Is the American way of life either directly or indirectly a hindrance to other countries' ways of li

Great Debates
1

I posed the above question in the title to my parents recently and was rather stunned to hear how they rejected outright any such possibility. They almost seemed offended that I could posit forth such a notion, that is was unfathomable to them that the American standard living comes, at least in part, at the expense of some other countries’ lower standard of living. I have always wondered about this, and suppose that I’ve always assumed that, indeed, we live the way we do because others do not live as well as us.

I have pondered though not fully articulated this question for years now. My intuition says that it does (it’s kind of implicit in this hackneyed statistic: “With 5% of the world population, the US consumes 25% of the world’s energy”), but I wonder how one would go about answering such a question, given that there seem to be so many different variables that in order to qualify/quantify this answer, they would all have to be considered. I wouldn’t really even know where to begin.

Anyway, I thought I would at least run this by the Teeming Millions, and see if you think it’s even a valid question to attempt to answer. (I checked the archives and couldn’t come up with any similarly phrased question.)

Thanks.

2

In a world of finite resources the haves will prosper at the cost of the have-nots.

So, sure, the US by virtue of having “more” gets that to some degree at the expense of other people. You could say the same for most of Western Europe as well and even subdivide down within the country among their own citizens. It is a competition and those other countries will seek to turn the tables. China is doing that particularly well recently. Their prosperity will come at the cost of others too.

3

Well, while I don’t know why they would be shocked, I can pretty much tell you that you are wrong. Here’s the thing…if America’s standard of living comes at the expense of other countries, then all you have to do to prove this is to show that during the last 200 years all the other countries (and the people in them) world wide got poorer. Or even just show that other nations in the world got proportionally poorer as America got richer.

Trouble is that you can’t show this, since world wide more people have more than they did 200 years ago. Chinese and Indians are ‘richer’ by any standard than they were in the past, overall…and the same goes for just about everyone else.

The reason is that the world isn’t a zero sum game…there isn’t a single pie that everyone on earth eats from, so that if America gets richer that means everyone else gets poorer.

-XT

4

Well, the OP could assert that the U.S. “leeched” resources indirectly that could’ve gone to other countries, and that they’d be better off right now if that hadn’t happened, but that, of course, is impossible to prove.

5

It’s a big question that has been debated pretty thoroughly. You are wading in to a pretty big scholarly pit with this question, and you are not going to find any easy answers. This is the sort of thing that people write theses about.

What you are going to want to look up is the dependency theory of international development, which can be thought of as a subset of world systems theory. For a very readable introduction to some current thought on the subject, look at Ha Joon Chang’s piece “Kicking Away the Ladder.”

While dependency theory has some compelling arguments behind it, it’s important to note that policy based on dependency theory (which was huge in Latin America) has been an astounding failure. Wildly successful East Asia took a very different approach, and figured out how to work with the West to increase prosperity. That said, there are a number of other factors in play, and there is no doubt that the West’s relationship to Asia has long been different than it’s relation to, say, Africa. In my opinion, Cold-War intrigues and alliances were an important part of who has failed and who has succeeded in the modern world. I wouldn’t go as far to say that we are rich off of the backs of others, but I can certainly say we haven’t done the poorest in the world a lot of favors.

6

This is far too simplistic. India’s standard of living, for example, did drop measurably with colonialism…exactly the time that Britain was rocketing through it’s industrial revolution. The Industrialization of Britain relied in part on access to cheap Indian resources and Indian markets. There is no telling where India would be without that influence. You can’t just measure people based on if they improved or not- there is the question of why some countries have improved dramatically while others are still plagued by easily-cured diseases, hunger and environmental degradation.

7

OP, is your intuition all you have in favor of your position? Seems like it at the moment. Curious that you are willing to even take a position on the issue based on intuition alone, but suit yourself, I guess.

8

First, let me say how refreshing it is to see an OP from someone with a join date of just a few days ago that isn’t just a one-liner or a link.

