zlacker

>>sebg+(OP)
I wonder what the long term solutions to these kinds of problems are in East Africa and similar contexts.

The remnants of colonialism continue to produce winners and losers economically, with the winners stuck in local maxima where they extract value from the people, but the people themselves see only marginal benefit, and development is stuck at a snail's pace.

As with seemingly everything in life, the incentives for the different players really don't line up. Consumers lose, producers lose, and only a select few middlemen win anything at all.

>>noodle+G5
All of our problems are caused by our not prioritizing compassion in our systems' designs and implementations, including how our economic transactions are structured and performed.

Compassion is the root of all virtue, and the balm for all vice. With a greater attention to compassion, every member of the chain of persons that grow, pick, process, market, sell, and even own Kenya coffee will help contribute to a better, fairer, and less deleterious to the Earth, system of farm-to-table.

Being compassionate includes being honest in one's business dealings, as well as not being greedy for exhorbitant profit. It also endures that everyone in the pipeline is actually performing a useful service, not just being an unnecessary middleman adding needless cost and other encumbrances.

And, of course, the Kenyan system was set up by the English Empire, so its parasitic pattern of worming its way into the fabric of all economic transactions is baked into their system. Yes, it's going to be difficult to extricate that selfishness from their system, but it's difficult for every culture to rid itself of the parasitism of selfishness in our societal systems. Note that ALL our current systems have that oft-dominant component present in them, causing waste and grief for all but the callous owners.

In our every endeavor, compassion is the only guaranteed path forward that has no intrinsic negative elements or effects, only difficulties due to our idioticly selfish inertias -- selfishly callous disregard being the opposite of compassionate service to the whole's well-being.

>>MrMcCa+wa
The problem is capitalism cannot function without an underclass, and while each capitalist country itself harbors an underclass that is brutally exploited, the countries themselves also become effectively an underclass too on the global stage, specifically the global south or the "developing world." Many of these countries are being exploited in one way or another, either by way of shady finance dealings that saddle them with untenable debt, which they must satisfy by selling their resources to western corpos at rock bottom prices, or via trade deals that inherently favor the western nations. The only countries I'm aware of that managed to avoid this trap in a big way were South Korea, which effectively created incubators for their home industries to grow in without needing to contend with the world market until they were in a fit state to do so, and China, which effectively is one giant state-run corporation.

The rest get fed to global capitalism in one way or another, the ways varying, but the outcome being pretty consistent: they're broke, they're in debt, and despite oftentimes being quite rich in resources, remain both of those things.

>>Toucan+jn
While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work. Capitalism may need an unskilled class of workers to work, but paying them like crap is not necessary as we’ve seen here in the US and seemed to have forgotten over the generations.

>>asdff+Dq
>While true, at one time within the memory of people alive today, that underclass in this country could afford homes with their paycheck from widely available unskilled work

The underclass? Or the WHITE MALE underclass?

>>mrguyo+La1
Black latino and asian people bought homes too you know. Thats what redlining was about: minorities and poor people were buying homes too close for comfort to the wealthy white people.

>>asdff+V06
Literally the only thing every layman you're gonna ask knows about real estate is "location location location" which is exactly why redlining was harmful and has led to poverty that is measured in generations. Yes, racial minorities did buy homes (at a lesser rate than whites, and in worse places to buy homes) in redlined neighborhoods, with the added and so obvious it feels ridiculous I need to say it caveat that: the homes in redlined neighborhoods were worth substantially less, which not only meant they had a harder time being financed by colored applicants, and an easier one being financed by white ones for the purposes of rent extraction, but also meant even for the ones that did manage to buy, that the property was then worth substantially less when passed on to their children.

And, that's assuming that the neighborhood in question didn't get bulldozed for a freeway by Robert Moses or any of the dozens of urban planners that used eminent domain to rat fuck minority homeowners out of the meager scraps they had managed to acquire.

And, that's only racial minorities, that's not even going into women who thanks to being largely un-banked and the presumptions that finance was simply over their pretty little heads, and of course that their jobs were chronically underpaid if they even could get them, would be laughed out of a bank entirely if they tried to buy a home.

So like, was it ONLY white men buying homes? Nah. But it was predominantly white men buying all the homes you would actually want to buy and if you weren't a white man, you had an objectively, measurable harder time doing it.