Why poor countries stopped catching up

GDP vs. What “Catching Up” Means

• Several comments argue GDP per capita is an increasingly distorted proxy in rich countries (financialization, imputed rents, healthcare billing) and may obscure real living conditions.
• Others note GDP still correlates strongly with life expectancy and infant/child mortality, but point out the correlation is far from perfect and declining over time.
• One commenter ran a rank-correlation analysis and found GDP–life‑expectancy correlation peaked around the early 1990s and has weakened since, suggesting more noise/confounders.

Was There Ever Broad Convergence? Or Just China + Commodities?

• Many see the article’s core claim as: the apparent “great convergence” was mostly China plus a China-driven commodity boom that temporarily lifted exporters.
• Some think this “sugar high” masked weak, non-diversified development (Dutch disease) and made economists overstate globalization’s success.
• Others criticize the piece for not really explaining why convergence stalled, arguing the China–commodity story is asserted more than demonstrated and ignores finance and deregulation.

Exploitation, Aid, and Global Power Structures

• One camp frames stagnation as rooted in long‑running exploitation: rich countries (and their corporations/IMF programs) extract resources and profits, leaving little capital accumulation in the periphery.
• Another camp pushes back, claiming some regions (e.g. Africa) have received huge assistance and are “the opposite of exploited,” with disagreements about how conditional aid and power asymmetries work in practice.
• There’s mention of capital flight and Western financial systems enabling corrupt elites in poor countries to expatriate wealth, recreating “extractive institutions.”

Markets, Institutions, and Political Stability

• One view: prosperity strongly correlates with free markets, rule of law, and political stability; poor countries stay poor by eschewing these.
• Counterview: success stories like South Korea used heavy protectionism, planning, and “infant industry” policies that contradict standard free‑market prescriptions.
• Political dysfunction, coups, and unstable governments are cited as key reasons some regions (Latin America, Sub‑Saharan Africa) fell behind while East/Southeast Asia surged.

Economics as a Discipline

• Multiple comments criticize economics as overconfident, numerically obsessed, and ideologically biased toward globalization and capitalism.
• Some argue the China episode shows how fragile grand convergence theories are, and that economists have underestimated distributional and democratic impacts in both rich and poor countries.