Well, for one thing, Russia is, and has been, rather intensely populated, and the only place to expand to is Siberia, which is where they send you if they want you to suffer.
Ecology-wise, it makes an interesting study. Quite possibly, in human history, the most single-minded rape of the environment ever was commited in Soviet Russia.
A story: a while ago I worked for a foundation (giving away money: doesn’t get better than that) and we would get letters from Russian scientists trying to beg some bread. (Couldn’t if we wanted to, illegal). You could always tell, the English was formally correct yet somehow stilted, and it looked like the letter was written on a Bulgarian word processor.
Anyway, this one guy writes how he needs money for better equipment. He was measuring heavy metal concentrations in the Volga River, and when he went to measure cadmium, his equipment couldn’t go above 1000 percent of the maximum allowable concentration EPA. this was generally the case, his American made equipment wasnt built to measure the concentratons of heavy metals he was routinely assaying!
Whats the current life expectancy in Russia? Low 50’s?
Look folks, we gotta live here, we got no place to go. We fuck it up, we’re dead. Politics, shmolitics, this is survival.
So, the moral of the story is that socialism is the biggest threat to the environment? I can agree with that.
I have a similar story. I visted Eastern Germany just before unification. Driving from Frankfurt to Ehrfurt was one of the most surreal expieriences of my life. The polution level in E.G. was mind numbing. Thick smoke coming from coal burning power plants, Trabis spewing forth exhaust that would make the biggest SUV here look like an environmentalist’s dream. And all I kept thinking was: this is the BEST of the eastern block countries…
Seriously, though, I’m all for cracking down on polluters. But there are plenty of ways to do that in the context of a free market. The gov’t tends to force a particular solution instead of just requiring specific results and letting complanies get creative. Let a hundred flowers bloom!
How exactly do you crack down on pollution in the “context of a free market” (which you seem to define as ‘without government control’) except for waiting for things to become so fucked that whatever your doing is unprofitable? There is NO place for human rights or the environment in the corporate model. Corporations have an obligation to only one entity- their shareholders. They have no obligation to do anything except get money for their shareholders. In fact, they are obligated not to do stuff that would cause their shareholders to lose money.
This isn’t to say that there isn’t the occasional philanthropic executive. There are plenty. And this isn’t to say that there arn’t some cases where it ultimately pays to protect your workers and the environment. Traditionally, it works best to pay your workers more so that they can afford to buy your products. But this all breaks down when your workers are half a world away from your market where you don’t have to deal with the consequences of their poverty in your business plan.
And don’t doubt for a moment that there are consequences. Species have and will continue to go extinct because of commerce. Short of cloning, this is something that can never be fixed. When we wait for something to become unprofitable before looking at its human and environmental costs, irreperaple damage has and will continue to occur. It is not self-righting. No matter how much your think it is, it isn’t.
There is no easy answer. I personally don’t believe it’s even possible to get legislation or social norms or whatever changed to the point that it would make a major difference in the current climate. You saw people’s shocked reactions when I recommended that we, say, try consuming less crap. It’s unthinkable. And as long as we consider a change in lifestyle unthinkable, we will not see signifigant and real improvements in human rights or the environment. The current paradigm doesn’t work that way. And if you ask any number of people in third world countries, they will say the current system doesn’t work at all.
“which you seem to define as ‘without government control’”
Where did you get that in my post?
One example of a free market solution is to sell pollution rights. Rather than force all companies into a single solution, one can limit overall pollution levels by allowing some companies’ lower pollutant levels to be “sold” to another complany with higher levels. You could still target the overall pollution level to be the same as what is produced by our current system, but it would economically reward pollution cutting technology.
And, BTW, I’m a big fan of “consuming less crap”. I try to do it myeslf, but don’t try to legislate it for others.
Well, if you can find a politically acceptable and effective way to regulate non-point-source polluters, then write your findings up and send them to the EPA. They’ve been working on that for years, and haven’t come up with anything. And they instructed the states to study the issue, and they have been working on it for years.
