Can nine billion people enjoy the standard of living of the rich?

Great Debates
61

And a lot of you remind me of those propaganda films from the '50s where people will be living on the moon and using laser knives by 1972.

I don’t doubt that a lot of fabulous new inventions will come about, but it is uber-naive to assume that something will come along and wonderously transform Nigeria into a paradise of efficiency, cleanliness, and industry.

Fortunately, I’m not a forward-looking scientist. I’m a backwards-looking historian. I don’t need your optimistic utopian outlook to kee pme envirograted and looking for the Next Big Invention. You’re right, I probably would have waved off the computer in the 1930s as a big expensive and pointless calculator, because I would have been more concerned with the abject poverty and crap going on around me at the moment. If you had said, “but in 70 years this will allow all kinds of efficiency and stuff”, I would have waved you off the same way I do now, because I am more concerned with social problems (which you handily discount in your utopian views).

You all marvel at the wonders that Mystery Power Technology will bring us without thinking about the practicalities of deploying that technology. It reminds me of the ass backwards “put computers in classrooms, that’ll make kids smarter!” thinking, which is just plain stupid.

Thankfully for both of us, both of us exist, so we balance each other out. But pardon me if I look at your Super Duper Mass Transit system with a little bit of skeptitude that people don’t want to pay higher taxes to pay for it. Like I said, most of what y’all are ruminating about would require a global authoritarian state.

62

You know, those things really piss me off, since much of that technology’s possible today, but folks would rather spend their money on the next Harry Potter movie.

Sadly, I cannot disagree with you here.

So, obviously you’re familiar with the fact that numerous inventions (such as the steam engine) have sat on the shelf for centuries before anyone managed to come up with a practical application of them.

Which is a pity, since as a historian, your focus shouldn’t have been on current events, but on things which had happened in the past.

And thus, showing that you were more than willing to discount any lessons you might have learned from history, since it should have been evident to you (as a historian) that things such as poverty, famine, etc., etc. had been around since time immemorial, and that only as mankind sought to broaden his/her horizons did any hope of a solution arise, and, as demonstrated, by James Burke, in his Knowledge Web Project and other efforts, that this solution can appear by unexpected means.

Don’t accuse us of generalizations, while making generalizations of your own.

Except, of course, that mass transit is only part of the possible solutions to the problems. There’s also the matter of housing, food, and disease, to name but three examples of problems which haven’t been solved in the millenia since mankind first walked upright and have no solution in sight.

63

I feel the same way about desertification. :wink:

Of course. A simple steam engine may have been developed in Rome, but (so the theory goes) they preferred to use slaves.

The reason to study the past is to understand the present. Social studies are really ageless.

Where did I accuse who of what now?

True. However, those are things I doubt you’ll solve any time soon (read: ever).

64

Hey, if you want to go after J. K. Rowling’s money in order to pay for reversing desertification, I’m all for it. While we’re at it, I’d like to volunteer Bill Gates’s fortune as well. No, really, I would. Can’t stand the little prick, and if it weren’t for job related issues, I’d be using Linux at the moment, instead of XP.

And sadly, so do we, as the various sweatshops evidence.

True. Which is why I don’t understand your opposition to the space program, since it was only through exploration that something like 60 percent of the world’s food crops were discovered. Admittedly, I don’t expect us to find maize growing on Mars, but then again, Columbus didn’t expect to find what he did, either.

Oh, come on, you’re being juvenile here and you know it.

Again, I agree with you, so I again fail to understand your opposition to the space program since even if that money were spent on things like HUD, or other social programs, by your own admission, it wouldn’t eliminate the problem.

65

Yes, it’s possible if you don’t mind a little time travel. The standard of living in most industrialized countries is exponentially higher than the richest person alive at the turn of the last century.

We have: air conditioning in every enclosed space (house, car, work), a inexhaustible source of information (the internet), any food that is desired (restaurants), wine women and song, and the medical care to cure the effects of wine women and song.

All of this is available (potentially) to every person on earth. Wealth is not finite and only needs a political environment to allow it and a populace to create it.

I was going to say the robot controlled airplane was stretching things but if you think about auto-pilots and GPS’s we are half way there.

66

But will all this be available to the 9 billion in 50 years? Even if we remove political problems, which is the greatest cause of inequity, the level of consumption will have to be reduced from using 2.3 hectares/capita, as we were in 1997, to ONE hectare each, which is what will be available in 2050 to sustain the 9 billion.

