By reputation, today, Rwanda. In the 1950s-60s, ROK, ROC, Singapore. Good at law enforcement.
Nebraska isn't really poor. It also has really shitty public transportation. It does have cheap daycare, because of very low wages for providers and weak standards on staff to kid ratios.
Well, 100 years ago everywhere was poor by modern standards. Britain had the same per-capita income as modern North Korea (and, like modern North Korea, had to reduce the minimum height requirement for its army from 157 cm to 150 cm because so many conscripts were too short due to malnutrition).
The rich then/rich now contingent aren't terribly interesting because that's sort of what you'd expect. Similarly the poor then/poor now. The poor then/rich now ones are quite interesting because whatever institutions they had then allowed them to catch up with the rich. But the rich then/poor now ones are the really interesting ones; what went wrong with, say, Argentina?
It hasn't had a genocide since the 19th century, so it beats Rwanda on that.
Currently also I think Costa Rica, Mauritius.
I realise I am kind of assuming that "well-run" means "will get rich later" but that might not be the best definition.
Off the top of my head, well-run countries:
- have high levels of trust and low levels of corruption
- have a focus on education, including to university level (not just primary school)
- don't have wars, civil or external, happening on their own territory; almost nothing is worse than having a war. Even having Communists in charge isn't normally quite as bad; Ukraine was grim in 1930-33 but much, much worse in 1941-44.
Israel, 1950s-60s? Malaysia 1960s-70s?
Have civil servants who do their jobs.
In a very practical sense, I'm interested in this question to see how it could map onto Heebieville, which has a majority of public servants operating in good faith, in my opinion, but has a high level of poverty.
If 8 is to 7: Malaysia didn't have a war on its own territory in the 1960s and 70s, unless you count Konfrontasi which was very geographically remote and pretty restricted and low-level. Israel too - the ground fighting in the Suez Crisis, the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War took place outside the borders of Israel, in the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. I'm thinking of actual no-kidding civil wars and invasions.
Rwanda is a better counterexample here, I suppose.
11: 8 wasn't to 7. That said, most of the countries I've listed were/are quite highly militarized, though you're quite right the actual fighting was mostly sporadic and remote. I doubt that's coincidental, but obviously militarization isn't necessary or sufficient for development. AFAIK Rwanda's level of mobilization post-1994 was high relative to GDP, but I doubt higher than Israel's or ROK's; and the fighting was almost entirely in the DRC.
Don't look now but Bolivia has averaged 5.3% annual growth over the past five years.
13: How much of that can't be attributed to resource exports? (High, Angola!)
Also, let us not forget Uruguay - not only the first county in the world to legalize the weed, but I've also been very impressed with their efforts to integrate technology into education. They done a lot more than just throw laptops at the students.
10: For that purpose, I'm not sure you're asking the most useful question. Heebieville (if I've identified it correctly) is orders of magnitude smaller than any country we've named, even Mauritius, and I'd guess has even less sovereignty. Also, your poverty is likely wealth by 1950s ROK standards. Definitely wealth by Rwanda standards.
How much of that can't be attributed to resource exports?
Hard to say, but I don't think the past 5 years have been particularly great for resource exporters. Low oil and gas prices sent Trinidad into a massive recession, and Australia has also had a bumpy ride.
What do they do?
I don't remember all the details - its was a few years ago that I sat through that presentation, and it was in Spanish. But the gist of it was that they were using technology as part of an overall restructuring effort of curriculum and educational practices. Doing the hard work in an area where most countries were shooting for easy wins.
Here is one example, where they are using remote teachers to provide English instruction to primary school classrooms.
Isn't Botswana often held up as an example? Including maybe relatively equitable spending of their ore resource revenue?
22: Yes, but only by local standards.
Rwanda's level of mobilization post-1994 was high relative to GDP, but I doubt higher than Israel's or ROK's
Well, let's have a look!
Rwanda's military budget was 1-2% of GDP in the 1980s, spiked dramatically around 1990 to 5.5% of GDP; it's been under 1% since 1995. That's actually really low for the region - well below levels for Burundi, Uganda, DRC and Tanzania. Well below Israel (7-10%) and ROK (2-3% over the same period).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS.MIL.XPND.GD.ZS?locations=RW-UG-BI-CD-TZ-KR-IL
Rwanda was running its war in the DRC very much on the cheap. (Largely I suspect because its expeditionary army was self financing.)
