I like this presenter. Clear enunciation, reasonable pace, energy, and a minimum of uptalk and vocal fry. The content is very solid, and no "cutesy-poo" nonsense like eagle-punching and misplaced attempts to be clever. Very well done.
Aren't there 5 stages of Rostow's model? I think she forgot the 2nd stage which is preconditions for take-off( where society moves away from traditional society and has an increase in investments in agriculture and infrastructure; But still a primarily still in the 1st sector( Extraction of resources sector)).
I'm a sociologist, and though I've enjoyed what this series has produced thus far, this episode is flat out wrong. The global poverty rate that they cite is so flawed that we don't even really recognize it in sociology and anthropology anymore (which there are a ton of reasons why [The "China exception", the "real" 5 dollar poverty rate, and the comparison of between/within county inequality]). The idea that "most evidence" suggests foreign investment helps is also wrong. The WTO, IMF, and World Bank interference in international markets, mainly in peripheral nations, has created MORE inequality WITHIN the country. Plus, most sociologists call it "world-systems theory", not dependency theory.
+rick wolford thanks for mentioning this. watched an interview the other day detailing your counter points, so was surprised to hear crash course end the video on such an uninformed note :(
could you be any more Marxist?! in what scenario could you imagine inequality not happening? let me answer that for you: only in a world without property or intellectual rights could you level out the playing field. & by level out, I mean, no one gets ahead, except of course, the state.
One could point out that talking about "nations" is a little confusing since wealth usually flows to cities. People it rural areas of "wealthy" nations often have more in common with people in "poor" countries.
Colonialism and capitalism as descending from modernism, left more than scars - it paternalized, dehumanized, invented race and created all sorts of ideas like what poverty and wealth are. The idea of 'helping, developing, or saving' children, the poor, women, colored people and 'other' peoples of the world is in itself a defining concept (earlier episode) of a particular worldview.
In many way Hong Kong is worse off being apart of China. The whole "One country, two systems" has been nothing but empty lies as the communist party is trying to shred every hit of democracy out of it.
I think it's a big thing to leave out the fact the almost all of the reduction in absolute poverty comes from China, Vietnam and other socialist countries. So maybe dependency theory has more going on for itself than the video suggest.
I thought I'd let you know Wallenstein took great inspiration from two latinamerican sociologists, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, with their book Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina.
Thank you for the valuable course. However, I'd like to point out that inflation should be taken into consideration when making the statement that fewer people are living on less than $1.25 per day compared to the eighties, unless you're talking in real terms
I think that one of the big problems we are facing not just today but throughout the history and all different areas of our lives is that we think that the way we live and think is the right one. It works for us, so why not for the others. And so we want to spread that to as many people as we can, trying to help or just minimize the void between ourselves and other cultures. But often we forget that maybe other kind of life is not just possible but maybe even better for other cultures and individuals. We are quick to judge but refuse to judged.
Yeah sure, but I'm almost one hundred percent true I'm saying if there was a culture that stoned women for getting raped we could definitively say they're wrong. You're getting very close to cultural relativism. I'm not saying our culture is the best at everything but we do most things pretty well. We have rights for gays, women, men, blacks, whites, Asians, and so on. On a side point the speaker is not an objective one. In the sense that what she is saying is not factual, merely interpretation of facts. There are some sociologists that would definitely disagree with this series. I'd recommend trying to find rebutals of this series, and or other sociologists. There's a more subtle deep message in how she presents her message I find disturbing.
Definitely needs an update to the ending - post-COVID and re: the World Inequality Report 2022 showing increasing wealth disparity within and between countries.
I tend to be skeptical of a theory that espouses complicated global trends and patterns as a zero-sum game, but in this, they are correct (best as I can tell). The great powers of Europe succeeded at the expense of their colonies and anywhere that wasn't flying their flag (or *a* flag).
Hong Kong's return to Chinese control was the first big news event I remember being aware of. I turned on the TV and there were all these people walking back and forth in a room full of red carpet and curtains.
Anyone discussing topics like this needs to *study Japan* . It went from a feudal society with no industry and little technology to a major world power in a generation after the Meji revolution. It has no natural resources to speak of. I am convinced that culture does play an important role.
Japan is certainly worthy of study and I invite anyone who wants to compare Japanese economic history with other countries to do so! However, I would caution anyone who does so to embrace the complexity of our world when doing so. It is entirely possible culture plays some role in economic success, but it is hard to say that Japan's culture after the Meiji era was the cause of its success when many commentators are blaming its decades of economic stagnation today on Japanese culture- the argument at least demands an analysis of either how the culture changed or how the condition of the world economy changed to make economic success happen under one culture turn into economic stagnation under a descendant culture.
I wouldn't exactly call Hong Kong "gaining independence" from the British. More like the British pawned them off on the Chinese, and from what I hear, the folks in Hong Kong were NOT happy about it. Ever play "Hong Kong '97?"
The British were strong armed into giving Hong Kong back; a good 50% of the territory was Britain's in perpetuity. The British leased the other 50% because they were running out of room for population growth, The British representative decided on 99 years because it was "as good as forever." In 1985 it was decided that it wouldn't be right to return only half on Hong Kong so the decision was made for them to give it all back. Nobody but Beijing was happy.
A few natural resource factors also helped Europe. The Americas lacked access to easily domesticated livestock before the Columbian exchange which limited the size of societies that could develop. Later on during the industrialization Europe was helped by the relatively easy access to coal which powered much of the industry AND the trains needed to support it.
To be fair, China is letting Hong Kong remain largely independent. (The same goes for Macau, who everyone seems to forget about.) "Oppressors" isn't the right word to describe China's relationship with Hong Kong, and "colonists" is just about as wrong as you can get. They could have phrased it better, but they're partly right.
"China is letting Hong Kong remain largely independent" No, China *was* letting Hong Kong remain largely independent. They have, over time, been taking more and more control over the city's governance. "Oppressors" is a _perfect_ word to describe China's relationship with Hong Kong over the last 5-10 years, even if it _wasn't_ the right word between Handover and then.
Hong Kong is hardly "largely independent". Oppressors is going way too far as well, but there is almost no autonomy on the political, legislative, and administrative level in Hong Kong, not to mention the complete lack of popular representation. Free speech has been infringed upon, the economy, while much more self-governing than other aspects of HK, is to a large degree influenced by the Mainland, and any "independence" that HK has is due to the efforts of its people, who ardently separate themselves from Mainlanders by maintaining a sociocultural divide, and any other sort of barrier they can manage. While "colonists" is too outdated a term to describe the HK-Mainland relationship, there are enough similarities for it to suffice, especially in the Cantonese language local to HK. Locals call for a return to British colonial status - that is how much we equate Chinese rule with that of the UK.
Hong Kong was ‘given back’ to China as had been contractually agreed 100 years earlier. Do, it didn’t become independent, especially not in the sense of other colonies of the British Empire.
