We Have Here, in Africa, Everything Necessary to Become a Powerful, Modern, and Industrialised Continent: The Fortieth Newsletter (2023)
We Have Here, in Africa, Everything Necessary to Become a Powerful, Modern, and Industrialised Continent: The Fortieth Newsletter (2023)
The problem of industrialising was always organisational, in Europe just as much as Africa. If the rest of the world disappeared it would naturally develop over probably a couple centuries, since the process has started. The question for developing nations today is how to do it faster than that.
Some countries have demonstrated how it can be done much faster than Europe and the US did it.
Yep. I'm not sure about Meiji Japan, but both the tiger economies and the Soviets did it by building on the existing European industrial economies. In the tiger's case, they bought easy to operate industrial machinery and ran it with cheap domestic labour for profitable export back to advanced economies, in Stalin's case he hired American contractors to build and train replica American factories in the USSR. After that, they could take the new resources and institutional experience and use it to build up to a next step.
Definitely right but they lack political stability, a key asset in long term plans
Right, and why are they lacking political stability?
"I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier; a land which has tamed rich natural resources through the energetic application of modern technology; a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America."
--from RFK's "Day of Affirmation" speech
Interesting article that lays out the challenges, opportunities, and some ideas for solutions.