Wealth accumulated by First World countries is largely based on riches taken from Third World countries. For example, the destruction of India's textile industry, the takeover of the spice trade, the genocide of native American tribes, and African slavery all served to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Below the fold is an interesting article that discusses the links between the accumulation of wealth concomitant with the over-exploitation of nature and how they cause poverty.
I am interested to read your reactions to this article, dear readers.
Two of the great economic myths of our time allow people to deny this intimate link, and spread misconceptions about what poverty is.
First, the destruction of nature and of people's ability to look after themselves are blamed not on industrial growth and economic colonialism, but on poor people themselves. Poverty, it is stated, causes environmental destruction. The disease is then offered as a cure: further economic growth is supposed to solve the very problems of poverty and ecological decline that it gave rise to in the first place.
The environment is seen as a shared resource when people depend directly upon it for their very lives. As modern society becomes farther removed from nature, it is easier for us to see the environment as a source of "free wealth" to be exploited by a few individuals, rather than a source of life to be utilized with care by groups of people. So it is easy for First World countries to destroy the environment wantonly while remaining blissfully unaware of the damage we are inflicting .. until too late?
When society's relationship with nature is based on sustenance, nature exists as a form of common wealth. It is redefined as a "resource" only when profit becomes the organising principle of society and sets off a financial imperative for the development and destruction of these resources for the market.
However much we choose to forget or deny it, all people in all societies still depend on nature. Without clean water, fertile soils and genetic diversity, human survival is not possible. Today, economic development is destroying these onetime commons, resulting in the creation of a new contradiction: development deprives the very people it professes to help of their traditional land and means of sustenance, forcing them to survive in an increasingly eroded natural world.
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It is a commonly held misconception of the left, that poor people are caused by avaricious capitalists. Because of technological advances the world economy is not a zero-sum game, win-win solutions are possible. Concentrating on historical injustices only serves to divert the attention of the poverty-striken from the actions needed to improve their own lots.
This is not to say that we aren't quilty of some of the things she talks about. Nor does it mean we shouldn't strive to help them. But playing the blame game won't help. Only the patient application of strategies that are actually shown to help will acomplish the worthy goal of reducing world poverty. This weeks Nobel Peace prize, highlighted one such program.
Sigh. Focusing on past injustices (re: bigTom's comment) is just participating in the blame game. It also attempts to further the collectivists agenda of casting enterprise as the bad guy.
God, for some value of God, did not create everyone equal. Some are brighter, stronger, better able to make a living than others. That some fall off the bottom of the economic heap is just the way it goes. Get over it.
Well, I tend to agree with this article. Our lifestyle, based on consumption of many things we do not need, does increase poverty in other places. Especailly when we undersell agri-biz items like cotton, which is subsidized by our governement to be so cheap that 3rd world countries cannot compete and sell it themselves. This is not the free market capitalism that we brag of as the underpinnings of our democratic economy. Yes, we are all different, and yes, compassion is a survival behavior too.
Glo, I hope we can do better than just telling those less fortunate than ourselves "just get over it". Any religion which believes in a caring God, would stress the importance of giving them a hand up.
And Glo. Given the lack of interest in technical (Science/Engineering) careers shown by the children of the rich world, versus the keen interest among the children in the developing world, I wouldn't be at all surprised if our great-grandchildren, are the ones needing the helping hand.
The essay reminded me of Garret Hardin's classic 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons" from a third world perspective. The commons has been destroyed with the introduction of corporate models and the stability of societies has been changed completely. However, the author looks on the subsistance economy with a litle too much nostalgia.
There is no doubt in my mind that the 'North' has taken much from the 'South' while the returns have not nearly been as great. What has been introduced by the 'North' has been a coin with two sides - for example, medical care and public health technology has prolonged lives, but has also contributed to overpopulation, which inevitably leads to the diminution of each person's share of the commons. The same thing can be seen with the introduction of higher yield crops and technologies. More people results in more pollution.
There is no way that society in the 'South' could go back to the old ways with current population trends. The old commons was stable with a much smaller population and it would not be possible for India, for instance, to be able to provide for 1 billion people with a land that used to independantly sustain and support ~150 million.
Another thing that bothers me is that the author seems to look back fondly on a society with a stagnant social structure. It's like many social conservatives looking back fondly on the good old days, which were good for some, but certainly not good for all. We often daydream about being "more in touch with the land" and "living the simple life" like people were a few hundred years ago, but this is almost certainly not in line with the way that people's lives actually were in most places only a few generations ago. The population was held in check by short life spans, infant mortality, rigid class structures and other things that we no longer face. It was only in the most benign environments that there was anything like the idyllic primitive life we sometimes imagine.
Natural Cynic, and consider that hundreds of years ago, the only way for a man to be wealthy, was on the backs of the poor. Now even a moderately skilled engineer in Bangalore can have many things (including a longer life-expectancy), that the richest king in the old world couldn't even dream of.
