Classic failure to establish a (close to) pareto optimal regulatory structure to avoid ending up in the self-organizing Nash equillibrium which is worse for everyone.
As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Pakistan is one of the most poorly governed countries in the world. If the Netherlands or Japan for example was equally poorly governed, the relative human toll would be much higher than it is in Pakistan.
Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
I see similar problems coming in South Africa, also, it's quickly approaching crisis, but the population just keeps electing the most corrupt politicians that are not interested in good governance at all.
Who wins by letting these countries run themselves into the ground and then create problems for everyone else?
Because people don't listen? We try and tried to warn (voice concerns I think it's called) for voting in a rasberry pi nano running a markov chain trained on a few pages of the redneck bible and dressed up in an orange baboon suit as president of the most powerful country on earth; considering how close the results were and seem to be again, it's apparently not the way.
Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
> Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?
Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.
Wisdom cannot be taught, only self-learned. Think about all the wisdom that people tried to pass down to you when you were young, how much of it you actually internalised at the time vs what you had to learn by yourself and then had an "a-ha moment" when you noticed someone years before had warned you of it.
There's nothing Western governments or societies can do to steer a whole other society/culture, and I think you haven't really experienced other cultures truly if you think you can steer the voting population into better decisions.
It requires a well educated population to understand what "good governance" even means, it requires a stable, out of survival mode, society to reason about long term consequences to society vs short term individual benefits. When someone is barely surviving they will most often vote for someone who promises them a better life, without critical thinking (stemming from my 1st point on education) there's no way for the individual to understand complex issues and why a populist won't solve it.
> Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
The current Pakistani administration is a product of an American-backed coup on Imran Khan because he was getting cozy with China.
What exactly would you have the other countries do? What does "warn them" even mean? As if the only problem Pakistan has is that its politics arent sufficiently dictated by the West? I mean, thing would probably be better if that were something the West were actually capable of doing, but Afghanistan shows what that experiment looks like.
Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.
Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.
I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.
Pakistan has had a western nation rule over it before and it didn't exactly go well. It's also not exactly a well-run nation that can tweak a few things to solve excesses like with antibiotics. Warnings about the overuse of antibiotics go back to the 1950s. This isn't something that will come to a surprise to anyone, and it isn't even an impossible challenge to overcome.
Here in the Netherlands, antibiotics usage in the meat industry was absurdly high until a bit over a decade ago, despite decades of warnings. And as a side note, I would classify the way the country has been run for all of my adult life as poorly governed, with elected officials constantly lying, government parties trying to work around the law rather than comply leading to several crises, and just general mismanagement. It's not Pakistani army bad, but it certainly warrants warnings from other countries.
As for Pakistan: If I were their leader, knowing about things like vaccination centres ran by the CIA to secretly hunt down and kill Taliban soldiers in search of Bin Laden, I'd be wary of warnings coming from the West. I wouldn't much trust foreign charities to install clean water infrastructure either, because that's far from the only time they've been used as a front.
Are your leaders listening to the warnings coming from Bejing, Brussels, Israel, the Kremlin, and Washington? Would you even trust what they say is in your interest? I wouldn't exactly put it past foreign intelligence agencies to spread typhoid in areas of interest just so they could come in and "help cure" everyone.
> Pakistan has had a western nation rule over it before and it didn't exactly go well.
I don't support colonialism, I think it's morally wrong. It's not an argument about whether there is some hypothetical upside or downside, it infringes on the freedom of a people, which includes their freedom to run their country off a cliff.
That being said, if you ignore the morality of it, as is fashion in the west, I'm not sure if it went relatively worse in a material sense than it's going now.
We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
Our assumption that the only valid way to happiness is a capitalist democracy, and we force it on everyone with our military strength, then thats just a crusade.
> We (the rest of the world) are not omniscient. Its always possible that we are wrong, and they are right.
I would care less if the collapse of Pakistan did not have consequences for the west, but it does.
And Pakistan and South Africa are far from Communist utopias, and regardless, continuing as they are will have massive human toll, regardless of how much you hate capitalism.
> As an outsider looking in, I have to wonder why the rest of the world, and especially the western world sit by silently while countries run themselves into the ground?
Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within. And if they don't have enough people who want the change, well... Inch'Allah.
The west is rapidly losing any kind of credibility and moral leadership due to its hypocritical stance where on the one hand they denounce the invasion of Ukraine, but on the other hand simultaneously support/enable the Gaza genocide. "Warn them" — why should they trust that western governments are being sincere rather than yet again just feigning humanitarian concern while having a political agenda? This extends to outside just central Asia: African leaders have been complaining for some time now that while every time China visits, they get a bridge or a hospital, every time a western leader visits, they only get a lecture (on how $COUNTRY is bad, how $STUFF is bad) and nothing ever gets done.
