The Current Discussion: In the future, global prosperity will present more of a threat than poverty, according to a recent Post op-ed. Is this just rich-American rhetoric, or is the world really getting too prosperous for its own good?
By Max Singer
Michael Gerson describes only part of the problem of prosperity. To understand the issue, you need to think of the whole world going down the same road, but starting at different times. Some are further ahead, and we can use their experience to see what those who are coming later can expect.
When Abraham Lincoln was a boy, the U.S. was poorer than most countries are today. For some time he lived in a house that didn't have four walls. About a century later the U.S. became the first country to become wealthy if you use a populist definition of "wealthy:" that is, if you look at how ordinary people live. A "wealthy" country can today be defined as one in which life expectancy is over 72 and at least three-fourths of children complete secondary school. About 15% of the world's people now live in wealthy countries. Portugal is an example of a country that has recently crossed the border to wealth, and many countries are getting close. By the end of this century, when China and India will have become wealthy, probably three-fourths of the world will live in wealthy countries.
So what is the problem with this growing prosperity? There are two kinds of problems. One is the kind of practical task that Gerson talks about. This includes increasing production of all kinds of things that people who are not poor will buy when they have enough money, and keeping the planet clean against the environmental pressures of so much production. The second kind of problem is the effect of wealth on human character and happiness. We all know wealthy people whose lives are a mess – whom we suspect would have been better off never having been wealthy.
The practical tasks of providing for, and cleaning up after, billions of newly wealthy people will be a big challenge for some years. But we can gain perspective from experience. Because of population increases – which may be coming to an end in the middle of this century – and growing wealth, the world has been multiplying its use of all kinds of raw material for well over a century. During that time the cost of grain, meat and all kinds of raw materials has been steadily declining. We now need only a fraction of the amount of money, or of the work hours, that we used to need to produce a ton of grain or a ton of copper. We can be confident that we will rapidly overcome the difficulty of meeting the demands of those who are now becoming wealthy. Prices may rise for a little while, but before long the long-term trend of price declines for material goods and price increases for human effort.
The pattern concerning pollution that we have seen, in one country after another, is first poverty and clean air, then development and pollution, then wealth and steadily reduced pollution. We have found that, like our houses, we can keep our environment about as clean as we can agree on and decide to pay for. There is every reason to believe that these lessons will apply to the part of the world now becoming wealthy, as it applied to the part that became wealthy before now.
We have less basis for confidence in our ability to overcome the deeper problem concerning the effect of prosperity on human life, which comes from the removal of traditional challenges and constraints, and the increasing rarity of many of the kinds of experiences that once helped people to learn discipline, patience, and other practical virtues.
In another century or two we will live in a wealthy world. If the experience of Western Europe, which used to be dominated by war and tyranny, is any guide, it will also be a democratic and peaceful world. Then we will see whether we can make good and happy lives in a wealthy, free, and peaceful world. Gerson may be right that prosperity can be a trap – but we shouldn't despair, the result depends on what we do ourselves.
Max Singer is a futurist and the co-founder of the Hudson Institute. His book about the paradoxes posed by a more prosperous world, A Passage to a Human World, is reviewed here.
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Comments (2)
Of course, Mr. Singer is far too sanguine and ...naive. He righly says : " When Abraham Lincoln was a boy, the U.S. was poorer than most countries are today. For some time he lived in a house that didn't have four walls. About a century later the U.S. became the first country to become wealthy if you use a populist definition of "wealthy:" that is, if you look at how ordinary people live."
That century between the time when Abe was a boy in a log cabin and the time the U.S. became the first country to become wealthy saw a horrifying civil war in the U.S. whose primary aim when it started was not to the soul-elevating one of ending slavery -- it had in more mundane motives. There were also two World Wars.
If we extrapolate from that experience, while both Messrs. Gerson and Singer are likely to be proven right that humanity will become on average welthier and will be in a psoition to satisfy most of their material wants -- at least the 'basic needs' aspects of those material wants, it won't at all be a smooth ride. Already, we are winessing a mad, mad, nad Third World War for energy resources at a time when most scientists (in particular, as I shall never cease reminding every body, Freeman Dyson in his Templeton Award Acceptance lecture just before the invasion of Iraq) hammered home to the world's policy makers that the investment in research of a fraction of the costs of the disastrous wars that they foresaw would unleash potentials for alternative energy sources that would amply meet humanity's needs before oil resources get exhausted even at the pre-war prevailing price of 23 US$ per barrel of oil.
Mr Singer does not spell out the "... deeper problem concerning the effect of prosperity on human life". Thinkers with as differing personalities as Friedrich Nietsche, Werner Heisenberg and Jacob Bronowski have expressed their apprehensions that the loss of believe in God will unleash a kind of barbarism that will endanger the whole fabric of civilisation. I personally don't believe that that will be the case, partly because the loss of faith in God will be the loss of faith in an anthropomorphic god but not God as Untimate Consciousness or whatever other meaning we give to the idea of the Deity. However, the folly of individual rulers using irresistibly ruthless State powers to, in effect set themselves up as deities, and, worse, of groups , castes, nationalities , tribes, to set themselves up as 'neo-chosen peoples', neo-brahmins, neo-super-castes will sporadically erupt and cause enormous damage to global harmony. Eugenics and technology-based embedded human enhancement will be the most dangerous developments and problem for an affluent future human brotherhood to tackle.
As Jacob Bronowski said in his "Ascent of Man" to counter the despondency that Darwin's "Descent of Man" had caused about a century-and-a-half earlier, while man has made enormous progress in the hard sciences and in mastering technology, his grasp of human nature lags far behind. Recent pluri-disciplinary research is fast contributing to the narrowing of this lag. But much yet reamins still to be done. Let us hope that the speed with which the foreseen catastrohpes are clsoing in on us is slower than the speed with which we manage to bridge this gap in our knowledge about human nature.
January 22, 2008 7:21 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 22, 2008 19:21
I was trying hard to give Mr. Singer the benefit of the doubt as I followed his argument that we were destined to a gleaming future of wealth and benevolence. He lost me when he sanguinely described a cycle of clean poverty, to dirty wealth, and finally, clean wealth. That would be a more plausible argument if poverty was indeed clean, and the "good" news about the end of population growth didn't top out at nine or more billion humans on the planet. His argument collapses by assuming that the raw materials needed to sustain wealthy human beings were undepletable and could be extracted indefinitely at affordable costs. His thesis makes sense only if all humans -wealthy and poor- adopt a poor but clean standard of living. I'm afraid we're not going to work our way out of our crisis by technological means alone.
January 22, 2008 3:44 PM | Report Offensive Comments
Posted on January 22, 2008 15:44