The question that the last 10 or so posts have been arguing about is:

Can TECHNOLOGY maintain our high STANDARD OF LIVING out of the smaller level of resource consumption on a SUSTAINABLE basis?
In 50 years our average level of consumption will have to drop by more than half to live sustainably. The USA will have to drop 10 times. Of course it wont though - the third world will make up the difference.

FWIW, I think the western work will have a big wake up call as more and more ecosystems are destroyed, but I am afraid that much of the third world will miss the boat.

1997 figures:

67

No, and no. It’s entirely possible that GM products might be able to provide the agricultural land use reduction benefits that you mention, plus all the benefits that Sam mentioned earlier; and if these turned out not to be accompanied by serious undesirable side effects, that could indeed have huge benefits for the environment. Technologically and theoretically, there certainly is potential in GM products for massive boons to agriculture and to human and environmental prosperity, and I don’t dispute that.

What I’m skeptical about (besides the hypothesis that GMOs will prove totally free of major negative side effects in real-world usage), is the assumption that practically and commercially, GM technology actually will be used by its owners to address sustainability problems in large-scale ways that are vastly beneficial to impoverished subsistence farmers. After all, most producers of any kind prefer to produce things that can be marketed primarily to the middle-class and the wealthy rather than the poor—because the poor can’t afford to pay as much for them—and I see no reason to think that GM technology would prove an exception to that general rule. (Of course, lots of producers are willing to scam the poor with offers that end up hurting them more than they help, like predatory lending and lottery tickets, but we’re postulating the commercially viable provision of genuine and significant benefits to the world’s poorest people here.)

So, I’m not arguing that GM technology ought to be banned or that it’s intrinsically useless for helping to solve our sustainability problems. I’m just pointing out that it sounds rather over-the-top to claim, as Sam did, that opposition to it is “the biggest threat to the wealth of the third world”. As I said, by that logic you might argue that the CEO should get a new stretch limo and private plane because if he had them, he could give poor children a ride to school in them. (You oppose a new stretch limo for the CEO? Then you’re a threat to the prosperity of poor schoolchildren! Shame on you, you luddite! Mmm-hmmm.)

Let’s face it, bioengineering companies are not in the business of providing charity to the poor, and we shouldn’t let the theoretical potential benefits of their technology dazzle us into assuming that the practical results of their activities will necessarily solve poor people’s problems. That, as I said, is just pasting save-the-poor-people warm fuzzies onto ordinary profit-seeking commercial activity.

68

Not sure I grasp your premise. The 2.3 hectar footprint of productive ecosystem doesn’t really mean anything. It implies that ecosystems are finite. Land is finite, land use is not. It is infinitely variable. We have substantial control over our environment from the prospective of food and energy production.

I do agree that much of the 3rd world will miss the boat. It’s the walking definition of “3rd world”.

69

I had a lot of trouble following your post until I got here.

No offense, but the problem with your thesis is you are making an assumption about how poor people can be helped. They are helped not with charity, but with new economic opportunities. If the GM corps provide a way to farm more cheaply, reliably, and efficiently, then the very things which make them comercially viable also make them a boon to poor cultures.

The very things which make them profitable will allow them to solve (to some degree) the problems we are talking about. The more they are able to solve these problems, the more profitable they will be for the bioengineering firms as well as the farmers.

It really is a win win scenario.

70

Again, that sounds nice in theory. In reality, though, if a GMO manufacturer can make more profit from, say, a pesticide-resistant crop primarily useful to American agribusiness than from, say, a salinity-resistant crop primarily useful to poor subsistence farmers, which do you think the manufacturer is more likely to invest in?

There is, of course, nothing wrong with developing and marketing a product for the use of American agribusiness. But we shouldn’t assume that that automatically means that there will be the same commercial incentive to meet the needs of Third World small-scale agriculture. Nor should we assume that Third World farmers will necessarily gain more than they lose by the new technology, even if it is marketed to them.

As one (pro-GMO) biology professor notes,

So ISTM that your sketchily outlined “win win scenario” doesn’t adequately cover the issues involved. I dislike it when GMO opponents make naive oversimplified arguments about how GM use is obviously bad, and I feel that GMO advocates shouldn’t follow their example by making naive oversimplified arguments about how GM use is obviously good. We need to look at the issues rationally and with a careful eye to the details, not just rhapsodize over how great it looks in the blue-sky version.