Vandana Shiva is an idiot.
Poor people are not called poor because they live in natural mud huts and wear natural fibers, but because they have a life expectancy of 40 years, one of their children in 6 does not live to see his first birthday, and half of them is illiterate (or something like that; these numbers are for Liberia). Vandana Shiva can celebrate the virtues of poverty, but she herself does not abide by them, given that she can write (I am not sure if she can read), is over 50 years old, and would not be a best-selling author without the technology based on the economic paradigm she decries. I don't know why we should listen to somebody who does not practice what she preaches.
Economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert Marks have argued that the Industrial Revolution would not be possible without the conquest of America and the subsequent labor of Peruvian Indian slaves mining silver, black African slaves harvesting sugar cane, and other forms of exploitation of non-Westerners. However, it is not like the West had not given anything back to the rest of the world during the last century. How about sanitation based on the germ theory of disease, the discovery that mosquitos cause malaria and nets can prevent it, hybrid rice and dwarf wheat that prevented the Malthusian catastrophes that were predicted by Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s? Isn't it ironic that India was historically the land of famines, and now Vandana Shiva complains that food prices in her native country are "tumbling"?
Here is a critical article about Vandana Shiva.
Hmm. The points are reasonable, but somehow I don't think that's the whole story, and she especially doesn't address the ongoing processes that tend to maintain the situation.
Some blatantly ungrounded handwaving: It seems to me that if wealth/poverty was distributed randomly, then its demographics would assume a normal-curve distribution. In contrast, the effect of "power" imbalances (that is, "wealth breeds wealth", and vice-versa) would seem to pull the curve toward a power-law distribution (the pun is unintentional!). What we're in fact seeing is the latter, and getting worse. Does this make any sense to those with actual experience in analyzing such things?
Certainly the most important task is to regain control of our governments from the looter regimes, end corporate welfare and try to establish actual free markets, which, historically, have been the best method of improving standards of living for the most people.
Didn't Greg Palast come out recently with a hypothesis that the cause of poverty among Mexican farmers is dumping of US corn in their market? The poverty then leads to the farmers leaving the land and trying to find a better life in - the US. If US farmers were not so heavily subsidized, perhaps other farmers around the world would be able to compete on a more level field.
Not just farmers, of course, but oil companies, big manufacturers (especially in aerospace), construction. The list goes on.
There's an old myth that if all the money in the world were evenly distributed tomorrow, it would be back where it started by the end of the year. I don't necessarily think that's true, because of the "power-law" factor that David Harmon alluded to above, but the real "power-law" comes from the forced redistribution of wealth from the poor and middle-class to the rich by way of taxation and government subsidies.
There are two ways to change that: One is to legally minimize your taxes (I can help with that if you live in WA) and use the money you save to support _effective_ economic justice. The other is to stop voting for Democrats and Republicans and vote for candidates who have a history of supporting small government and independent business.
Looks like this blogging engine ate my A HREF: the critical article about Vandana Shiva is at http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=17
Strangely, the higher the perceived technology of a product, the more likely it is that the producers will have used aspects of copyright, patent, or licensing law to limit the rights of purchasers to replicate, reverse engineer, or independently review. They believe the purchasers efforts to understand or replicate their product will
There are numerous governmental and businesses factions who have zero-sum assumptions so thoroughly embedded in their theology that they reflexively oppose win-win solutions. The MPAA is an excellent example. Each time a new way to copy movies has emerged, the MPAA has reflexively and fanatically opposed it, believing that every time someone gains a copy, they lose money. So far, every time the MPAA has lost its fight against some kind of copying technology, the technology has later turned into a major profit source for the MPAA. This is strong evidence that the MPAA's zero-sum theology causes it to act counter not only the interest of their customers, but also their own interest.
There are many widespread mythologies that cause people to act as if the world economy is a zero-sum game, even when there is no evidence the resulting actions will benefit anyone. Unless you consider organizations like the MPAA to be leftist, most of these mythologies are unrelated to leftism. As far as I can tell, leftists and non-leftists are subject to them in similar proportions.
Technological advances are only part of what is necessary to render the world economy other than a zero-sum game. The foundation of the world economy is energy. This is inescapable; everything we do, be it thinking, picking fruit, blogging, or surgery, requires energy. Fossil fuels are finite, and so are fissionables. If those were our only sources of energy, a zero-sum game would be ultimate inescapable. Non-zero-sum conditions would occur only while technological advances were increasing the efficiency with which energy was used used. Such periods would likely short and unpredictable.
Fortunately, a prodigious amount of energy from the sun is intercepted by the Earth every day. Compared to the typical lifespans of large mammal species seen in the fossil record, the lifespan of the sun is so huge, that for our purposes, the sun's total output is unbounded. The sun is why the world economy is not a zero-sum game.