Implementing Democracy 1.01 in Iran

[9th Engineer]

Doesn't the simple fact that 90% of the worlds wealth is owned by 10% of the population tell you anything?

Yeah, it tells me that 90% of the world needs to get its ass in gear and start producing a useful product that has some value.

[9th Engineer]

I still stand by what I say here as not just the only reasonable way to eliminate poverty, but also one that has been proven to work. It's just that the whiners out there will tell you people can't do it or make excuses.

I'm not saying every American has a good chance of becoming a millionare, but it's perfectly possible to live comfortably. We are moving away from an industry focused on unskilled labor and trying to become one of businesses, skilled workers, and academics.
I take a rather strong view on this but it is coupled with an even stronger view of our parallel resposibility to provide an education that can take every student as far as they are willing to go. I cannot emphasize this enough, the single most important part of everyone's life before the age of 20-25 is becoming educated, and it is my generations fight to make it possible for every student to have the opportunity. Unfortunately we are still far from this, I absolutely admit it, and it's mostly because of the ignorence in our society about the times we live in and the irresposibility of many members of the older generation. Parents must never burden their children with responsibilities that stop them from persuing their education. I personally see this as an afront as serious as physical and emotional abuse, and it is certainly shameful. It may not be malicious, but if it exists the student should have the opportunity to escape it. The Japanese treat highschool very similarly to how we treat university, and students will sometimes travel and live on their own in order to attend the best highschool they can. We should make an effort to start some sort of subsidized housing programs around highschools for students comming from bad homes, and perhaps even a type of dormatory would be a good idea.

refer to the original for more detail.

[Aliantha]

Originally Posted by 9th Engineer

Woah woah woah, hold on there. That is a serious misconception. There is no great 'pie' out there that everyone gets a slice of and once its gone, that's it. I won't use the term 'creating wealth' because it's slightly misleading, wealth is not the same as money. A better term is buying power, new technologies create the illusion of everyone having more money by allowing what used to cost them $1 to be produced and sold for only $0.75. No new money minted, but people are now 25% richer. Very often, when a person gets very rich it's because they've done something like this, and personally pocketed 15 cents of the reduced cost. Do it on a large scale, and POOF!! 100 million dollars seems to spring from nowhere. But as you can see, no one is any poorer.

This isn't everything, I'm just trying to prove the point that people getting richer is not a sign that other people must be getting poorer.

Agreed. I accept that I over simplified my point, however, the fact still remains that this planet does not have the resources to keep every soul on it at the same level of comfort which we in western nations enjoy.

By trying to 'democratise/westernise' the whole world a whole new set of long term issues are being created as anyone with any environmental intelligence will tell you.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

Just another thought.

You must consider the distribution of wealth. There's only so much of it to go around, so if one person gets richer, another is going to get poorer. If you want the rest of the world to live the way America does, where do you think they're going to get the money to do so?

Doesn't the simple fact that 90% of the worlds wealth is owned by 10% of the population tell you anything?

Ooooops, Aliantha: you've accepted the idea that economics is a zero-sum game. Look around you; the evidence is that it is not. Speedread Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb for how far zero-sum economic ideas can lead a prediction astray.

Economics may be a zero-sum game on a solar system-wide scale, but this doesn't seem true of planetary-scale. We are nowhere near operating on a systemwide scale yet.

And it tells me that about ten percent of the population is good at wealth. Thing is, this kind of thing is learnable. It's not exactly a matter of luck.

[DanaC]

The US is NOT a meritocracy!

Well said. I truly believe there aren't any meritocracies in the world. There are systems which claim to be meritocracies.....but that just justifies inequality by making those who don't succeed as well as those that do, responsible for that lack of success. Sometimes, all the hard work of a lifetime doesn't buy success.

But, if a society claims to be meritocratous, it allows the elite to take full possession of their success. It allows them to dismiss every good break and advantage that they had by birth and tell the factory worker who works 12 hour shifts to barely keep his family, that it's his own lack of ambition or foresight that keeps him down.

[9th Engineer]

"Work hard and you can achieve whatever you want" A lie that has probably dashed more hopes than I care to think about. "Make your work valuable to others and you will be secure, make yourself indispensable to those higher up than you and you will have whatever you want" is a more useful maxim. A labouror who works 10 hours a day on a construction site might work hard, but because people who can do his job are as common as water he does not produce valuable labour. It is not how hard you work, but how valuable your labour is that determines success.

[DanaC]

And what about those who do the jobs which aren't valued? Do they deserve to live badly? Are bricklayers worthless? Not everyone can be 'successful'. Does that mean they have no merit? Surely they are the grist to your mill?

[Aliantha]

It's got nothing to do with economics. It has to do with limited resources. This planet cannot sustain everyone at the same level of comfort that people in western societies enjoy. Hmmm...is it de ja vous or did I just say that?

[Undertoad]

Ali, would it surprise you to learn that, worldwide, obesity now affects more people than hunger?

1 B people are thought to be obese.
800 M people are thought to be starving.

Things are changing fast as the productivity changes that made the west, are exported to the east. This includes not only inventions and innovations -- China didn't invent the train, car, plane etc but it sure has them now. It also includes ideas: the barely-sustainable systems of the last century are abandoned for the freedom-oriented ideas that generate wealth.

