On Oct 31, 2008, at 2:26 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
Carrol wrote:
I think Raghu has a point. Growth is a concept
(and certainly a word) that pretty much belongs
to The Enemy.
My .02 USD:
Growth is a term used not only in economics, but in the physical and
biological sciences, ...
Perhaps but we are on an economics list, no? But anyway, I have made
reference, in the past, to the First Law of Thermodynamics or the law
of conservation of energy. As we continue to grow our consumption, our
material wealth, our populations, etc, we will (and have) cross(ed) a
point where we destroy the things that sustain us. IMHO, there is no
working around this simple fact. What is left is the shouting about
whether we can continue to [necessarily] inequitably and unequally
consume resources, or whether it is time for contentment and
redistribution.
As even the neoliberal Obama implies, it is better to *[re]distribute*
the wealth than to aim for [the right-wing idea of] "growth" [that
lifts all boats]. And though some have held that only intellectuals
love poverty, that and what it implies, are not true. For one thing, I
have known more than one poor intellectual who is (or was) poor not
because of love of it, but because he or she doesn't find any value in
riches. And how does one define "poverty"? That seems a much more
ambiguous term than the one under contention i.e., "growth". Also,
what people desire is a result of the environment they are a part of.
If the reigning attitude is one of individualistic hedonism backed up
by a religion that mandates that the world and all it contains exist
purely for our consumption, I suppose many might desire the luxuries
they are conditioned to desire. But that's a poor and local
application of induction. People live (and have lived for thousands of
years) in other circumstances with other attitudes.
And this "growth", couched in language of "more schools, more
hospitals", is at the cost of those whom these "more"s will never
reach, purely by the logical implications of "growth". Here is Majid
Rahnema:
http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-5078-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html
For most of his working life, Dr Rahnema had always assumed that by
definition "the poor were poor." By using the proper economic levers
to better manage scarce resources, he believed that development
experts, like himself, "could make their situation better."
His experience in Calcutta launched him on a personal journey that
would see him reject these two widely held assumptions as irrelevant.
"The societies and people we call poor," Dr Rahnema states, "have to
be studied and examined and approached in terms other than this
negativity which we call poverty. Their riches are in their
relations with one another, in the types of things that can be done
together, and in their relationship with nature. Of course, the
societies we call poor did not produce many of the consumer goods or
gadgets which today we call riches."
[...]
Each system or society builds its own network of relations to meet
its goals and, in the process, creates its own sense of value, of
both rich and poor. According to Dr Rahnema,"riches or things have
no value in themselves. Value is attributed to something through a
nexus of relations and culture-specific perceptions of needs or of
poverty. In Persian, for example, a poor person is one who has
nobody to look after him or her."
The proponents of economic development saw it as a way to transform
the scarcity they witnessed and labelled as poverty into abundance.
But economic development has had the opposite effect — scarcity is
built into the system .
"A modern person is one with unlimited needs, " says Dr Rahnema."
And the economy claims that it can provide such a person with the
unlimited means he or she needs to satisfy them."
The problem is that "the creation of needs goes much faster and in a
more secure way than the creation of resources needed to satisfy
those needs. What you have at the top of the echelon is a small
group of individuals who can satisfy those needs and a greater mass
of people who can never be satisfied."
According to Dr Rahnema, the whole notion of a society organized
around scarcity runs counter to the world view held in the past and
still found among more traditional societies. They consider
themselves as part of an abundant whole. In their view, "a human
being was a person who had to learn the art of living with necessity."
[...]
Questions need to be more specific, more concrete, and grounded in
the reality of those we seek to help. In the final analysis though,
he believes that changing the entrenched views on the poor and
poverty will prove very difficult. To do so, we must examine the
beliefs and values that underpin the dominant social and economic
models in operation today. According to Dr Rahnema,"the relevant
questions we avoid, because those questions mean a much greater
seriousness and perhaps need total radical approaches to the way we
live and the society we are — and we don't want to question that."
Here is Rahnema on education, as quoted by Paul Feyerabend:
Cultures and civilizations...
were formed, enriched and transmitted by millions of people who
were learning by living and doing, for whom living and learning
was
synonymous, as they had learn for living and they learned
whatever
was meaningful to them and to the community they belonged to.
Before the current school system came into being, for thousands
of
years, education was not a scarce commodity. It was not a
product of
some institutional factories, the possession of which could
bestow
upon a person the right to be called 'educated ... The [new]
school
system ... serve[d] as a rather efficient channel of sieving
out, into
the Power Establishment, the most ambitious -- and sometimes the
brightest -- aiming at personal professional fame. It also, para-
doxically, did serve as a 'cultural medium' to some outstanding
indi-
viduals, among them radical thinkers and revolutionaries who used
some of its unique learning resources for their own liberating
pur-
poses. Yet, on the whole, it soon became an 'infernal machine'
which
distinguished itself in the systematic organization of
excluding pro-
cesses against the poorest and the powerless ... The old days ...
when 'every adult was a teacher' were over. Now, only those
certified
by the school system, according to its self devised criteria,
could have
the right to teach. Education thus became a scarcity [my
emphasis].
It is interesting to see how little influence these discoveries have
had on the sermons preached by professional rationalists. Karl
Popper, for example, bemoans the "general anti-rationalist
atmosphere ... of our time", praises Newton and Einstein as great
benefactors of humanity but breathes not a single word about the
crimes committed in the name of Reason and Civilization. On the
contrary, he seems to think that the benefits of civilization may
occasionally have to be imposed, on unwilling victims, by a "form of
imperialism" (see chapter 6, section 1).
There are various reasons why so many intellectuals still argue in
this short-sighted way. One reason is ignorance. Most intellectuals
have not the foggiest idea about the positive achievements of life
outside Western civilization. What we had (and, unfortunately, still
have) in this area are rumours about the excellence of science and
the dismal quality of everything else.
The standard, and IMHO intellectually lazy response to this, is to
sneer at New Age Hippy'ism or to critique the critic ("I bet Rahnema
and Ravi own and drive a car").
--ravi
--
Support something better than yourself ;-)
PeTA => http://peta.org/
Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/
If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
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