Theme: Productivity

AFRICA: INVENTORS ARE NOT GODS.

IMHO why do we make investments in authors of innovations (gods) rather than techniques (recipes). And why to past rates of discovery and achievement, rather than to current use of techniques? Is it so that we can imitate the characters (gods) by doing nothing, instead of imitate the techniques by doing something?

My understanding of these things is that while anyone can invent something, they did so because of access to trade routes and the income from creating, defending, taxing, and profiting from them.

I have spent a bit of time over the past six or eight months trying to learn why Africa, or at least west Africa didn’t achieve an imperial period earlier, and the answer is just that: geographically, west Africa might as well be Australia, and lacking sufficient means of concentrating capital none of the regional emprires were able to amass sufficient wealth (or production) to assert and hold dominance over an area large enough to produce a critical mass of trade until the late modern period – at which time the colonialists arrive.

I don’t know about the rest of Africa yet, but at least in the west, the region was entering it’s period similar to that of the ‘european franks’ trying to build a military economic, and political order, and westerners compare the region to development of amer-india , which was 7k years behind. It’s not true of west Africa that was simply trying to circumvent the high cost of rather impossible difference from the nexus of world trade in the eastern mediterranean.

To much focus on the European miracle and not enough focus on the geographic rates of development due to geography. the more I learn the more I understand why the blacksmith is the oldest character in western myth: extraordinary emphasis on mining, smelting, and metalworking. The rest is the military and political order of miners, smelters, metalworkers and cattle raiders for whom farming was a means of serving the animals. And who had a 40% increase in caloric availability due to their adaptation to the drinking of milk. Thats the west’s advantage: accidents. Just as the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Pakistani-Indian, and the Chinese river valleys were accidents.

Yes, only europeans could have invented European culture’s odd predilections. But anyone can use the products of them – just like anyone can use the products of every other civilization. And if europeans were more inventive, that is wonderful accident of history that everyone can make use of.

It is, in my opinion, more important to study why some cultures stagnated and fell, than to study why some got to military, economic, and political critical mass first.

And we know that answer: lack of military discipline, complacency, and the overextension of rents, the over extension of reach, and the education of competitors with nothing to lose and everything to gain.

That’s because the reason you “get there first” is luck.

The reason you fall behind or fail is what you do with a military, political, and economically productive civilization once you achieve it.

I do not understand african self criticism. What I understand is that every culture must go thru the transition of suppressing local corruption so that the velocity of cooperation can increase, and that capital investment is safe from predation. And without capital to fund a strong military, police, and justice such that there are no economic conditions under which ‘defection’ against the people (corruption), is a malincentive against future returns, then it’s quite difficult.

Africa will do fine. But it will take the same time it has everyone else. At least africans aren’t fighting it like other groups.