Many pollutants have been diminished with the regulations in place on point-source polluters such as manufacturing plants. The major source of non-point-source pollution may indeed be the automobile, but if you think you can take the automobile away from the common American and get him to embrace public transportation, you’re in for a rude awakening. Yet some progress has indeed been made.
Best example? The percentage of pollutants that were disposed of in oceans has dropped over the last 30 years from something in the teens to ZERO. Yes, zero. There is no ocean dumping whatsoever. That’s progress for cleanliness, isn’t it?
I think we’re doing as well as we can. Some problems aren’t so simple. Take your mercury example. Mercury in riverbeds is a recent issue that came up here in Missouri. The problem with the “solution” is that it may only make things worse. Trying to get it out of the river may only stir it up. We lack the technology to remove it without releasing it from the riverbed into the rest of the water flow.
In short, have some patience. Technology is still catching up to what they require. ALOT of sites have been cleaned up with CERCLA, and more are being cleaned up as discovered. Problems are being addressed as discovered. The series of environmental laws passed in the early 70’s are a MUCH bigger success story than such notable failures as the “War on Poverty” and the “War on Drugs.”
(BTW, how do we even know what a “pristine” wilderness is? Forests in North America have always been managed since the moment we got here. They were managed forests when the native americans lived here before we arrived. Regardless of the technology level of the population, any forest where people lived was managed. So is there any inherent virtue to preserving “pristine” wilderness, when such a thing existed only where people didn’t, and is therefore just unusable wasteland?)
So if wealth is solely a product of natural resources and/or fortunate placement at a port, would anybody care to expound on the reason for Switzerland’s per capita GDP of $31,700?
All very true. But there are few reasons for patting ourselves on the back. All we have done to date is refuse to address the root of the problem and convince ourselves we’re being green little consumers because we’ve quit using leaded.
You don’t really believe that, do you?
I’m not saying that progress hasn’t been made. I just don’t think we’re in any way justified in feeling either smug or complaisant. It’s a classic case of denial. Let’s use the fact that the engine burns cleaner to fool ourself that it’s ok to drive a vehicle twice the size. We use recycled plastic bags to buy our groceries, so it’s ok to drive three times the distance to the shop. One step forward, two steps back.
And above all we have to shake the notion, very prevalent in this thread, that western, capitalist, economics is the only way to measure the worth of something. This is a system that’s done us well to date, but works on the flawed premise that all resources are infinitely renewable.
And this is an excellent example of the short term thinking I’m talking about. We can’t think of a way of exploiting this resource at the moment to our profit, so it is therefore “wasteland”, without value? The point is that each pristine wilderness, like any other environment, is unique and therefore, by any method of measuring value worth considering, priceless. It is a totally unrenewable resource, we have no way of recreating it if we should suddenly find that we need it. This is why bio-diversity is the only real ‘wealth’ that our planet has. Once it has gone, it’s gone forever.
Highly skilled labor. Large exports of finished goods which require skilled labor to produce. Let’s not forget the Swiss financial institutions which do a good business as well.
And I’ve had a bit of time to think on it, and I’ve decided I AM going to argue for a zero-sum economic model. The caveat here is that we assume we’ve reached carrying capacity of physical resources. Wealth can be created endlessly, but wealth is simply marks on paper if you can’t use it to obtain physical goods and services. Let’s take a couple of examples.
Sometime in the future, the world is very wealthy. Stock deals, tons of stock options, all kinds of wealth all over the place. Two wealthy people, Person A and Person B walk into a real estate agent’s office. Both have decided they want to purchase and live in Frank Llyod Wright’s Falling Water. Person A makes a bid of 50 gojillion dollars. Person B offers 60 gojillion dollars. A bidding war ensues, but ultimately only one person can own the house. Person B wins the war with a bid of 1,325 gojillion dollars. Person A screams and raves about how wealthy he is. He calls his CPA, he calls his broker, he shows his checkbook and all the zeros in his statements. None of it matters because there’s still only one Falling Water.