Let’s look at what you intuition is based on-- the 5% using 25% issue. Ask yourself, are people unable to obtain “energy” because the US uses too much, or is it a matter of not being able to afford more? It’s not like there’s just some random amount of “energy” out there, and the US goes out and grabs 25%. The market determines how much energy the world needs, and supplies that amount. (Now, that’s a bit of an oversimplification since OPEC controls a large part of that market, but the principle is the same.) If everyone in China suddenly had an income of $25,000 per year, OPEC would pump a lot more oil to supply the demand.

Does that change your intuition at all?

9

This is a complicated question. The answer in general is no simply because the U.S. develops so much technology at much of our own expense, educates foreign graduate students with it, and they go back home to replicate it. The world is much richer in a technological sense because of the U.S. I am not sure how anyone could claim otherwise.

When it comes to finite resources, things become more tricky. We do live in an interconnected world with many large countries at various stages of development. The U.S. is or can be self-sufficient in most natural resources just because the land area is so varied and vast. That doesn’t take anything away from other countries unless they wanted the U.S. to remain largely unpopulated and tap those resources on their own but that is a different question with an outcome that is probably worse.

The really tricky part are finite energy resources, especially oil. The U.S. has already made major strides in energy efficiency but we need vast amounts of oil, natural gas, and coal to fuel our needs. We have more than enough coal and natural gas but oil needs to be imported to a large degree. That does drive the cost of oil up for the rest of the world but oil conservation by the U.S. alone won’t do much except shift the supply to other developing countries like China who have the potential to burn through existing reserves faster than we are if they also develop an even more oil dependent infrastructure. In short, it is going to get bought and used by someone so it may as well be the countries that are the leaders that have the most developed technology to use it most responsibly.

10

I’d join the voices rejecting the premise, and equally I’d reject the corollary:
i.e. that any increase in other countries standards of living does not come at the cost of the US’s.

Indeed, the US’s continued growth in living standards relies on having increasingly wealthy customers to buy those valued products where you have competitive advantage.

However, if “you” are going to try this sort of nonsense …

… i.e. that the US has some inherent birth right to the consumption of global oil reserves, then the cost of preserving that right is going to break the piggybank.

11

I can think of two possible mechanisms by which the American way of life might hinder other countries’ standards of living.

a) The US has a large amount of political power. Obviously, where they can, they are going to use that political power to make deals with other countries in ways which advantage them. For instance, I believe that it would be in the long term interest of the major oil producing countries to produce a smaller amount of oil than they do, and let the price climb - they’d make less per year, but it would last longer and they’d make more overall. I further believe that the reason they don’t do this is that the political consequences - up to and including having your country invaded and a more compliant regime installed - are too dire.

b) The US makes a lot of weapons. Wherever these weapons are deployed, they destroy stuff and lower the local standard of living.

Whether these factors outweigh the positive factors mentioned upthread of US companies inventing stuff and engaging in peaceful trade for it, is obviously suitable matter for debate. But I don’t think it’s a priori ridiculous that (particularly if we’re working on an individual country case by case basis) sometimes the negative factors might outweigh the positive.

12

Is the American way of life directly (or indirectly) a hindrance to other countries’ ways of life?

People in other countries are forced to accept American entertainment and food.

The French for example have been compelled against their will to go to EuroDisney and eat Big Macs.

13

I doubt this.

Possibly where the weapons are used, then that can lead to a lower standard of living for the indigenous population, at least temporarily. I imagine the GDP of Kuwait took a hit during the first Gulf War. But I don’t think you can reasonably blame the economic woes of Iraq prior to 2003 on the deployment of weapons by the US - more on Saddam’s violations of the cease-fire agreement.

And further consider the differing status of East vs. West Germany of a few years ago, or of North vs. South Korea today. These are practically textbook experiments, where the deployment of US and allied weapons kept a less efficient economic system out, and allowed a more efficient system to flourish. Or even Japan post WWII. It is extremely difficult to argue that the deployment of US weapons during WWII, even atomic weapons, and the presence of US military bases, caused a drop in Japan’s GDP in the long run.

