I argue with my dad about politics quite a bit.
The Murdoch-Limbaugh-Skull and Bones socio-media complex has pretty much scooped out his brain. Apparently this happens as you age. Common sense is replaced by anger, and a desire to buy gold from goldline.
ANYWAY, I had a revelation talking to him the other day:
He genuinely doesn't believe there is "enough to go around"
He thinks there will always be inequality, that there is essentially only a fixed amount of "the good life" available. In his worldview, there will always be "people at the bottom" and "people at the top" and just staying where we, as 1st worlders, are is more than worth all the blood and treasure we expend doing so.
Suddenly, upon this revelation, his perceptions and politics made much more sense to me. The "red scare" is based on the notion that if there is "leveling" or "redistribution of wealth" to a common standard,
the common standard will be very low.
This hypothesis - that the resources available simply can't provide a good standard of living for all - seems deeply threaded in every critique of every form of comun- or social- ism, from the glib Hannity/Glurge email critique to the more reasoned examinations of the fall of the soviet bloc I've been reading.
So what does the forum think?
Could we sustain a reasonable standard of living, sharing for the benefits of modern medicine, educational and information access, adequate shelter and nutrition, and tolerable conditions of civil rights and social mobility for the whole planet, now?
Can we in the near future, with only reasonable assumptions for the advancement of technology?
I would like this to be more about "What would the standard be if we split everything equally" rather then "Fix the planet with scientific or political hotfix X" - A is an interesting question I haven't seen too much thought on, B is the path of digression. IE "how much actual raw material is out there - could it actually be enough" - is the question I am interested in, not "what political system would actually be needed to make it happen and what measures would be required to put it in place"
I'm certainly interested in the questions I've framed as secondary/digressive, but I'm thinking they're covered enough in other threads, or beyond the scope of a single thread.
The material I'm finding on it runs to fairly dense economics (for me).
I can tell you the per-capita planetary GDP is about 10,000 USD a year, but I'm not sure what that really means, you know? When you start to explore the global market, you run into information walls. I don't hate digressions into economic theory, but I would like to go ahead and solicit opinions while I educate myself more. Suggestions for that education are very welcome, as well.
Notions of how much raw material there is and how its consumption is divided abound, but they all seem tainted by political opinion.
Posts
Fixed. Sorry, Lauren.
I host a podcast about movies.
Well, I'm more wondering, "If we took the rate of consumption now, and just sort of split it equally, what would each person have" - the sustainability becomes a question after we answer "is it enough"
He's in his 70s - he's got a genuinely 1950s worldview that's very interesting to me. As in, he comes from the real time, not the "leave it beaver" version of the time. Like talking to an actual hippy who was there in the 60s vs the guy in your dorm that just really likes NORML . . .
I host a podcast about movies.
Anyway. As a guide to start off, there are two relevant dynamics to think about: the rate of improvement in technology (i.e., how many more people we can support with some known level of natural resources) and population growth (especially the relationship between growth and wealth).
On technology, it tends to grind down into "how cheap is electricity", since that drives desalination and transport and aeroponics and recycling and virtually everything else that comes about when you posit a world with exactly nil minerals to pry from the earth. Then you get into the debate over when fusion will ever be here, or how sustainable fission really is, or how practical solar can ever be, etc.
On population, this depends whether you buy into the notion that population decline is inevitable with economic growth. There is certainly some evidence in that direction.
I hope I have depoliticised it sufficiently!
Civilization as we know it now is simply not sustainable anyway. There will be problems in the future. "Challenges" if you prefer.
A definition of sustainability that holds the status quo as being the pinnacle of society over the course of history.
Well maybe not everyone, but most.
Nuclear power is already practical. Toss in fusion in maybe two generations as a pessimistic deadline. Cue electricity too cheap to meter, finally. Add in declining population after India and China finally peak and start declining, and Africa gets it shit together (it is a lot more stable and wealthier on average for the past decade than it has been since decolonization, even after taking into account Rwanda and Somalia and so on).
