Another Empathic Appeal for the poor on NewsJunkiePost.com, entitled, Poverty: Half The World Lives On Less Than $2.50 A Day
Unfortunately, the first prerequisite for prosperity is to control your population’s breeding.
The worlds problems are not ‘density’ or ‘pollution’ or ‘capitalism’ but the transfer of life-extending technology to peoples who do not the cultural ability to control their breeding without the limits set on life by agrarian food production. For thousands of years, food production and disease gradients have limited population for people who lack the personal and social technology to control their birth rates so that they may stay within their productive means.
Then we in the west, in our compassion, and in our lust to profit, sell these people life extending technologies without demanding that they control their birth rates.
Were we to distribute all the wealth of the west to these people they would simply consume it and would match their reproduction to all increases in production, impoverishing the west as well.
The division of knowledge and labor, the resulting increases in production, and the virtuous cycle of lowering prices because of this increased production are only one half of the equation. The control of breeding in the (protestant) countries is the other half of the social problem.
More countries need a one-child policy, and the infrastructure to support that policy. Unfortunately, corruption is so rampant in these breeding-centers.
Thankfully the rate of capitalism’s transformation of the world from agrarianism where children are a productive asset, to industrialization where children are a very high cost, is slowing the overbreeding problem in the ’second world’ of organized states. Incorporation of women into the workforce further controls breeding, and often too much (Japan and Russia). The reason we need women’s participation in the work force, especially in poorer countries, is so that they do not breed their civilizations into permanent poverty.
The problem isn’t money. It’s cultural discipline. If we are going to even discuss mobilizing states to correct poverty then we should mobilize states to control breeding. Otherwise, along with our technology of life extension we are simply handing a murder weapon to a madman.
“In other words, in 2004 about 0.13 percent of the world’s population controlled 25 percent of the world’s wealth. If we consider the global spending priorities of 1998, the trends were already extremely alarming.”
Most people who read have heard of the 80/20 principle. Which means that 20% of the people control resources. This principle was developed by Vilfredo Pareto, for whom it’s named the “Pareto Principle.” He used quite a bit of data to show that in England in particular, 20% of people controlled about everything, and that income was rewarded accordingly.
This also supports the value added by people. Despite our rhetoric of egalitarianism and equality, the top third of people are more productive than the bottom two thirds combined. And, at least it appears, that the top twenty percent are more productive (have more impact on generating goods and reducing prices) than the rest combined. The problem for any society is allowing the most productive people to concentrate sufficient capital that they may raise the population into prosperity. After which it’s possible to implement programs of redistribution. you can’t share what you don’t have.
Unfortunately, the only value most citizens have in an economy is to provide menial labor and to consume goods and therefore create demand for goods and sevices. Imbalances in assets are needed to allow the creative and productive members of society to concentrate capital (which is the ability to influence others in an organized fashion) so that productivity can be increased.
There is no record in history of this system of wealth concentration being abated. If it IS changed, then the vast majority of people on this earth will rapidly die. The problem is instead, to control reproduction and to increase production and continue the ‘virtuous cycle’ while we live within our means, so that we can redistribute something on the order of 20% of our wealth to those who have EARNED that right by the cost of forgoing further reproduction.
In other words, you EARN redistribution by controlling your breeding.