I don’t think the history of US involvement in the world economy is a string of unblemished successes, nor can it be said that economic development always develops smoothly or without any costs, but simply saying the West got rich off the backs of the Third World because we bought their raw materials or used their cheap labor is an over-simplification at best. And that is not even considering our technology or our agriculture.

Regards,
Shodan

14

[QUOTE=even sven]
India’s standard of living, for example, did drop measurably with colonialism…exactly the time that Britain was rocketing through it’s industrial revolution.
[/QUOTE]

I’m sure it did. India was conquered after all, their entire economy directly subjugated to the British Empire and it’s needs and wants. I doubt it was a 1 to 1 exchange, however…i.e. I doubt that for for every increase in the BE, India went down the same amount.

Also, IIRC, this mostly impacted the ruling class in India, and really didn’t have a major impact on the lower classes (who’s lives weren’t exactly goodness and light before the British).

And none of this has anything to do with, in modern times, the US has held India back, or our prosperity has come at the expense of the Indians. I haven’t seen any prosperity curves for India, but I know they have been going up across the board for the last several decades, which sort of contradicts the assertion that it has been ‘the American way of life’ that is holding them back.

Of course it is. I’m too lazy to do complex.

Hard to say. They could have been like the Ottoman Empire and completely fallen apart if left on their own. They may have been stronger. I seriously doubt they would be all that much more prosperous than they are today if they continued with the same system they had pre-BE, but that’s just my gut feeling…I know the basic of Indian history from a very History Channel perspective, but don’t know enough to do more than make WAGs. Since their independence from the BE I don’t believe that there is a correlation between other countries getting richer at India’s expense, however.

Well, my point wasn’t that some countries improve quicker than others, merely that if one country improves by X that means that another country decreased by X. the ‘American way of life’ hasn’t caused a comparable decrease in the rest of the world…arguably the ‘American way of life’ has helped to enrich many other nations (such as China, India, Japan, South Korea, several EU nations, etc) by having a large market for goods, services and raw materials for those countries to be able to sell too, and recently to be sources of cheap labor that manufacturing companies outsource too in order to service that market.

-XT

15

The answer to the OP is yes. Absolutely. Offshoring, for one, demonstrates this fact quite clearly.

If all third world nations became prosperous that would mean their standard of living would increase. In fact, this is a historical fact. Workers in Japan are a classic example. China and India are emerging examples, as is Latin America. Their GDP is going up and so is the average amount of wealth being held by their citizens.

(The oft-made claim that there are 900 million desperately poor people in China does not negate the fact that China has a growing middle class. Growing, folks, as in growing in numbers. So does India. Their GDP is going up and so is the collective wealth of their citizens.)

History also shows that the cost of labor in these countries has risen as their standard of living has improved. Japan is a classic example. China and India are emerging examples. They’re even looking at offshoring to places like Eastern Europe and Vietnam as a direct result of their improving standards of living, and the rising wages that accompany this improvement.

So let’s take this forward a bit. If the standards of living increase around the entire Third World such that they rise to the level of the First World, their wages will also approach the levels of the First World. History has already demonstrated this with individual countries like Japan.

When Third World wages approach First World wages it will become too expensive for offshoring to continue.

Others have rigorously argued that this would have a profound effect on the cost of goods. Particularly, if you cannot find labor priced much below American labor anymore then the cost of, say, an iPod, will in fact bounce back from $300 to something around $1500: because when the Third World reaches First World standards of living, you will not be able to find labor anywhere that is cheap enough to keep iPods at $300.
Of course the alternative is that these other countries remain quite poor so the cost of their labor remains very low. Which means that if you accept the pro-offshoring argument… first world living standards cannot survive without the third world having low standards of living. If we are to maintain our standard of living, according to the pro-offshoring argument, the American way of life absolutely MUST interfere with the third world’s rising standard of living… or things will become QUITE expensive here because we cannot find cheap labor anymore.

16

So, you DID post this (for the third time) in the GD thread. Well, good for you…it shows courage and the ability to cut and paste like a champ.

