you wrote several hundred pages on this subject, right? what do you say? Were we just dealt with a bad hand?
Actually, I would much prefer it if you could write an extensive piece about educational policies and share any insights you might have on how to fix the system. I'd say you have much to offer on the subject. If you have the time of course. No pressure
I want to know why,enlighten me. [This is off-topic response to TR_123456, but thought I might answer publicly; feel free to move it wherever it's appropriate] It's quite simple; you cannot teach something you don't know yourself. It's about the quality of teachers and their absolute ignorance...
defencehub.live
haha
, the question about how the west got rich is not an impossible question to answer, but an impossible question to answer in a succinct but satisfactory way (on a non-academic setting like an internet forum nonetheless, where everyone is probably convinced their version of reality, which are mostly very run of the mill narratives, is the seal of all stories).
From the times of Francis Bacon (where the narrative about supremacy of printing press, papyrus and salt petre comes from) people have been trying to answer some version of this question. The modern answers include the works of Max Weber (much more interesting and older than the Voltairean 18th century answers provided in popular accounts; scholarly works have progressed past those kind of answers a long time ago, but popular accounts are far behind an answer that refuted the conventional wisdom a century ago), Joseph Needham, Eric Jones, Frank Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein, J. D. Bernal, Nathan Sivin, Ian Morris, Thomas F. Madden, Michael Zmolek, Patrick Spread, Jeff Horn, Joyce Appleby, Andre Frank, Robert J. Gordon, Ellen Wood, Yingqiu Liu, Michel Beaud, Sven Beckert, and dozens more. Then there are less serious answers which are dismissed out of hand by more scholarly and erudite writers. These include stuff by Jared Diamond, Kenneth Pomeranz, Niall Ferguson, Acemoglu & Robinson (this one does regurgitate the findings of development economists who provided the original arguments which Acemoglu & Robinson spent their careers refusing to admit until they were forced to after the 2008 crash), etc.
But the question of "why Muslim countries are poorer" or "What is the path to development" are very different questions than the one about the wealth of the West. They are also much easier questions if you already assume the answer to the latter issue; esp. the question of development I believe has been answered, because this is 21st century, not the middle ages. There's a sort of a consensus among development economists about the optimal path to development. It's the path taken by China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea. All of them share certain core components (for instance infant industry protection while having domestic competition); but they all have problems also. The works of development economists like Jeffrey Sachs, Stiglitz, Chang are almost like a roadmap for development. But Lee Kwan Yew, I hold, could not have achieved the restructuring that he achieved during the cold war if he was alive today, as expectations these days are adjusted to the level represented by the bulk of social media content, i.e. stuff from western sources, so he would face severe social upheaval. But there are workarounds present.
On the question of "Why Muslim countries are poorer?" one must take into account the fact that what was abnormal was the rise of the west, not the inertia of all other societies who went on very similar and historically orthodox paths of development. What I think many are considering is that not only Muslim countries are poorer than the west, they also got stuck behind others who could develop in late 20th and 21st centuries much easier, due to availability of technologies and the globalized village; but these are a minority. I think this is not an interesting question, because it assumes a certain metaphysical essence to "Muslim" countries. You can look at christian or other non-Muslim countries which are situated in the midst of other Muslim countries and you can get your questions answered that way. I can assure you if there was a Muslim country in Latin America, its economy probably would look like your average Latin American economy, bar the minor fluctuations which one can assume to be the result of starting conditions, geographical peculiarities, etc.
In answering the former, more interesting question about the west's history, what people in their more common sense, and conventional wisdom answers ignore are quadruple fold: first they ignore to account for the sufficiency of their cause or causes, which in order to account for, they need to know the detailed microhistory and Alltagsgeschichte of those countries along with showing a certain controlled environment in the countries they discuss (an almost impossible task to guarantee in the case of all non-nomothetic sciences anyway, but particularly an impossible task in this case as those societies, obviously, are long gone). Second is they ignore to account for the necessity of their cause, and do not consider societies or instances where these causes didn't exist but development occurred. Third is they do not consider that the cause or causes they mention for the effect in question, might be just by-products of a more fundamental cause. So they ignore the possibility that their cause(s) comes second (making it at best an auxiliary cause) in the causal chain. Fourth and one of the most easy things to miss (and a crucial point of my argument in my forthcoming work, so I'm mentioning here it protestingly) is to assume the mechanism of actions of a cause to be immediate, completely disregarding slow-acting causes which set the ball rolling, taking the signs the ball takes down on its route as the real milestones. Hence they put the origins and roots of development at the earliest in and around renaissance (more scholarly works do understand that this cannot hold based on the drastic changes after the black death, themselves again by-products of other causes), or later, reformation; then there's the scientific revolution (a concept believed by those who haven't read more than one book of history of science, and in complete ignorance of Pierre Duhem, Dijksterhuis, Marshall Clagett, Edward Grant and modern serious historiography of science in general) and then comes the more unrefined commentaries which can even delay the causes and roots as late as the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution. The most moronic ones are the deterministic ones of course, as their historical narrative is full of holes and what they make seem inevitable, was very much contingent.
So I cannot give my answer here as it is a complex web of anthropology, material cultures and amalgamation of factors (but one factor I can give you hints about and that is the essential differences in the type of population growth based on rice-farming, as opposed to population growth based on changes in approach brilliantly put forth in the works of G. E. Fussell, changes which predate the popular narrative about the black death and the ensuing revolts); but one thing I can tell you. All the causes you have seen mentioned, which are the most common answers in received wisdom and popular books of pantheon of liberal hegemony, are second-rate (i.e. subordinate and dependent) and fast-acting causes.
P.S. I tried to say nothing and I wrote 5 paragraphs. You can imagine what would ensue if I tried to actually say stuff. So I think I would cause less headache and it'd be to the benefit of everyone if I just didn't try to say stuff.
