A topic that has received a fair amount of attention recently is that of economic inequality. The new Catholic Pope, Francis, has spoken about the issue, criticizing the concept of "trickle-down" economics and calling for greater efforts to end disparities in wealth. A report released a little over a week ago by the humanitarian group Oxfam revealed how extreme these disparities are. The 85 richest people in the world (just over 0.000001% of the total population of over 7 billion) have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world's population, though the latter are 40 million times more numerous. The richest 1% of the world population hold nearly half the world's wealth, or 65 times the amount owned by the poorest half. What's more, in many countries, including the United States, the gap is widening. In his State of the Union address the other day, US President Barack Obama spoke about the need to face this issue, and took a small step towards doing so by raising the minimum wage for federal contract workers to US$10.10 an hour.
Amazingly, there are some who criticize anyone who speaks out on this issue, whether it is Pope Francis, Oxfam, or President Obama. Incredibly, they seem to imply that the wealthy deserve everything they have, and that the poor for the most part likewise deserve to be poor, as if the richest of the rich really work thousands or millions of times harder than the poor, or have that much more ability. Aside from being absurd on the face of it, this ignores the many ways in which wealth breeds wealth, particularly when aided by a tax system that favors the rich, such as in the US, where low taxes on capital gains and other forms of income favor the richest Americans, or even more egregiously in Taiwan, as discussed in this fascinating but depressing article, which notes that in 2005 it was revealed that of the 40 wealthiest individuals in the country, "15 paid effective tax rates of under 1 percent, and eight of them paid no taxes at all." This problem is compounded when wealth enables the rich to buy political power. In the US, ridiculous court decisions such as Citizens United mean that rich individuals like the Koch brothers can spend millions to influence elections. While defenders of the Citizens United ruling claim that restricting election spending by private individuals and groups somehow restricts freedom of speech, that is absurd. If everyone has equal rights to post a blog or stand on the soapbox on a corner and say what they want, than we can say that everyone has freedom of speech. But when some people can spend millions to buy ads on television and the Internet in order to propagate their speech, then their speech, to paraphrase George Orwell, is more equal than that of everyone else, and their influence is correspondingly greater. While my opinions may be far more objective, fact-based and logical than that of a number of extremely wealthy individuals I can think of, that does little good when few people know of mine and they can ensure that millions of people hear theirs.
The ironic thing is that a more equal society would benefit most of the wealthy as well as the poor. Not only would the rich be less of a target for resentment and hostility, but a better educated, more affluent workforce would benefit the corporations who employ them and sell their products to them. While Henry Ford was an awful person in many ways, he did one thing that was very sensible. He realized that if he paid his workers well enough, not only would they be more content, but they could afford to buy the cars he was selling. Today, on the other hand, big corporations like Walmart and McDonald's pay their workers so little that the employees often have to rely on food stamps and other government assistance to get by. This short-sighted approach ultimately does no good to anyone. While there is no instant solution to the problem of disparities in wealth, raising wages for the poorest people while ensuring that the wealthiest pay more taxes – and, through reforms like public financing of elections, are less able to influence the political system – is a good place to start (for some more general suggestions about tackling global inequality, see this blog post by an Under-Secretary General of the United Nations).
Friday, January 31, 2014
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Some Musings on Possibilities for the Future
I don't like to make predictions about the future. For one thing, such predictions will inevitably turn out to be wrong in some way or another. Besides, unless there is something we can do to bring about the good predictions and prevent the bad ones from happening, there isn't much point in making specific prognostications. Instead, I'll just mention a few of the best and worst possibilities for the next few decades. Some of them it may be possible for us as individuals to help work towards or against, while others we may not be able to affect much one way or another.
Many of the more unpleasant possibilities for the upcoming decades involve environmental degradation and the related problem of overpopulation. If we don't start seriously addressing climate change, rising global temperatures will have increasingly dramatic effects, including drastic changes to local weather patterns, disruption of habitats for numerous species and rising sea levels that will endanger coastal and island communities all over the world. Even people who are not directly affected will feel indirect effects. People whose current homes become uninhabitable due to rising oceans or disruption of agricultural production will have to go elsewhere, and the influx of refugees will strain resources in their new homes. Products, particularly agricultural ones, will become scarcer as their original places of production become unsuitable. A particularly difficult problem will be water, as fresh water supplies are already under great strain in many places around the world. All of these problems will be exacerbated by overpopulation, something that is discussed in some of the links from my previous post. If climate refugees flee to places that are already crowded, their new homes may not be able to absorb them. The world can't really afford a drop in food production; in fact, if the population continues to increase at anything like the present rate, we will need to produce much more food than we do now. Between climate change and an increasing population, humans are likely to continue to squeeze out other species, resulting in an accelerating rate of extinctions. In a worst case scenario, the combination of strains on the global system could result in complete collapse. More likely, humanity will somehow muddle through, but at the cost of great suffering and the loss of many other species.
A less negative possibility for the future is that we may see some dramatic advances in medicine, including possibly development of ways to substantially increase human lifespans. But while such a possibility is less negative than climate disaster, it would not exactly be an unequivocally good thing. After all, if everyone can live longer, then it will increase the overpopulation problem and the strain on the world's resources. If longevity treatments are only available to the wealthy, the population implications will be less severe, but the divide between the haves and the have-nots will become even more pronounced, possibly resulting in fatal tensions in society. So while I personally might like to be able to take advantage of a drug that acts like a fountain of youth before I get too old, for the sake of humanity it might be better if we can solve some of our other problems first, including that of rapid population growth (perhaps if nothing else the longevity drug could come packaged with contraceptives...). Another possibility with somewhat mixed implications would be the development of ways to repair our brains and bodies, with the danger being that those who can afford to may use such techniques for frivolous personal gratification.
