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.