What is Poor?

I been thinking lately about the fact that Estonia doesn't really seem poor, even though by every measure it's the poorest country I've ever lived in. Of course, in many ways it's obviously not a wealthy country, with aged infrastructure and abandoned buildings here and there, but there's little evidence of poverty that I remember seeing in places like China and Russia or even in the US for that matter.

Using GDP per capita as an approximation of wealth, it is estimated that GDP per capita in the US is about 2.5 times that in Estonia. But what does that really look like? Part of the problem of visualizing it is that wealth varies so much within a country. I've spent most of my time in Tallinn, the wealthiest city in Estonia. So I found statistics on the GDP contribution of various metropolitan areas in the US and Europe and compared them and found some interesting numbers.

As a whole, Estonia's GDP per capita is similar to that of cities along the Texas-Mexico border. So it's poor, but not something that would be unfamiliar to Americans. By itself, Tallinn is comparable in wealth to Yuba City. Once again poor, but something Americans are accustomed to. I think that's why I don't really see it. I've been to cities in the US that are of comparable wealth, so it doesn't seem that much different.

Another difference in Estonia is that wealth is more evenly distributed, so there's fewer people that are super wealthy, but there are also fewer people that are a lot poorer than the general population. In fact, I've not seen a single beggar since coming to Tallinn. That said, I've also seen very little expressions of great wealth with the exceptions of tourists in the old town.

Anyway, after finding these numbers, I became fascinated by how much wealth is actually in a lot of Eastern European cities, so what follows is a list of major Eastern European cities and a US metro area to which they are comparable.

Prague, Czechia - Sacramento, CA
Warsaw, Poland - Rochester, NY
Bratislava, Slovakia - Charleston, SC
Ljubljana, Slovenia - Fort Collins, CO
Berlin, Germany - Winchester, VA
Zagreb, Croatia - Riverside, CA
Budapest, Hungary - Eugene, OR
Tallinn, Estonia - Yuba City, CA
Riga, Latvia - Pueblo, CO
Bucharest, Romania - Ocala, FL
Vilnius, Lithuania - Prescott, AZ

While these comparisons might seem surprising, it's important to remember, these are the wealthiest cities within their respective countries (except Berlin). In most cases, the rest of the country was so poor they could not be compared to any US metro area. In case you were curious, Asheville sits between Budapest and Tallinn.

So few terrorists

Foreign Policy

A friend of mine recently shared this on Facebook. I thought it was a fascinating article, so I wanted to share it here. The writer, Charles Kurzman, a professor at UNC, puts forward the premise that if there are over one billion Muslims in the world who supposedly hate America and the West, why are there so few terrorist attacks? It would seem that there would be attacks all the time with such numbers. He uses the example of a "terrorist attack" in Chapel Hill back in 2006 to make his point.

While the attacker was a Muslim and he professed to be part of a jihad against America, the details of the case reveal that he was really just some sadly deranged man who used the language of jihad to justify his attempts to kill. He was incredibly incompetent in executing the attack, failing to even purchase a gun, and was sorrowfully lacking in knowledge about Islam, the very religion he claimed to be fighting for.

In looking at other recent attacks in the US, this seems to be the rule rather than the exception. They typically work alone, are mentally unstable, and generally incompetent. Where are the well-organized attacks that we all came to fear after 9/11? These attackers fit the profile of school shooters and Eric Rudolf types more than Islamic terrorists.

One of the goals of the 9/11 attacks was to actually get the US to fight, which is what happened. The US even went so far as to invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, and in fact was an enemy of Al-Qaeda. By getting the US to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, Al-Qaeda hoped that the Muslim world would become enraged and fight back. However, that hasn't happened, in fact, since 9/11 recruitment of militants has dropped. The vast majority of Muslim simply don't share Al-Qaeda's views or vision.

Kurzman lists a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one to me is that the victims of most Islamic terrorists attacks are other Muslims. Al-Qaeda isn't just fighting a war against the West, but also against other factions within Islam that are opposed to their goals. While the US invasions may have hurt the US's reputation among Muslims, these Muslims didn't turn to Al-Qaeda and other such groups because they were also killing fellow Muslims.

While I doubt I'll find it now, years ago I read an article that compared the Islamic terrorists of today to Anarchist terrorists of the early-20th Century. Anarchists were a major bogeyman of that time period, assassinating President McKinley as well as playing a role in setting off WWI. However, by the time WWII came around, Anarchists were largely forgotten. The author proposed the same would happen to Radical Islam. By attacking civilians, Anarchists damaged their image which hurt recruitment. Also, the conditions in which the Anarchist movement was created were changing. Anarchy was no longer a relevant ideology.