A pretty good outlook, all around.
Fortunately, we are not China or India.
This might be true for some people in some societies but as a blanket statement about the way people around the world are, is ignorant of history, sociology, and pretty cynical even for someone who lives in a society that places great value on wealth accumulation.
Show me a counter example and I'll show you how it conforms.
1) The American economy in particular is based not only in growth in consumption, but growth forever, which is a ridiculous notion that is necessarily false.
2) 1st world countries export a ton of environmental damage to the 3rd world, via deforestation and other lacking government regulation in those countries. Secondarily, we are also dumping other externalities on them, like health costs.
3) To the extent that American jobs have been shipped overseas, we are building their middle classes at the expense of our own (American jobs in particular because we dont have the sense to protect our domestic industries/free trade).
Even if it were the case that we could sustain a reasonable standard of living for all the Earth's denizens at the current time, continuing population growth would eventually reverse the trend.
Deforestation in particular and environmental degradation in general (exacerbated by population growth) is the leading cause of the collapse of civilizations, from the Norse in Greenland, to the Anasazi of the American southwest, to the Maya, to the people of Easter Island, to modern day Rwanda and Haiti.
The answer is strong central governments that have an eye for protecting the environment from private, short term interests - in modern times, corporations.
If everyone's allotment were equal then the level standard of living might be, say, upper-middle-class American (I have no idea if this is true; I'm just saying). That would be spectacular for all of the people with a lower standard of living, meh for the people already there, and kinda crappy for those above that standard beforehand. Given the current wealth distribution this would be a win for very nearly everyone on Earth.
Problematically, The American Dream tells us that everyone can be fabulously wealthy if only the work hard enough. So whether you're above, at, or below the "leveling line" post-redistribution, adherents to The Dream will argue against it because, if they work hard enough, they will eventually be in the small portion of the populace which would be detrimentally impacted by the change.
There's probably enough "Good Life" to go around, but there really is a limited supply of "Fucking Awesome Life", and every red-blooded American believes that they are entitled to a piece of it.
You don't have to get very complex in your reasoning to see why his argument is flawed.
IF there is a finite amount of resources, then the mean standard of living is always the same. Six trillion dollars divided among six billion people is a mean of $1000 per person, regardless of how it is distributed.
However, the most common standard of living - the mode - gets smaller as the distribution gets topheavier. For instance, if you have six trillion dollars to divide among six billion people, and the top 10% gets 90% of the funds, then you only have 10% left to divide among five billion people, or about $120 each.
Consequently, in a limited resource situation, the notion "if there is "leveling" or "redistribution of wealth" to a common standard, the common standard will be very low." is actually backwards - the highest common standard of living is achieved through the most egalitarian leveling or redistribution.
This is really basic statistics.
Of course, none of this really reflects reality. First off, wealth is not finite. That's econ 101 stuff. Second, the benefit of any sum of money depends largely on the holder's standard of living. $1000 goes a lot farther in the hands of the poor than it does in the hands of rich. Third, the rich benefit more from taxes than the poor. Fourth, so-called "socialist" countries have higher social mobility than "capitalist" countries.
Your dad is wrong, but he's not even wrong in a sensical way. He's wrong in such a wrong way that he has to become wrong in a different way before it's even possible to have a decent discussion with him.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, I didn't say the "same" standard of living - I'm talking a reasonable level. I mean, standards of say dwelling size in japan are different from the US, most citizens of other nations wouldn't take our health care, etc, but in general, we're certainly both "first world" in both spheres - is that standard of living of necessity paid for with someone else living below their preference?
I host a podcast about movies.
Here, have China's population pyramid:
Whoops! So much for "will not naturally decline".
e: updating image URL
The "solution" as it were is to increase our total wealth faster than our population increases. The thing is that in order for these advancements to occur you absolutely need some concentration of wealth first. If everyone had the global average income allotted to him or her, there'd be no particle colliders nor tokamaks. There'd be no genetics labs.