This planet can, unquestionably, sustain everyone at the same level of comfort that people in western societies enjoy. It can't sustain everyone driving SUVs, granted.

Until, that is, another round of innovation improves batteries, and another round of innovation improves power generation. The battery round is well under way.

What's really exciting, though, is what will happen (not what MIGHT happen) if all those humans start to become as educated and relatively free as the west. At that point, all their innovations will start to enter the stream as well.

Even a heavily political Nobel Prize committee has really only granted prizes in physics, chemistry, economics to western-educated people. But a lot of the east has now woken and they have a ton of people, some of whom I'm sure are very bright. The revolution has just begun.

Because wealth is most certainly *generated*, not cut up like some big pie. The most useless and available raw material on the earth, sand in the deserts, is now converted into silicon chips that run our lives and glass fibers that connect them. The chips and fibers constitute much more wealth than the sand particles. This is how wealth is generated - useful items spring from almost nothing. Wealth is generated when order displaces disorder, when government sets up useful systems that permit people to interact, not to control people.

When cultures decide to not fight each other and build schools instead, wealth is generated out of nothing. When cultures decide to allow their women to make their own choices and become productive, wealth is generated out of nothing. Most cultures are only just now figuring this out. The revolution has just begun.

[Aliantha]

Acording to the world health organization there are 1B people overweight with 300mill of them being classed as obese.

852 Million people are hungry. 16 000 children die of hunger every day.

These are facts and undeniable.

UT, as persuasive as your argument is, it's just simply not correct. This planet does not have the resources to support life all at the same level...even basic western standard levels.

We are consuming ourselves to death. There are no limitless supplies. Once they're all gone, they're all gone. The current rate of consumption, even taking into account new technologies, has doomed the human race and everything else with it.

People have to change the way they think before we even have a hope of changing this course and unfortunately, scientific studies are telling us it's simply too late. Forget about the sun going supernova. We'll be extinct long before that happens.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

There are no limitless supplies, true -- but that is the one thing above all else that drives innovation.

Five billion years from today, the sun won't be exactly gone, but it will be a frightfully inconvenient red giant star, and the Earth, toast. Toast containing about a quarter of the U238 it began with and a lot more lead.

Flint, more and more efficiently exploited, then replaced in tools by bronze.

Bronze, strategically limited by availability of tin, replaced by the more plentiful but harder to extract iron.

Whale oil for lighting, replaced wholly by kerosene.

Pay phones will be almost entirely replaced by portable cell phones.

You can come up with two dozen more off the top of your head.

[Aliantha]

That's true UG, however, the fact still remains that our consumption levels even as they are now are greater than our ability to develop innovations to counteract our use of resources.

At current rates we have I believe (need to get a fact on this. Will get back with confirmation later) less than 300 years to go.

We're already running way low on oil as we all know. This is just the begining.

[Undertoad]

My mistake, 1B overweight.

Predictions of shortages and unresolvable problems - I've heard them all. I remember the terrifying predictions they made decades ago. None has come true.

Market forces deal with shortages in interesting ways. The economists understand this, and very few others do.

http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/Pe...ian_simon.html

In 1980, economist Julian Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich decided to put their money where their predictions were. Ehrlich had been predicting massive shortages in various natural resources for decades, while Simon claimed natural resources were infinite.

Simon offered Ehrlich a bet centered on the market price of metals. Ehrlich would pick a quantity of any five metals he liked worth $1,000 in 1980. If the 1990 price of the metals, after adjusting for inflation, was more than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became more scarce), Ehrlich would win. If, however, the value of the metals after inflation was less than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became less scarce), Simon would win. The loser would mail the winner a check for the change in price.

Ehrlich agreed to the bet, and chose copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten.

By 1990, all five metals were below their inflation-adjusted price level in 1980. Ehrlich lost the bet and sent Simon a check for $576.07. Prices of the metals chosen by Ehrlich fell so much that Simon would have won the bet even if the prices hadn't been adjusted for inflation.

[Aliantha]

The cost of these sorts of materials has been lower over recent decades due to improved refining techniques etc. You don't need me to tell you that. I'm not arguing that point in any way. Yes I agree that we'll continue to be able to utilize natural resources which were previously unavailable due to poorer or less developed technologies etc.

My point still remains that these natural resources are being depleted slowly but surely and soon they will not exist. By soon I don't mean tomorrow. Maybe they'll last 100 more years or even a thousand, but that's a very small period of time in comparison to how long this planet has been inhabited.

I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to realize that unless they change right now, there will be no future. Yes we'll develop different ways of living. Maybe one day everyone will be the right weight and no one will be pigging out while someone else starves. Maybe one day we wont rely on fossil fuels. Maybe one day solar power will be a realistic option. Maybe maybe maybe. What about what we know as fact?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Aliantha

I don't understand why it's so difficult for people to realize that unless they change right now, there will be no future. Yes we'll develop different ways of living.

Different ways of living sounds like a future to me.

My point still remains that these natural resources are being depleted slowly but surely and soon they will not exist.

Conservation of matter says that the resources are not being destroyed, they are merely being converted to other resources (like, for example, carbon dioxide.) 5,000 years from now someone may be screaming that our lifestyles are using up all the precious carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, and creating useless byproducts like diesel fuel.