A less mixed positive development that we might hope to see in the upcoming decades is a human expansion into space. This could take a number of forms, but by the middle of this century, there are a number of things that I hope will have happened, whether or not I live to see them myself. One is that humans will not only have been to Mars but have taken the first steps towards permanent settlements there. I also hope people will have returned to the Moon, for the purposes of scientific research stations and even tourism. I also hope commercial space tourism in near Earth space will be well established, and that people will have visited a few asteroids, though my feelings about human exploitation of their mineral resources are slightly mixed. And while it is unlikely that humans will have reached Jupiter and Saturn by 2050, I hope we will have learned a lot more about them, and particularly that we will have checked out the possibility of life on locations like Europa, Enceladus, and even Titan. In a related field, I hope that by the middle of the century astronomers will have discovered evidence of planets with life orbiting other stars (e.g., planets with substantial amounts of free oxygen in their atmospheres, which would be an almost certain sign of life), though it will much longer before we'll be able to even hope to visit such a place in person.
Again, none of the above are predictions. They are just a few of the many possibilities for the future that I find it interesting to contemplate. There are of course many more, such as progress in eliminating social problems such as discrimination and poverty, or an improvement of the human rights situation globally (or a reversal of our gains in these areas). In any case, while I am not willing to lay any bets on what kind of future we'll actually see a few decades from now, I do strongly believe that humanity as a whole needs to make greater efforts in many areas to make sure that our future turns out to be as good as possible.
Many of the more unpleasant possibilities for the upcoming decades involve environmental degradation and the related problem of overpopulation. If we don't start seriously addressing climate change, rising global temperatures will have increasingly dramatic effects, including drastic changes to local weather patterns, disruption of habitats for numerous species and rising sea levels that will endanger coastal and island communities all over the world. Even people who are not directly affected will feel indirect effects. People whose current homes become uninhabitable due to rising oceans or disruption of agricultural production will have to go elsewhere, and the influx of refugees will strain resources in their new homes. Products, particularly agricultural ones, will become scarcer as their original places of production become unsuitable. A particularly difficult problem will be water, as fresh water supplies are already under great strain in many places around the world. All of these problems will be exacerbated by overpopulation, something that is discussed in some of the links from my previous post. If climate refugees flee to places that are already crowded, their new homes may not be able to absorb them. The world can't really afford a drop in food production; in fact, if the population continues to increase at anything like the present rate, we will need to produce much more food than we do now. Between climate change and an increasing population, humans are likely to continue to squeeze out other species, resulting in an accelerating rate of extinctions. In a worst case scenario, the combination of strains on the global system could result in complete collapse. More likely, humanity will somehow muddle through, but at the cost of great suffering and the loss of many other species.
A less negative possibility for the future is that we may see some dramatic advances in medicine, including possibly development of ways to substantially increase human lifespans. But while such a possibility is less negative than climate disaster, it would not exactly be an unequivocally good thing. After all, if everyone can live longer, then it will increase the overpopulation problem and the strain on the world's resources. If longevity treatments are only available to the wealthy, the population implications will be less severe, but the divide between the haves and the have-nots will become even more pronounced, possibly resulting in fatal tensions in society. So while I personally might like to be able to take advantage of a drug that acts like a fountain of youth before I get too old, for the sake of humanity it might be better if we can solve some of our other problems first, including that of rapid population growth (perhaps if nothing else the longevity drug could come packaged with contraceptives...). Another possibility with somewhat mixed implications would be the development of ways to repair our brains and bodies, with the danger being that those who can afford to may use such techniques for frivolous personal gratification.
A less mixed positive development that we might hope to see in the upcoming decades is a human expansion into space. This could take a number of forms, but by the middle of this century, there are a number of things that I hope will have happened, whether or not I live to see them myself. One is that humans will not only have been to Mars but have taken the first steps towards permanent settlements there. I also hope people will have returned to the Moon, for the purposes of scientific research stations and even tourism. I also hope commercial space tourism in near Earth space will be well established, and that people will have visited a few asteroids, though my feelings about human exploitation of their mineral resources are slightly mixed. And while it is unlikely that humans will have reached Jupiter and Saturn by 2050, I hope we will have learned a lot more about them, and particularly that we will have checked out the possibility of life on locations like Europa, Enceladus, and even Titan. In a related field, I hope that by the middle of the century astronomers will have discovered evidence of planets with life orbiting other stars (e.g., planets with substantial amounts of free oxygen in their atmospheres, which would be an almost certain sign of life), though it will much longer before we'll be able to even hope to visit such a place in person.
Again, none of the above are predictions. They are just a few of the many possibilities for the future that I find it interesting to contemplate. There are of course many more, such as progress in eliminating social problems such as discrimination and poverty, or an improvement of the human rights situation globally (or a reversal of our gains in these areas). In any case, while I am not willing to lay any bets on what kind of future we'll actually see a few decades from now, I do strongly believe that humanity as a whole needs to make greater efforts in many areas to make sure that our future turns out to be as good as possible.
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