I don't think perfect equality of condition is even the best hypothetical scenario from a utilitarian standpoint.
I have a natural desire to look at things like this on the largest scale possible, though, because it makes everything so damn simple. The solution goes from a complex distribution of wealth, influence, and energy to "get moar technology!oneone."
So your definition of envy is so large that it can encompass anything from material possessions, to caste, to profession, to off spring amount, to religious zeal. In a world where The Good Life is defined by resource consumption, you'd be half right, but we live in a world where The Good Life has so much more to it than vanity and envy. It might be hard to imagine it if you're so ingrained in what you value, but there are people and societies who enjoy a higher quality of life and less resource consumption.
Do the Amish live the good life as judged by you or by themselves?
I see two blank squares.
... do you know how the internet works?
Only if the allotment is made at an unsustainable level. If everyone on Earth were provided a half a kilogram of food, of some kind, per day and nothing else we could sustain it for as long as the population survived. That wouldn't be terribly long. If everyone had the equivalent of a billion dollar annual salary it wouldn't be sustainable beyond the first few days, if that. Somewhere in the middle exists an equilibrium point where the output of humanity does not exceed the input and where the consumed resources do not exceed the rate of resource renewal.
The can be reflected, practically, in the average incomes of "socialist" nations vs. "capitalist" nations. Also, in the social mobility inherent within.
What happens after the initial redistribution of wealth? Certainly, some people will then start making more money than others?
Do you just keep redistributing forever?
Shrug. Shows on my computer, maybe the Census Bureau site only populates the image if you've visited their site already.
Here's it again, uploaded to Imageshack:
Whut? China's birthrate is already below replacement rate (its at 1.75 - below most of Western Europe), and trends point to India getting there eventually.
What? this is a very minor effect (and really won't be kicking in for a while now ~2020s at the earliest) and only in China (due to the one Child policy). The decrease is due to greater femal empowerment, availability of contraception, China's harsh child policy, and increasing wealth in both.
So if we leveled the playing field only 1 in 10 people gets a car, that is probably acceptable to the vast majority of the world, and very unacceptable to most middle aged residents of 1st world countries who have been driving cars their whole lives.
The question is at what point do the advantages of unequal wealth distribution (i.e. concentration of capital, which is required to build, say, a new mine or a Saturn V) outweigh the disadvantages? Everyone agrees that absolutely concentrated wealth (one person owns everything) is unacceptable, and I think that most people agree that total equality is also unacceptable. Somewhere in between is the "correct" level.
middle class people in Europe and Asia could probably accept that.
Well he's never taken econ 101, Feral. He was busy building roads and defending borders for people who got to take econ 101 in his stead. How to reach people like him, with deeply held beliefs that run contrary to their real political interest, is almost always on my mind right now. He's not a stupid man, not remotely, and I guess part of my OP should have been "Was this belief system something taught at some point?" and "If not, are bad beliefs a necessary side effect of spending a reasonable amount of your life's work on things that aren't education?" because the notion that I am currently the victim of one or more traps of thought like this one, or that I will become so as I age, actually bothers me. I guess that's the real soul of my question: I refuse to write all people who hold these beliefs off completely. I know first hand many of them are not stupid or even, in a broad sense, uneducated, and I'd like to know how to work toward saving the intellectual and political soul of this country, which seem to be suffering from a terrible entrenchment of dogma.
Moving on: I think the mindset I'm describing understands, if not by name, the difference between mean and mode. The fault he'd find with your argument would be that while the greatest common standard of living is found by level distribution, that standard would not be very high in his hypothetical.
He thinks if you made the mode equal the mean, the resultant net change in the real standard of living would not be enough of an improvement to the many to justify the effect on the few.
I host a podcast about movies.
Yes.