Sunday, February 17, 2019

The Future of Poor People....


What happens to poor people in future years, and why?

We are living through a complex changing time. One of the biggest, but unheralded, changes is that a large base of citizens is no longer a pre-requisite for power or influence. And, because of that, the need for the powerful to support poor people (in many advanced countries) is falling quickly.

Much of what we consider societal goods, things like education, transportation infrastructure and medical support, arose through the need of the government to have a healthy, educated population base for war-making. You couldn’t fight a war with sickly men. And a basic education was necessary for your population to support a modern war effort.

The first time that education was mandatory in England was 1880s, when the Empire was expanding. For the United States, national education was not compulsory until 1918 – after the “Great War”. Public Health was first widely available under Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany introduced public health care to keep a war ready population. And the US Interstate system was undertaken by Eisenhower not as a public infrastructure good, but a response to a poor infrastructure for military transportation in World War II.

But now warfare doesn’t require a large population of healthy, intelligent people. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but respect and admiration for our country’s military. However, we are moving forward with drones, satellites and bombs that are so powerful they make armies irrelevant.

And so, the demand from the government to feed and educate masses of people is reduced. And you see this in the voters of most stripes. We are moving away from public schools and tinker with private schools. The idea of publicly funded college is a joke. When I went to UCLA it was $700 a quarter. But, as people doubt the purpose of public education past high school, the price has increased to $7,000 per quarter, for in state. You see the slow decline of public schools at all levels, because government don’t want to pay for it.

In primary schools we see more and more private education for those that can afford it.

In the United States the fight is over Affordable Health Care. If the country doesn’t need healthy men to fight, then why try to keep everyone healthy? We spend a lot to keep our soldiers and veterans healthy and try to spend very little (of public funds) to keep the general population healthy.

Is the economic good of the country tied to population?

So, if the government doesn’t have to support poor people for military reasons, how about for economic reasons? Is there a tie between population and wealth?

I think there used to be. A large population was needed for farming and manufacturing and a large population made that much more possible. Granted, it helped to be the right type of population; once again, education played a large role here. But now, globalization makes a large population less important. Germany’s “power” didn’t grow when West Germany absorbed East Germany in the 1990s. Singapore is one of the richest countries in the world with a tiny population, almost no natural resources (albeit a great location). Nigeria has a massive population and is poor. Brazil has a massive population is reasonably well-off. Population doesn’t relate directly to power.  And we see the ruling class in the United States actively trying to reduce our population (we have grown for the last few decades mainly by immigration).


The Emerging Apartheid of Rich and Poor

And so we expect to see fewer policies that benefit the poor, since the poor have less benefit to the ruling class of society. That is harsh, but seems true.

We will see more value placed on the well-educated, but that education is quite often based on the ability to pay. The best educated are now quite often those that can afford the best education. Either through directly paying (as is the norm in LA and New York) or indirectly paying by paying to live in a very good school district (the norm in much of our country).

We see a reduction in emergency rooms and clinics, and a rise in specialist doctors with no wait that the comfortable can afford.

Public infrastructure is replaced by tool roads, private airports and corporate transportation schemes. Public police forces are supplemented by private security, gated communities and specialized alarms.

As a society, we don’t care about what happens to those in prison (I have stories if you think we do), because they are not integral to our society’s well-being. The United States tolerates an infant mortality that is worse that Bosnia’s, because it is primarily the poor who suffer.

The Future

The rate of inequality has only grown in the past and will probably grow in the future. The lack of action on behalf of the poor will probably get worse. There are 2 factors that make me expect these results.

The first is globalization. In this I mean even if the United States decided to become more focused on equality for all people with a common purpose. The richest of our citizens could easily move to avoid this. We have already seen this in some tech people with dual citizenship who left for Singapore or New Zealand when our tax laws changed (FATCA lead to hundreds of rich citizens with dual nationalities giving up their US citizenship).

The second is that the next wave of progress will probably result in improved lifespan and quality of life for the richest of us. Already in China they have edited the DNA of children. We have experimented with adding computer processing power to human brains. These changes will create a class of humans with more capabilities than normal humans. And the people that use this first will be the rich.

How much will those augmented humans worry about the people who are not augmented? I think you can make a reasonable guess from the way Americans think about Syrians of Sudanese who are dying. It is sad in a remote way. Or the way Israelis think of Palestinians dying in the West Bank and Gaza. It’s sad, but easy to assume they are less worthy of live than their own tribe. Now, imagine a culture of augmented humans. Poor non-augmented humans may be pityed, but easily ignored.

We in America have a dreadful history of overlooking those people who live here but don’t seem “American”, be it the slaves we brought, the natives we drove off the land or the Irish we hated at one point. Now it is “brown people”. I see problems, but we need to face them.