Message-ID: <00ec01be3289$b4886aa0$0b73fea9@jay98> Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998 07:44:17 -1000 From: Jay Hanson <mailto:j@QMAIL.COM> Subject: LIFE IN REVERSE To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
----- Original Message ----- From: Wilbur Streett <mailto:WStreett@mail.Monmouth.com>>>You "proved" the laws of thermodynamics do not apply to economics? <G> My
>>goodness Wilbur! Do some research -- you owe it to your kids.
>
>Yes, Jay, I proved that what you said wasn't based on reality, but based on
>hyperbole. You provided a lengthy quote, where the german author admitted
>that there was no basis for the assertion that Thermodynamics had anything
>to do with Economics. You have become so enamored by the text that you had
>missed that little bit. I pointed it out for you.
Wilbur, there are NO exceptions to the laws of thermodynamics. And to be blunt about it, for you to suggest otherwise is either a reflection of your lack of intelligence, or your lack of ethics.
>Enough already Jay. Speak to the heart of the matter, how this has
>anything to do with "Technology Transfer in International Development".
It's because "International Development" is about to undergo a radical change in character. And if ambitious entrepreneurs like yourself want to get in on the ground floor of a new high-growth, high-tech industry, they have to find out about it.
BACKGROUNDER In the past, the mission of "International Development" was in the World Bank's euphemism "structural adjustment". In other words, to destroy existing Third World political arrangements and thereby facilitate the West's money- based politics: one dollar, one vote. ---------- The Bank’s first function is to be an instrument of integration through the market. This market is (or should be) co-extensive with the world; like that of the Church, its vocation is universal. All nations and all people must become ever more tightly bound to it. In this setting, the doctrine of export-orientation finds its natural home. All countries must trade as much as they can and rely for their subsistence first on the world market, last on their own resources.
Until quite recently, even in wealthy countries, communities provided for most of their wants from their domestic, local economies. What they could not find close at hand, they sought at the regional or national level. Only rarely, usually for luxury items, would they have recourse to the world market. This historical pattern has been turned on its head: we are now exhorted to satisfy our needs first from the international, global market, then the national or regional one and so on, down the ladder to the domestic economy, lowliest of all.
The Bank's second function is to act as a guide. Those who believe that its own doctrine is that of laisser-faire are mistaken. The Bank is, in fact, far more interventionist than the interventionist governments whose policies it seeks to transform. If the Bank were to leave people and societies alone, anything could happen -- they might operate not on the basis of the marketplace but on principles of reciprocity, redistribution or solidarity. In modern societies, the state has attempted, with greater or lesser success, to organize redistribution and solidarity. Thus the state, like the traditional society based on reciprocity, is under threat from the Bank.
Here we face a contradiction. The marketplace cannot be the natural habitat of humankind. If it were, the Bank's interventions would be unnecessary. Everywhere the market would already be the sole guiding principle of society and, if it were, in the Bank's own view, there would be no underdevelopment, no South, no need for modernization or for structural adjustment -- and no need for the Bank.
Why do we think we need the Bank? For the same reasons we think we need the Church. Frail, imperfect humanity needs constraints, guardrails, continual instruction in, and interpretation of, the doctrine. Those who have not yet reached the full expression of market capitalism and consequent development, those who fall by the wayside, must be goaded along the path to salvation.
To change society one must also change individual men and women. Man must be ontologically reconstructed and redeemed as Homo economicus. What is redemption if not the passage from one state to another, from darkness to light? The virtues of the New Economic Man, whose dwelling place is the market, are the will and the capacity to accumulate, to follow self-interest and to maximize profit in all things. His wants are unlimited; to satisfy them, he must learn to struggle against his fellows. Scarcity is a fact of life. There is not enough to satisfy the unlimited desires of all nor to provide a place in the sun for everyone. If unemployment in their country is twenty per cent or more, the New Men and Women will pit themselves against each other to find work at any price, at all costs.
