You have a farm. Things are going pretty well. Your ugly kids have plenty to eat and the land is so fertile you think it might be Catholic. The days are pretty, the work is satisfying. What more could you want? But just as you’re about to pluck your suspenders about your good fortune….BAM locusts, BAM droughts, BAM you don’t have a goddamn thing in the world and your wife is pretty sure it’s all your fault.
Put another way, we might say that crops in your neck of the woods have just gotten a lot more scarce. But as crops get scarce your labor as a farmer becomes scarce too. Once nature stops beating the crap out of the country, we’re going to need to get agriculture back on track and because of that there’s a spike in demand, making your skills as a farmer more valuable. Here the scarcity of a good and the scarcity of the labor that delivers that good are almost the same thing. But as we add technology to the process of farming, the scarcity of famers like you and the scarcity of crops no longer change in neatly parallel ways.
Now let’s assume this series of plagues has wiped you out financially, and another farmer whose crops miraculously went untouched buys your land. Normally this would be a stupid move for him, because he’d simply own more land than he could practically farm. Fortunately though a new tractor was recently invented that allows him to double the amount of land he can handle. At first the news of this tractor sounds fantastic, and certainly it’s tricky to hear bad news when the headline: “Crop yields double thanks to new wonder machine!” comes plodding across our news feed. But who do they double for?
Wait, how many people does all the food belong to?
Nobody could reasonably argue that the wildly increased productivity that technology makes possible for us is a bad thing. But of course, our choices are not simply between good and bad. No matter how miraculous, every change brings in a new set of costs and benefits. We get so excited when we see new benefits show up, that we tend to ignore the costs they carry with them, a practice which can be costly in its own right. New costs are often extra tricky because of their novelty, even if they are fewer and farther between. People can often accept more of the same work, before than can accept less of a different kind of work, just because adjusting to the work’s newness is a one time, upfront cost that many people find it uniquely hard to spare. The new trade off created by the tractor technology is that its increased ability to produce automatically limits the number of people it produces. Our farm example is an illustration of a bigger problem that’s built into progress; every time technology eliminates labor, it necessarily also concentrates power. A concentration of power is a scarcity of power, and as the citizens of any dictatorship will tell you, a scarcity of power can be just as life threatening as a scarcity of food.
We live in an unprecedented technological age. While there’s a lot about that that’s good news, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that as technology has taken off, the middle class has largely sunk. We like to talk about this process as though the middle class is some bed ridden patient we’re observing through a plate of glass. We never say things like, the tech giants and real estate giants have deliberately eliminated the middle class. No, the middle class has just miraculously shrunk and in unrelated news the rich are richer has ever been possible before in the history of the planet. Wages are simply down, they haven’t been lowered. Home ownership has just reduced, it hasn’t been hoarded.
From: How the American Middle Class has Changed Over the Last Five Decades. By the Pew Research Center.
If we really want to look at the costs that tech brings with it through the barest set of incentives we can, we might say that normally we have an incentive not to harm people whose labor is scarce. That’s the basic logic behind the strike; where labor is essential, that labor can be used to leverage a higher quality of life. But as technology has made essential labor more scarce, it’s made the lot of us much easier to harm. If we can simply get a machine to do it, then what do we need you for? If we can use a machine to get anyone, anywhere in the world to do the job, well then you’re needed even less. So we’re seeing a shift in the basic motivations that we normally use to understand human conflicts.
We almost always view war as a problem of scarcity. Take modern day Syria. A drought hit Syria’s farm land and hungry farmers flooded into the capital city to demand some kind of action on that national crisis. The government of Bashar Al Assad responded by simply shooting people dead in the streets, a process so heartless and insane it sparked the Syrian civil war, which quickly spiraled together with similarly unhinged conflicts in the region to create the Islamic state. At first it seems entirely obvious that a natural scarcity was the source of this conflict. Yet with the absurd amount of international aid available in the modern world, the real problem was not that there was not enough food to feed the farmers, but that the farmers lost control of the food there was to distribute. Once that resource became concentrated in much fewer hands, their starvation became a deliberate choice of the brutal Assaad regime, one whose only solution was a direct reclamation of that power through a military conflict. Put another way, the farmers had to use guns to replace the government’s incentive not to harm them which their land had formerly provided for them.