That was well done as always but there were a few serious missteps that ought to be corrected. Wallerstein's capitalist world economy model is a part of his world system's analysis which very much does not belong to dependency theory but instead came as an outgrowth of it as well as the Annals school and other intellectual movements in the way this video mentioned dependency theory come out of conflict theory. Furthermore, Wallerstein's whole point in the founding of world-system's analysis is the concern over the unit of analysis, namely that it ought not be states but instead systems of interactive power both between and within the states and the various bulwarks of power that make them up. Thereby lumping him in with dependency theorists and the tendency of that movement to not culminate into realistic solutions for the states analyzed in their theories is both unfair and a total misreading of Wallerstein. Nice to see him mentioned though
I don't really know how you can say Liberia was uncolonised. It was literally created by the American Colonization Society. It was a racist colonial construction by abolitionists who thought returning free black people to an unknown 'homeland' would be a good idea. Also the criticisms of colonialism being too little of a force, or in Ethiopia's case not having been colonised (bar Italy), sort of rests on completely ignoring ongoing imperialism and neo-colonialism. How is arguing for national self-determination and anti-imperialist socialist struggle not useful to a modern globalised economy?
WhiskeyWhiskers I think they were saying they weren't under direct imperial control. They had some semblance of independent government. Fake or not. Where the other territories reported directly to London, Paris or where ever.
you're telling the most recent history, and when you say "world" you seem to be refering mainly to Europe. Afrika had no poverty before the invasion. If anything we had abundance
Interesting how one benefit of the Columbian exchange was new foods leading to the benefit of increase in population. Yet in the previous video population growth in low income countries is seen as a negative. I think there is a contradiction, or have I missed something?
This might be answered later in the video but here's the thing. I can see how Europeans spreading diseases and also gaining resources through trade helped them out in terms of supposedly advancing faster but then what's the explanation for them being the ones that traded with/traveled to overseas countries in the first place as opposed to Native Americans, who as far as I know didn't really go overseas to trade/conquer? Was it a difference in resources or something, like what building materials/technology did they have the potential to make with what they had? Or difference in culture? But then how could there not have been ANY Native Americans that thought of seafaring endeavors, since at one point Europeans had to think about that prospect to even start seafaring in the first place?
Lydia Anonymous Eurasians and North Africans had draft animals and a lack geographic barriers that impeded technological sophistication in the Americas and sub-Sahara Africa and even the wholesale lack of civilization in Australia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do." -Samuel P. Huntington
I don't get this 'dependency theory'. For example, suppose, country A can produce 50 units of X and 50 Units of Y with a certain amount of resources. It is more efficient in producing X, so if it allocates all it's resources in producing X, it can produce 150 units of it. Country B can similarly produce 50 units of X and 50 Units of Y, or alternatively produce 150 units of Y, as it is more efficient in producing Y. Both the countries need to consume 50 Units of X and 50 Units of Y. Now, if they stop trading and produce according to their need, they will be able to meet their requirements. But if they produce what they are more efficient in producing and then trade, they'll have 50 units of X&Y extra after the trade and consumption, which they can trade with country C for another resource. Global trade based on each nations own competency makes everyone better-off. The key is finding something you can produce more efficiently. Countries that are chronically poor lacks this efficiency/specialization that they can trade with others. Countries that have found out their own strength will eventually get out of absolute poverty. Relative poverty is impossible to eliminate, but we can get rid of absolute poverty. It's quite possible, i believe, to arrange for food, water, shelter, basic education and basic healthcare for every person of the world, provided that, the population don't go above 10 billion.
And then a single disease wipes out all the 'efficient' monoculture cash crop and the country is unable to meet its food needs with local agriculture which has been tooled towards cash crops and unable to purchase food because their cash crop has failed.
10:35 This dollar a day statistic is disingenuous because it was initially developed in relation to the worth of the dollar in 1985, when the statistic was developed. Anyone that knows basic economics knows that the PPP of the dollar will always decrease, and the current IPL of one dollar a day would actually be about $0.85 in 1985 dollars. So that means that people haven't really been lifted out of poverty. If we actually use the initial threshold for poverty, the current metric should be about $2.29 per day, for it to be an accurate measure of people being raised out of poverty. Yet, somehow, we're using $1.90 in 2015 dollars as our metric. Source: www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
By saying that Hong Kong was the last British colony, does that mean that all the other territories around the world formally under Britain were uninhabited when they were claimed by the British?
I would like to correct you about hong kong. This was given back to Chinese control as they(England) see hong kong as a leased land. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_sovereignty_over_Hong_Kong www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hong-kong-returned-to-china
Isn't the critics of the conflict theory part a bit reductive? It's not blaming capitalism but domination and coercion systems of each era. But the criticism is valid in the sence that it's more about individual cases of exploitation to study rather than a sociological phenomenon, while the other approach looks more like a global system indeed. Anyway, both seems very real to me, completing each other as in "genetic vs social" debates where the answer is always "both".
Nowhere? Jared Diamond is not very well thought of in geography and anthropology. Some examples: "Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing. Even critical works like Questioning Collapse often treat Diamond with kid-gloves, since the authors support Diamond’s stance on issues of climate change." livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/ "Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science." www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm "This is a punchline about race and history that many white people want desperately to hear. Those dying black kids at the end of the special - we know, because We Are Not Racist, that they don’t deserve what they are getting. They are not inferior. In fact, there but for the grace of god… thus affirming that no one but god has any historical responsibility, and that the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability. Diamond’s account loudly insists that alea jacta wast (pardon the pig latin conjugation) before we even got going. And it poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody’s fault. This is a wicked cop-out. Worse still, it is a profound insult to all non-Western cultures/societies. It basically says they’re sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn’t/can’t hep it. Such an assertion tramples upon all that anthropology holds dear, and is a sham sort of anti-racism." savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropologys-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/
Silverizael interesting, I have always regarded him in high esteem after reading his book, but I should do more research on his critics, thanks for the links!
Another thing to note about him is that Diamond also wrote an official review of Questioning Collapse, a book by anthropology scientists specifically calling out Diamond's Collapse book and debunking it, as a representative of the journal Nature, all without pointing out that the book was directly in response to his book and that this was a conflict of interest. And, of course, he completely slagged off Questioning Collapse in the review, using the name of Nature to do so. Sources: www.cambridgeblog.org/2010/03/from-the-editors-of-questioning-collapse-requesting-full-disclosure-and-correction-of-factual-errors/ www.imediaethics.org/jared-diamond-reviews-book-about-himself-in-nature-journal-without-disclosing-the-obvious-conflict/view-all/ www.imediaethics.org/nature-journal-responds-to-charge-that-jared-diamonds-book-review-had-undisclosed-conflict/
How about Acemoglu on institutions? I have studied development economics and while we were told that Diamond's theory faces a lot of criticism, we didn't hear anything about Acemogly. Could you please let me know how well thought of Acemoglu is in geography and anthropology?
Thank you, for being so neutral with your presentation of multiple theories and the support/flaws for each. You didn't blame the poor countries, or the rich countries, or make anything political. :) *claps*
I put the cause on geography. Only where the climate was temperate, the land fairly flat, and the land was cut by large navigable rivers did you see industrialization happened first.
Yellow river is functionally not navigable, because back then you couldn't have cities build infrastructure on it's banks since it had a bad habit of flooding. In fact it was normal for warlords to use such flooding tactically to destroy enemy cities. Which leaves the Yantze. Not a bad river but not enough compared to the Europeans. Also the North European plain is far larger than China's Yellow-Yangtze River Valley. True the Europeans were in a near constant state of war with each other, but that is what motivated them to develop better technologies than the other. Vs China who didn't have any transnational threats (save the occasional spat with japan), but constant internal power struggles.
