No…Nine billion people cannot maintain the standard living of the rich - multiple ridiculous houses, boats, cars etc. We should be able to afford the standard of living of the middle class - one reasonible house, car, some electronic toys and furniture, food and clothes.
Take a drive out to the Hamptons any summer weekend. The infrastructure can barely support the rich we already have.
I was at a lunch in 2002 where I heard the former head of the Canadian stock market speak. Among other things, he said that sweatshops were a valid stepping stone in the process of industrializing third world nations. I asked him after about the statements by Canadian scientists (I tossed that true fact in to insure he wouldn’t just brush me off) that stated that it would take the resources of four planet Earths to bring and keep the entire world population at a western standard of living.
His response? (paraphrased, of course) “When the city of New York was expanding they looked at the projected population a few decades in the future and realized that with horse based transportation the streets would be filled waist deep with horse crap if that many people were living there in 30 or 40 years. We will develop some sort of technology to fix this.”
So we should continue on at full speed and pray someone comes up with a plan to extend unrenewable resources indefinately… Damn we’re screwed.
How many resources are unrenewable? Oil? That’s about all I can think of. Air, water, energy, lumber, food, land - it can all be recycled, filtered, grown and otherwise renewed.
I am a big believer in the equilibrium of all things. When the technology and resources exist to support an entire world population at Western standards only then will the entire world be at Western standards. Scarce resources drive up prices and reduce the standard of living. It also encourages seeking more efficient alternatives. With gas prices hitting $2 a gallon, I bet a lot of people would consider buying that hybrid car instead of the SUV.
I’m not saying that we should recklessly burn through resources. But I do think that technology is the answer to improving the standard of living for everyone. What’s the alternative? All of us here in the West should go live like unwashed hippies?
I’m for it.
That lunch was a long time ago, I think I may have misquoted either myself or him. I can’t remember exactly how it was said, but we were talking about renewable resources which were being consumed at a rate far greater than we could replace them.
We’re already at a dangerous point nowhere near equilibrium. Rainforests are being torn down at a shocking rate, something like a species a day is going extinct (I may be grossly under or over exaggerating this number), and there’s a huge hole in our ozone layer while we drive around in SUVs (even if gas is two bucks a gallon). I’d say lets reconsider and reorganize the western form of living before we export it to every little nook in the world.
Maybe the “hippy” idea isn’t the worst solution, but I’m sure there are others… its better than having either us or the next generation die off from a massive collapse of the ecosystem.
sigh
we were talking about renewable resources which were being consumed at a rate far greater than we could replace them as well as nonrenewable resources.
Of course 9 billion people won’t be able to enjoy exactly the same standard of living that the rich enjoy today, just like the middle class of today doesn’t enjoy exactly the same standard of living that feudal aristocrats used to enjoy. Today’s middle class don’t have vast estates, they don’t get to administer low justice, they can’t make war upon their neighbors with impunity, they can’t have peasants who insult them murdered, they can’t grab beautiful women off the streets for their private use, they don’t have giant staffs of servants or slaves to care for their bodily needs. Of course it would be impossible for the majority of people to have those things, since they depend on other human beings to provide those services.
However, today’s middle class in many ways has a vastly superior standard of living compared to that feudal aristocrat. Our meals aren’t provided for us by an army of peasants and cooked by servants, but it is available cheaply and conviniently at any supermarket or restaurant. We aren’t free to use violence whenever we like, but we are also largely free of the threat of violence from others. We can’t force women into sexual slavery or concubinage, but pornography is widely available. We don’t have vast estates, but we can travel the world safely and conveniently, and public spaces are numerous. We don’t have servants to wash the dishes or our clothes or clean our houses, but we have machines that allow us to do the cleaning ourselves easily. We don’t have private court jesters, musicians and entertainments, but we have the whole panoply of the modern entertainment industry. And of course, there are many things that were completely unavailable to the ancient aristocrats that we take for granted…medical care, communications, the rule of law, and on and on.
So while the poor of tomorrow might not enjoy the same things that the rich do today…several cars, a big house with staff to clean it, etc, there’s no reason they couldn’t enjoy the comforts that the rich enjoy but delivered in different ways. Private cars for everyone is unrealistic, but in Europe and Japan today it is perfectly possible to enjoy an upper-middle class lifestyle without owning a car. People take trains, or taxis, or busses, or fly, or when needed rent or hire a car. There’s no need for 9 billion luxury internal combustion private vehicles. What people want is to be able to get where they want to go quickly and conveniently. Nine billion suburban homes with 10 acre grounds might not be possible, but luxurious high rise appartments certainly are. Nine billion daily newspapers printed on wood pulp might be inefficient, but why do newspapers have to be printed on wood pulp? Nine billion washing machines are certainly possible, but so are clothes that shrug off dirt more easily. And there’s no reason that those nine billion people couldn’t enjoy the latest fashionable designer clothes, since those designer clothes don’t actually take more resources to produce than cheap knock-offs. People need packaging for all the food and consumer goods they buy, but we can rationalize and dematerialize all this, and recycle the stuff we do use more efficiently, to where it costs less to recycle a good than to throw it away. All those people will need teachers, journalists, scientists, engineers, health care workers, entertainers, cops, lawyers, counselors, xxxxxers, yyyyyers and zzzzzzers, who will provide those services? Of course those new entries into what we consider “the rich” will provide those services for each other. And there will be whole new classes of goods and services that we are only beginning to enjoy that people in the future will consider neccesary luxuries. They won’t be just consuming goods and services, they’ll be providing goods and services.
