re: Haitians seeks reparations from France: "All whites have "blood on their hands"

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That’s irrelevant.

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They'd have been fine if they could have kept those numbers up.

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How many years did the DR have to pay reparations?

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Taking its colonial history into consideration, I’m unsure how anyone can be surprised by where Haiti stands today.

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Google it.

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So if they wouldn’t have revolted.

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You realize what revolutions do to the landscape and population of a country, right?

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This is going to sound like a dick comment, but it's serious. Perhaps you shouldn't wade into the conversation until you do.

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This idea is a pillar of “third world” socialism and “decolonial” thinking, but it also exists on the political Right. This is, in a sense, a very natural thing to believe — imperialism is a very real feature of world history, and natural resources sometimes do get looted. So this isn’t a straw man; it’s a common misconception that needs debunking. And it’s important to debunk it, because only when we understand how nations actually do get rich can we Americans make sure we take the necessary steps to make sure our nation stays rich. (There actually are some more sophisticated academic ideas along similar lines, and I’ll talk about those in a bit.)

So anyway, on to the debunk. The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich. There’s lots of uncertainty involved in historical GDP data — plenty we don’t actually know about populations, prices, and what people consumed in those eras. But even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:

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Nor were colonized and exploited nations and peoples rich before the European empires arrived. Yes, Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia were harshly exploited by European empires for their natural resources. But although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.

This should be the first very strong clue that modern rich nations’ wealth didn’t come primarily from plunder, but from something else — something that nations started doing over the last century and a half. In fact, we know what that something is — it’s industrial production, coupled with modern science.

We are far richer than our ancestors because we know how to make a lot more stuff than we did then — cars and trains and planes and antibiotics and vaccines and reinforced concrete and electricity and running water and TVs and computers and all the rest. And we know how to make stuff more efficiently. In 1810, 0.4 percent of Americans’ income was spent on nails. Yes, you heard that right — the little metal pointy things took $1 out of every $250 we earned. Nowadays it’s negligible. In 2006, the price of lighting in the UK was about 1/4500 the price of lighting in 1786.

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It actually does. That's called a counterpoint. You're an adult, correct?

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