Radical Islam appears to be going the same route. As they continue to kill other Muslims, their support and recruitment numbers will drop. Also conditions in the Muslim world are changing. Most Islamic countries are former colonies, so they harbor resentment to their former colonizers as well as elements of neo-colonialism. However, as colonization becomes a more distant memory and the Western countries slowly decline in relative power, Muslims have gone from blaming the former colonizers to blaming their own governments for their relatively poor condition. The ideology of Al-Qaeda is no longer relevant to the average Muslim, if it ever was.

Economic Patterns

Yesterday I did a comparison of economic growth in various countries. I was curious to see how much of the world's economy is being gabbled up by China each year. I have a listing of the GDP (PPP) of 123 countries, representing pretty much the entire global economy (the 70-odd countries left out are all very small or poor). Looking at this, I found that China gained around 8% of the global economy during the past decade, a little less than 1% a year. India, another massive and rapidly growing economy, has gained less than 2% of the global economy. China isn't the fastest growing economy, but it is large and therefore its growth has a lot of consequence.

Looking at the numbers of the other countries, I decided to see which countries were growing relative to the global mean and which were declining. I should note, declining in this sense is just relative. Nearly all countries have seen economic growth, but some more slowly than others. I started at 1989 because it's starting from that date that I have the most information but also because it's historically interesting. I went through each country and labelled their peak in relative economic size and their nadir. However, I found much more than just some countries decline and some incline, but nearly all countries fit into some category just by looking at when their peaks and nadirs were.



General growth (continuous growth since 1989): Dark Green

General decline (continuous decline since 1989): Purple

Momentum gained (decline followed by growth): Green

Momentum lost (growth followed by decline): Pink

Post-Soviet recovery (Peaks in 1989 followed by nadirs and gradual growth): Red

Virtually no change: Blue

Senegal is the only blue country. I don't know if it's just lack of information, but its position barely changed from 1989 to 2010.

I found it interesting that so much can be interpreted by just looking at relative economic figures. Post-Soviet states definitely stood out in the data. It also brings up questions such as why does virtually all of South American fall into the "momentum gained" category? What prevented their collective growth in the 1990's and why are they growing now? You might also notice that not all the former communist states are in the "Post-Soviet recovery" category. This is because while they did recover slightly at first, they have since lost relative economic position. They may in fact be wealthier now than in the 1990's, but their growth has been relatively slow.

Another pattern I found in the data was what I called the Post-Soviet Bump. While the economies of the former Communist Bloc collapsed, several countries that fall into the "general decline" category saw a temporary rise in their relative economic position.

Alternate East Germany

The Local

It recently came up in German news that the chancellor of West Germany from 1949-1963 proposed a deal to swap West Berlin for the state of Thuringia and a few other border territories with East Germany. This brings up an interesting alternate history scenario.

Symbolically, the biggest difference would have been the lack of the Berlin Wall. Depending on the timing of the proposal, the Berlin Wall would have either never existed, or been unceremoniously removed soon after its construction.

The integration of Thuringia into West Germany would have gone much more smoothly than full reunification as the population being integrated would have been much smaller relative to the overall size of West Germany. While already by the 1960's East Germany was much poorer than West Germany, it probably wouldn't have been as economically painful for Thuringia as it industries wouldn't have been as out-dated as they were during the 1990's. Also, During the 1960's West Germany was at the height of its economic recovery and the integration of Thuringia would have brought in much welcomed additional labor, land for industrial expansion, and a new consumer market.

More in the dark though are the events of 1989. The disintegration of the Communist Bloc didn't start in East Germany. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germans were already escaping through the open border in Hungary, so that may have still happened. It was these events in Hungary that eventually led to East Germany opening its borders, but the process would have gone much slower had it not been for a misunderstanding as to when this would take place and the immediate flood of people at East and West Berlin border crossings. People would instead have to go out to the largely unpopulated East-West German border to cross. While many thousands probably would, it wouldn't have had the same psychological effect that the collapse of the Berlin Wall brought.

Reunification would probably be inevitability with the collapse of the Communist Bloc. It is difficult to say if it would have gone more smoothly though. In terms of population, not much would have been different, the population of West Berlin was not much different than Thuringia. The main difference probably would have been that West Germany would have already had experience with integrating new states.

In the end, the major difference it would make today would be that Thuringia would be much better off, but Berlin would be in a much worse position. Even now, Berlin is a surprisingly poor city, but was at least an oasis of development within East Germany during the 1990's. Instead, Berlin would have been much like all other East German cities in the 1990's and its population would have dropped significantly.

Historical Memory

Rough estimate of the percentage of the current US population alive during:
2001 - WTC attack - 86%
1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall - 73%
1969 - Moon landing - 46%
1945 - End of WWII - 24%
1929 - Start of the Great Depression - 4%
1918 - End of WWI - 0.6%