24: Interesting. I stand corrected.
24 last: They certainly tried to run it that way, don't know to what extent they succeeded. The scale of armed forces in the Congo war was also absolutely tiny. IIRC single-digit thousands at any one time.
25: I would have thought the same - certainly you get the impression that post-1994 Rwanda was a highly militarised society. And maybe it was highly militaristic, but that isn't reflected in the spending numbers. (I wonder about that big pre-genocide spike as well. It was enormous.)
Good point about scale of the Congo war; and African troops are cheap to support at reach.
26: Yes, I'm very surprised. AFAIK the c.1990 spike was in response to mounting internal pressures and preparation for looming invasion by the RPF out of Uganda as the civil war wound down there. I'd speculate the RPF considered itself to have established adequate preponderance of force after it cleared out the Hutu camps in Congo in the late 1990s and established its proxies in Kivu. Whereas in Burundi for instance the military is split 50/50 Hutu-Tutsi. That's endured so far, but has to make people nervous.
Also, I have to wonder about the quality of the figures. I wouldn't be surprised, frex, if Rwanda has a large gendarmerie counted as police but indistinguishable from army.
For context, equipment and infrastructure are about 25% of the British defence budget (i.e. 75% is other than procurement and almost half of that is the direct payroll.) That's going to be close to an upper bound; most countries that spend anything like as much on equipment also employ more soldiers.
Yes, I was assuming high payroll expenditure. I wouldn't be surprised if they're still using mostly stocks they captured in 1994.
So anyway Heebs, what you do is, round up some guys with rifles and pickup trucks and go capture a cobalt mine in Mexico.
For that purpose, I'm not sure you're asking the most useful question. Heebieville (if I've identified it correctly) is orders of magnitude smaller than any country we've named, even Mauritius, and I'd guess has even less sovereignty. Also, your poverty is likely wealth by 1950s ROK standards. Definitely wealth by Rwanda standards.
Oh, for sure. It was an idle curiosity question borne out of a more practical question. But I'm not sure there aren't still lessons to be learned.
You're right about the lack of sovereignty. The state government loves to micromanage its cities and outlaw things that the cities might want to do. And then abdicate their responsibility on the things they run. Still, act locally and all that.
What are the problems, specifically? Wiki says the place is thriving.
Allow me to nominate "fixes broken water mains in a timely manner" as a key indicator of good governance.
I spent last night in a motel just so I could take a *!%$! shower.
You might not like this plan, but just hear me out, okay?
How about "has a system to insure that power struggles between the legislative and executive branches won't cause a breakdown in the performance of necessary routine government functions"?
10: If history at all seems like it would be helpful to you, you might want to check out Jon Teaford's The Unheralded Triumph, which is about US municipal government from 1870-1900. Teaford tries to make a case for what was good in municipal government during that era, which pretty much everyone thinks of as thoroughly corrupt.
Full disclosure: I haven't read it, having dropped out of history while it was on my to read list. So I don't know how convincing his argument is. Reviews were decent enough to make me think I should read it, though.
I see Minivet beat me to the Botswana suggestion. They're not exactly poor, but I wonder how Costa Rica does on these kind of measures.
Are there states where you can see differences over time from corruption? NJ vs CT or something?
33: It is false and defamatory to suggest that Equador complained about your hygiene.
I'M GOING TO INVADE ANYONE WHO SPELLS MY NAME WRONG.
I spelled it the way it should be spelled.
Based on location, I'm thinking heebie's best bet is to hit up Halford for LA/SoCal history: many small municipalities gradually merging along highways, suburbs, immigrants, tax revolts, pockets of working class people.
How about "has a system to insure that power struggles between the legislative and executive branches won't cause a breakdown in the performance of necessary routine government functions"?
Most local governments in the US are actually set up with a much more functional institutional structure than the federal one, so this sort of thing isn't as likely.
10: A U.S. city can't do much about the level of poverty, and shouldn't do what it can do. Tearing down the affordable housing will cause the former residents to move away, and will improve poverty statistics, but isn't really a good idea.
A better municipal goal is to improve the lives of the impoverished. Good libraries, municipal wifi, better transit for the carless, etc.
I've only seen Panama from the air but the city is looking amazing these days, like there has just been a ton of development in the past decade. Which there has.
Also Garreau's Edge City might be useful on some ways developers think.
