Anecdotes from underdevelopment • tflora

I recently spent a couple of months in a poor country. Well, “middle-income,” says the World Bank, though their middle-income threshold is $1,136 (FY 2026). The upper bound is $13,935. Best to avoid hurting fragile egos in capitals everywhere.

75% of the world populace lives in middle-income countries. They’re missing out on small conveniences. It makes their lives much worse in aggregate.

Nasty

Imagine the following:

Water sometimes comes with dirt (and maybe pathogens). So you spend money on a water filter outside your home so that your shower water is always actually clean.
The water filter above requires a minimally-trained technician to install it. It’s installed incorrectly and water flows in the wrong direction. You need a second technician to come over and fix it.
Windows don’t seal, so your sleep is doomed to interruption by morning traffic or whatever fun activities neighbors have in store.
Buildings don’t have ventilation systems. Or they don’t have serious ventilation systems. Restrooms on a 7th floor clinic just stink with the trapped fumes.
No ventilation systems, no central AC. One must imagine there are even fewer HVAC engineers than in Europe.
Insulation is not a need, since the weather is always above freezing. ACs don’t cool as much as they could, cold days require jackets and blankets inside.
There are no tumble dryers (Europeans can again relate), so you must spend a good few minutes hanging clothes individually and hope for good weather.
Fabric quality could also compel you to iron your clothes.
Gas for cooking doesn’t come from a utility, but from cylinders you buy individually and install yourself.

Oh, so many first-world problems. That’s the point. They’re problems in high-income countries because they’re inconveniences. The time one spends ironing clothes not only ruins their back as it takes much of an evening away. An evening they could spend reading, pursuing a hobby, scrolling TikTok. The water filter takes a significant chunk of income for what should be a reliable service from a utility. The unventilated restroom causes a draining, if short, negative emotional experience where none was needed. God forbid a gas leak because you messed up installing a new cylinder.

The lack of skilled technicians also leads to second-order effects. I’ve met people doing “maintenance buffering:” saving smaller maintenance jobs for one large maintenance event, so you can call the one person you trust for the job to come over for just one day, saving you some cash.

Brutish

From the small inconveniences of daily life, you start observing the systemic:

There are so many people just standing around, paid to gesture or state the easily searchable.
Wait, some of those people are selling trust. A few will sit near a bunch of cars on a street to “protect” them from burglars. They expect a tip when you leave - is the insurance worth it? Couldn’t you just leave without paying?
May be best not to risk it. There are “neighborhood guards” that fulfill a similar function. They get paid on a schedule, and “prevent” home invasions and robberies. Some suspect they share proceeds with criminals and coordinate who they can steal from.

To state the obvious, crime holds development back. To a great degree. Poverty makes the cost-benefit calculation of crime a lot better. Unfortunately, it becomes much harder to escape poverty if any investment that could lead to improvement is at constant risk of expropriation. Small parts and metals become targets of pilfering, even though they’re worth cents. A relative working at a steel plant had their newly-built showers for construction workers open only to spend the following week dispensing cold water. Someone stole the nichrome coils from the shower heads; they weren’t worth more than $20.

Security becomes a larger and larger line item in your budget. Gated communities if you can afford them, a neighborhood guard if you can’t. Broken glass bottles at the top of your walls if “a budget” is as foreign a concept as a safe street to walk on at night. Bigger cars if you can afford them, because sometimes gangs place large rocks on highways to stop traffic and rob drivers. You need more security not just because the frequency of problems is higher, but because the surface area of crime is so much wider.

For instance, graveyards no longer have many copper or bronze adornments. They’re often swiped - even in small towns! I’m not sure why crime used to be lower - and thus why there used to be bronze adornments - considering only greater poverty existed in the past. Maybe something something culture.

Let’s list threats to growth and a decent life that crime bring:

Living with fear. Avoiding the dark. Outside at night. Outside alone. Fear of a quiet street instead of appreciation for it. You won’t run that errand, do that activity, enjoy that party because you don’t want to be vulnerable.
Adding a security cost to most productive investments. If nichrome coils are valuable enough to be stolen, you can bet most machinery is too.
Adding a security cost to everything. Residential buildings need a doorman, no matter how small, for protection.
Imposing penalties to trust. If you’re very likely to be scammed, you become justifiably wary of strangers. Collaboration at work becomes relationship-based, instead of task-based. Time to productivity rises.
Bureaucracy and rulebooks expand. If there aren’t solid-enough norms for behavior, formality fills the gap. Rules abound. The state becomes a “nanny” because companies aren’t trusted not to try and scam their own customers. It happens anyway: low state capacity generally means it can only go after those successful enough to attract attention.
Financial success comes with a presumption of wrongdoing. Drug dealers, shady businessmen, and corrupt politicians exemplify “the rich.” It’s hard to convince smart young people they should pursue wealth creation if they hear much more often of wealth extraction.

Short

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