There was no Australia. Any industrialization that occurred in Great Britten would translate to the rest of the empire. The reason BE was able to industrialize first is because at the time (1760-1820) all the other great powers in Europe were stalling except France. Germany didn't exist yet. Russia was still trying to figure out what an Enlightenment is. The Austrians though incest could produce competent rulers, Spain just got rofel stomped by BE.
Patrick Kennedy what mistake? Is Hong Kong a colony? Is it under colonial power? Is it not part of a country? With citizens belonging to said country? You clearly does not understand the concept of colony
Eduardo Rodrigues Rocha dos Reis Are you aware of the umbrella movement in Hong Kong? It is a movement that wants independence from mainland China, which Hong Kong was given to in 1997 - the event which this episode describes as being granted 'independence'. Both Hong Kong and China would dispute that Hong Kong is independent. So unless you want to argue that rule by Beijing is independence, it follows that there is a type of colonialism going on. However that isn't the point. There isn't a binary of colony or independent. I am arguing that it was not granted independence, not that it is a colony.
I don't think you can explain the dynamics of change and differences without considering the impact of evolution and natural selection at the core. For example, what made or motivated certain behaviors that emerged and thrived verses those that did not. Furthermore, What elements of environment acted as the catalyst for change in behavior or selection of natural traits. Moreover, ask yourself what would society and the traits/behaviors of man look like in the context of a world where the environment eliminated need for change or adaptation.
Sociology does consider that, but only when there's viable science on the topic. The reality is there's no actual genetic relevance to poverty that's ever been scientifically discussed, and almost all claims about natural selection/genetics and the current state of the world aren't at all genuine or concerned with academic analysis/some form of authentic causation, they're just coming ideologically driven people who have a racial agenda to push. Natural selection, genetics, etc when they aren't relevant, (which is most everything in sociology, because we're talking about social sciences and not natural) are just more modern ways of racists trying to hide their racism and make it seem scientific
Seems you're trying to find or relate economic organisation to natural selection when the two aren't related. The human race is that, a race; and there would be no scientifically plausible explanation for economic disparity that comes from evolution. You're just projecting ideology over science.
Basically, if someone from a science field would ever actually find something relevant to what you're talking about, it would be added into the equation. But until that happens, don't try and make concepts that aren't biological biological. They're just not, and that's unscientific.
I love the *fabricated* equality between the independence of African countries with the return of Hong Kong: Have you been to Hong Kong in the last few years? I think that it is dishonest to draw a connection between these two types of events.
I would argue that Wallerstein's description is more accurate-the US runs an empire.And the Pentagon is freaking out that it is unravelling-see their report "At Our Own Peril" :ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1358
Global resources are limited. There is no way everyone is rich at the same time, and there is no way every nation is rich at the same time. If such situation exists, then that means the Earth's resources are used at a unsustainable way, let's say it won't last long.
I think claiming for much of human history all of the societies on Earth were poor is problematic. What is your standard? The concept of material wealth has been very different throughout the ages. Is your standard that they didn't have a lot of material objects? Also, in 1940, Italy ruled Ethiopia. Not to be a negative Nelly, but I find some things in this episode problematic.
Ummm, Hong Kong was given back to China, NOT granted independence. They weren't really happy about it, either. Ya kinda just shot your credibility there. Do your homework.
I would like to add an interesting idea that could explain why Europe and parts of Asia were that developed and "modern" in the 1500: the pure chance that domesticable animals lived in those territories. As CGP Grey explains in his video ( th-cam.com/video/wOmjnioNulo/w-d-xo.html ) most animals in Europe and some parts of Asia had the Four F's: feedable (has to be easy to feed), friendly (the animal shouldn't kill you), fecund (has to breed fast for human standards) and family values (it has to see you as the alpha leader of the pack), and the main thesis is that domesticable animals help societies to further advance in technologies. The problem here is that America had terrible animals to domesticate: buffaloes, bears, reindeer, you name it. The largest cities in America were in the south, where llamas could be domesticated (in high grounds). Meanwhile, in Europe you could find cows, pigs, dogs chickens, horses, sheep, goats. And we have to remember that there was little tools to do it: native Americans only had bows, arrows, spears and lasso -forget horses as mounts, those came from central Asia-, plus the weak fences they could build.
I don't know, I've never heard from him. What are his claims? Edit: I read about him and yes, indeed in his book Guns, Germs and Steel he talks about this. I had no idea that those claims were discredited. Thank you for the info!
Here's some examples where they go into the claims in his books and the issues with them. livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/ www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
i think you have a point when you say Africa has over lamented on Colonialism, why couldn't the leaders take advantage of the infra structure that was left behind, some of the buildings in schools to-date are the colonial structures, the issue is leadership, the presenter feared to talk about the autocratic and bad leadership still in Africa
It's really sad to see fellow Africans put it like this. The "institutions" left by colonization were constructed to specifically benefit the process of exploiting people and land. Universities? to groom the new middle-class citizens to serve the man, Infrastructure? To streamline the process of transporting stolen goods and land. The leaders who wanted to break this cycle were killed or overthrown.
There was a false start crash course Sociology before this one which set out to discredit Guns, Germs and Steel. It was so bad they took it down, changed presenters and restarted the series several months later. Kind of feels like the elephant in the room in this episode as a result.
"Modern historians and anthropologists are quite critical of, if not borderline/outright hostile to, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Put bluntly, historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history that, in the end, paradoxically supports the very racism/Eurocentricism he is attempting to argue against. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history". From www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22 , second link.
Mateo R. Doesn't any theory of a complex system's emergent properties, like "global stratification", have to generalise? The two theories that are discussed in this video seem similarly grand and generalized. They also seem equally vulnerable to being portrayed as post hoc rationalization if your starting assumption is the conclusion e.g. "Protestantism good" or "Capitalism bad" respectively rather than "Europe good".
Jared Diamond is not well thought of in the relevant scientific fields at all. Here are some examples: "Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing. Even critical works like Questioning Collapse often treat Diamond with kid-gloves, since the authors support Diamond’s stance on issues of climate change." livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/ "Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science." www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm "This is a punchline about race and history that many white people want desperately to hear. Those dying black kids at the end of the special - we know, because We Are Not Racist, that they don’t deserve what they are getting. They are not inferior. In fact, there but for the grace of god… thus affirming that no one but god has any historical responsibility, and that the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability. Diamond’s account loudly insists that alea jacta wast (pardon the pig latin conjugation) before we even got going. And it poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody’s fault. This is a wicked cop-out. Worse still, it is a profound insult to all non-Western cultures/societies. It basically says they’re sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn’t/can’t hep it. Such an assertion tramples upon all that anthropology holds dear, and is a sham sort of anti-racism." savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropologys-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/
Isn't imperialism far more relevant to the discussion than capitalism? All the richest, as well as the poorest countries are capitalist. They owe their respective wealth & poverty, not to capitalism, but to imperialism.
+Mabasei All the rich countries are imperialist & all the poor ones aren't. It'd be the same situation without capitalism. Imperialism is just colonialism for capitalists.
OTOH, it was European technological advances during the 18th and 19th century that allowed them to be imperialist, and nations like Italy or Germany show that you didn't need actually useful colonies to become rich.