If we pay for food we won’t have any money left to shoot protesters. Use your head peasants. (Bashar Al Assaad on the billboard there)
We can’t create peace without understanding the incentives that lead to violence. There’s a subtle change that’s spreading throughout the world; from the scarcity of resources creating an incentive to harm, to a scarcity of essential labor removing an incentive not to harm. Understanding this change is a critical feature of creating peace out of a geopolitically connected world.
For instance, a classic vision of scarcity as the push behind political violence is the problem of over population. Again on the surface, the sheer numbers involved seem impossible to argue with. There’s only so much space on the planet. The more of us there are, the more of us we make. We’re going to run out of room and when we do, it’s gonna hit the people at the bottom the hardest. Almost automatically society will adopt an incurable wave of starvation at its bottom edges and that ugliness will remain a permanent feature of our species as we approach the carrying capacity of the planet. Yet this mathematical fatalism implodes as soon as we look at what happens to population growth as we spread wealth around. In the United States for instance, the standard of living is relatively high and native born American citizens are having children at a level below the rate of replacement. This turns out to be a relatively stable feature across cultures that reach a certain level of wide spread affluence. Birth rates drop as standards of living increase, meaning we are very much not caught up in an inevitable, overpopulation entropy which threatens to add an emaciated death wave to our collected definition. The lowered rates of birth that come with wide spread prosperity turn the problem of over population inside out. It’s not that scarcity means we must have starvation, but that we must not starve or there will be scarcity.
We’re faced with a choice, to either do what Assaad has done and mow down the hungriest people in society, or to provide a standard of living that stops them from feeling like they need to poop kids out like the sky is falling. Our problem is not with scarcity, but with how easy it is for people like Asaad to simply pull the trigger with impunity. It’s no longer either you or me. It’s who can get away with it.
The difference seems subtle, almost semantic even, yet the belief in scarcity as the mother of all war is a huge part of the thinking that creates the wars around us. We even have a word for it: “Malthusian”, after the thinker Thomas Malthus who is to having old time side burns and frowning at stuff what Superman is to wearing his underwear outside of his pants. It’s a uniform that lets you see from a hundred miles away what this guy is about: Keep it in your pants.
I like to think the artist whipped it out so he could get the right expression out of Tommy “the Gun” Malthus here.
Malthus basically took the idea of saying ‘I told you so.’ and scaled it out into a complete vision of society. In his time there was one way and one way only to control populations: keep it in your pants. If you don’t we’ll have more people than food and that starving is the hell that preachers yelled about on Sundays when they tried to summon feelings that were stronger than horniness out of their congregations. For Malthus, virtue is not some spirit that would be nice to have, it’s how we stop society from starving to death. The evils of street crime and disease are the wrath of God who wants us to follow his chaste plan and give the good stuff to him on Sundays. People took his ideas about populations and ran with them, stripping out the concepts of virtue for more cold, numeric assessments of target carrying capacities and how they might be reached. A town so overrun with stray cats that they starved in the street would be said to have a malthusian cat population. Condoms, the clearest opposite of Malthus’s message of virtue and restraint, were initially referred to as ‘malthusian devices’ for their ability to curb populations and I guess just to see if it was possible to get someone to roll over in their grave.
He gave the upper class of the time something they could not wait to gobble up, a dry mathematical proof which justified the starvation of the masses without any proselytizing on their part. Believing in a final level of natural scarcity is like that. It takes all the work out of being a son of a bitch. As soon as it’s you or me, all killing becomes justified as self defense. Here we can start to see the silhouette of the upper classes take shape as an apology for exactly this predicament. If we let those unrestrained poor people run everything, then more people than necessary will die. We’ve got Malthus, we’ve crunched the numbers. It’s the white man’s burden you know. We don’t like it, that’s why we’re so cold about everything. Someone has to starve, and someone has to survive. At least we’re surviving with class.
