than $1.90 a day. If you doubled everyones income the equality/inequality metrics wouldn't change but the level of human misery and suffering would decrease massively.
Nigeria's GINI is hardly exceptional. Adjusting the shape of the income distribution can achieve limited improvement to the quality of human existance compared to raising the distribution's mean.
It's being downvoted because the Heroic Defenders of Free Speech (tm) that dwell on HN are made very uncomfortable by facts that don't fit their worldview. You certainly won't see any substantive response let alone evidence to the contrary. You'll see a lot of skulking about, oh and look, somebody mentioned Somalia. I guess that settles it.
Because a simple thought experiment disproves his point and criticisms of the West.
If the “troubles” of a society are really the disparity between the richest and poorest, then a country like Somalia would be a glorious example of liberty and prosperity. Yet everyone there is poor and with extremely limited options in anything you might want to measure.
Clearly this isn’t it. Maybe in order to get a healthy thing going you must have some extreme outliers as a result of the freedom/ability to let people do their thing.
If that is a reason, I think the downvote wrong. I think this is a place for exhange of views and debate, not an exam in which "wrongly" argued points are downvoted.
Because those points he’s trying to make are extremist and violent it seems. “The only fix is war” seems like the typical extremist sound bite by someone with those views.
Proposing violence to fix an issue with which appears your friend is not well versed on seems just like the mass mob lynching of a “suspected” person doing X. The mob feels righteous at the time, only to learn the person killed didn’t do anything at all.
That seems somewhat disingenuous, unless I've somehow completely misinterpreted OP's point. OP was not proposing violence as the fix, but merely stating the fact that historically only wars or other kinds of catastrophic events have reversed trends of increased wealth inequality [1].
Stating that as the basis for a debate is not the same as endorsing violence as the fix. It seems to be a tragic fact that different societies have not found a political way of solving this issue and that alone is worth discussing.
If you look closely, you'll see that "fix" is in scare quotes, indicating that dnomad doesn't believe war to be an actual fix, but nonetheless an inevitable consequence of extreme inequality.
I think that's wrong, though. Poor people do not have the resources to wage war. Wars are led by people with resources against other people with resources, with poor people only serving as cannon fodder. That also holds for revolutionary wars, e.g. pretty much any Communist revolution was led by middle-class intellectuals. So I think that inequality might increase criminality and strengthen violent gangs, but it's unlikely to lead to actual war.
Boiling frog is the better analogy. Rome wasn’t built in a day and didn’t decline in a day either. It’s the slow death-march, “water drops to the forehead” of civilization that so weakens it such that criminal mobs and/or religious lunatics can takeover. The pattern throughout history has been roughly the same story every time, except now there is an abundance of technology, population cresting/declining and absurd inequality.
I have never been to Lagos but I do live in Cape Town South Africa, and there are lessons to be learnt here as well. Infrastructure in South Africa has declined dramatically in the last 20 years since the first inclusive elections in 1994. If you look at all state run institutions, like health, education, police, water, sanitation, conservation and everything else people take for granted in well run countries, you find a dramatic decline. What this translates to in people on the ground is a widening gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, growth in private healthcare and security, unreliable and expensive power supply and high crime rate, often violent. Sub Saharan Africa is a difficult place to invest in with corruption and the threat of expropriation of property a possibility. Will it ever change? I am not sure, it doesn't seem likely
I have driven though 25+ countries in West Africa from Morocco to Cape Town and now on my up to Cairo in the last ~2 years [1].
While I understand what you're saying, I have some things to add:
1. Cape Town and Lagos (Nigeria in General) have virtually nothing in common. Cape Town is essentially Zürich compared to Nigerian cities.
2. state run institutions, like health, education, police, water, sanitation, conservation and everything else people take for granted in well run countries, you find a dramatic decline. ... a widening gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, growth in private healthcare and security, unreliable and expensive power supply and high crime rate, often violent.
You have just described the exact challenges faced by the United States.
3. There are millions of stories about how bleak "Africa" is and how many challenges it faces. I have been constantly shocked by how developed many places are, and how fast they are not only catching up to, but in some cases surpassing "Developed" places.
For example: have you been to Brazzaville? very nice and modern city, fantastic roads all over the Rep. Congo now - Pointe Noire too.
Lomé in Togo is another great example.
4. In my experience Africans are positive and optimistic about the future. That means they're working hard to make stuff better, as apposed to those who sit around in the developed world and complain about how everything is getting worse. I wonder where we'll be in ~20 more years.
I love Africa and its people, dont think I want to dismiss the continent as a lost cause but if you want to compare the US with Africa look at one index that of unemployment, South Africa is looking at an effective employment of 50% while the US has effectively 0% unemployment. I dont doubt the US has problems but its way better governed than African states
Two points: It is not useful to generalize “African states” because different African countries have different systems and qualities of governance. The current US system of governance has some characteristics that citizens of other countries would find unacceptable, eg the disconnect between popular and electoral college vote, the large amount of power of the presidency, the politicization of the judiciary. South Africa’s constitution and constitutional court on the other hand are widely considered an example of good governance.
I think it is worth noting that population growth has been incredibly fast in these countries, and institutions simply could never keep up with this growth.
I think that in many places, governments are slowly getting to grips with this issue, educating and providing the basics to their populations. But the problems being faced are hard and take time to resolve.