Georgia (the Tbilisi one, not the Jimmy Carter one) fired all of its traffic police and re-hired something like a quarter of them at increased salaries under substantially new leadership. That significantly cut corruption in daily life and stands in stark contrast to at least three of the country's four neighbors. It also had a knock-on positive effect in other areas of public administration, such that daily corruption when I lived there was as invisible to me as it is in Germany and the US.
That's an area of operations where local US governance may have a good bit of influence, too. Does your local government and/or police force rely on fines for a significant share of its operating budget? Are there a bunch of little jurisdictions in and around Heebiebville, each with its own police force?
If the cops are not preying on the populace, that's a sign of a pretty well-run polity. You'd think that's a low bar to clear, but then again you'd think that Obama's foreign policy maxim -- "Don't do stupid shit" -- was an easy one, too, but.
46: My favorite factlet from that book is that when a company relocates, the site chosen for the new headquarters is invariably the one that gives the CEO the shortest commute.
48: Mine, that the first suburbs are always built upwind of the city.
47. Yes, paying traffic cops enough to live on should be simple common sense, but I remember 50 years ago when I was in Pakistan the municipality of Karachi not only paid them about $12 a month but gave them white uniforms that they had to clean at their own expense, which is like deliberately adding insult to injury. Result, predictably, any traffic incident became an auction. No idea if they've seen sense since.
No idea if they've seen sense since.
That sounds entirely sensible - make "traffic policeman" a job in which you not only can make a lot of money from bribes, but have to, so everyone does it and there's no pressure not to, and it becomes a valuable asset which you can sell to your political supporters and/or collect a share of the bribes to line your own pocket. And of course if they stop supporting you, you can sack them for corruption.
City of Quartz on LA I haven't read but I've seen cited repeatedly wrt conurbation growth.
51 Ajay is obviously going to rise to supreme ruler of knifecrimea after the referendum. He understands the way things are going.
Why am I not astonished to discover that the priest who converted Newt Gingrich to Catholicism sexually assaulted a woman who came to him for counselling?
A correspondingly fashionable priest in London has also fallen completely out of public view in the last decade, but there is no public explanation.
53: if you haven't read "The Dictator's Handbook" yet, you're missing out. A friend of mine used it (somewhat to my alarm) as a self-help book and says it changed his life. (He is not now a dictator.)
That's hardly an endorsement.
48: or so that he can move closer to his grandchildren. At least, i'm Pretty sure that explains one I know of. And that CEO recently resigned.
54.1: The real surprise, sadly, is that it wasn't a minor.
My city is undergoing a mini-exodus of police officers. They're leaving for a number of reasons (including being the worst-paid cops of any neighboring jurisdiction), but one of the gripes is not enough take-home vehicles. I guess driving a different fleet vehicle every day would kind of suck, but I was surprised to learn it's that big of a deal.
If they have to return the vehicles to the station that would impose extra commuting?
It's a pretty significant perk if you think of it as having somebody pay your committing costs. Plus, it probably means you can be on the clock as soon as you walk out the door.
I think it's a reasonable perk if you have a job where you might be called in outside your regular shift.
60. Not as I understand the stats, which are admittedly fragmentary. Only a minority of Catholic clergy are celibate in real life but most of them are having sex (if intermittently) with adults.
55. I don't know who you're thinking of; the one I am thinking of was said by a (then) mutual friend to have celebrated the Mass on acid once to see what it felt like.
Having sex non-intermittently sounds like it would just be painful.
|| In view of the Brexit thing, I'm calling it Naif Crimea for now. |>
God, isn't Brexit over yet? I'm changing the channel. US politics suck, French politics look weird and confusing, I don't like the look of this AfD plotline in German politics. I'm gonna settle in and watch a nice long sesh of Canadian politics.
I was at a thing yesterday with the head of the Bavarian Jewish community, a woman who survived the holocaust hidden out on a farm in the Bavarian countryside. She had three heavies guarding her, even in the grounds of Windsor Castle. It made her worry about the rise of AfD look a whole lot more serious.
[Incidentally, the best thing about this conference centre is that you get to eat supper in the rather unassuming room where Edward VIII had it explained to him by Stanley Baldwin that he could be King, or married to Wallis Simpson, but not both.]
61: I have a small violin handy. Shall I play it for them?