71

Well, of course. Didn’t you read the parts of my and Sam Stone’s posts which included the thought that the crop would have to have some comercial advantage to the farmers in poorer countires?

Obviously, subsistence farmers are not in a position to benifit from improved farming technologies. That’s why we don’t have them here anymore. The point of developing farming technologies which are better suited to the parts of the world we are talking about is that they will not limit people to subsistance farming. That is the whole point of this thread.

I didn’t think I had to repeat this, but I don’t think I ever said that GM products would definately solve all of the worlds hunger problems. I don’t think Sam Stone did either.

What I said, was that GM products show promise, and if they can be developed with traits which make them comercially viable in the poorest parts of the world, they would solve a lot of the problems we have been talking about. You responded with an anti profit meme seeming to indiciate that no, companies would make profit, but that would not solve the problems.

Now, if you are saying that GM products might not be developed to thrive in the parts of thw world which are now having difficulty growing their own food, then OK. I agree. The might not. However, if such crops were developed, their comercial viability would be the tool by which they would solve the problems of land usage that this thread is partly about.

72

That was too confusing. The problems I am talking about are those of the amount of arible land, and the number of people which can be supported by a given amount of crop land.

My point is that the theoretical properties which might allow GM products to solve or at least address these problems could also allow them to be comercially viable. And this is only in response to your post:

Now if you meant by this that GM products might be developed which do not address the problems of land use then ok, but I would argue that any characteristics which do not allow such products to address these issues will also exclude them from use in the poorer parts of the world. If you meant that the seeds would be too expensive for subsistance farmers, then Ok, lets have less of those. Or, I’d say that as the use of such GM product increases, the costs would decrease. Perhaps to the level that even some subsistance farmers (or those poor farmers who want to increase his productivity to leves which allow him to no longer be a subsistance farmer) could afford them.

Nothing is perfect nor immediate. The first GM crops will most likely be marketed to modern agri business. But it is daft to think that such technology will never or cannot be used in poorer countries. Obviously, no single thing will solve all of our problems. I suppose that I am still not sure what your problem with Sam Stone’s first post is.

As I re read your post, I have another thought. Are you saying that a GM product could be developed that profited modern agri business, but was useless to poorer farmers? If so, I think you included the idea that such a product could be produced which not only met this criteria, but also did nothing to reduce the pollution problems we face with modern agri business. I think you may need to explain this.

Any GM product which improves the productivity of modern agri business would have to at least address the problems we face visa vi theamount of arible land required to support 1 person. That’s what a productivity increase means.

Meanwhile, any GM product which is comercially viable in poorer countries would of necessity have to improve the lot of subsistence farmers there. That’s what comercially viable means in that part of the world.

Perhaps you have in mind some sort of GM product which is profitable for the company which created it but which does not address any of these issues? If so, how can the company make any money. I certainly understand that a particular GM product might not address all of these issues, but they would have to address some of them in order to be comercially viable. Wouldn’t they?

73

Yes, and I pointed out a thought that you omitted to consider: namely, that just because a product has “some commercial advantage” to poor consumers doesn’t necessarily mean that a producer will choose to provide that product, if they can make more profit from providing a different product to richer consumers.

But if this is truly to improve the standard of living of all these impoverished subsistence farmers—which is the real whole point of this thread—then it has to bring them, individually, massive improvements in prosperity. You seem to be suggesting that the development strategy should somehow eliminate subsistence farming, replacing it with more efficient agriculture that can “benefit from improved farming technologies”.

The question is, how would this impact the subsistence farmers themselves? Nobody’s denying that we can make money by marketing technological advances that in some way improve a country’s agricultural productivity and grow its economy. But in a thread about the achievement of a universally high standard of living, what we need to ask is, how will these developments actually be implemented and what effect will they have on the poor? And what is the evidence, as opposed to oversimplified ideal economic scenarios, on which we make these predictions?

It’s when I cannot get clear and detailed answers to questions like that that I start mistrusting the optimism of advocates of technological “win win scenarios”.

I didn’t say that either of you did.

