Poor Man’s Hero: Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world..

Reason: Poor Man’s Hero: Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world..

This sort of

economic and political centralization is the really problematic legacy of colonialism

. It created new, very strong power centers in a lot of places where they hadn’t really existed before. You can see this in Africa. As the scholar George Ayittey has shown, in many African countries there once existed regional markets and local democracies where the chief was accountable to his people and had to follow their decisions. But when the colonizers appeared, they created power structures that weren’t accountable in the same way. They extracted resources and, with the help of small groups of locals, became autocratic occupiers of the land. When they left, the local elites just took over the power structures and became the new occupation forces. They simply took over the machinery of power left by the colonizers.

That creates a sense that the only way to improve things is to seize centralized power, to control a country’s political machinery. Many Western countries exacerbated this problem by distributing billions of dollars into these very centralized governments in extremely miserable and poor countries. The rulers would use some of this to buy off the people, but they mostly kept it for themselves and their associates. Everybody living there could see that if they wanted a good life for themselves and for their family, they had to seize political power -- as opposed to, say, going into business or trade.

Kendra: this dude eerily echoes my explanation for India's lingering poverty after its independence in 1947 - 'white' masters were replaced by 'brown' masters, operating the same economically extractive institutions.