Comment by dnautics
4 days ago
eh, germany and japan seemed to go okay, grenada too. korea kind of a mixed bag (it took decades for it to not suck)
4 days ago
eh, germany and japan seemed to go okay, grenada too. korea kind of a mixed bag (it took decades for it to not suck)
Korea, by what metric? South Korea was through the 50 poorer than North Korea, North Korea was considered the roaring growth economy, huge success of planning and leadership.
Park Chung Hee took a country that could not be a functional democracy, provided leadership and put it onto the path of economic success. Iirc, the reduction in poverty through that period is the fastest in human history (when you consider that China, that is an incredible statement).
I think people (still) assume both that democracy is superior economically for every situation and that people who don't have any food care about being unable to vote...neither of these things is obviously true. Indeed, in the latter case, we now have a good test case of poor countries adopting democracy early and they have generally not been successful as power rotates between various quasi-dictators who give massive handouts to the poor to retain power (without doing anything actually useful).
The choice should be free though - everyone should be able to opt out. Restricting people to leave the country is a major red flag that something is going in the wrong direction.
Crediting the US for Germany's post-WWII transition is a bit of a stretch. There were quite a few more players involved.
Considering the Soviet strategy of stripping assets from the East and the fact that Britain and France were broke and in shambles - yes, the Marshall plan deserves great credit. To this day East German states remain the poorest in the nation.
To be fair they had kind of started implementing the Morgenthau Plan until they realized that maybe it wasn't the best idea (and the British played a significant role in convincing the US government about that...)
1945 to ~1947 were very rough in Germany even in the allied occupation zones (and that was at least partially an outcome of a conscious decision by the allies to not allow German industry to recover)
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> grenada too
Grenada is something of a joke in this context - the entire thing came about because the communist government fell apart and started fighting internally, so it's pretty likely the regime would have shortly collapsed with or without the invasion
The scale of investment and commitment was orders of magnitude larger, as was the utter devastation inflicted for years before hand. Incomparable.