Frankly it concerns me that so few people know that the global south is rapidly losing trust in the west because of our own hypocritical, politicized, insincere behavior. Western media pretty much never talks about this sort of stuff and so most people are still in lala land.
> African leaders have been complaining that while every time China visits, they get a bridge or a hospital
And China gets wide unlimited access to African raw matters for decades, all-you-can-eat style.
This is not a gift; Is African countries receiving something but losing control over their fisheries or wood. And if there is an environmental disaster, bye. The African country will keep the mess.
The Nigerian writer Tade Ipadeola wrote on X: "The dust at the Lagos-Ibadan rail station is silica dust. Respirable and a known carcinogen. Every building within 100m of this site is currently covered"
"Jack Straw, remarked that what China was doing in Africa was much the same as what Britain had done 150 years ago.”
Is much better than American Indians receiving crystal bead collars, but the underlying system is the same. Both part benefit, but one benefits much more than the other. Is just a soft type of Early Colonialism, not really different than the European trading companies slowly eating India in the past.
Not sure it's that hypocritical. The basic western principle is people should be able to live in peace. If some actor starts killing them, be it Putin or Hamas, it's ok to fight back.
Pakistan is a country that launch satellites to the space and spend solid money on building atomic bombs. They are perfectly capable to develop new antibiotics to fix their problem. They may also want to support and teach more people doing microbiology research on the country.
That will contribute to the well-being of every children in the world, providing also the state with a lot of political leveraging and allies.
The Japanese company that developed the antibiotic currently used on Pakistan will never have the same resources as the state of Pakistan.
They do manufacture antibiotics. That’s in some sense the source of the problem: they don’t regulate them enough resulting in excessive usage. This breeds resistant strains.
Manufacture and develop are different words. Same as with clone vs create.
We all know since decades that the antibiotics are failing. We all know that the misuse of the extant antibiotics cause this damage. We can't just at this state to pretend that weren't warned about that.
There are many points here that could improve the problem and don't depend on anything except the will of Pakistan government to do it. A lot of low hanging fruit here.
1. How much could take for the government to regulate better the use of antibiotics? A week? Four hours and a pen?
2. What about building a scientific team to develop new antibiotics?
3. Could be the unreliable water system made more reliable? Maybe just adding a filter made with sand and cheap industrial materials would help. Dunno.
4. What about a campaign to teach your citizens about the correct use of antibiotics?
Pakistan does not have the Economy, Educated workforce nor the Money to do any kind of research. They are surviving on loans from IMF/World Bank and are basically a basket case.
Readit News
Meropenem resistant typhi is described since 2022.
But don‘t worry, we have IV meropenem + colistin left. Don‘t mind the seizures, neuro- and nephrotoxicity.
The Price of Anarchy strikes again.
Got links to read further to comprehend meaning of word salad?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_efficiency
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
Pakistan is one of the most poorly governed countries in the world. If the Netherlands or Japan for example was equally poorly governed, the relative human toll would be much higher than it is in Pakistan.
Why is every western government not warning Pakistan, and it's population, that if they continue to elect leaders who run the country into the ground that this will have dire consequences for their longevity and wellbeing?
I see similar problems coming in South Africa, also, it's quickly approaching crisis, but the population just keeps electing the most corrupt politicians that are not interested in good governance at all.
Who wins by letting these countries run themselves into the ground and then create problems for everyone else?
People hate being told what to do/told that what they're doing is wrong.
Especially when the advice is unsolicited and coming from people from a different country.
I'm not saying whether that is or isn't rational.
Pakistan is and has always been run by the army. It sounds bad, but in 2024, radical populists such as Imran Khan sound even worse.
One option is to twist their arm into good economic policy using loans. Wold Bank has already attempted this and failed.
The other option is to intervene. Pakistan has nukes. You can't intervene.
Dead Comment
It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.
- Rudyard Kipling
There's nothing Western governments or societies can do to steer a whole other society/culture, and I think you haven't really experienced other cultures truly if you think you can steer the voting population into better decisions.
It requires a well educated population to understand what "good governance" even means, it requires a stable, out of survival mode, society to reason about long term consequences to society vs short term individual benefits. When someone is barely surviving they will most often vote for someone who promises them a better life, without critical thinking (stemming from my 1st point on education) there's no way for the individual to understand complex issues and why a populist won't solve it.
