This is important. One aspect of development is credentials, codes, standards, etc. So either it is done the "right" way or it is not done. So there is little buffer room for truly self-help projects, unless of course, the individual moves way out in the country, "off the grid" in more ways than one.
Maybe we either have a developed society which delivers in good times but is brittle when times are tough. Or we have an "under-developed" society which allows for or is indifferent to doing things as the individual determines since there are no rules or regulations in many cases. The former can deliver when things are working well, the latter is more resilient but never really delivers the outcomes of a developed society and economy. In our society, individuals have come to rely on the system for jobs, etc., and when the jobs aren't there there is no history, no culture and little possibility of doing things for themselves for the reasons mentioned. Do they turn to the state for help. Or rather they expect the state to help. Interesting. Arthur -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 12:41 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [Futurework] [Ottawadissenters] Re: FW: Too Poor to Make the News > What it suggested is that there is a third world in the US, the > wealthiest country in the world. What Ehrenreich says in the > current article is that the American third world is sinking, perhaps > into a fourth world. There was apiece in the Toronto Globe & Mail recently that reported how economic groups such as the OECD were amazed (they didn't actually say "shocked and appalled" but they meant that :-) because poor people in 3rd world countries were just, well, you know, doing stuff that other people needed done. You know? Like, just working? Hang out a shingle and fix broken stuff, make new stuff, whatever. No license, no employer, no tax, no permit. Jeez, they said, what is the world coming to? Here we do all this stuff to Create Jobs and Employment and.... well, okay, so the job creation thing isn't doing all that well in lotsa places but what *can* these people be thinking, cutting us and the gummint out of the action? In the US, there seems to me to be two competing traditions: The more recent one is based on the sense of entitlement to a full panoply of consumer goods that's been engendered by television. "I can't be a real person unless I have all that Stuff, or a least tacky down-market imitations of it." So deprivation turns people to apathy, crime, dependency, alcohol etc. The older tradition is self-sufficiency. "My great-granpa lived in a sod house, my granpa hauled a load of wood to town with horses each week to trade for flour and my daddy farmed his rocky holler all his life. I worked 30 years for GM but if GM's gone, we can make do in a sod house if we have to." One can hope that, if (or as) the US socioeconomic infrastructure decays, people will opt for the older model. Regrettably, we have in place a whole body of regulation to prevent it. Among other things, it's generally against the law to shelter yourself and your family. You either have to build to code -- tens of thousands of dollars in mandated details, more thousands to meet minimum size and so on -- or you can live in a cardboard box under a bridge. Shacks, cabins, sod houses or anything in between the two extremes are not allowed. A down-town urban variant of building your own shelter is the squat -- an abandoned mall or factory, a failed condo complex or whatever -- but once again the existing legal, regulatory and liability infrastructure in the US responds with a shudder, harrassment and extirpation. Is there a good master's thesis in comparing self-sufficiency in, say, Bangladesh of Mali with the criminalization of self-sufficiency in industrialized countries? FWIW, - Mike -- Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~. /V\ [email protected] /( )\ http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