The Bank's third function is to be the standard-bearer of a programme of truth. If the world market is the Bank's fundamental organizing principle, price is its instrument. One of the Bank’s major articles of faith is "getting the prices right", which it translates in French as la vérité des prix, the truth of prices. A price has a metaphysical quality because it is supposed to be the invisible point at the intersection between hundreds, thousands, millions of individual transactions. Price, if governments do not meddle by providing subsidies and otherwise distort the natural balance of things, will regulate human activity and necessarily bring order out of apparent chaos.
Those who deny a programme of truth defy the law, in the case of the Bank the laws of economics, structural adjustment and the market. With the International Monetary Fund, the Bank is the keeper of laws which, like the Ten Commandments, are immutable. Once revealed, they must be followed. Defiant countries that refuse them outright are blacklisted, literally excommunicated from the international community. Governments which receive the law halfheartedly must be exhorted to better performance. The Bank will reward or punish them by the granting or withholding of loans and credits. Thus it helps return them to the straight and narrow path or, in its own words, puts them back on-track.
If the New Man finds his life in the market, what of his death? All great truths must in one way or another speak of last things; the Bank’s is no exception. The Bank’s nominal mission is to promote development. Development in its biological sense means an organism's attainment of its inherent potential, inexorably followed by decay and death. In the Bank’s vocabulary, however, this biological meaning is replaced by a concept of never-ending growth. The Bank’s priesthood specifically denies limits to growth and promises an ersatz eternity in the here-and-now.
If such endless growth is supposed to lead to an American or European middle-class standard of living for over five billion people today and who knows how many tomorrow, we already know this to be an ecological and biospheric impossibility, even assuming tremendous and rapid changes in technology. The Bank refuses to confront this last of all last things -- not merely individual or societal death but the possibility of species extinction, including that of the human species. Incantations like "sustainable development" stave off the moment when the finite must at last be faced.
The Church's traditional imagery of heaven and of hell is graphic and explicit. Although it cannot prove that anyone has ever gone there, it still issues the visas to the promised land. The Bank paints no pictures with saints, angels and demons but it does put up signposts pointing towards paradise, exhorting the faithful to imitate the blessed -- the now-developed rich market-economy countries or at least those who are well on their way, like the Asian tigers.
The very vagueness of the concept of development and the great number of candidates who hope to attain it legitimize the Bank's functions, justify its existence and explain its power. As long as the fragile planet's heavenward journey lasts, as long as the poor are with us, as long as salvation is sought where it cannot be found, the World Bank will find for itself a role and a mission. [1] --------
BUT... But the Bank economists didn't understand "The Lesson of the Cake" -- they believed economics was not subject to universal physical laws. In short, they believed in Santa Claus. But in the real world there are no exceptions to universal physical laws, and a lot of people are going to die because of economists.
The next hundred years will look like the last hundred running in reverse. The shortage of energy will force the First World to abandon its "economic" agenda for global domination and revert to "political" Cold War tactics.
Age-adjusted mortality in Russia rose by almost 33% between 1990 and 1994.... Russia is not alone in experiencing drops in life expectancy; all the nations created from the break-up of the Soviet Union have reported a decline in life expectancy since 1990, although none has been as large as in Russia. [JAMA. 1998;279:793-800]
Africa is beginning of a full-on Malthusian dieoff. See "Worldwatch Briefing: Sixteen Dimensions of the Population Problem" at http://www.worldwatch.org/alerts/pr98924.html and "Life on Earth is Killing Us" press release at http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/1998/10/100298/killingus.asp and study itself is at http://dieoff.com/page165.htm
LIFE IN REVERSE Thanks to the economists, twenty million people in Asia fell back into poverty last year and Russia is busy rewiring the bipolar world, conducting subcritical nuclear tests, and deploying a new generation of ICBMs.
So the handwriting is on the wall Wilbur, start sticking your little happy faces on weapons because that's the high-growth, high-tech industry of the future. Moreover, it's never too soon to start discussing what kind of weapons produce the biggest bang for the buck!
Jay ----------------------------- [1] pp. 245-251 Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire by Susan George, Fabrizio Sabelli Westview Press; ISBN: 0813326079 http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813326079