67. There is a sense in which Brexit will never be over.
Rwanda: good governance if you're wearing technocratic blinders, but deeply autocratic, lots of political prisoners, farce of an electoral democracy
Botswana: imperfect but still impressive. When you drive from SA to Botswana, it's dramatic how much the infrastructure improves as soon as you cross the border. It's not because Botswana has more money, although it's rich compared to most of the rest of the continent.
72.1: I did say "good at law enforcement".
72.2: Like ajay, I was implicitly using "get rich" as a standard, which isn't what the OP asks for.
It's like they said in medieval Flanders. Get rich or dye trying.
Botswana is almost as rich as Mexico!? I had no idea. That's pretty rich.
The dentist office is playing 70s weinie rock. Including "There Is Love," the strongest argument against heterosexuality ever set to music.
It always weirds me out how rich the poorest US states are. Mississippi has the same 2013 median household income as the Netherlands!?!? How is that even possible?
77: No idea. My first thought is median vs. mean, but median is usually the more reliable metric. My second thought is that in enlightened topless Europe, the government takes care of more. Mississippi's household income doesn't sound so attractive when you realize that people have to use it to pay for health insurance.
Hmm, wonder if there could be any relationship between the phenomena noted in 51 and 65.1.
I think those Mississippi versus Netherlands comparisons show the limitation of economic statistics. You compare downtown Rotterdam to downtown Jackson and it immediately fails the eye test. You compare the Delta to the poorest spot in the Netherlands, and it immediately fails the eye test. Royal Dutch Shell, Philips, and Unilever are all headquartered in the Netherlands. The largest employer in Mississippi is Nissan. The second largest is a Domino's franchisee.
Part of the difference has to be things like health care and university. I think another, underappreciated point, is that the US kicks the fucking shit out of the lower class, which means services are much cheaper. I don't know about the Netherlands in particular, but every place I've lived hiring somebody to clean your house costs a fortune, while in the US every middle-class person can afford it. So if you are below the median in the US, life sucks, but if you are above the median you get a pretty sweet deal.
I bet a big enough Domino's franchise has more oil than Shell.
For the UK, a significant part of the gap (IIRC not far off half) is accounted for by the fact that NHS care is valued at cost for national accounts purposes. Insurance is a valuable service in itself, so US health "care" shows up in GDP both for treatment provided, and also for some valuation of insurance in its own right.
The NHS is, of course, insurance - you pay your National Insurance contributions off your paycheck come what may, and if you need a whole-body transplant or a couple of aspirins, it does its thing. You've swapped a right-tailed but statistically tractable risk for a stream of premiums, and that's what insurance is. However the System of National Accounts doesn't see it because there is no policy and no transaction (and IIRC James Meade, Simon Kuznets et al started on the project before the NHS existed).
I am not sure - really I have no idea - how this works for other civilised countries' social insurance systems. I would not however be astonished to find that a lot of basically nugatory transactions in the US shit pile manage to make it into GDP.
Also, the Netherlands is a slightly special example because it's a tax haven of sorts. I am not sure whether this would over- or under-estimate GDP.
US health "insurance" premiums probably show up as a large portion of the "income" for the majority of people, although it is money that goes directly from the employer to the insurance company (basically a very regressive tax), including the amount paid by the employee out of their salary and also the amount paid by the employer that they don't tell the employee about.
Well, Mississipi's PPP GDP per capita is 35 000 and the Netherlands' is 53 000, about the same as Iowa, Virginia and Hawaii.
Speaking of police officers, I think this guy must have pissed off some of his colleagues for reasons not mentioned here.
This dynamic chart from a NYT article from 2014 uses LIS data (the best available) to show various percentiles for PPP-adjusted per capita disposable income (net of *direct* taxes and transfers, but doesn't count e.g. health care or sales tax) from 1980-2010. LIS has newer data now, and the NYT should really have chosen household-size-equivalized income (which is what LIS generally uses), but supposedly the story there is the same.
TL;DR: by this measure, the US is still the richest of the 10 countries (CA, UK, DE, NOR, NED, FR, FIN, SWE, IE, SP) depicted from the 50th percentile on up (though at 50%-ile, tied with Canada), but unsurprisingly falls behind below that, and is ahead of only Spain at the 5%-ile. Also, unsurprisingly: US disposable income (but nowhere else) fell for the 5%-tile since 1980, stayed stagnant at the 10%-tile, and the growth increases as you go up the distribution (95%-ile: 40k → ~60k).
But click on the chart, it's great.