Think of all the kids today who could grow up to be brilliant scientists, or artists, or all sorts of things, who are actually going to end up as subsistence farmers, sweatshop workers, or street people in some third world slum. What if they could actually lead productive creative lives?
Of course, we’ll still have the mega-rich, we’ll still have poor people, even 100 years from now I imagine there will still be places on earth where the lifestyle would be recognizable to a serf from the middle ages. But more and more those places will exist on a semi-voluntary basis, because what it takes to become a rich country will become more and more obvious, and people who wish can leave those places to become part of the global society. And there will still be people complaining that the poor don’t have access to nano-immortality, or can’t own their own asteroid palaces, or whatever the fashion of the mega-rich will be in 100 years. Perhaps the fashion will be for hand-crafted goods that are unreproducable by industry, not everyone will be able to afford homespun cotton grown on their own farm, woven on a hand-loom and stitched together with needle and thread. Anything that requires human attention or effort will be expensive, anything that can be automated will be cheap and regarded as inferior, regardless of whether it is superior to what 99.99% of humanity has had to struggle with over the millenia.
And of course, not everyone will get that little social thrill of being richer and more powerfull than other people. Most rich people today don’t try to make money because they want more comfortable clothes or better food or a less-lumpy matress. They want expensive goods, not because those goods are better, but precisely because they are expensive, and show that the person who owns them is the sort of person who can afford to spend money on luxury goods. Material wealth beyond the wildest dreams of today’s middle class Americans won’t stamp out that human impulse.
Perhaps, but I really don’t think it has anything to do with externalized costs.
No, I don’t think it is. Ifyou develop a GMO product, it will have to be cheaper in some sense to be comercially viable. If the only difference between it and the already available crops is that it is genetically engineered so that the company with the patent can trace and enforce its patent, there will be no incentive to use it. I suppose a company could lie and say that a GM crop is more disease resistant, or produces more nutrition, or something. But it seems quite unlikely that such a claim would last very long if it were tested on the scale of current agriculture.
Meanwhile, what we have today is not a glut of irrelelvant GM crops. We have crops which have been shown (at least on small scales) to have definate benifits. What we have is objection to those crops based on precisely the sort of logical fallacy you are bringing up (if in the other direction). Namely, GM products are objected to because they could do something naughty. What that is and what the chances of it are are never discussed. Its like the objection to radiated food. We could provide safe food to far more people than we do if we simply stopped being so reactionary to new technology.
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned Absolut Vodka, whose slogan should be “The Vodka that Tastes Like Ass.”
Absolut’s triumph of image over quality is taught in marketing classes. I have given untold dozens of Absolut drinkers blind taste tests and so far 100% of them have chosen Stoly or Ketel One over Absolut. They usually point to the other brand and say, “That one is better, so I know it’s the Absolut.” Bzzt. Wrong 100% of the time so far.
Kimstu, I think I have been misunderstanding you. Are you saying that a particular GM product could provide some benifits but not enough to reduce the amount of land needed to maintain our lifestyle low enough to reduce polution enough to “sustainable” levels?
Are you saying that a product which helped reduce land usage might be said to help but not solve the problem?
Isn’t it going a bit far to suggest that such a product’s “only definite, dependable function is to make money for its owners.”?
Dont be silly msmith537.
Of course many resources are renewable with time. Given a few hundred million years there could even be some more oil on earth. The problem is when the rate of consumption of resources is greater than replenishment of resources.
Take water for example. This is a resource that moves through various ‘stores’ around the system, spending time in each as it continues round and round. The amount of water does not decrease overall, but it can be diverted from one ‘store’ to another, thus affecting both industry and ecosystems.
In Australia more water is used than falls on the continent. ‘Used’ means taken from a store such as a waterway or aquifer and moved to another eg converted into produce (shipped overseas or moved to the atmosphere). The greater the pressure for production of resources the less water is available for maintaining existing ecosystems.
And what about land. Did you read my link on ecological footprints?
Arable land does not increase in area. We can increase the productivity of land by way of GMO’s and smarter land management, but the area of productive land on the planet is decreasing. Also there are going to be 3 billion more people on the planet in the next 50 years who will need to share that land. A certain amount of land is needed to support a certain level of consumption for one person - there will be less land available for each of the 9 billion people on the planet.
Levels of consumption will have to go down and in the meantime more ecosystems will need to be protected or destroyed.