Poverty is still the norm. Who the hell owns even a place to sit and starve to death? We are all still serfs living in our lords' manors, it's just our lords who are wealthier, and their manors commensurably nicer, but we're still just serfs living in them.
We aren't serfs, I'm sure you'd get that from this skewed butchery of sociology though. Serfs don't have iPhones and Instagram. Even a good chunk of lower class people can afford relative luxuries that the world wouldn't even dream of having. It's fallacious to say we're serfs, we have an obsesity epidemic. This series is a political message masquerading as science. That's not to say I don't agree with half of what the speaker says, just don't take it as science. This series with how it is painted is subtle indoctrination. I know I sound quite loony and nuts, but a good chunk of things the speaker uses in this series are discredited by other sociologists. A lot of the theories she offers involving race and class are contested and disputed, as they're not objective meaning "definitively true."
Mac Kaste That's simply false, the majority of start up businesses fail. It's fallacious to portray the owners of factories and businesses put in little work for great return. Individuals are entitled to own property they have rightfully achieved. There's a reason why those workers make very little and see very little gain in wage, your effort is not as valuable as being educated. While education and ambition together along with having children when you're able to support them financially, at minimum have a highschool education, and be fiscally responsible you will not be poor. This is of course statistically speaking. Moving onto the point about "why does there have to be private means of production." There is no law or barrier in place of individuals of good moral standing creating your ideal public company. Individuals are very welcome to join said companies. Hypothetically if you had factory A where businessman A pays 7.50 and hour while business man B pays 9 dollars an hour I can say definitively everyone will gravitate towards B. Of course there is a limit to which business man B can raise his wage and still profit. However inevitably the larger salary will attractive more skilled workers. My question is who's in the right to decide who has control over the means of production. The individual themselves controls their means, not the government, not the ruler of the Soviet gulags, not Pol Pot, only an individual may decide. They are then free to contract out their labor, this is a the foundation of Western society. The only countries that flourish are capitalist. Yes, that includes the Swedish, Norwegian, and other Scandinavian countries. The head of Sweden came out to gripe at Bernie Sanders calling his country socialist. I commend how well you articulate your words. However I find it obfuscating how you use slavery to provoke a picture that isn't there. There is a reasonable end to discuss the social safety net and I frankly support it. I'm even fine if people start their own communes to live free and happy, no problem there. We live in a time of liberty, why revert to forcing a public means of production? There is nothing more authoritarian saying "this is how you must contract your labor or face jail." Society is best left to liberty instead of iron control. Read gulag archipelago, even the factories of the publicly controlled means of production in Russia still gave the people disease of the lungs. They starved due to the idiotic ideological demagoguery. I am not saying your mistrust in the business owning class is wrong. They can very well buy elections if left untampered, but don't replace one tyranny with another.
FWIW I am not talking about the employer-employee relationship at all, rather the lender-borrower relationship (and landlord-tenant, which is a specific case of the same thing: renting is borrowing housing). Also, housing most definitely counts as productive capital, as it's the single most basic thing you need to make a living: first thing of all, you have to exist somewhere. The thing that made serfs serfs is that they didn't own the land they lived and worked, so they had to borrow land to live on and to work from their lords, and pay their lords a large fraction of what they produced for that privilege, with little hope of ever changing that situation. The industrial revolution introduced more kinds of capital than land, so now there are more kinds of lender-borrower relations than just landlords and tenants, but still almost everyone is on the borrower side of it with little hope of ever changing that situation. We're just serfs in postindustrial feudalism. Which is still nicer than preindustrial feudalism, sure, but that's because of technology, not because the social relations have improved.
I defer from the opinion is "getting better" while people are getting more dollars for there laybor the purchasing power of those dollars has been downgrade by 96% since1920...
I like this presenter. Clear enunciation, reasonable pace, energy, and a minimum of uptalk and vocal fry. The content is very solid, and no "cutesy-poo" nonsense like eagle-punching and misplaced attempts to be clever. Very well done.
Yes. Very understandable and little to distract from the content.
People seem to be confusing Wheezy Waiter with Crash Course Host Clone.
I love the eagle punching.
Except maybe her awesome teeth. Had to replay parts 'cause of them.
Reasonable pace?
Aren't there 5 stages of Rostow's model? I think she forgot the 2nd stage which is preconditions for take-off( where society moves away from traditional society and has an increase in investments in agriculture and infrastructure; But still a primarily still in the 1st sector( Extraction of resources sector)).
I'm a sociologist, and though I've enjoyed what this series has produced thus far, this episode is flat out wrong.
The global poverty rate that they cite is so flawed that we don't even really recognize it in sociology and anthropology anymore (which there are a ton of reasons why [The "China exception", the "real" 5 dollar poverty rate, and the comparison of between/within county inequality]). The idea that "most evidence" suggests foreign investment helps is also wrong. The WTO, IMF, and World Bank interference in international markets, mainly in peripheral nations, has created MORE inequality WITHIN the country. Plus, most sociologists call it "world-systems theory", not dependency theory.
Rick Wolford Hi, I'm considering a PhD in sociology, if you don't mind me asking, how many years did it take you to acquire the doctorate?
+rick wolford
thanks for mentioning this. watched an interview the other day detailing your counter points, so was surprised to hear crash course end the video on such an uninformed note :(
Forgive me if I misrepresented myself. I have 1.5 years until I get my Ph.D. I've been in graduate school for 4.5 years
could you be any more Marxist?! in what scenario could you imagine inequality not happening? let me answer that for you: only in a world without property or intellectual rights could you level out the playing field. & by level out, I mean, no one gets ahead, except of course, the state.
Even your strawman of Marxism sounds a lot better than capitalism.
One could point out that talking about "nations" is a little confusing since wealth usually flows to cities. People it rural areas of "wealthy" nations often have more in common with people in "poor" countries.
Colonialism and capitalism as descending from modernism, left more than scars - it paternalized, dehumanized, invented race and created all sorts of ideas like what poverty and wealth are. The idea of 'helping, developing, or saving' children, the poor, women, colored people and 'other' peoples of the world is in itself a defining concept (earlier episode) of a particular worldview.
Hong Kong was not granted independence in 1997 but rather it was "given back" to China, disregarding any sovereignty. You could have said decolonized.
In many way Hong Kong is worse off being apart of China. The whole "One country, two systems" has been nothing but empty lies as the communist party is trying to shred every hit of democracy out of it.
nemesis962074 so true, thank you.
@@micomeng3992 Watching this comment in 2019 feels pretty awkward
was gonna say it lol
@@woodchuck003 let's not lie. hong kong was never a democracy. the governer was assigned by the British Prime Minister.
I think it's a big thing to leave out the fact the almost all of the reduction in absolute poverty comes from China, Vietnam and other socialist countries. So maybe dependency theory has more going on for itself than the video suggest.
I thought I'd let you know Wallenstein took great inspiration from two latinamerican sociologists, Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, with their book Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina.
Thank you for the valuable course.
However, I'd like to point out that inflation should be taken into consideration when making the statement that fewer people are living on less than $1.25 per day compared to the eighties, unless you're talking in real terms
World systems theory (Wallerstein) is separate to dependency theory, not just a subsection.