The current Pakistani administration is a product of an American-backed coup on Imran Khan because he was getting cozy with China.
Do you really want to establish as normal foreign governments going mucking around in local politics based on their own sense of what is right?
We also had something similar in Sweden after the last two elections.
Deleted Comment
Every western and really non-western government should publicly state that the trajectory of Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, etc is concerning and that if these countries do not change trajectory the human toll will be catastrophic.
Instead we just have silence, and some effective pretence that what is going on in these countries is entirely acceptable merely because the people have voted for their own destruction.
I'm not saying the west should invade and replace the governments as they tried in Afghanistan, but the poor governance in Africa, Asia and South America is incredibly costly for the west. If the west has to pick up the tab when it all comes crashing down, it should have some say.
Here in the Netherlands, antibiotics usage in the meat industry was absurdly high until a bit over a decade ago, despite decades of warnings. And as a side note, I would classify the way the country has been run for all of my adult life as poorly governed, with elected officials constantly lying, government parties trying to work around the law rather than comply leading to several crises, and just general mismanagement. It's not Pakistani army bad, but it certainly warrants warnings from other countries.
As for Pakistan: If I were their leader, knowing about things like vaccination centres ran by the CIA to secretly hunt down and kill Taliban soldiers in search of Bin Laden, I'd be wary of warnings coming from the West. I wouldn't much trust foreign charities to install clean water infrastructure either, because that's far from the only time they've been used as a front.
Are your leaders listening to the warnings coming from Bejing, Brussels, Israel, the Kremlin, and Washington? Would you even trust what they say is in your interest? I wouldn't exactly put it past foreign intelligence agencies to spread typhoid in areas of interest just so they could come in and "help cure" everyone.
I don't support colonialism, I think it's morally wrong. It's not an argument about whether there is some hypothetical upside or downside, it infringes on the freedom of a people, which includes their freedom to run their country off a cliff.
That being said, if you ignore the morality of it, as is fashion in the west, I'm not sure if it went relatively worse in a material sense than it's going now.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
Our assumption that the only valid way to happiness is a capitalist democracy, and we force it on everyone with our military strength, then thats just a crusade.
I would care less if the collapse of Pakistan did not have consequences for the west, but it does.
And Pakistan and South Africa are far from Communist utopias, and regardless, continuing as they are will have massive human toll, regardless of how much you hate capitalism.
Because last time they did something it was "outside interference CIA black OPS are the devil". And before that "colonialism".
So good luck to the people of those countries but the change has to come from within. And if they don't have enough people who want the change, well... Inch'Allah.
Agreed, but do they know change has to come? When was the last time this message was clearly proclaimed to them?
Frankly it concerns me that so few people know that the global south is rapidly losing trust in the west because of our own hypocritical, politicized, insincere behavior. Western media pretty much never talks about this sort of stuff and so most people are still in lala land.
And China gets wide unlimited access to African raw matters for decades, all-you-can-eat style.
This is not a gift; Is African countries receiving something but losing control over their fisheries or wood. And if there is an environmental disaster, bye. The African country will keep the mess.
https://globalvoices.org/2021/06/07/belt-and-road-initiative...
The Nigerian writer Tade Ipadeola wrote on X: "The dust at the Lagos-Ibadan rail station is silica dust. Respirable and a known carcinogen. Every building within 100m of this site is currently covered"
"Jack Straw, remarked that what China was doing in Africa was much the same as what Britain had done 150 years ago.”
Is much better than American Indians receiving crystal bead collars, but the underlying system is the same. Both part benefit, but one benefits much more than the other. Is just a soft type of Early Colonialism, not really different than the European trading companies slowly eating India in the past.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
That will contribute to the well-being of every children in the world, providing also the state with a lot of political leveraging and allies.
The Japanese company that developed the antibiotic currently used on Pakistan will never have the same resources as the state of Pakistan.
We all know since decades that the antibiotics are failing. We all know that the misuse of the extant antibiotics cause this damage. We can't just at this state to pretend that weren't warned about that.
There are many points here that could improve the problem and don't depend on anything except the will of Pakistan government to do it. A lot of low hanging fruit here.
1. How much could take for the government to regulate better the use of antibiotics? A week? Four hours and a pen?
2. What about building a scientific team to develop new antibiotics?
3. Could be the unreliable water system made more reliable? Maybe just adding a filter made with sand and cheap industrial materials would help. Dunno.
4. What about a campaign to teach your citizens about the correct use of antibiotics?
Also see my other comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41635777
SUPARCO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUPARCO
PAKSAT-1R: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paksat-1R