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... but do not require some entirely different socio-economic theories to be understood...

Why do we have separation between church and state and they don't?

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? Money. Do you have more or less than you could have otherwise, all things equal. That's not a very complex concept...

So prove that Africa is poorer than it would have been had local culture been entirely wiped out.

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OK, then, I would be tempted to agree with you in the sense that a lot of the practices developed by Japanese management were actually developed internally. And, if you've heard of it in the 80s, there were scores of western managers who made trips to Japan to try to pierce those "secrets". Or it was "the MIT is full of genuises who guide the economy with the surest of hands". Or it was "the buddhist, equalitarian, self-effacing japanese culture of cooperation, long term employment and collaboration between banks and companies" allow long term investments rather than crude, short-termism like the West driven by Wall Street's need for quaterly results... In truth, as i said, a lot was made out of it in the 80s but a lot of the "Japanese Miracle" was not down to their "specific institutions" or "secret management methods" (which, I agree with you, were internally developed or the result of adapting western institutions to local mores) or whatever but good old fashioned catch-up... As we saw when they did fullfill their potential for catch-up and, on top, blew themselves up in a bubble... Then, we found out "it wasn't different, this time either"... (http://www.economics.harvard.edu/fil..._Different.pdf

*shrug* I never said it was magical, merely that it was autochthonous.

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