How Black Pride produces Black Poverty.

One of the main things that have kept black people at the bottom of most measures of human development is the feeling of shame they have at copying the cultures of other people. In many black American communities, for example, a person who works very hard and reads a lot is stigmatized for “acting white.” They want to preserve “black pride” at any cost.

This particular problem with school can not be found virtually  anywhere in Africa itself, the “motherland” of African Americans. The culture of Africa in that area comes from the influence of Christian missionaries who brought and emphasized education to Africans very long ago. Some African Americans might argue that this shows that such formal education is not really part of African culture since it was just brought by whites. But the same blacks shamelessly proclaim their faith in Jesus Christ and see no irony in that!

In Africa, black kids can walk many miles just to get to a school, and in some of these schools the kids sit on bricks instead of desks due to poverty, and yet some of them endure – at least until their parents can no longer afford to let them go. I know at least one Chemistry professor who went to such a primary school and he had to walk a very long distance every single day (he taught me at university). In Africa, a good education is very highly valued but very difficult to achieve beyond the many obstacles. Most of these kids would give anything to get the quality of education that is offered to inner city black American kids!

And yet even Africans, especially when they do get very educated, start talking about “preserving our own culture” and avoiding copying Western culture, which is also a common view among the middle-class black Americans who do like education. Ironically, they learn this nonsense from Western universities or textbooks. That’s where they hear about the supposed importance of maintaining “diversity” in world cultures, and the ridiculous idea that all cultures are equal and valuable. They too embrace the attitude of black pride at this higher level and begin to claim that our culture is great but our problems are actually caused by “greedy white capitalist” countries (or just greedy white capitalists, in the case of black Americans).

If your culture does not produce prosperity, does not produce technological developments, does not cure diseases, and so on, it must be changed. It is certainly not valuable. There’s no rational reason for preserving something just because you’ve done it for a long time. For example, in many African villages, instead of hospitals, they have witch doctors. Should they reject the building of modern hospitals because these are “western” or “foreign” things?

Fortunately for Africa, the people in these poor villages have not had the privilege of going to university to learn about preserving their own culture. When a hospital is built among them they quickly recognize it as superior to their witch doctor and they take their children there because they can empirically see that it has a much higher success rate compared to the ramblings of their witch doctor.

The only hope for blacks all over the world is to humble themselves at every level and start copying the general lifestyle, manners and work habits of other people who have been more successful. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, because that’s how everyone else develops. No group started out developed. They all copied from other people and sometimes even improved on what they copied so that the copied group eventually started copying from the copiers.

Thus when the Japanese officially decided to copy American culture and business approach after the second world war, they did so well that Americans started sending people to Japan to study their management techniques. But I am quite sure it is not the black ghetto culture that the Japanese copied.

To put it bluntly, blacks need to humbly copy the culture of whites (or Japanese, if that sounds less emotive) – not poor low class whites, but high class whites. They need to first start with learning to always keep time. And then start to work very hard, very honestly and very smart. Start studying hard and thinking long and hard about problems until you solve them with practical innovations. Start saving money and stop consuming more than you produce (copy the Jewish money lifestyle, and I don’t mean Jewish hip hop producer Scott Storch!)

Copy and even improve on the superior cultures of others so that they can start catching up too. That’s how humanity develops.

Soccer and Political Referees

The ongoing Soccer World Cup in South Africa has drawn a lot of attention to the match referees, some of them for their astonishingly poor decisions. A good referee is someone who just fairly and predictably punishes physical offences in the game. And such a good referee is a good analogy for what every government of the world is supposed to be.

A government is not supposed to be ruling a country in an unpredictable way. They are supposed to limit their punishment of offences only to initiations of physical force and its derivatives, not to any kind of offence they just dream up, in the name of “the public good.” If they are allowed the discretion of just effecting punishment wherever they feel there is an offence to the public, they will create an unpredictable environment.

Human beings are not designed to live in unpredictable environments. Nature is not that way. We can study anything in nature and be able to adapt it to our lives or to control it appropriately and intelligently. But politcians are able to create an environment that is impossible to live with because they have free will, because they are not bound to any predictable forces of nature. This is why the best and most successful human societies are those that have entrenched the rule of law in their culture through strong institutions that provide checks and balances against the whims of politicians. To give them unchecked power to punish any player if they just feel this is “in the public interest” (as Mr. Obama wanted to do against BP) would be equivalent to allowing a soccer referee to just send off one player from the field – perhaps because he feels that the team is too strong compared to their opponents. The game of soccer would not work because it would be anti-human.

No president should decide what is offensive and punishable, only the law should. And it is only those who have been physically injured by someone that should have the right to appeal to the law for justice, not those who just feel offended.