Still in the future, two new Persons, C and D. C wants to get laid. Specifically he wants the services of the fabulous porn star Madame X who is working at a ranch in Nevada. D is also feeling frisky. He recalls Madame X and is also desperately smitten with desire. Both board their private jets and fly to Nevada. Madame X’s agent meets them at the door and says that she only accepts one client at a time and she is booked for the rest of the day except for a single block of time. Again a bidding war ensues, but, no matter how many zeros are in the checkbooks of Persons C and D, one of them is going to walk away disappointed.
Wealth is created, not just distributed. BUT, wealth is useless except as a means of obtaining goods and services. These goods and services are ruled by the laws of the physical universe. You will simply NOT have enough for everyone if their consumption rate exceeds carrying capacity. We’re not quite sure what carrying capacity of the planet is, and certainly recycling/reusing or changes in technology/lifestyles change the impact each individual’s consumption makes on the whole, but surely we can all agree it is finite?
Now, the rest of my assertion, that the entire world can’t consume at US levels. This is a guesstimate, the world may be able to support it, but I’d be very suprised. Let’s look at some numbers.
The population of the US(from the CIA factbook) is roughly 280,562,489 (July 2002 est.). According to the International Programs Center, U.S. Bureau of the Census, the total population of the World, projected to 4/22/03 at 16:26:33 GMT (4/22/03 at 12:26:33 PM EDT) is 6,288,272,900.
6,288,272,900/280,562,489 ~= 22.41
So, we’ll look up the US consumption numbers in the FactBook and multiply them by 22.41. Let’s look at a simple statistic. Consumption of a non-renewable resource. The United States consumed 19.7 million barrels of oil per day in 2000 19,700,000 * 366(Leap Year) * 22.41 = 161,580,582,000
This site has some data on EUR(Estimated Ultimately Recoverable) oil reserves. Surely recovery techniques will improve, so we’ll take the high end of their scale.
Now the estimates in the article are not using the same growth factor we are. If we’re saying it is possible for everyone in the world to have a lifestyle comprable to the US then we should project what such a lifestyle would cost, especially in terms of non-renewable resources. The concept of “wealth” still falls apart if you can’t use it to buy gas because there isn’t any to be had.
Top end of the scale. 2,200,000,000,000 barrels of oil EUR / 161,580,582,000 used per year = 13.62 years before all the oil is gone.
I stand by my assertion that, barring tremendous changes/technological advances, the world can not support a global population with a lifestyle, especially consumption levels, like the US.
“You will simply NOT have enough for everyone if their consumption rate exceeds carrying capacity. We’re not quite sure what carrying capacity of the planet is, and certainly recycling/reusing or changes in technology/lifestyles change the impact each individual’s consumption makes on the whole, but surely we can all agree it is finite?”
Steve:
I see your point and agree to you to an extent. If you phrase the question the way you did, of course it’s true-- if we’re at the carrying capacity, then each population group equal to the US in size (about 5% of the total) can’t consume more than 5% of the resources.
The problem comes in defining the carrying capacity. And using a static analysis (i.e., new technologies don’t replace older ones). I’m sure your ancestor from 300 years ago got on his equivalent of the SDMB and showed that the world did not have enough wood to burn to support a wealthy lifestyle for eveyone on earth. Now, what would’ve been wrong with his argument? IIRC, back then oil was considered this nucence substance that you tried to avoid if you encountered it while digging in the ground.
Anyway, as I said, I do agree with your concept, but am perhaps a bit more optimistic than you that newer technologies (solar power, for instance) will keep expanding the pie to make it, in effect, a non-zero sum game. Will there always be some folks more wealthy than others? Sure. When everyone has all the same shit you have, you don’t feel all that wealthy anymore. That seems to be part of human nature.