This is the obnoxiously smug undercurrent of aristocracy which every American inherits a contempt for as a natural birthright. We can easily bring up fairly obvious facts that by themselves crumble the entirety of malthusian thinking, things like the larger levels of wealth that are possible once all of society advances, or the stabilization of birth rates that accompanies an increased standard of living. But as soon as we confront this incredibly silly charade with simple facts, it doesn’t by any means simply disappear. If the dry malthusian calculus that supposedly underwrites the hoarding of wealth was actually about allowing society to be driven by rational principles, then facts like these would have eroded the malthusian snobbery that so much of our society is built on long ago. As Buckminster Fuller, put it in his Keynote Address at the Vision convention in 1965:
“Only one decade ago, at the meeting in Geneva and its companion meeting of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, it came so clearly into scientific view that the leading world politicians could acknowledge it to be true that- as reported by Gerard Piel, publisher of the Scientific American- for the first time in the history of man, it was in evidence that there could be enough of the fundamental metabolic and mechanical energy sustenance for everybody to survive at a high standard of living. Granted the proper integration of the world around potentials by political unblockings, there could be enough to provide for all men to enjoy all earth at a higher standard of living than all yesterday’s kings, without self-interferences and with no one being advantaged at the expense of another.
But clearly both political leaders [Eisenhower and Khruschev] and their respective states were frustrated by all the political checks and balances each side had set up to protect and advantage only their own and their allies’ side in view of yesterday’s dictum that there was only enough of what it takes to support one in a hundred. So all the ages-long fears; all the bad habits; all the shortsoghted expedients that have developed in custom and law frustrated whatever might be done to realize the new potential. But the fact to remember was that it was only one decade ago that man had this completely surprise news that Malthus was indeed wrong and there now could be enough to go around-handsomely.”
From- Utopia or Oblivion by Buckminster Fuller.
It’s one hell of a book.
It’s been an accepted scientific fact since the 1950’s that not only is there no reason for anyone on the planet to starve, but that our choices are not between making the rich less rich or letting the poor starve. Imagine if a king in the 1500’s refused to let literacy spread. That king might very well have been as wealthy as possible in the amputated world that he controlled, but he may also simply died from some easily curable sickness, he would have never known what it means to fly in a plane or drive in a car. Think of how much more productive society is as a whole when everyone can read. The more productive we are, the richer it is possible to become. Our choices aren’t between making the rich less rich or letting people starve, they’re between collectively languishing in a bygone era for no good reason while people starve to death, or stepping forward into the future as a species.
We have all seen someone who has no reason to harm another person but who also has no reason not to harm them, act like a total bastard and hurt for hurting sake. They’re the kind of person who hits their wife, who sees a camera turned off and thinks only of what can be wounded before it’s repaired. They’re the kind of person who’s stuck on repeat, who’ll shoot through a crowd before feeding them, not because it’s safer or smarter, but simply because maniacs can’t imagine being anything else.
We have to descend into a madness like that, to drive ourselves crazy successively over the generations, until sheer homicidal lunacy is the only thing that makes sense to our laws, our institutions and our leaders. It was a mistake for us to think that once scarcity was solved, wars would end. A hurdle was certainly passed, but now we have a different set of challenges in front of us. Power today is defined less by who must be harmed, then by who may be harmed and ironically, that’s the kind of change that brings out the worst in people. Real evil is unnecessary. A person who has to kill or be killed can be forgiven, but someone who creates suffering simply because there’s no outside force stopping them, is someone who has evil inside their heart. We’re no longer in a kill or be killed situation, but it’s exactly this needless exercise of force that has attracted some of the worst elements among us to power. This is not greed. It’s not some emotionless calculus that sees a bottom line and nothing else. It is the next obstacle, blocking the way to a more complete future.
Our last major obstacle, the ability to erase ourselves with atomic weaponry, is one that we seem to have made it past. What I’m suggesting here is that this next obstacle is easily as dangerous as atomic weaponry. The wave of starvation that sits at the carrying capacity of the planet is something that we will hit unless we deliberately avoid doing so. That perpetual wave is easily the equal of any lingering field of radiation that follows an atomic blast, and there are “peace time” cities all over the world whose murder rates suggest they have already been struck by this new kind of bomb. Yet another irony rears its head here because the most frightening thing about this problem is that war and the threat of war can’t solve it for us. Plenty of practical and technical feats will have to be put in place to solve it, but at the end of the day it is a moral epiphany that disarms this bomb. We have to pull ourselves out of the descent into madness, to stop acting like statistics control us completely and decide to do the right thing, because it is the right thing. We’ll all be richer because of it, and nobody gets rich by surrendering to the ways of the world. Share the wealth and watch it multiply. Let’s disarm the new bomb.
It’s all in your head.
Princess Fantastic 