South Africa beats France : a lesson in cultural transfer.

Former world champions France have been stung by World Cup hosts South Africa. Only a couple of decades ago it was considered nearly impossible for an African team to beat a European team. Now it’s not so shocking.

We can take a lesson about cultural transfers from this. The African skill level has risen so high, firstly because of the large number of players the continent has been exporting to Europe. Secondly, cheap technology has made it possible for Africans to follow the European league closely, Just as if they lived in Europe. This means that the tactics and styles of top European league players can be seen and copied by kids growing up in poor areas of Africa.

If habits and skills in soccer can be transferred across continents and peoples, so could any other cultural traits that one group of people might be lacking. A less advanced group can learn from a culturally advanced group by merely paying attention and learning.

In fact, this happens to be the natural process whenever two culturally different groups meet. The group that has learned more things through many interactions with more cultures is always more advanced. It has nothing to do with race or genes.

When Europeans came to Africa, they had gone through much more cultural evolution than Africans. They had been to China and learnt some things, had met the Persians, etc. Africans had not had much contact with any other people, so they were backward. As interaction between the two groups happened, so did cultural transfer. It’s nothing to be ashamed of because that’s how every group developed.

It would be like feeling ashamed that we couldn’t play skillful soccer before but now we have learnt. It’s more shameful to fail to learn.

My ancestors could neither read nor write. In fact, my grand parents and great grand parents were part of the first generation of Africans to see written words for the first time as European missionaries read the Bible to them. My father was brought up by parents who could hardly read but he became an engineer (and I, of course became a Biochemist, and later, an entrepreneur). Within a generation of seeing the English alphabet for the first time, Africans were producing engineers and scientists!

Unfortunately, this natural process can be hindered or even reversed by politicians through their ideologies. After independence, many African presidents chased away Europeans by either forcing them to give up their jobs to Africans or by nationalizing their companies. South Africa itself has implemented what they call the Black Empowerment policy and it has seen a massive loss of European Africans who have migrated to Australia, Canada and other countries. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe took their farm land and gave it to blacks who hadn’t learnt how to farm at that level. There is growing pressure in South Africa to nationalize the white-owned mines.

The Africans of old valued cultural transfer from Europeans, the new politically educated Africans want the transfer of stuff from Europeans. Their education tells them that whatever Europeans have was stolen from them. They have forgotten that it is a culture of discipline and knowledge that took the minerals from the hard ground, produced crops on a massive scale, and so on. Africans are now producing more “intellectuals” than engineers, scientists or entrepreneurs. There are more people who believe in sharing (redistributing) things than in creating things.

Solving the inequality problem in Africa?

A writer friend recently asked me to comment on the problem of inequality in subsaharan Africa — and how African governments should deal with it. I decided to respond through this blog.

As I started thinking about this, there was a live tv broadcast of Goldman Sachs Congressional hearings for their allegedly unethical practices and their supposed role in the recent financial crisis.

When will Western intellectuals realize that they don’t know how to solve Africa’s “inequality” problems if they don’t even know how to solve their own much smaller inequality issues?

Something that kept being repeated in the Goldman hearings is the fact that the crisis was rooted in the American government’s efforts to help the poor get loans for houses. Why? To reduce inequality in America. The people who were supposed to be helped are now jobless. So, here’s an idea for American experts who are obsessed with advising African nations: how about you first succeed in lifting your own internal “Africa” out of poverty?

The Goldman Sachs hearings overshadowed another big event in the news: the debt crisis in Greece. But they were both really about the same lesson: when the state tries to reduce inequality through any positive interventions to help the poor, they can only create a big disaster that will hit the same poor people hardest.

The only way the poor in any country can be helped is when government stops trying to help them and leaves that job to business forces. Every effort by the state to help the poor requires that they take something away from the business sector. In short they always make it harder for businesses to make money and thus to lift more people out of poverty.

Every single African country has tried to close the gap between the rich and the poor through state intervention and in every single case the result has been disastrous to different degrees, depending on how efficient the plan was. In Zambia, our first president, Kenneth Kaunda, even set a cap on how rich a Zambian could become (so that everyone could “rise together”). Thus it was official policy for the government to nationalize any Zambian owned business if it started making too much money for the owner. The result was to take Zambia from being one of the richest emerging states at independence to being an indigent failed state that is still struggling to recover.

The latest case is of course Zimbabwe, which tried to solve the “problem” of a few white farmers having more fertile land than the majority blacks (never mind that the produce from these farms fed the entire country; the problem of inequality was apparently more urgent). Mugabe grabbed this land and “redistributed” it. He decided to “spread the wealth around.” Again, the result was indeed reduced inequality: everyone became poorer, especially the poor, even while they owned more land.

Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result each time. So, after seeing this idea destroy every single African state that tried it, there is now growing pressure in South Africa to try it too. They believe the result will be different this time. Somehow.

Education vs Common Sense. Part 1.

Is it really true that education can destroy the ability to follow common sense?

Yes it is. Common sense is the way we always experience life. When faced with a new situation we simply apply lessons we have gathered from our general experience of life: our common sense.

For example, all experience tells us that there is a right way of doing anything and there is a wrong way. If you drive your car in the wrong way you can cause death or destruction. If you eat the wrong foods you could harm your body. And so on. That’s how we experience life.

But how many times do we hear a professor (especially in the social ‘sciences’) say “there is no right or wrong answer; there are just opinions, life is subjective.” And his students feel learned when they become less “judgmental” since there are really no objectively right or wrong ideas. They master this “learned” habit until they reach ridiculous levels of subjectivism: there is no right or wrong culture, it’s all subjective. We only have to understand other cultures.

Meanwhile those who are not privileged with such levels of advanced education can clearly see that just as there are destructive drivers on the road, there are destructive cultures in the world. They can clearly see some cultures leading to destruction of life, while the ivory tower professors continue saying that all cultures are valid, all ideas are valid, there is no right and wrong and there is (especially) no good and evil.

Nietzsche even wrote a book for the elite called “Beyond Good and Evil.” It is supposedly a state you reach when you become an advanced human being, above the lost masses who think that life is as simple as it looks. It is a state of an intellectual “over man” (super man).

And yet, in reality, it is this sort of irrational elitism that makes such people continuously craft policies (for “the masses”) that only lead to death and destruction. More people in history have died from the grand unrealistic visions of such leaders than have died from all natural disasters and calamities combined. But this fact does nothing to discourage them or to cause any sort of humble reservations before they embark on their next “plan” for the salvation of the poor masses.

In short, they have the audacity of hoping against common sense.

Zambians reject socialist “human rights.”

The large group of delegates that is currently dealing with the task of changing the Zambian constitution is reported to have derisively laughed out loud when a “human rights” clause was presented to it for inclusion in the next constitution. The clause basically stated that every Zambian has a fundamental right to shelter, food, water, etc, to be secured by the state. Fortunately, most of the delegates are apparently not educated enough to have abandoned common sense. They instantly and intuitively knew that this was laughable nonsense. One of them even stood up and correctly protested that this would only lead to unsustainably high taxes for the more productive citizens. Another one feared that this kind of idea sounded even worse than the policies of Zambia’s first (socialist) president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda.

Most of the older Zambians can still remember what happens when you have policies that guarantee any form of “caring” for the poor: you simply get more people joining the ranks of the poor every day.

The Zambian people are not unique in relying on common sense to know when the educated elite are trying to impose their silly Utopian ideas on them. The people of the USA also rejected recent proposals by their new president that try to implement a (healthcare) Utopia. They too gave the same kind of arguments as the Zambians, driven by a grassroots movement called the “Tea Party” movement.

Unfortunately for Americans, their Marxist president seems to have prevailed so far by already having his hugely unpopular socialist bill passed into law. And in typical elitist fashion, he has decided that he will go around the country to try to explain to Americans why they are too stupid to understand his ideas. And to literally add insult to injury, he even claims that it is his policies that represent “common sense,” even though human history is replete with examples of countries that tried to do just this, always with predictably disastrous long-term results. Mr. Obama believes that Europe has implemented similar policies with great results.

The nation of Greece is already languishing from the inevitable long-term results of such Utopian ideas as we speak, but the American president somehow still insists that his ideas represent common sense.

I think common sense is knowing that there is no such thing as a free lunch. But even more, it is knowing that many people will be lazy when you politically promise to protect them from poverty and its painful effects.

How is this not common sense?

http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=8205

Why the Chinese won’t listen to Obama.

It was interesting to hear Mr. Obama lecture the Chinese on the need for keeping their currency under the dictates of the market. He explained that it was in the self interest of the Chinese to do this if they really want a more sustainable economy.

But why should the Chinese listen to a man who has rejected the supreme wisdom of the market in many areas of his own country’s economy? The main argument presented by his opponents in the healthcare debate was that this industry should be put under the forces of the market instead of subjecting it to the intrusive powers of the state (Chinese-style). They proposed reforms that included such market based ideas as allowing interstate competition among the health insurance companies. But he simply mocked them for their “blind faith in market fundamentalism” and even dishonestly charged that this is “the kind of thinking” that created the crisis in the first place (the crisis was created by government intervention).

Mr. Obama should hope that the Chinese haven’t translated his many antimarket speeches from English.