From the Prospect article:
I know the Japanese have to get by with little personal living space (not surprising, since their country is no larger than California and has at least twice the population), but I’ve never heard anyone suggest they have a low standard of living in any other respect. Could you expand on this?
Now, that’s a problem that Lind kind of glosses over, and one I regard as the biggest flaw in his analysis. He is simply assuming our energy problems can and will be solved by technological improvements, such as hydrogen fuel cells for powering our cars. We’ve had several GD threads on this – I remain unconvinced that a practical “hydrogen economy” is in our future. And without it – what are we going to do for personal motorized transportation, on the surface or in the air, after the fossil fuels run out?
I’m one of those people who tends to write off “what ifs” based on some technological miracle (see the NASA threads - I mean, come on, creating airtight bubbles several miles wide? On Mars? Not in this lifetime, bub).
This thread only differs in that it asks a question that can be answered (hint: antechinus came the closest), neverminding the impracticality of the question itself, which is so absurd it is obviously a hypothetical.
Except that is not a technological miracle. We can do it now, and I’m not talking about something like a geodesic dome covering NYC, but the Chunnel. Yes, I realize that there are ventilation shafts into the chunnel, but the simple fact remains that the Chunnel must remain a sealed environment or it will be innodated by water.
Except, of course, it is not entirely hypothetical. The world’s population is increasing, the only question is: At what population level will it stabilize, if it ever does? And most, if not all, of the unindustrialized world, does want the things which those of us in the industrialized world take for granted, so sooner or later, the world is going to face the issue of whether or not the planet can withstand the onslaught.
Vast difference between an oversized mechanical worm diggign a tunnel in England, and creating a several mile wide dome on Mars (not to mention, filling it full of atmosphere). We have a good enough time landing a RC car with a camera on Mars and calling it a success.
You kidding? So far in this thread we’re assuming that we have an infinite (er, sorry, near infinite) energy source, everyone has individual aircraft, etc.
Of course, no one says that we have to build a dome. And, one of the reasons that landing an RC car on Mars is considered a success is that we don’t have the capability of self-repairing robots. Putting humans into the equation is a whole 'nother matter.
I’m not assuming any such thing. A quick review of my posts will confirm this.
But we don’t all need magic energy powered cars, or personal helicopters. And we don’t all need 3 or 4 high-performance IC engine cars to enjoy an equivalent standard of living to rich of today.
Zagadka, you remind me of a guy complaining that we’ll never find enough pasture for everyone to ride a horse to work, and all the manure will clog the cities. The answer isn’t neccesarily more of the same, or more of the same but a little better, or more of the same but with a technological miracle added.
How about inexpensive, safe, convenient, and luxurious mass transit? Is that such a far-fetched fantasy? Sure it would be expensive, but surely it wouldn’t be out of line compared to what we spend today on roads, personal automobiles, and all the infrastructure to support them. Many people in Japan get along fine without a car, why can’t we imagine people living in the high-tech cities of India and Nigeria getting along without cars? How about people figuring out ways to work from home 80% of the time? How about moving goods by cheap efficient high-tech rail rather than IC engine trucks? Surely that isn’t a fantastic pipe dream?
What material requirements exactly does someone have to have to live like “the rich” of today? Luxurious clean housing, ability to go wherever you want whenever you want, personal security, delicious wholesome plentiful food, exciting entertainment on demand, beautiful and comfortable clothing, access to education, ability to participate meaningfully in the political process, top-notch medical care, personal autonomy, and whatever toys that are currently interesting. That’s what being rich means.
These things can all be provided with surprisingly small material inputs. They might require significant labor costs to provide, but you can free up 8 billion people from being agricultural workers or industrial laborers and make them doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers instead. Well made goods don’t neccesarily require fewer materials than cheap shoddy crap, and they don’t neccesarily require more energy to produce either.
And while we can’t rely on any one particular technological advance to save the day, it is also foolish to believe that technological progress is going to stop tomorrow at 6:00 in the morning. Predictions that assume futuristic technology are likely to be wrong, predictions that don’t assume futuristic technology are SURE to be wrong. I’d be very surprised if our transportation problems are solved by giving everyone flying cars. I won’t be surprised if our current system of publicly owned roads and privately owned gasoline burning individual cars gets replaced by something superior.
It is completely untrue to believe that a certain level of lifestyle requries a certain amount of land to sustain, and that since there will be more people living a better lifestyle they will need more land. Why? Are you seriously denying that technological progress is possible, and asserting that we’ll run out of pasture for all the horses those 9 billion people will need to ride?
Politics is all a part of it. It’s not enough to have the technical know-how to deal with nuclear waste relatively safely! One must also have the social management know-how to avoid political gridlock, so one can get the technical solution in place.
After all, without such social/political skills, how are we going to keep the theorhetical 9 billion wealthy people from killing each other off? We have enough problems with 6 billion poor people and several hundred million wealthy people killing each other off as it is!
Or just to do it cheaper? To many, this would be the point, and doing it right and doing it cheap, while they are not mutually exclusive, are not the same thing.