It is tragic how basically no one understands how anything currently works or should work. One of the popular but tragic ideas out there right now is that Africa desperately "needs to industrialize". And they always say it in exactly those terms — "needs to industrialize", vague, in that way, which doesn't reveal the specific things involved in the supposed "industrializing".

But of course what they mean is Africa becoming a superpower's vassal like lots of actually "wealthy" countries currently are, and attempting to climb the conventional economic ladder by which nearly every "wealthy" country has economically developed in recent history, and which remains recommended by Western Economists: focusing on a few things which they are great at producing and importing everything else.

The good thing is that we are not going to be doing anything like that. Naively taking Ricardo's Comparative Advantage seriously leads to eventual ruin. There is absolutely no good reason to leave your fate in the hands of outsiders.

One thing lots of people do not realize is that whatever you cannot independently create in your society, you do not actually own. Because there are so many reasons a foreign trade partner could stop supplying stuff to you.

Maybe they come to lose the production process knowledge themselves for whatever reason. Or there comes to be logistical difficulty with getting stuff to you. Or they decide to stop trading with you because of ideological disagreement as to how your society is run. Or maybe they temporarily deny you stuff to weaken you so that they can militarily conquer your society. Or maybe they experience a population decline and come to need to prioritize making specific stuff for themselves because of a manpower shortage.

There are a thousand different reasons that there can come to be a failure in trade between different societies, whether abruptly, or by a continual whittling down over time.

It is simply psychologically unnerving to have no control of the production of stuff which you rely on. It seems obviously necessary to be capable of making all of your own stuff, even if only for psychological security.

It may seem like if several different African countries focus on different things, then they will unwittingly cover all of their own needs and be able to trade only with one another should the need arise. Unfortunately, that is not the smart way to get things to work out well for you. It needs to be a result of deliberate state policy. It is not prudent to hope that things accidentally work out in your favor in that way.

While we desire autarky because it is the best long-term politico-economic policy, we desire it not only because of potential outsider threat, but because it fits well within our philosophy of civilizational existence. There will be no individual African countries like there currently are, but one large agglomeration. We have an eternal and universal civilizational plan which does not involve any other human group aside ours and the idea of completely independently pursuing our civilizational goal is only right.

And there are those who, deep down, do not think it is possible to "industrialize" at all, because it is just a random buzzword to them which they cannot concretely conceptualize. Industrialization means the mass production of material things using sophisticated scientific and technological processes. It isn't magic. Anyone competent who wants to make a lot of stuff can make a lot of stuff.

People are also always talking about how much behind Africa is and how so much more advanced developed countries are. This too is because almost no one correctly understands anything. All of the fancy things people see when they walk around developed countries and cause them to speak like this are fluff. Development is not bright lights and tall buildings.

The things to focus on are concrete material and immediate needs. The problems to focus on are very basic things: food, clothing, shelter, cleanliness, basic health care and other trivial things like that.

In terms of the physical appearance of the environment, ugly shiny lights and very tall buildings are an absolute eyesore anyway. There are always those silly viral videos of garish Asian cities and Africans on Twitter swoon over them. We are never going to build those sorts of things. Ever.

With exceptional designers, you can build very beautiful cities with a lot of concrete, wood, glass and cool plants and trees. All very basic materials. You do not need to do things the way some foreign societies do them.

One reason Africa looks bad is all of the filth. And people rarely talk about this. Taking care of the filth solves so many problems, and basically costs nothing. The ability to solve this sort of simple problem is a good measure of state capacity. Of course, everything is complicated as is well understood, but as a measure of state competence, of all the things needed to build a successful society, a thing like cleanliness is low-level challenge.

And because real life is a complex system, solving these basic problems comes with an attendant need and ability to solve other basic problems like mass communication and transportation, and also, the increasing ability to solve more complicated problems.

People who cannot solve cleanliness or cannot get people culturally organically forming a queue aren't going to be doing anything more interesting.

These are the sorts of basic problems to shoot for. Solving them is a matter of coordination and basic competence.

If you solve these basic problems, in what ways then are "developed countries" so much ahead? What else exists in "developed" countries?

One other poorly understood thing is how financial costs are totally fake. People think it costs a lot of money to do things like build enormous infrastructure. Not true. For example, the proposed Grand Inga Dam which, it is estimated could have an installed capacity of at least 40GW, making it the single largest power plant globally, it is estimated would cost $80 billion.

That sounds like such a lot of money, and this is the sort thinking that causes people to think... "Oh. the DRC cannot afford to build such an expensive project".

Fortunately, this isn't true at all because that estimated financial cost is fake. It doesn't cost billions of dollars to build anything, not even a superlarge dam. What it actually takes to build this instead: tons and tons of different kinds of raw materials freely available in nature across several African countries and a couple thousand scientists, engineers and technicians with deep mastery of very different and complicated disciplines.

There are ways to acquire all of these things without throwing money at the problem. You do not need any loans from any development bank anywhere.

Ditto everything else. Do you need a 1000 gigabillion dollars to have a space program? Absolutely not. The financial costs of all projects are fake. Everything comes from freely available natural resources and human ability.

Relatedly, there are always those people who talk about GDP numbers and possible GDP growth numbers, with projections as to what is possible. It makes lots of people very dejected. These people say things like: even growing at maximal possible x% for y decades, z African country is still going to be poorer than k Western country decades in the future.

There is absolutely no reason to pay this people any mind. They do not understand how anything works at all.

Like already explained, the things to focus on are basic human needs while pursuing a long-term civilizational goal. Not trying to "catch up" with misled and misdirected people in overrated places who do not know what they are doing.

Basic human needs can be solved across all of Africa within a decade. There is no long "catching up" arc at all.