I think that one of the big problems we are facing not just today but throughout the history and all different areas of our lives is that we think that the way we live and think is the right one. It works for us, so why not for the others. And so we want to spread that to as many people as we can, trying to help or just minimize the void between ourselves and other cultures.
But often we forget that maybe other kind of life is not just possible but maybe even better for other cultures and individuals. We are quick to judge but refuse to judged.
Yeah sure, but I'm almost one hundred percent true I'm saying if there was a culture that stoned women for getting raped we could definitively say they're wrong. You're getting very close to cultural relativism. I'm not saying our culture is the best at everything but we do most things pretty well. We have rights for gays, women, men, blacks, whites, Asians, and so on.
On a side point the speaker is not an objective one. In the sense that what she is saying is not factual, merely interpretation of facts. There are some sociologists that would definitely disagree with this series. I'd recommend trying to find rebutals of this series, and or other sociologists. There's a more subtle deep message in how she presents her message I find disturbing.
So in other words, cultural relativism is just a 'quick fix' lol get it? ; )
WP :)
Definitely needs an update to the ending - post-COVID and re: the World Inequality Report 2022 showing increasing wealth disparity within and between countries.
Thank you for explaining in 12 minutes what 15 pages of a textbook and an hour long lecture couldn't
I tend to be skeptical of a theory that espouses complicated global trends and patterns as a zero-sum game, but in this, they are correct (best as I can tell). The great powers of Europe succeeded at the expense of their colonies and anywhere that wasn't flying their flag (or *a* flag).
Lots of love and affection for this person including a higher degree of respect.
Hong Kong: we wish
indeed...indeed...
God bless you crash course. I finally understand what my teacher couldn’t teach.
Hong Kong's return to Chinese control was the first big news event I remember being aware of. I turned on the TV and there were all these people walking back and forth in a room full of red carpet and curtains.
Finally! Look forward to the next one
Anyone discussing topics like this needs to *study Japan* .
It went from a feudal society with no industry and little technology to a major world power in a generation after the Meji revolution.
It has no natural resources to speak of.
I am convinced that culture does play an important role.
Japan is certainly worthy of study and I invite anyone who wants to compare Japanese economic history with other countries to do so!
However, I would caution anyone who does so to embrace the complexity of our world when doing so. It is entirely possible culture plays some role in economic success, but it is hard to say that Japan's culture after the Meiji era was the cause of its success when many commentators are blaming its decades of economic stagnation today on Japanese culture- the argument at least demands an analysis of either how the culture changed or how the condition of the world economy changed to make economic success happen under one culture turn into economic stagnation under a descendant culture.
Yeah but national debt though
Very informative👍
At 6:49, there is a huge space between Europe and Asia, that's not what the Mediterranean sea looks like.
I wouldn't exactly call Hong Kong "gaining independence" from the British. More like the British pawned them off on the Chinese, and from what I hear, the folks in Hong Kong were NOT happy about it. Ever play "Hong Kong '97?"
The British were strong armed into giving Hong Kong back; a good 50% of the territory was Britain's in perpetuity. The British leased the other 50% because they were running out of room for population growth, The British representative decided on 99 years because it was "as good as forever." In 1985 it was decided that it wouldn't be right to return only half on Hong Kong so the decision was made for them to give it all back. Nobody but Beijing was happy.
Does anyone else try to pause, and read the word bubbles in the intro? They're hilarious.
I did, they are so realistic and humorous
A few natural resource factors also helped Europe. The Americas lacked access to easily domesticated livestock before the Columbian exchange which limited the size of societies that could develop. Later on during the industrialization Europe was helped by the relatively easy access to coal which powered much of the industry AND the trains needed to support it.
I'm assuming there's only one island who bought all the potatoes.
*TOP IN THE MORNING TO YA LADIES!*
7:35 Hong Kong was granted independence in 1997? Try telling that to both the people of Hong Kong and the Chinese government.
we wish
....From the U.K. Not from China.
To be fair, China is letting Hong Kong remain largely independent. (The same goes for Macau, who everyone seems to forget about.) "Oppressors" isn't the right word to describe China's relationship with Hong Kong, and "colonists" is just about as wrong as you can get.
They could have phrased it better, but they're partly right.
"China is letting Hong Kong remain largely independent"
No, China *was* letting Hong Kong remain largely independent. They have, over time, been taking more and more control over the city's governance. "Oppressors" is a _perfect_ word to describe China's relationship with Hong Kong over the last 5-10 years, even if it _wasn't_ the right word between Handover and then.
Hong Kong is hardly "largely independent". Oppressors is going way too far as well, but there is almost no autonomy on the political, legislative, and administrative level in Hong Kong, not to mention the complete lack of popular representation. Free speech has been infringed upon, the economy, while much more self-governing than other aspects of HK, is to a large degree influenced by the Mainland, and any "independence" that HK has is due to the efforts of its people, who ardently separate themselves from Mainlanders by maintaining a sociocultural divide, and any other sort of barrier they can manage. While "colonists" is too outdated a term to describe the HK-Mainland relationship, there are enough similarities for it to suffice, especially in the Cantonese language local to HK. Locals call for a return to British colonial status - that is how much we equate Chinese rule with that of the UK.
Hong Kong was ‘given back’ to China as had been contractually agreed 100 years earlier. Do, it didn’t become independent, especially not in the sense of other colonies of the British Empire.
OMG she talks fast! Dudes, give her more time. I have a headache, now.
Thanks আপু 💜💜💜.
Great episode. I learned a lot. Thanks!
Hong Kong was NOT granted independence in 1997. It was handed over to the Chinese government in 1997. Please could you clarify this in the video?
Good video, but needs to include discussion of post-Mao China.
That was well done as always but there were a few serious missteps that ought to be corrected. Wallerstein's capitalist world economy model is a part of his world system's analysis which very much does not belong to dependency theory but instead came as an outgrowth of it as well as the Annals school and other intellectual movements in the way this video mentioned dependency theory come out of conflict theory. Furthermore, Wallerstein's whole point in the founding of world-system's analysis is the concern over the unit of analysis, namely that it ought not be states but instead systems of interactive power both between and within the states and the various bulwarks of power that make them up. Thereby lumping him in with dependency theorists and the tendency of that movement to not culminate into realistic solutions for the states analyzed in their theories is both unfair and a total misreading of Wallerstein. Nice to see him mentioned though
Got Hong Kong and Sri Lanka so absolutely wrong.
Correction : HongKong didn't gain independence， HK was returned to China
Happy Columbus Day, it's good we are learning about the good and bad about Columbus, not just the Eurocentric model. Thanks Crash Course!
excellent explanations
I don't really know how you can say Liberia was uncolonised. It was literally created by the American Colonization Society. It was a racist colonial construction by abolitionists who thought returning free black people to an unknown 'homeland' would be a good idea.
Also the criticisms of colonialism being too little of a force, or in Ethiopia's case not having been colonised (bar Italy), sort of rests on completely ignoring ongoing imperialism and neo-colonialism.
How is arguing for national self-determination and anti-imperialist socialist struggle not useful to a modern globalised economy?
WhiskeyWhiskers I think they were saying they weren't under direct imperial control. They had some semblance of independent government. Fake or not. Where the other territories reported directly to London, Paris or where ever.
