Peacekeeping promotes violence

[Jester]

John signed Magna Carta with his signet and his mark because he was illiterate. Best way to get ahead back then was to be a fighter working for the local <strike>warlord</strike> baron. Somehow education caught on anyway.

Sure, and if you've got eight centuries to wait, I'm sure the Somalis will catch up. British (or English, way back) society evolved, slowly and organically, with the will, incentive, and ability to do so moving roughly forward together for centuries. If you'd just told King John "education is the key!", it might have been good advice, but there's not a tremendous amount he could have done with it. Medieval society only had so much use for educated people, and education was costly to obtain.

True, but what kind of incentives? And how do you get them started?

If that was an easy question, then we probably wouldn't have a couple billion people living in poverty on this planet. But it is the interconnectedness that is the problem of failed states like Somalia, and one major reason why great tons of aid has accomplished quite a bit in keeping people from starving to death, but not a whole lot in putting Somalia on the path to a modern society.

Somehow, conditions have to make being a peaceful farmer, whose kids are getting educated, who pays taxes and saves money for the future, a better deal for Somalis than joining a militia or a pirate crew and making a quick buck. That means security has to be in place, at least in part. It means jobs have to exist, and pay enough to get by. It means that markets have to be secure enough that you can count on not having to scrounge for necessities. It means that your kids have to have a pretty good chance of living well past the end of their schooling. Until those things are at least partially true, education is going to be valued very little, and of very little use.

But, of course, each of those things is in part dependent on the others. The same interconnected web of externalities that make the first world a nice place to live makes Somalia a hellhole.

-Jester