Oh, at last I think I see the misunderstanding. You thought I was saying that GMO manufacturers would profit off of solving the problems of Third World agriculture without actually solving the problems of Third World agriculture. You are right that that would have been a pretty illogical and meaningless thing to say. But what I was actually saying is that GMO manufacturers have many other ways to make profits, so we should not assume that just because they may have the potential to solve Third World agriculture problems, therefore they actually will do so.

What on earth is an “anti profit meme”? Oh, never mind, it’ll just make more confusion.

Whew. You and I, pervert, just shouldn’t have conversations. I’m not saying it’s your fault, and I hope it’s not mine, but we are simply not wired to understand one another’s statements, and the sheer amount of bandwidth required to make them comprehensible is too exhausting. Sorry about the mixups.

74

I know. LOL. I’m pretty sure its me. I seem to fail and understand you consistently.

Let me answer this question by asking another. What happened to the subsistence farmers who used to live in the west? The answer, of course, is that they became something else. Not imedeiatly, and not all of them, but by and large productivity increases increase wealth. This allows less and less people to be trapped in the subsistance lifestyle.

My appologies if my earlier answers did not take this question into account. I sort of take it as a matter of common understanding that increasing wealth works this way.

This makes a little more sense. However, I think it is now not very closely related to the post which you originally responded to. Obviously, a potential is just that. The fact of the matter is that none of the GM crops we are talking about has been developed yet. It is certainly possible that no such crop will ever be developed.

I tell you what. I promise that the next time I respond to you, I will take a few deep breaths first and ask the pressing question first. I think I see some of your thoughts as anti profit, or anti capitalism (whatever that means exactly) and I over react. I will make a point of trying not to do that in the future.

75

Well, in the case of small farmers in 20th-century America, most of them have been put out of business by larger producers better able to exploit economies of scale. This may have ultimately increased productivity and grown the economy, but I don’t think it massively improved their standard of living in the short term—quite the contrary.

As I said, when I don’t see detailed and evidence-backed arguments to support optimistic predictions like this, I feel somewhat distrustful of them. What you seem to be saying is “well, in the long run, people overall will be better off”. A good deal of acute human misery among a frighteningly large percentage of the nine billion might be elided under that cheery prediction, and I think we ought to have a clearer idea of exactly what those subsistence farmers should expect from our development plans.

Heck, I like capitalism; I’m just trying to defend it from the unrealistic expectations of some of its fan club. :slight_smile:

76

The reason things continually improve under capitalism is because of the nature of market transactions. People don’t exchange with each other unless they both feel they benefit. Also, the freedom of the individual to choose is what prevents capitalism from spiralling out of control. It has built-in feedback mechanisms which prevent that from happening.

For example, when the price of a commodity goes up, it suddenly opens the market up to replacements which were too expensive before, but no longer are. If there is a glut of labor, the price of labor goes down until people find it valuable, and those people get hired again. If there is a shortage of a certain type of labor, wages rise, which attracts people into the field.

In fact, it’s government which is unstable, and which is the real threat to peace and prosperity, because government has the power of force and is therefore able to short-circuit the natural feedback mechanisms of supply and demand.

Let me give you a perfect example of the difference: In Canada, Atlantic fishermen lobbied the government for aid, on the grounds that fishing is seasonal and they should be able to collect unemployment benefits during the winter months. The government allowed this, which short-circuited the mechanism which would have fixed this ‘problem’. Now we have a permanent underclass dependant on government largesse to maintain their lifestyles. And once their income becomes tied to the whim of legislators, they begin agitating for more, or complaining when they get less. Atlantic Canada is not really very happy about their economy.

Now look at Atlantic U.S. states like Maine. They have the same problem, don’t they? Well, no. Because the government never bailed them out. So the market took over. Smart people noticed that there were a lot of people looking for work in the winter, so seasonal businesses showed up. Atlantic U.S has evolved summer and winter economies. The people there have good standard of livings and unique lifestyles that they enjoy.

I’ve often said that the difference between central planning and the market is that the market is like the natural forces holding a pencil in balance when it is suspended from your fingers. If it gets pushed away from vertical, gravity pulls it back again. Likewise in the market, if the price of something goes up, forces arise to compete and offer alternatives, or to build more of the thing until prices stabilize again. As people satisfy their needs, they move on to new things. New markets open up to meet new demands, and capital and labor flow into them, as if guided by an invisible hand.