WhiskeyWhiskers
What imperialism and neo-colonialism?
Liberia was FOUNDED and not a country taken over by America.
WhiskeyWhiskers
Last paragraph: ...national...socialist...
WhiskeyWhiskers
Let's argue for national socialism together! ^,^
you're telling the most recent history, and when you say "world" you seem to be refering mainly to Europe. Afrika had no poverty before the invasion. If anything we had abundance
This is my dream job honestly
Same
Educational!
Just FYI at 3:42 the I in individual isn’t colored but the rest of the word is
Interesting how one benefit of the Columbian exchange was new foods leading to the benefit of increase in population. Yet in the previous video population growth in low income countries is seen as a negative. I think there is a contradiction, or have I missed something?
This might be answered later in the video but here's the thing. I can see how Europeans spreading diseases and also gaining resources through trade helped them out in terms of supposedly advancing faster but then what's the explanation for them being the ones that traded with/traveled to overseas countries in the first place as opposed to Native Americans, who as far as I know didn't really go overseas to trade/conquer? Was it a difference in resources or something, like what building materials/technology did they have the potential to make with what they had? Or difference in culture? But then how could there not have been ANY Native Americans that thought of seafaring endeavors, since at one point Europeans had to think about that prospect to even start seafaring in the first place?
Lydia Anonymous
Eurasians and North Africans had draft animals and a lack geographic barriers that impeded technological sophistication in the Americas and sub-Sahara Africa and even the wholesale lack of civilization in Australia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.
Could you consistently HAVE or NOT HAVE the "coming up next" outro? I get vamped and do research ahead of time if I know what the next episode is on.
where are your citations for this information? thank you c:
Thank you
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do." -Samuel P. Huntington
I don't get this 'dependency theory'.
For example, suppose, country A can produce 50 units of X and 50 Units of Y with a certain amount of resources. It is more efficient in producing X, so if it allocates all it's resources in producing X, it can produce 150 units of it. Country B can similarly produce 50 units of X and 50 Units of Y, or alternatively produce 150 units of Y, as it is more efficient in producing Y. Both the countries need to consume 50 Units of X and 50 Units of Y. Now, if they stop trading and produce according to their need, they will be able to meet their requirements. But if they produce what they are more efficient in producing and then trade, they'll have 50 units of X&Y extra after the trade and consumption, which they can trade with country C for another resource. Global trade based on each nations own competency makes everyone better-off. The key is finding something you can produce more efficiently. Countries that are chronically poor lacks this efficiency/specialization that they can trade with others. Countries that have found out their own strength will eventually get out of absolute poverty. Relative poverty is impossible to eliminate, but we can get rid of absolute poverty. It's quite possible, i believe, to arrange for food, water, shelter, basic education and basic healthcare for every person of the world, provided that, the population don't go above 10 billion.
And then a single disease wipes out all the 'efficient' monoculture cash crop and the country is unable to meet its food needs with local agriculture which has been tooled towards cash crops and unable to purchase food because their cash crop has failed.
10:35 This dollar a day statistic is disingenuous because it was initially developed in relation to the worth of the dollar in 1985, when the statistic was developed. Anyone that knows basic economics knows that the PPP of the dollar will always decrease, and the current IPL of one dollar a day would actually be about $0.85 in 1985 dollars. So that means that people haven't really been lifted out of poverty. If we actually use the initial threshold for poverty, the current metric should be about $2.29 per day, for it to be an accurate measure of people being raised out of poverty. Yet, somehow, we're using $1.90 in 2015 dollars as our metric.
Source: www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html
Its all in the book
By saying that Hong Kong was the last British colony, does that mean that all the other territories around the world formally under Britain were uninhabited when they were claimed by the British?
I would like to correct you about hong kong. This was given back to Chinese control as they(England) see hong kong as a leased land.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_sovereignty_over_Hong_Kong
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/hong-kong-returned-to-china
Isn't the critics of the conflict theory part a bit reductive? It's not blaming capitalism but domination and coercion systems of each era. But the criticism is valid in the sence that it's more about individual cases of exploitation to study rather than a sociological phenomenon, while the other approach looks more like a global system indeed.
Anyway, both seems very real to me, completing each other as in "genetic vs social" debates where the answer is always "both".
Where does Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel fit into this?
Nowhere? Jared Diamond is not very well thought of in geography and anthropology. Some examples:
"Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing. Even critical works like Questioning Collapse often treat Diamond with kid-gloves, since the authors support Diamond’s stance on issues of climate change."
livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/
"Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."
www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
"This is a punchline about race and history that many white people want desperately to hear. Those dying black kids at the end of the special - we know, because We Are Not Racist, that they don’t deserve what they are getting. They are not inferior. In fact, there but for the grace of god… thus affirming that no one but god has any historical responsibility, and that the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability. Diamond’s account loudly insists that alea jacta wast (pardon the pig latin conjugation) before we even got going. And it poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody’s fault. This is a wicked cop-out. Worse still, it is a profound insult to all non-Western cultures/societies. It basically says they’re sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn’t/can’t hep it. Such an assertion tramples upon all that anthropology holds dear, and is a sham sort of anti-racism."
savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropologys-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/
Silverizael interesting, I have always regarded him in high esteem after reading his book, but I should do more research on his critics, thanks for the links!
Another thing to note about him is that Diamond also wrote an official review of Questioning Collapse, a book by anthropology scientists specifically calling out Diamond's Collapse book and debunking it, as a representative of the journal Nature, all without pointing out that the book was directly in response to his book and that this was a conflict of interest. And, of course, he completely slagged off Questioning Collapse in the review, using the name of Nature to do so.
Sources: www.cambridgeblog.org/2010/03/from-the-editors-of-questioning-collapse-requesting-full-disclosure-and-correction-of-factual-errors/
www.imediaethics.org/jared-diamond-reviews-book-about-himself-in-nature-journal-without-disclosing-the-obvious-conflict/view-all/
www.imediaethics.org/nature-journal-responds-to-charge-that-jared-diamonds-book-review-had-undisclosed-conflict/
Academics always get upset when their work is simplified and brought to the masses.
How about Acemoglu on institutions? I have studied development economics and while we were told that Diamond's theory faces a lot of criticism, we didn't hear anything about Acemogly. Could you please let me know how well thought of Acemoglu is in geography and anthropology?
Thank you, for being so neutral with your presentation of multiple theories and the support/flaws for each. You didn't blame the poor countries, or the rich countries, or make anything political. :) *claps*
I put the cause on geography. Only where the climate was temperate, the land fairly flat, and the land was cut by large navigable rivers did you see industrialization happened first.
Like China?
Australia?
Yellow river is functionally not navigable, because back then you couldn't have cities build infrastructure on it's banks since it had a bad habit of flooding. In fact it was normal for warlords to use such flooding tactically to destroy enemy cities.
Which leaves the Yantze. Not a bad river but not enough compared to the Europeans.
Also the North European plain is far larger than China's Yellow-Yangtze River Valley. True the Europeans were in a near constant state of war with each other, but that is what motivated them to develop better technologies than the other. Vs China who didn't have any transnational threats (save the occasional spat with japan), but constant internal power struggles.