[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
The answer to the OP is yes. Absolutely. Offshoring, for one, demonstrates this fact quite clearly.
[/QUOTE]

So, the answer to the OP’s question (which, to refresh everyone’s memories was “Is the American way of life directly (or indirectly) a hindrance to other countries’ ways of life?”) is ‘yes’ ‘absolutely’, according to you.

Ok.

Hm. Ok, what you seem to be getting at here is that the nasty ‘hindrance’ from the US comes from making those other countries prosperous, increasing their GDP and flowing capital into them, thus increasing their standards of living. Got it.

Why yes, if labor is the only factor, then if labor costs around the world cost the same then other factors will come into play. And America (and presumably all the other first world countries) will have hindered the world into rising up to our standards. And you see this as a problem? Why? Because that means there won’t be any more cheap labor? It will make goods and services cost more? Cheap labor is the only way to make things?

(You also might want to consider that, even though standards of living are going up around the world in many places, ‘many’ does not constitute ‘all’, and it’s going to be quite a long time before even China and India are up to first world standards across the board…let alone Africa, Central and South America, economic hell holes like North Korea and Cuba, etc etc).

-XT

17

There is room between “the world is a zero sums game and every winner makes a loser somewhere else” and “the world is an infinite source of wealth and everyone’s prosperity is entirely beneficial for everyone else.” For example, during the Ethiopian famine, Ethiopia was actually exporting food. It made better economic sense to export food to rich buyers than sell it in their own land. This is an example of how “there are plenty of resources, they just can’t pay for it” can result in measurable harm. Equatorial Guinea is one of the richest countries in Africa, but 90% of it’s people live in abject poverty. The politics of Western oil consumption are a big part of what allows this continue.

Anyway, I don’t think the connection between the Western standard of living and third world poverty is direct, but it’s not entirely absent, either.

We have no idea what North Korea would be like without the world’s strongest military massed at their border for decades.

18

You think the reason millions starve in North Korea is because there is an army preventing their re-invasion of the South? I am sorry, but that is too ridiculous to know how to address.

Regards,
Shodan

19

It also made sense to sell the food and let the pesky Eritreans (IIRC) starve to death rather than fight them.

I do think that aid and tariffs can have the effect of hindering other countries’ way of life for our benefit. Aid can undercut local markets and drive local farmers out of business. Tariffs can skew a country’s comparative advantage in producing a particular good. Aid obviously isn’t meant to hurt the other country, but tariffs and other protectionist measures are.

You may now explain how I am a total moron.

Thanks,
Rob

20

Did I say that? No. The whole history of the region would have been completely different, in ways we can never even begin to guess. Maybe the North Koreans would have taken over the world and we’d all be paying hommage to the Great Leader. Maybe they’d be like China and go through some hard times before coming upon some good times. Maybe they’d be like Cuba and become increasingly irrelevant. Maybe the would have had their own democratization movement in the 1990s like the USSR and now be a thriving democracy. No way to tell.

I am willing to bet, however, that having the US massed at their borders played at least a small role in North Korea’s descent into a paranoid regime obsessed with military buildup. I’m absolutely not in any way saying that the US didn’t do the best they could (I don’t know enough about the subject) but I think the cause-effect thing there was pretty obvious. How would you expect them to have a nice happy friends-with-everyone path to development when they have a gun pointed to their heads? Wouldn’t you also be paranoid and defensive?

Or try it this way- can you imagine an alternate future that is any worse than what they have now? Can you picture a worse path they could be on?

The rest of the world got over Communism pretty well…why is North Korea different? Can you really tell say with a straight face that the US has absolutely nothing at all with the fact that Soviet communism collapsed, Chinese communism gave up…and the two countries that the US tried their damnedest to isolate (North Korea and Cuba) are among the few commies still left?

IMHO the whole “Kim Jong Il is a crazy madman and that’s that” attitude towards North Korea is a dangerous over simplification. There is no doubt that he is a crazy madman, but that is just one of many factors in the situation.