This is a WAG since it never happenned, but I’s imgine that Americans would act the same way if a chinese spy plane ended up on American soil.
In regards to sensitivity at anything that can be perceived as a slight, had any freedom fries lately? Heaven forbid a sovereign nation disagree with us, let’s pour their wine down the sink!
This is a good idea for a debate, yet for most part, outside of the OP, it seems to have an abundant lack of evidence.
Mostly there seems to be a bunch of moralizing and lame, obtuse appeals to supply and demand.
I won’t pretend to predict the future, but when it come’s to natural resources, we DO have a zero sum game. Yes, prices will rise with demand. The point is what effect these price raises will have on our economies. So… justify your explanation of this effect with facts please.
Of course! Americans should push China in a situation where they will invade Taiwan, killing hundreds of thousands on each side and ruining both their economies!! Just so that the West can go on!
Hopefully, my father, mother and brother in-law won’t get killed in the process but hey - they’re not worth as much as American lives, right?
Very good msmith, you can explain simple supply and demand.
However, you have not answered the question. How will supply and demand prevent depletion of resources and ultimately decreased standard of living.
As demand for food increases, the price of food increases, … then what - people starve or eat what?
I think everyone would agree that both the human population and average consumption are increasing while the total area of productive land is fixed or in decline. So isn’t it obvious that as access to resources (lets keep it simple and stick with food) decreases so does the standard of living.
Mister Malthus thought the same. However, the primary limiting factor on food is not productive land… but rather transportation and technology. We have, in the last century, increased crop yields by… goodness knows how much. Ten times, perhaps. Enough that we actually pay people not to far. Farmer subsidies.
Food, for the forseeable future, is not an issue.
Now we are looking at people in China having the same ecological footprint as those living in the USA.
Currently:
USA ~10 hectares/capita
China 1.2 hectares/capita
So, that is a 10 times increase in the amount of land required to move China to an ecological footprint of the USA.
Now we will have 1,300,000,000 happy Chineese.
How about the 1 billion Indians?
200 millian Indonesians?
Better start terraforming, or perhaps we should keep destroying habitats and ecosystems.
Thank you. Now are you able to understand it?
Who said standard of living was going to increase? Eventually as resources become scarce, they will become more expensive for everyone.
You think wrong.
As has already been pointed out to you, there are alternatives:
-Increasing China’s productivity per hectare
-Utilizing more farmland in countries like the US
-Industrialized farms
-Genetically modified foods
So while yes the surface area of the Earth is fixed, there is a lot of room to increase the productivity of the land we have add more land that is being underutilized. It is not as simple as “we are running out of land”
I don’t see the problem.
All you have to do is convince the Chinese government to adopt a completely socialistic economic model to control their country.
That should take care of any energy waste activities.
No cars, except for the governing class. A “People’s Rapid Mass Transit System” (PRMTS) for the plebs, wind or solar powered, of course, no useless energy consuming goods such as pogo sticks or similar useless goodies.
Equal wealth (or lack thereof) all round and no extra burden on planet Earth, or Gaiea, if you prefer.
Yes. It all makes sense. Before you post, would any of you be so kind as to declare your expertise in, let us say, Economics?
Yes, I haven’t, but neither have any of you.
mssmith, you might do well to read the essay by Jared Diamond on the Easter Island’s inhabitants slow deforestation, leading to eventual societal collapse:
Let’s try not to make the same mistake, eh?
OK, demand for food increases. Food prices therefore increase. Does that mean people must therefore starve?
Why do you assume that we can’t increase supply to match the demand? Demand increases, prices increase, suppliers look at the high prices and decide they want to get some of those profits. Around the world, the problem for farmers is LOW food prices. Farmers are going bankrupt because the world is awash in surplus food.
So why are some people starving? Every famine is the result of a political problem. Poor harvests are caused by drought or insects or what have you. Starvation is caused by political failures. Every famine in the last hundred years could have been prevented, if only the neccesary political decisions had been made. What are those? End wars. Why was there famine in Ethiopia? Because warfare meant that farmers were unable to raise their crops…if they farmed bandits/soldiers would steal their produce, or kill them. And the bandits/soldiers made it impossible for aid agencies to safely give away food. Warfare causes famine, end the war and you end the famine. Other famines, like the North Korean famine, are caused by political mismanagment shading into a deliberate policy of starvation. Starve the peasants who might oppose the totalitarian regime, reward the most loyal. If the only source of food is the state, then one must be loyal to the state or die. And of course, collectivized agriculture and state controlled economies have extremely poor productivity records compared to private farms. And even when totalitarian states don’t actually wish to cause starvation, the abscence of accountability makes starvation at most an annoyance. See Amartya Sen’s work.