There was no Australia. Any industrialization that occurred in Great Britten would translate to the rest of the empire. The reason BE was able to industrialize first is because at the time (1760-1820) all the other great powers in Europe were stalling except France. Germany didn't exist yet. Russia was still trying to figure out what an Enlightenment is. The Austrians though incest could produce competent rulers, Spain just got rofel stomped by BE.
That's my point. It clearly can't only be geography or Australia (which has areas which fit your criteria) would have industrialised.
Hong Kong was not 'granted independence'.
Patrick Kennedy Granted independence from the UK but yeah, it's misleading.
remilia scarlet yeah it is. It's mistakes like this that demonstrate the real ideological biases of this series.
Patrick Kennedy what mistake? Is Hong Kong a colony? Is it under colonial power? Is it not part of a country? With citizens belonging to said country? You clearly does not understand the concept of colony
Eduardo Rodrigues Rocha dos Reis Are you aware of the umbrella movement in Hong Kong? It is a movement that wants independence from mainland China, which Hong Kong was given to in 1997 - the event which this episode describes as being granted 'independence'.
Both Hong Kong and China would dispute that Hong Kong is independent. So unless you want to argue that rule by Beijing is independence, it follows that there is a type of colonialism going on.
However that isn't the point. There isn't a binary of colony or independent. I am arguing that it was not granted independence, not that it is a colony.
I don't think you can explain the dynamics of change and differences without considering the impact of evolution and natural selection at the core. For example, what made or motivated certain behaviors that emerged and thrived verses those that did not. Furthermore, What elements of environment acted as the catalyst for change in behavior or selection of natural traits. Moreover, ask yourself what would society and the traits/behaviors of man look like in the context of a world where the environment eliminated need for change or adaptation.
Sociology does consider that, but only when there's viable science on the topic.
The reality is there's no actual genetic relevance to poverty that's ever been scientifically discussed, and almost all claims about natural selection/genetics and the current state of the world aren't at all genuine or concerned with academic analysis/some form of authentic causation, they're just coming ideologically driven people who have a racial agenda to push. Natural selection, genetics, etc when they aren't relevant, (which is most everything in sociology, because we're talking about social sciences and not natural) are just more modern ways of racists trying to hide their racism and make it seem scientific
Seems you're trying to find or relate economic organisation to natural selection when the two aren't related. The human race is that, a race; and there would be no scientifically plausible explanation for economic disparity that comes from evolution. You're just projecting ideology over science.
Basically, if someone from a science field would ever actually find something relevant to what you're talking about, it would be added into the equation. But until that happens, don't try and make concepts that aren't biological biological. They're just not, and that's unscientific.
I love the *fabricated* equality between the independence of African countries with the return of Hong Kong: Have you been to Hong Kong in the last few years? I think that it is dishonest to draw a connection between these two types of events.
Sri Lanka - Flourishing economy???
Sri lanka prospering? Oh this is 5 years ago...
Funny how the book I use in school copies everything she says in this video word for word.. I wonder if you can sue the publisher here 😂
WOWOWOWOW! Ethiopia was never colonized?? what about Italy? and SRI LANKA?? They had a civil war and genocide. What are you talking about?
I would argue that Wallerstein's description is more accurate-the US runs an empire.And the Pentagon is freaking out that it is unravelling-see their report "At Our Own Peril" :ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1358
First to the global competition
Global resources are limited. There is no way everyone is rich at the same time, and there is no way every nation is rich at the same time. If such situation exists, then that means the Earth's resources are used at a unsustainable way, let's say it won't last long.
I think claiming for much of human history all of the societies on Earth were poor is problematic. What is your standard? The concept of material wealth has been very different throughout the ages. Is your standard that they didn't have a lot of material objects? Also, in 1940, Italy ruled Ethiopia. Not to be a negative Nelly, but I find some things in this episode problematic.
I love this girl's teeth.
"Diseases"
0:29 left old man looks like Stan Lee.
Ummm, Hong Kong was given back to China, NOT granted independence. They weren't really happy about it, either. Ya kinda just shot your credibility there. Do your homework.
I would like to add an interesting idea that could explain why Europe and parts of Asia were that developed and "modern" in the 1500: the pure chance that domesticable animals lived in those territories. As CGP Grey explains in his video ( th-cam.com/video/wOmjnioNulo/w-d-xo.html ) most animals in Europe and some parts of Asia had the Four F's: feedable (has to be easy to feed), friendly (the animal shouldn't kill you), fecund (has to breed fast for human standards) and family values (it has to see you as the alpha leader of the pack), and the main thesis is that domesticable animals help societies to further advance in technologies.
The problem here is that America had terrible animals to domesticate: buffaloes, bears, reindeer, you name it. The largest cities in America were in the south, where llamas could be domesticated (in high grounds). Meanwhile, in Europe you could find cows, pigs, dogs chickens, horses, sheep, goats. And we have to remember that there was little tools to do it: native Americans only had bows, arrows, spears and lasso -forget horses as mounts, those came from central Asia-, plus the weak fences they could build.
Isn't that just a variant on Jared Diamond's long since discredited claims?
I don't know, I've never heard from him. What are his claims?
Edit: I read about him and yes, indeed in his book Guns, Germs and Steel he talks about this. I had no idea that those claims were discredited. Thank you for the info!
Here's some examples where they go into the claims in his books and the issues with them.
livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/
www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
i think you have a point when you say Africa has over lamented on Colonialism, why couldn't the leaders take advantage of the infra structure that was left behind, some of the buildings in schools to-date are the colonial structures, the issue is leadership, the presenter feared to talk about the autocratic and bad leadership still in Africa
It's really sad to see fellow Africans put it like this. The "institutions" left by colonization were constructed to specifically benefit the process of exploiting people and land. Universities? to groom the new middle-class citizens to serve the man, Infrastructure? To streamline the process of transporting stolen goods and land. The leaders who wanted to break this cycle were killed or overthrown.
India is by no means a middle-income country. Any glimpse at the living conditions clearly indicates that it is low-income.
What the hell is up with that map at 655?
"for much of human history, all of the societies were poor" ... that is a straight up lie!!
Opening statement- Athenians? Spartans?
One might argue that Hong Kong is still a colony, just of the PRC rather than the UK
David Lev
They are NOT colony but a semi-independent state.
The world may have finite resources, but we haven't yet reached that cap, so the point is irrelevant.
Wiki on U.S. occupation of Haiti for people who were as confused as I was when I heard that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti
In my state, The Pocahontas Parkway is haunted by Native Americans.
double shadows behind texts, my eyes(
Thoughts? insights
How could you leave out the theory of Jared Daimond in "guns, germs and steal"? That is the best explanation of global stratification today.
that's not a theory for stratification it's one to explain (without racism) why blacks,brown, and yellow people didn't end up like europe.
There was a false start crash course Sociology before this one which set out to discredit Guns, Germs and Steel. It was so bad they took it down, changed presenters and restarted the series several months later. Kind of feels like the elephant in the room in this episode as a result.
"Modern historians and anthropologists are quite critical of, if not borderline/outright hostile to, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Put bluntly, historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history that, in the end, paradoxically supports the very racism/Eurocentricism he is attempting to argue against. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history".
From www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22 , second link.