John, I read Steve’s post as a simple rebuttal to Sam’s even simpler (beyond ridiculous) ideologue’s assertion that the entire world could live as well as the US if they’d only just try to be more productive.
Your general point should be obvious to most others, though - the entire world could live at a similar standard, but only within the limits of the resources of Spaceship Earth, and not at the current highest level.
Actually, I believe Sam meant that they just needed to BE as productive. Frankly, the productivity of the US worker has less to do with the workers themselves, than with the investment that companies make to allow those workers to be productive. Hey, it’s certainly not our stellar K-12 education system that spits out these uber-workers. And the implication is that it’s not all that hard to set up factories in other, lower wage countries, and get worker productivity damn well close to what it is here. Now, there is the issue of overall infrastructure to deal with. It doesn’t help to have wonderfully skilled workers if there’s no transportation to get the goods out or if the power goes off 5 times every day. Or if there is the threat that the gov’t might experience a coup and all the industries will be nationalized. All this factors into what workers are paid. A worker in country “x” might be just as SKILLED as one in country “y”, but the overall productivity and risk level might skew their pay scales considerably.
The trouble being, we don’t know what the ‘limits of the resources of Spaceship Earth’ really are.
Consider what you are using to read this post. It is based in part on a silicon chip. Silicon is sand, which used to be useless. Human ingenuity has changed the sand into something wonderful - in fact, created wealth.
In the nineteenth century, it would have been obvious that not everyone could own their own horse - think of the manure problems. Instead, we own cars, which run faster, and don’t consume nearly as much when they are not being used. Our growth was not limited by the carrying capacity of the US for horses.
Or the world is coming to an end because we are running out of oil (again). Does that mean we are going to be limited by how much oil we can find? Or does it mean that we are using oil because oil is cheap, and when oil is no longer cheap, because we are running low, we switch to nuclear breeder reactors, or finally figure out practical fusion, or build solar collection panels in space and use sunlight?
Our limits are not always our resources. Our limits are only our imagination.
India doesn’t have famines anymore. Smallpox is gone. Lake Erie has fishermen again. Life expectancy at birth is trending upwards all over the world.
The only place we are not improving is in the crowds of environmentalists following the US around saying, “Well, that will never work.”
That’s true. New technologies and changes in consumption habits/lifestyle choices can drastically affect how much of the pie is edible as well as how much we eat. I’ve always acknowledged that. This would underpin my point that more than just mismanagement which is keeping other countries from having a prosperous society a la US.
It’s not enough to say they’re mismanaged, or “not as productive”. It should be acknowledged that the pie simply isn’t big enough given our current technology and the costs implicit in maintaining a US style of living. A good bit of it isn’t even cooked yet. If they tried to pony up to the table they’d likely as not end up with raw dough. This is assuming they were able to find a seat in the first place.
This has been my point. The relative wealth of individual nations isn’t a simple issue which can be understood by saying “it is due to mismanagement” or “they just don’t produce enough”. It is a limitation of our physical world that, even perfectly distributed, our physical resources combined with our current technology could not allow every person on the planet to have a lifestyle like the average US citizen enjoys.
But the fact remains that many poor countries HAVE become prosperous while others have stagnated. Look at Argentina. It was not long ago one of the richest countries in the world. I don’t remember the exact figure, but it was something like one of the top 10, as measured by pre capita GDP. Now it’s a basket case. primarily becuase the gov’t has not been able to create a stable environment for investment. According to your point of view, as Argentina sank into poverty, some other country should’ve popped up into prosperity AS A DIRECT RESULT.
You see 20 hungry wolves fighting over a carcus that can only feed 10 and I see several wolves smart enough to leave that carcus and go find another one. Lift your head up from the carcus for a minute and you’ll see it’s not the only grub around.