As an aside, I find exploring gapminder is a great way to help think about what is going on.
More Vanagons (T3) than Burning Man, Oregon, Santa Rosa and Turo app combined. Just let it sink in that those go for $8k USD each in the US and parts are scarce.
Also, flattening of the world, resurgence of populist pedagogues, crises of the majority of countries slowly/quickly becoming perpetual failed states. Corruption, manufactured consent and disengagement have led nearly every civilization to this same conclusion at around 10 generations or 250 years. It’s not inevitable, it’s just the doom of repeating history by being ignorant and passive.
It's unclear why or how could a disequilibrium form and stand in a free to travel country: as long as the metropolis offers even a modicum of economic opportunity, such as being a water seller at the intersection, that is already much better then being a subsistence farmer in an overcrowded country that experienced famine as recently as last year.
There is no catastrophe looming, just the slow grip of poverty following people around and slowly suffocating their lives, absent coordinated social organization and coherent politics to end it.
Lagos and all of Nigeria suffers from the same plague that is consuming the West: extreme inequality. There's economic growth but when the rich capture the overwhelming majority of the new wealth then, combined with population growth, you can get a population where many people are actually worse off as time goes on. This is why even as the economy grows the number of people living in poverty is actually increasing [1][2].
It's highly unlikely the government will/can/wants to address the inequality [3]. At some point the only "fix" to this problem will be, as it has been in the past, war. The growing regional and ethnic divisions just need another decade or so (by that time we'll probably see as many as 120m living in poverty) and then, suddenly, the water reaches a boil.
Ironically, if you speak to many Nigerians they'll tell you that inequality isn't a problem at all. If you work hard and smart enough you can make it. Sound familiar?
[1] https://www.stearsng.com/article/inequality-in-nigeria-is-wo...
[2] https://qz.com/963465/some-of-the-worlds-biggest-countries-h...
[3] https://www.oxfam.org/en/even-it-nigeria/nigeria-extreme-ine...
But there seems to be an assumption baked into your point that inequality is the problem to optimize for, rather than actual poverty alleviation. And of course wealth inequality doesn't correlate very well with absolute outcomes in economic wellbeing. Cambodia has very low income equality (Gini index of 30.8%) and very high percentage of people living in extreme poverty (6.15%). Brazil, on the other hand has very high Gini index (51.3%) and very low percentage of people living in extreme poverty (0.5%). Those numbers are just from Wikipedia but there are plenty of studies done on how useless 'inequality' is as a measure of real world outcomes.
[1]https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/World-...
Nigeria's GINI is hardly exceptional. Adjusting the shape of the income distribution can achieve limited improvement to the quality of human existance compared to raising the distribution's mean.
If the “troubles” of a society are really the disparity between the richest and poorest, then a country like Somalia would be a glorious example of liberty and prosperity. Yet everyone there is poor and with extremely limited options in anything you might want to measure.
Clearly this isn’t it. Maybe in order to get a healthy thing going you must have some extreme outliers as a result of the freedom/ability to let people do their thing.
Proposing violence to fix an issue with which appears your friend is not well versed on seems just like the mass mob lynching of a “suspected” person doing X. The mob feels righteous at the time, only to learn the person killed didn’t do anything at all.
Stating that as the basis for a debate is not the same as endorsing violence as the fix. It seems to be a tragic fact that different societies have not found a political way of solving this issue and that alone is worth discussing.
[1] https://voxeu.org/article/europe-s-rich-1300
I think that's wrong, though. Poor people do not have the resources to wage war. Wars are led by people with resources against other people with resources, with poor people only serving as cannon fodder. That also holds for revolutionary wars, e.g. pretty much any Communist revolution was led by middle-class intellectuals. So I think that inequality might increase criminality and strengthen violent gangs, but it's unlikely to lead to actual war.
While I understand what you're saying, I have some things to add:
1. Cape Town and Lagos (Nigeria in General) have virtually nothing in common. Cape Town is essentially Zürich compared to Nigerian cities.
2. state run institutions, like health, education, police, water, sanitation, conservation and everything else people take for granted in well run countries, you find a dramatic decline. ... a widening gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, growth in private healthcare and security, unreliable and expensive power supply and high crime rate, often violent.
You have just described the exact challenges faced by the United States.
3. There are millions of stories about how bleak "Africa" is and how many challenges it faces. I have been constantly shocked by how developed many places are, and how fast they are not only catching up to, but in some cases surpassing "Developed" places. For example: have you been to Brazzaville? very nice and modern city, fantastic roads all over the Rep. Congo now - Pointe Noire too. Lomé in Togo is another great example.
4. In my experience Africans are positive and optimistic about the future. That means they're working hard to make stuff better, as apposed to those who sit around in the developed world and complain about how everything is getting worse. I wonder where we'll be in ~20 more years.
[1] http://instagram.com/theroadchoseme/
I think that in many places, governments are slowly getting to grips with this issue, educating and providing the basics to their populations. But the problems being faced are hard and take time to resolve.
As an aside, I find exploring gapminder is a great way to help think about what is going on.
Also, flattening of the world, resurgence of populist pedagogues, crises of the majority of countries slowly/quickly becoming perpetual failed states. Corruption, manufactured consent and disengagement have led nearly every civilization to this same conclusion at around 10 generations or 250 years. It’s not inevitable, it’s just the doom of repeating history by being ignorant and passive.