Pangloss Up To Date
In the last post I claimed that the world was not bad at solving its problems, and simply managed to create new and possibly even bigger ones in the process.
Where are we now compared to fifty years ago?
All out nuclear war is still possible. However we have grown to live with the bomb, and with only one superpower, it is as magnificently pointless as Bush's "starwars" missile shield. One can imagine in the future a retreating defensive America and rising Chinese and Indian superpowers in a second cold war nuclear standoff, but it seems implausible. We seem to be through the worst period of danger.
The bomb has in fact imposed an unprecedented global peace. The exception is Africa, which has fallen into post-colonial anarchy, but this is not reported on the world news and nobody cares. Perhaps a third of the population of the Congo died in the past ten years - nobody even noticed. Even Iraq and the current level of terrorism is pretty mild by any historical measure of violence.
Totalitarianism is dead. Autocracy is not, and in China we have a rising first-rate economy with a backward autocratic regime; the last time this combination occurred with in Imperial Germany and Japan, and that was pretty scary. This was brought home to me two years ago in the Holiday Inn in Wuhan. I was watching CNN news on cable when the announcer said the dreaded three words " the Dalai Lama". The screen went blank for three minutes until the item was finished. The censors were watching on line. China is not monolithic however, the Chinese are perfectly well aware of what is going on in the rest of the world, and how Mao ever thought he could convert this nation of individualistic wheeler-dealers into Communists is a mystery.
China brings me on to the subject of the first world/third world gap. China is clearly moving back to its normal position as the world's largest economy (for every century except the last two : so it was just a short term blip) and the Indian economy is finally taking off. That is 40% of the world's population. Within fifty years on present trends a majority of the world's population will be in developed countries, as opposed to about 20% at present.
With this growth comes a reduction in birth rates. The way to reduce population growth is to make people rich and expect them to educate children for a long time, which is expensive, and to liberate women, who are then no longer willing to be child production factories. Thus birth rates have fallen sharply in China, the wealthier parts of India, Latin America. Only parts of the Muslim world and Africa still have catastrophically high birth rates (even in the Middle East birthrates are falling fast, but with a lag to other areas) Indeed in Europe and Japan falling populations are the new problem
Have new and even bigger problems been created? You bet. Environmental destruction and climate change may be either a non-problem, or the shortest route to the Apocalypse yet devised. Less noticed (and if it is, by different people to those who emphasise environmental problems) is the decadence and decline of the West. On these, more in succeeding posts
Where are we now compared to fifty years ago?
All out nuclear war is still possible. However we have grown to live with the bomb, and with only one superpower, it is as magnificently pointless as Bush's "starwars" missile shield. One can imagine in the future a retreating defensive America and rising Chinese and Indian superpowers in a second cold war nuclear standoff, but it seems implausible. We seem to be through the worst period of danger.
The bomb has in fact imposed an unprecedented global peace. The exception is Africa, which has fallen into post-colonial anarchy, but this is not reported on the world news and nobody cares. Perhaps a third of the population of the Congo died in the past ten years - nobody even noticed. Even Iraq and the current level of terrorism is pretty mild by any historical measure of violence.
Totalitarianism is dead. Autocracy is not, and in China we have a rising first-rate economy with a backward autocratic regime; the last time this combination occurred with in Imperial Germany and Japan, and that was pretty scary. This was brought home to me two years ago in the Holiday Inn in Wuhan. I was watching CNN news on cable when the announcer said the dreaded three words " the Dalai Lama". The screen went blank for three minutes until the item was finished. The censors were watching on line. China is not monolithic however, the Chinese are perfectly well aware of what is going on in the rest of the world, and how Mao ever thought he could convert this nation of individualistic wheeler-dealers into Communists is a mystery.
China brings me on to the subject of the first world/third world gap. China is clearly moving back to its normal position as the world's largest economy (for every century except the last two : so it was just a short term blip) and the Indian economy is finally taking off. That is 40% of the world's population. Within fifty years on present trends a majority of the world's population will be in developed countries, as opposed to about 20% at present.
With this growth comes a reduction in birth rates. The way to reduce population growth is to make people rich and expect them to educate children for a long time, which is expensive, and to liberate women, who are then no longer willing to be child production factories. Thus birth rates have fallen sharply in China, the wealthier parts of India, Latin America. Only parts of the Muslim world and Africa still have catastrophically high birth rates (even in the Middle East birthrates are falling fast, but with a lag to other areas) Indeed in Europe and Japan falling populations are the new problem
Have new and even bigger problems been created? You bet. Environmental destruction and climate change may be either a non-problem, or the shortest route to the Apocalypse yet devised. Less noticed (and if it is, by different people to those who emphasise environmental problems) is the decadence and decline of the West. On these, more in succeeding posts
Labels: History
posted by Total Issues at 6:42 pm
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