Government, on the other hand, is like trying to balance a pencil on your fingertip. The pencil starts to tip, so you have to notice this and react by moving your hand to keep it balanced. That’s what government tries to do. It tries to solve problems by pushing and pulling at society from the top down to ‘fix’ problems that crop up. Taken to its extreme (socialism or communism), government even tries to solve the problems of day-to-day supply and demand from the top down - with predictable (and unstable) results. Shortages, gluts, inefficiencies, etc.

Empirical evidence backs this up. Look around the world, and show me a capitalist economy that melted down or spiraled out of control. I, on the other hand, can show you all kinds of countries that spiraled out of control and became basket cases due to flawed government policies.

It’s a good thing to be skeptical of markets, because they can have their problems as well. What distresses me is that the same people who seem to be ultra-skeptical of markets tend to accept the efficacy and efficiency of government as a given. You worry about how the market treats health care? I’m TERRIFIED of what government can do to it. You should be too, given its track record.

Government should always be the tool of last resort, applied sparingly, after much deliberation, and only when all other alternatives are exhausted. It should not be used like a giant fix-it man, to be applied willy-nilly to ‘solve’ every problem we face. That’s the road to poverty and disaster.

77

I did not say 2.3 ha of ‘productive ecosystem’. I was refering to ‘biologically productive space’. Ecosystems are appropriated by humans to produce consumables. Ecosystems are a subset of biologically productive space.

‘Ecological footprint’ is a way of quantifying human use of nature.

There is a finite amount of sea and land available to produce food and other consumables sustainably. You can set up greenhouses on non-arable land, but these require resources to make them productive. Same as an aluminium smelter - it consumes resources (eg water) to produce a consumable.

Can you please explain what you mean by saying “land use is not (finite)”.

78

Continuing on the GMO “sub-thread” - I believe there are only a handful of people who would actually argue that improving agricultural yield through technology is inherently bad (or implausible). The objection I usually hear to implementing GMOs in poor countries is political. Basically, a 3rd world farmer who switches to Monsanto could be giving up control of his crop management, locking himself into a long-term system where he has to buy his seeds and pesticides and fertilizers from a certain corporation.

Many third world economies have already given up their power of self-determination through a cycle of debt, and by being locked into export models (eg producing coffee for export instead of food for local use) and are reluctant to add to their problems by becoming dependent on a foreign for-profit corporation fortheir seeds etc.

To yield so much power to a non-elected body that has its power base in another country, whose primary motive is to maximize its profits is a huge leap of faith. In other words, the argument isn’t about GMOs, it’s about who holds the power in this system.

While I agree that governments in general have a dubious track record - in the case of agriculture, in today’s world, market forces do not operate. Agribusinesses function much as the governments that free-marketers so despise ! To make things worse, these huge corporations are in no way accountable to a farmer in India, and do not even pretend to represent his interests.

While in theory I completely agree with you Sam, in practice the biggest hindrance today to the operation of market forces isn’t government, it’s Corporations.

79

No, you miss the point of my question. Where did those subsitance farmers go? Did they die off in huge numbers? Did they emigrate to Canada, Mexico, back to Europe? What happened to the farmers?

No, this quote was about history.

Yes. If markets and thus economies are allowed to grow. Do you honestly think this is not the case?

Except that this was not your original objection to GM producers. No have you offered any alternatives. I’m willing to accept the notion that capitalism is a teriible way to run an economy, to paraphrase, except for all of the alternatives. What would you like to do about the possiblitiy of subsistance farmers being displaced by more efficient GM products?

You way this often. But many of your attitudes betray it. I mean no offence, but I would really like to see you examine this assumption. :slight_smile:

80

I would like to agree with you in one small way. Modern agri business seems to hold far more power than one might like. But I would suggest that the solution is not smaller corporations, but larger globalization. If you think that large corporations do not have the interests of small Indian farmers in mind, let them sell seeds to a few hundred million of such farmers. They’ll get interested very quickly.

The reason that large agri businesses have the power they do is that farmers are seen as a sort of nationally important economic sector. That is, “we have to support the local farmer, what would we do in the case of a way if he were not solvent.” This has lead us to all sorts of bad governmental policies. The solution is to expand the markets for these sorts of goods. Allow these large corporations to compete on a truly equal footing with their global counterparts.