Sunday, October 25, 2009

Part 2

Now, while the media focuses on Chinese manufacturing drones and Indian IIT graduates outcompeting midwest labor unions and medium quality amercan engineering graduates, no one talks about how screwed the rest of the third world is in the new flat reality. A recent nytimes article highlights how far we have to go in alieviating global poverty:

I live in a third world country and my job entails screening people for an application process that is primarily computer based. In this country, most people are so computer illiterate that they can't even go on to my company's web site and fill out an application. They frequently go to public notaries, and still make basic mistakes with spelling and biographical questions. The big question I always think is: where is Thomas Friedman now? My friends keep saying: don't worry, they'll catch up eventually. I think: they can't even use a computer and are brain dead when I talk to them, how can they compete with an IIT graduate who designs machines to automate them?

Well, here is your answer on what happens to those left behind in the new economy:


The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number.

The global financial recession added at least 100 million people by depriving them of the means to buy enough food, but the numbers were inching up even before the crisis, the United Nations noted in a report last week.


You go hungry. You starve.

Now, I'm not another wide eyed liberal in the likes of Nick Kristof or Jeffrey Sachs who pushes campaigns to eliminate poverty as the duty of the west or "something we can achieve in our generation."

I'm just a person who genuinly cares about innocent children starving to death (about 25,000) per day from preventable causes. This is a moral tragedy on an unimaginable scale, but what really infuriates me more are the grandstanding liberals who don't give HBD a chance to UNDERSTAND the root causes of poverty and put into place measures to alleviate this.

Not to mention the meat eaters who misalocate resources into meat production that could easily go towards alleviating third world hunger.

Nytimes continues:


The so-called green revolution of the 1960s and ’70s ended the specter of mass famines then, but the environmental cost of chemical fertilizers and heavy irrigation has spurred a bitter divide over the right ingredients for a second one.


The green revolution just merely delayed a bare minimum economic reality: In a capitalist system, you get what you produce. And in a system in which an unemployed laborer has no land of his own, there is poverty.

I vast swaths of the third world, there are simply masses of people who produce less economic value than what they need to sustain themselves, and they grow hungry. Why do they produce less? HBD.

And it's just going to get worse. While machines become more intelligent, they will make redundant vast swaths of the labor market. The third world and low intelligence races will suffer the most, because they won't even have a shot at developing IT intense industries. They will be simply bypassed.

So if you're stuck in Latin America, Africa, or South Asia, and are an unskilled laborer with nothing to offer, good luck. Thomas Friedman doesn't even have enough time to write about you, because in the new economy you're already screwed.

Change we can believe in.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

"I live in a third world country and my job entails screening people for an application process that is primarily computer based. In this country, most people are so computer illiterate that they can't even go on to my company's web site and fill out an application."

You should talk more about this. I studied abroad in Thailand -- Chulalongkorn University -- and it was interesting to see HBD in action. However, Thai people are still attractive...

Anonymous said...

"I live in a third world country and my job entails screening people for an application process that is primarily computer based. In this country, most people are so computer illiterate that they can't even go on to my company's web site and fill out an application."

You should talk more about this. I studied abroad in Thailand -- Chulalongkorn University -- and it was interesting to see HBD in action. However, Thai people are still attractive...

Alan said...

"I'm just a person who genuinly cares about innocent children starving to death (about 25,000) per day from preventable causes. This is a moral tragedy on an unimaginable scale, but what really infuriates me more are the grandstanding liberals who don't give HBD a chance to UNDERSTAND the root causes of poverty and put into place measures to alleviate this."

What measures would HBD put into
place that would alleviate this?
How does HBD inform policy in
a useful, practical way?

Johnson said...

Changing birthrates among people with different IQ levels through sterilization and reproductive benefits for the intelligent.