Do you have any data to back that assertion? Are you suggesting that the world is about as rich as it can possibly be, given our level of technology?
How do you explain South Korea, which went from being a 3rd world country filled with ‘sweatshops’ into a modern, 1st world country with a high standard of living?
I don’t think you really understand how wealth is created and what it represents. It’s not about consuming more resources. It’s not about grabbing a ‘piece of the pie’. Wealth is created by focusing human effort into the task of making human lives better.
Look at Iraq - a country with more natural riches than the majority of countries on the Earth. And an economic basket case. Why? Because the wealth was spent on non-productive things. Building a military, then destroying it. Educating children, then killing them. Lavish palaces, which represent the wealth of a handful of people, but which cannot be leveraged to create still more wealth.
Wealth comes from hard work, directed in an intelligent way. The beauty of capitalism as a wealth-creating tool is that it directs labor into the practice of efficient construction of things society wants. It has NOTHING to do with how much we consume, other than the minimum level for comfort. A country that can educate its children and look after the health of its citizens is wealthier than a country that cannot, even if their overall consumption of material resources is the same. A man who can use his brains to grow enough food to eat in an hour, and devote 12 hours to leisure, education, and improving the quality of his home is richer than a man who must labor 13 hours a day to grow the same food, even if their overall consumption is the same.
Now, it’s true that wealthier countries tend to consume more. Part of that is because we use high-energy industries to focus and magnify our brains and muscles. But part is the result of wealth, not the requirement. Heating our homes is not a requirement for producing the GDP we produce - we heat our homes because we can afford to.
You seem to be saying that all the investment capital in the world is tied up elsewhere, giving them no chance. This is simply not true. Investment capital flows where returns are highest. Set up the conditions for investment in any country on the planet, and investment capital will flow there. And with it will come engineers, scientists, mechanics, etc. And you know what they’ll do once they’re there? They’ll set up a sweatshop to maximize their return on investment. BUt they’ll have to pay more money than what people can earn elsewhere, or they’ll get no employees.
Initially, profits will be high - that’s the reward you get for taking a risk investing in a new country. After all, there could be a war, or a revolution, or a new government that confiscates the wealth. Or, well-meaning-but-clueless knuckleheads at home could arrange a boycott of the ‘sweatshop’ and force it to close.
But let’s say that doesn’t happen. Our sweatshop stays open. What happens then? Well, now other companies become attracted to the region. The first one proved that investment could work. Profits are high. So others move into the area. Competition for labor starts driving up wages, which drives up the cost of production. Eventually, profits stabilize due to competition, as do wages.
Then what happens? Well, if the country is run well, the taxes collected from the businesses and employees are sunk back into the economy. The businesses themselves need better communications, transportation, etc. Job training programs help educate the population. Better nutrition causes the people to be healthier and more productive.
As their productivity increases, profits start to rise again. This attracts more business, as does the better infrastructure and more educated population. The cycle endlessly repeats: improvements, better infrastructure, new businesses, more competition, a more efficient workforce, etc.
This is how economic growth works. This is how poor countries become rich countries.
If you attempt to jump-start this by mandating minimum wages, unreasonable social safety nets, exprensive environmental standards, etc., the end result will be to drive capital investment away. Cue the music for a new round of poverty.
You’ve provided no evidence for this whatsoever. Here’s a clue: As we’ve gotten wealthier, the amount of available resources has INCREASED. Prices for most raw materials have FALLEN. There’s more to go around now than there was 50 years ago, when the world GDP was only fraction of what it is today.
There are no limits to growth. One asteroid can provide all the metal the Earth uses in a decade. Sunlight is a virtually limitless energy source. Where 90% of Americans used to be employed in agriculture, today it’s something like 5%. We can make far, far more food than the world needs, and we can do that indefinitely. With a hydrogen economy, we could ship concentrated energy around the planet for use in industry, for as long as the sun continues to shine. Petroleum reserves are still growing, not shrinking.