If you compare food production in the US to food production in China, you are going to see some dramatic differences, notably the number of acres available per capita. The US has very low population density compared to most countries. Yet other countries with much much higher population densities than the US still manage to feed themselves quite nicely. How is it that Belgium or the Netherlands or South Korea can produce enough food for themselves, even at many times the population density of the United States?
Again, it is a mistake to think that US land use models are the only ones that are appropriate to a wealthy country. The US, Canada and Australia are atypical because of our large unpopulated regions. But Europe and Asia have many wealthy countries that are more densely populated than China and yet still manage to feed everyone easily.
One more point, about overfishing. Again, overfishing is a problem because normal market forces don’t apply. A farmer with an apple orchard doesn’t cut down his trees for firewood, because he knows that those trees will produce for him next year. But an individual fisherman has no incentive to reduce his catch no matter how hard it is on the fish stocks, because each fish that he leaves is just going to be caught by someone else. Since the stock of wild fish is a common resource there is no incentive for each individual to manage their take sustainably. A hundred years ago, it seemed as if the supply of fish was so much greater than the demand that we could treat wild fish as free for the taking. But now we know that is not the case. And so–since fish are a limited resource–we have to arrange the distribution of that resource somehow. Allowing everyone to go out in a boat and take as much as they want will lead to disaster. And so we must have some sort of regulation. But that is difficult, since fish stocks are a global resource but there is no real global governance to regulate them.
What that has to do with China becoming rich and eating everyone else’s food, I have no idea. I suppose the point was brought up in an attempt to discredit the idea that technology or capitalism could provide more food for people who wanted that food.
But the intractability of overfishing is more like pollution…if we allow people to dump wastes into the public air or water, they will do so since there is no incentive not to, even if each dumper would have a net benefit from an overall reduction in dumping even taking into account the loss of their own free dumping. This is only a failure of capitalism if we naively believe that wild fish, air, or water are free resources in unlimited quantities like we used to be able to treat them. If we recoginize that they are NOT free, then we can arrange markets in such a way as to avoid treating them as free, and suddenly the problems are manageable again.
Sam, I put “standard of living” in quotes in the hope that it would be clear that I mean gas-guzzling SUVs and our disposable attitude towards darn near everything. I obviously failed to make that clear.
I have no problem with anyone improving their lives. I hope governments won’t discourage that idea. I hope that governments, public service groups, non-profit organizations and pretty much everyone else will encourage everyone (not just the people in India and/or China) to make more-efficient use of the resources they consume (examples in my earlier post).
Saying that “governments should” was a bad choice of words, and not thought out as well as I had originally hoped.
Virility and fertility are not exactly the same thing. If I understand it correctly (which occasionally happens) the demand for Tiger Penis is the same as the demand for Viagra–guys feel more manly if they can get it up more often and keep it up longer. If we can educate them that Viagra produces this result and tiger penis does not, we can save the tigers (and incidentally save them some money, since I believe that authentic tiger penis extract is darned expensive) and make a tidy profit for the drug companies as well.
Well, I did actually understand it before.
Remember the OP. This is what the thread is about. If all the world has the same level of consumption as the western world, then everyone will have to lower our standard of living.
“China’s economy is growing incredibly fast and, at this rate, their standard of living could be similar to Western ountries in 20 - 30 years. This is very desirable for several reasons. One is simply a matter of justice: the Chinese have no less right to an affluent lifestyle than we do.”
We have a limit to the amount of land available.
That land is there to be shared by species other than humans. Do you imagine earth as one big farm?
Sure efficiencies in production are always being made. At the same time productive land is being lost, through poor land management. Many parts of the world are already practicing unsustainable farming techniques - the land will not be as productive in the future due to loss of nutrients and topsoil.
Well, not exactly “done,” but it does give me hope. For tigers and their private parts, anyway.
When I was in China (March 2002), one of the menu items that I enjoyed* was “Three Penis Soup”–ox, sheep and pig, if you must know.
*Enjoyed reading on the menu, rather than enjoyed eating.
Let’s be clear about what it means when prices rise. It does NOT mean that standards of living must fall. It also does not mean shortages.
What it means is that the allocation of resources in society change. Values change. Behaviour changes. Take gasoline, for example. It is not a reduction in your standard of living to drive a Volkswagan Jetta TurboDiesel that gets 50 mpg, stead of a Hummer that gets 8. People choose to buy Hummers for many reasons - status, mostly. If gas rises in price, additional societal pressure will be put on SUVs. They will stop being ‘cool’, and people will of their own volition choose to stop driving them.