Mateo R. Doesn't any theory of a complex system's emergent properties, like "global stratification", have to generalise? The two theories that are discussed in this video seem similarly grand and generalized. They also seem equally vulnerable to being portrayed as post hoc rationalization if your starting assumption is the conclusion e.g. "Protestantism good" or "Capitalism bad" respectively rather than "Europe good".
Jared Diamond is not well thought of in the relevant scientific fields at all. Here are some examples:
"Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers. Introductory anthropology textbooks often borrow Diamond’s ideas, as if Diamond needs further popularizing. Even critical works like Questioning Collapse often treat Diamond with kid-gloves, since the authors support Diamond’s stance on issues of climate change."
livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/guns-germs-and-steel-jared-diamond/
"Guns, Germs, and Steel is influential in part because its Eurocentric arguments seem, to the general reader, to be so compellingly "scientific." Diamond is a natural scientist (a bio-ecologist), and essentially all of the reasons he gives for the historical supremacy of Eurasia and, within Eurasia, of Europe, are taken from natural science. I suppose environmental determinism has always had this scientistic cachet. I dispute Diamond's argument not because he tries to use scientific data and scientific reasoning to solve the problems of human history. That is laudable. But he claims to produce reliable, scientific answers to these problems when in fact he does not have such answers, and he resolutely ignores the findings of social science while advancing old and discredited theories of environmental determinism. That is bad science."
www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/diamond.htm
"This is a punchline about race and history that many white people want desperately to hear. Those dying black kids at the end of the special - we know, because We Are Not Racist, that they don’t deserve what they are getting. They are not inferior. In fact, there but for the grace of god… thus affirming that no one but god has any historical responsibility, and that the world as we know it is a regrettable inevitability. Diamond’s account loudly insists that alea jacta wast (pardon the pig latin conjugation) before we even got going. And it poisonously whispers: mope about colonialism, slavery, capitalism, racism, and predatory neo-imperialism all you want, but these were/are nobody’s fault. This is a wicked cop-out. Worse still, it is a profound insult to all non-Western cultures/societies. It basically says they’re sorta pathetic, but that bless their hearts, they couldn’t/can’t hep it. Such an assertion tramples upon all that anthropology holds dear, and is a sham sort of anti-racism."
savageminds.org/2005/07/24/anthropologys-guns-germs-and-steel-problem/
Isn't imperialism far more relevant to the discussion than capitalism? All the richest, as well as the poorest countries are capitalist. They owe their respective wealth & poverty, not to capitalism, but to imperialism.
no capitalism as it exists needs imperialism they're linked.
They are two ways to point out the same thing.
+Mabasei All the rich countries are imperialist & all the poor ones aren't. It'd be the same situation without capitalism. Imperialism is just colonialism for capitalists.
Right, so it's capitalist imperialism that's the problem.
OTOH, it was European technological advances during the 18th and 19th century that allowed them to be imperialist, and nations like Italy or Germany show that you didn't need actually useful colonies to become rich.
What happened to the guy 2 years ago!?
0:29 stan lee on the left
Wtf does TL:DR mean...? huh
I wonder how world poverty got halved again since 2000.
what? slavery died down in mid 19th century?
Who is doing your maps?
You have excluded Pakistan and Bangladesh, part of erstwhile British India!
The comment about Hong Kong status needs to be revised.
Poverty is still the norm. Who the hell owns even a place to sit and starve to death? We are all still serfs living in our lords' manors, it's just our lords who are wealthier, and their manors commensurably nicer, but we're still just serfs living in them.
The difference between relative and absolute poverty must have flown right past you if you think not being a homeowner counts as "poor".
Is the slave of a billionaire less absolutely poor than the slave of a mere millionaire? Still a slave either way.
We aren't serfs, I'm sure you'd get that from this skewed butchery of sociology though. Serfs don't have iPhones and Instagram. Even a good chunk of lower class people can afford relative luxuries that the world wouldn't even dream of having. It's fallacious to say we're serfs, we have an obsesity epidemic. This series is a political message masquerading as science. That's not to say I don't agree with half of what the speaker says, just don't take it as science. This series with how it is painted is subtle indoctrination. I know I sound quite loony and nuts, but a good chunk of things the speaker uses in this series are discredited by other sociologists. A lot of the theories she offers involving race and class are contested and disputed, as they're not objective meaning "definitively true."
Mac Kaste That's simply false, the majority of start up businesses fail. It's fallacious to portray the owners of factories and businesses put in little work for great return. Individuals are entitled to own property they have rightfully achieved.
There's a reason why those workers make very little and see very little gain in wage, your effort is not as valuable as being educated. While education and ambition together along with having children when you're able to support them financially, at minimum have a highschool education, and be fiscally responsible you will not be poor. This is of course statistically speaking.
Moving onto the point about "why does there have to be private means of production." There is no law or barrier in place of individuals of good moral standing creating your ideal public company. Individuals are very welcome to join said companies. Hypothetically if you had factory A where businessman A pays 7.50 and hour while business man B pays 9 dollars an hour I can say definitively everyone will gravitate towards B. Of course there is a limit to which business man B can raise his wage and still profit. However inevitably the larger salary will attractive more skilled workers.
My question is who's in the right to decide who has control over the means of production. The individual themselves controls their means, not the government, not the ruler of the Soviet gulags, not Pol Pot, only an individual may decide. They are then free to contract out their labor, this is a the foundation of Western society. The only countries that flourish are capitalist. Yes, that includes the Swedish, Norwegian, and other Scandinavian countries. The head of Sweden came out to gripe at Bernie Sanders calling his country socialist.
I commend how well you articulate your words. However I find it obfuscating how you use slavery to provoke a picture that isn't there. There is a reasonable end to discuss the social safety net and I frankly support it. I'm even fine if people start their own communes to live free and happy, no problem there. We live in a time of liberty, why revert to forcing a public means of production? There is nothing more authoritarian saying "this is how you must contract your labor or face jail." Society is best left to liberty instead of iron control.
Read gulag archipelago, even the factories of the publicly controlled means of production in Russia still gave the people disease of the lungs. They starved due to the idiotic ideological demagoguery. I am not saying your mistrust in the business owning class is wrong. They can very well buy elections if left untampered, but don't replace one tyranny with another.
FWIW I am not talking about the employer-employee relationship at all, rather the lender-borrower relationship (and landlord-tenant, which is a specific case of the same thing: renting is borrowing housing). Also, housing most definitely counts as productive capital, as it's the single most basic thing you need to make a living: first thing of all, you have to exist somewhere.
The thing that made serfs serfs is that they didn't own the land they lived and worked, so they had to borrow land to live on and to work from their lords, and pay their lords a large fraction of what they produced for that privilege, with little hope of ever changing that situation. The industrial revolution introduced more kinds of capital than land, so now there are more kinds of lender-borrower relations than just landlords and tenants, but still almost everyone is on the borrower side of it with little hope of ever changing that situation.
We're just serfs in postindustrial feudalism. Which is still nicer than preindustrial feudalism, sure, but that's because of technology, not because the social relations have improved.
Here's an idea. Crach course American sign language.
All I see is - the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
The host wears glasses for no reason.. If you look at hes eyes, there is no image distortion that you normally get from wearing glasses.
I defer from the opinion is "getting better" while people are getting more dollars for there laybor the purchasing power of those dollars has been downgrade by 96% since1920...
Validating the dependency theory over the rest.
9.27 out of 10.00