In the face of all that, how can you possibly say that it’s a lack of resources that prevents the 3rd world from becoming wealthy?
Well, of course there are. At the very least, there are limits to intelligent growth. It may be entirely possible to sustain an Earthly population of 20 billion people. I still think its a bad idea. As in, yeeeeech!
“One asteroid can provide all the metal…” Jesus, man, how big is your catchers mitt? We’re gonna go and fetch one? It would take us three years to get to Mars and back, who the hell is gonna sign up to go to the asteriod belt and back?
“…that it’s a lack of resources that prevents the 3rd world from becoming wealthy?”
What prevents the 3rd world from being wealthy is that we’ve got all the money and we won’t give it to them. The global economy only coddles those who are useful to it, a ricksha driver in Calcutta ain’t buying no Toyotas.
Of course we could feed the world, I only wish we wanted to.
“What prevents the 3rd world from being wealthy is that we’ve got all the money and we won’t give it to them.”
I guess you could say that your statement is true, in the most literal sense since you said BEING as opposed to BECOMING. But surely you didn’t mean to make such a vacuous statement, so I’m assuming that you’d support your statement with that modification made (being --> becoming).
If the only way to be beome wealthy is for someone to give you money, how did anyone become wealthy in the first place? Your statement (substituting the word “becoming”) so clearly contradicts itself that I feel a bit foolish even pointing it out.
Mtgman, my point in that post was that such a high GNP does not arise in a vacuum. An economy based on skilled labor and specialized services takes time to develop, and cannot happen overnight. It seemed to me your (and others’) contention that all rich countries got that way because of their geography. Switzerland is offered as an example against that belief.
I forgot to mention that additionally, many African countries are rich in resources but economically poor, making their problem clearly one of mismanagement (be that economic or political). For instance, look at Sierra Leone, whose natural resources include diamonds and gold, both obviously valuable on the world market, yet whose per capita GNP is only $500. Sometimes the issues are more than luck and the greed of the wealthy countries.
Ok, I see some misunderstandings of what I’m actually trying to say, so I’m going to lay it out as straightforward as I can.
It takes more than competent management to create a prosperous country.
It would take FAR more than competent management to create a prosperous world community. (i.e. everyone on the planet with a USian lifestyle)
ONE of the factors in the equation is availability of physical resources. This availability changes with changes in technology(being able to harvest asteroids(while completely impractical at the moment) may become feasible in the future). This also fluctuates depending on how necessary certain resources are to the consumers. Hundreds of years ago, as John Mace pointed out, oil was an annoyance, now it is a lynchpin of modern life. In the future we may use hydrogen, solar, geothermal, hydro, or something even more exotic which hasn’t even been dreamed of yet.
There are other barriers to prosperity beyond simple mismanagement. Market availability, resources, location, abilities and education of a countries population, politics, etc.
I am also not interested in arguing about the economic concept of “wealth” where such wealth exists only on paper. I recognize some usefulness in such concepts, but they do not always map coherently to the real world. The movement of capital(meaning monies directly used to build infrastructure or anchor a business) is about as far as I’ll go down such roads. Speaking of the “wealth of individuals” is a side issue IMO because the availability of physical resources is still the determining factor in transactions. Well, I guess one could trade on-paper wealth for a numbers in a different column of on-paper wealth, but I don’t see such a transaction as significant when talking about quality of life of the population of the gobe. It only becomes interesting to me when someone tries to USE that wealth to improve their position/comfort in the physical world.
Certainly the world can be improved. Certainly it is possible, in theory, to achieve some minimum where no one has to work in sweatshops and everyone has X amount of per-capita wealth which is adequate to achieve a healthy lifestyle. Not opulent, but not poverty. I am emphatically NOT saying that the status quo is the best we can do. I’m simply saying that scarcity and distribution are still real problems and they are both part of the barrier to prosperity.