In the meantime, a higher price for oil means a lower relative price for oil alternatives. Wind and solar become more competitive. The reluctance to use nuclear power will fade. Alternatives will appear. Perhaps the height of cachet will no longer be the size of the vehicle, but how exotic and efficient its power plant is.
You can already see changes like this in wealthy liberal communities. I have a fairly famous friend who lives on Saltspring Island near Vancouver, which is a sort of ‘hippie commune’ (a very wealthy one). They built a house on a lake, and spared no expense to make it energy efficient, with composting toilets, earth berm construction, solar heating, etc. Why? Not because it was the economically smart thing to do, but because in that community, it’s a status symbol to ‘live lightly on the land’.
Different economic pressures create social change. In a free economy, this tends to push society towards efficient outcomes. In the meantime, resources divert to research into the areas where shortages appear, etc.
The worry about food is ridiculous, however. If there’s one thing we aren’t short of, it’s food. The U.S. could make ten times as much food as it currently does, if it wanted to. The amount of GDP spent on food production has fallen steadily since the turn of the last century, and is a small fraction of what it once was.
And while the increasing cost of energy may take a bit out of our wealth, it doesn’t mean that we’ll get poorer - it means that the rate at which we get richer may slow down. But that may be more than offset by the increase in world economic productivity due to a rise in Chinese and Indian productivity.
This is a very good thread and I have enjoyed reading every post. I don’t know anything that I have to add, except for this thought. If this discussion was going on 15 years ago, it would be about Japan.
Make that “50 years ago” and I would agree with you. Japan was well into full scale modernization by the late eighties.
Yep, it makes me sick to think about all the Chinese and Indian kids stuck behind a plow or doing piecework in some manufactory when they could be going to school and learning how to do some really productive things. Imagine a planet where 90% of our intellectual talent isn’t just pissed down the drain into farms and factories. Imagine all those kids instead studying science, computers, math, languages, engineering, law, economics, or heck even literature, art, music, or drama, man does not live by bread (or rice) alone. Just think of what science and technology might be doing if we had 10 times the number of really smart people in the field. A kid who could have been a physics Nobel Laureate is right now working in some shithole brick factory in Guangdong. What a waste.
Been following this tread for a while. Its very interesting. I guess I don’t get why its so hard to understand about the food issue. If you live in America, look around. All around you is land that was formally used to grow crops…in a lot of cases that land is used for other things now. Yet, we have surpluses every year, and farmer are paid NOT to grow food. Do you get it yet? If China was up to the same standard as the west, they could grow the same amount of food they currently are (or MORE) on a fraction of the amount of land currently in place.
Someone threw around a figure that America is 10 times as efficient in our production of agriculture as we were say 100 years ago. I don’t know if its true or not, but lets take that figure. Now, if China were to become 10 times as efficient in agricultural production as they are today, they could have 10 times the population as today (gods forbid) while using exactly the same amount of land currently in production. How do you see them starving??? More likely, their population will stablize or even drop if they adopt western style ways (populations are falling in America and western Europe if I recall correctly), which means that, if they become more efficient in their food production they will be able to feed thier populations better on less land. Get it?
The same goes for other resources. China needs more steel for all the new cars? Become more efficient in producing the steel they have (say, again, up to western standards), recycle, use alternatives. I don’t see whats so hard to understand about all this. Its not rocket science.
Now, if you want to talk about the environmental impact, then I would agree…a China that consumes (and wastes) on par with, say, western Europe or America would have a drastic effect on the environment. IF they modeled after America or Europe of TODAY. But why should they? Won’t they more likely jump on the technologies of 20 years from now, when this supposed affluence comes into play? And the technologies of THAT time might very well be hydrogen fuel cells, efficient pebble bed micro nuke reactors, greater recycling capabilities (garbage into oil, etc), possibly fusion, alternative fuels AND materials, stuff that replaces hydrocarbon based fuels and things like steel.
This isn’t all pie in the sky. As the price of oil or the scarcity of some resource or other drives up the price, alternatives that are currently available (or new ones that haven’t been pursued because there is currently no need) will come to the for. I don’t see us as a modern Easter Island counterpart, doomed to slowly use up all our trees building large statues. The difference is we have a whole world, instead of a small island. The difference is our rate of change and development…where the Easter Islanders were fairly stagnant (like most cultures/civilizations back then).
So, to answer the OP, IMO the world can easily afford a rich China…and a rich India, a rich Africa, etc etc. The world will be a better place with a rich (insert country here) IMO, at least from a human suffering perspective.
-XT