Saving Humanity Part 1

I was reading Umair Haque's thoughts on 21st Century Capitalism....its an interesting post, and I think these points are well made:

The great Joseph Schumpeter argued that growth happens through a process of creative destruction. There’s a simpler word for that: turbulence.

I think there’s a problem with this thesis. In an interconnected world, there are more and more players creating and destroying – as a simple example, the pool of workers in export-oriented industries has tripled, from 300 million to about 900, over the last 20 years. And so, today, turbulence is intensifying.

Creative destruction has two sides – the costs of destruction as well as the benefits of creation. And as creative destruction intensifies, the costs of this great tradeoff are going to sharpen. The price of growth, it seems, is a world that’s always riskier, more uncertain, and more brutal at the margin.

And the outcome is fairly predictable too:

When the last bubble was in internet technology, welfare was minimally affected – jobs were lost. When it shifted to housing and credit, welfare was affected more – houses and saving were lost.

Today, it’s shifting in large part to energy and food. What happens when hypercapitalism causes a food bubble? What happens when the masters of the universe in Greenwich bid up the price of food for India, China, and Africa's huddled masses?

Here’s the answer: marginal starvation. Lives are lost.

Its alluded to in the newspapers, and more bluntly in City bars, but we all know that speculation is driving some of the price rises for raw materials and basic foodstuffs (not helped by daft biofuel subsidies), and that this is tipping the point at which people starve.

But no national government, nor the UN, has the power to stop food commodity speculation - and not all even have the will, as starvation is not impacting the world equally. The poor are getting poorer, the rich are getting richer and own an increasing amount of the planet's assets, and globally the middle classes are slowly sliding into peasantry as their share of real incomes erode and they live more and more in debt.

Here comes Feudalism 2.0..... So what is to be done?

Its been clear, even before I was at Uni (remember the Club of Rome) that the whole system of growth-chasing is unsustainable as is, but the belief has been throughout the last few decades that technology in one way or another will save us. What is becoming clearer today is that it may (or may not - the "how" is still unclear) , but before that happens a lot of "us" will lead very uncomfortable lives, if not die.

Umair's view of the solution:

What happens when we think of using new DNA to reorganize structurally inefficient industries? A blueprint for the next industrial revolution emerges. Here’s what it looks like.

Organize the world's hunger.
Organize the world’s energy.
Organize the world’s thirst.
Organize the world's health.
Organize the world's freedom.
Organize the world's finance.
Organize the world's education.

That's not an exhaustive list - it's just a beginning. What's important is the logic behind it. Let's make that as razor-sharp as possible.

I looked at Umair's answer, and I think those are by and large the right areas to go after, but I'm not sure about how the "organise" bit works in practice - it implies central controls and smacks a little of "Marxism 2.0" to me as is - probably needs some fleshing out. I know Umair thinks for eg Google is very benign and is a model to cleave to, but I'm afraid I see any large public corporate caught up in the current structure as probably structurally unable to sort things like these out. I suspect we need new organisations with new structures to solve these problems.

Answers have I none yet - need to mull this one over a bit, but I suspect a part of of the solution is in the use of small scale, local, user owned structures, as E F Schumacher hypothesised when he looked at the issue years ago.

Another bit must be to peg back some of the freedoms of the financial markets, they were nowhere near this powerful or dangerous when the Club of Rome wrote its report in the 1970's. I think one thing that is cyclical over a Kondratieff wavelength is the wax and wane of the power of oligopoly, and we are living in a world akin to the turn of the 20th century in terms of power and wealth concentrated in the fewest hands, and that accountability needs to be returned to the people it has been eroded from over the last 30 years or so.

And another bit must be this Internet thingy - revolutionary new comms tools have tend to drive socioeconomic and political change throughout our history, so why not this time?

Incidentally, I do hope everyone realises that its not the planet we are saving from extinction, but our own sorry little genes - the planet will do just fine if we gas ourselves to death, its taken bigger hits before.

Anyway, more tomorrow......

So its tomorrow, and the overnight thought was this - The Earth is one giant Tragedy of the Commons test for humanity. Thus the answers can be framed roughly as "what is required to prevent Tragedy of the Commons occurring" and that will be Part 2 of this series a its a post in its own right.

But to be clear, failure of the test may mean extinction of the species, and will definitely mean extreme misery for many members of our and other species, and probably a major reduction in numbers. Its happened before in microcosm (even to extinction), and we are not dreadfully well structured to sort it out collectively (as Jared Diamond has recorded in Collapse). More thoughts on what "organise" means in Part 2 therefore, but some initial scribbles here:

- We seem (historically) to find it difficult to self organise early within a situation before fairly major catastrophe occurs

- I don't therefore believe that "here comes everybody" modes are the answer long term - traditionally these movements are protest based rather than structured to run things sustainably, and tend to be short lived

- However, it may be that this sort of mass approach is required to tip things onto a new plane.

- We can't expect the financial system to assist - its structure is a power law, the rich grow richer until it tips over (cf Great Depression)

- Ditto the public corporate value chain system - its causing most of the problems

- Not clear if current (Western) political structures can work - they are too gummed up in lobbyism and are probably not split along the right lines today.

- Also not clear if other models in say China or Russia will work - benign autocracy is wonderful in theory, but autocrats seldom stay benign if history is any guide

- Sadly, most of the people who need most of the help have no resources to get it and others need to fight their corner

- Those others need to persuade their own countryfolk to give up a huge amount of what they have, for a very uncertain future and benefit. For eg, US produces c 25 of man's carbon emissions, with c 5% of population - ask them to reduce by 4/5 and hand over to Asia and Africa? Aint going to happen

Uh Oh - Part 2 is going to be no cakewalk