The Rise of the Rest; A Newsweek Article
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An excellent article IMHO. It is well worth reading.
The Rise of the Rest
......American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.......
An excellent article IMHO. It is well worth reading.
The Rise of the Rest
......American anxiety springs from something much deeper, a sense that large and disruptive forces are coursing through the world. In almost every industry, in every aspect of life, it feels like the patterns of the past are being scrambled. "Whirl is king, having driven out Zeus," wrote Aristophanes 2,400 years ago. And—for the first time in living memory—the United States does not seem to be leading the charge. Americans see that a new world is coming into being, but fear it is one being shaped in distant lands and by foreign people.......
Comments
The problem, is that many Americans are not interested in staying on top. They take it for granted. If you want a great society, you have to encourage people to become the professions that a good society needs most. You need to make role models out of doctors, engineers, honest politicians, police officers, and trade workers. You have to applaud the good work done by community leaders. You have to respect leaders who are working towards solutions even if you dislike some of their beliefs (especially if the beliefs you dislike are morally relativistic and have no bearing on their actual job). Instead, we have a society where the best a man can do is be an athlete and the best a woman can do is be an actress. And this attitude more than sums up why other nations are catching and surpassing America in many domains.
But I also think this article has really missed a point. Let's be honest here, if I can squeak out an existence that is at least as good as my parents did, then things are moving in the right direction. You can't define that as just "a bigger TV" either. A better existence should be better in every way. If I can have an extra 5 minutes of spare time a day, live in a house that is a little bit more comfortable, eat food that is a little bit better, and have relationships that are a little bit easier to maintain, then I've won. The malaise I see isn't because other countries have taller buildings, it's because things are really not better than a generation ago in many of the most fundamental ways. People feel busier than every, and they are finding less lasting relationships than they used to. Even if the homes are getting larger and the food fresher (debatable with the recent shortages), our society is moving backwards in some real ways.
So what if other countries are becoming more prosperous and/or powerful? Americans can still lead productive happy lives regardless.
But let's not bog down on sports. How happy is Boeing if they aren't #1 in the world? Somehow, it's night and day different if Boeing sells 7% more planes than Airbus, as opposed to things being the other way around. Microsoft can have a multi-billion dollar business, but they seem unhappy if any other company leads them in even one segment of that business. Whether it be web browsers, online search, mp3 players, video game consoles (well they don't seem to care *that much about video games), or even document formats (yes they care if you use their published "standard" as opposed to someone else's standard).
Is that too big of a scale? How about keeping up with the Jones'? Let's be fair, with a family of 4, unless they are all 8' tall and 400 lbs, a 2500 sq ft house with 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms is 100% completely reasonable. Adding extra space doesn't really buy you that much better of an existence. But don't tell your neighbors that, because they don't want to hear it. And if their neighbor can afford a BMW on a similar salary, then they must be able to get a new car too.
This competitive streak and worship for being on top is part of our culture. Either we get past it, find a way to stay on top, or the malaise will just become more profound.
* us meaning a large percentage of Americans.
#1 gets everything.
#2 gets nothing.
Being #1 can be vitally important for long term success and happiness.
I always read about how people are busier than ever, and I see it with some people, but haven't experienced it myself. I think it's more of a choice, not a necessity. People don't always have to answer the phone, for example. A trick I think is to embrace technology that improves life (like auto bill pay), while shunning stuff that makes it more harried (like online chat and text messaging).
When I grew up food was in terrible shape, covered with pesticides and getting worse with genetic modification (i.e. built-in pesticides). Now you can get loads of organic stuff, assuming it's really organic. There are forums like this one, where we be entertained discussing esoteric topics with strangers. These and other improvements can keep our standard of living increasing even as the US edges down in the stats.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boj75h3urLU
In almost any situation that really matters, this is a false dichotomy. If society needs widgets, and you make them 50% better (higher quality or cheaper) than I can. You drive me out of business. I lose, you win. For us, it looks like a zero sum game. But society just won as well.
How about a more concrete example - dating. In any pool of people, one woman will be the "best catch", and therefore only one man is likely to "win". Does that mean the 2nd and 3rd best guys in the pool get nothing? Certainly not, they just get slightly less attractive matches.
The wealth divide in America has never been greater than it is today. But, people living in poverty are better off in every way that counts than even the wealthiest people from 100 years ago. Even in poverty, you can get fresh food any time of the year, you have TV/radio entertainment, you can move at 60 mph cheaply, and you're life expectancy is north of 65 years. Over the last 100 years, some people have won more than others, but overall everyone has won. For more on this topic, I recommend The Progress Paradox. It's a little preachy and reaches some (I think) wrong conclusions but the message is a good one.
That's nuts. GM is amongst the greatest advances in human history. I'm not going to defend the agriculture industry at large, because it has many problems, but GM foods are absolutely not comparable to foods covered in DDT. Just so this is clear to everyone, "natural" =/= "safe" and "artificial" =/= "dangerous". Also, FWIW almost every vegetable you eat today is genetically modified. The only difference is they were modified over thousands of years via breeding rather than over dozens of years. Look at some natural, organic, never touched by humans corn and compare it to the genetically modified stuff we normally eat.
Major differences are that the vegetables we eat that were modified over thousands of years are obviously healthy (GM foods don't have the same track record), and GM foods are modified not to improve health or taste or some other benefit to the consumer, other than cost, by maximizing the profit of the grower.
I've read that early versions of GM corn caused rashes due to its built-in pesticides. The corn prevalent in the US today is engineered to withstand a weed killer that kills any other kind of corn. That sounds like a recipe for cancer to me. One thing's for sure: If the companies that make GM foods knew they caused cancer but it likely wouldn't show up for 20+ years, they'd hide that fact and fight the lawsuits when they start.
I try to adhere to Jack LaLanne's maxim: "if man makes it, don't eat it". They guy's 94 and is active & seems still in good health. Why trust GM food when we don't really know its long-term effects, and plenty of other factory-made foods have turned out to be health disasters (like margarine and saccharin)?
So you would have no problem non-edible products from genetically modified plants? GM crops might offer higher yields of cotton or ethanol producing sugar cane. Indeed, GM plants could potentially offer SUPPERIOR fibers and attributes for industrial uses (e.g. plastics) than any "natural" varieties.
Of course, this whole distinction between "natural" and "GM" doesn't make any sense to me. Great advances in cross polination/hybridization in the last 20 years have created strains that were utterly impossible to past generations. It's hard for me to think of these test-tube germinations as being "natural", even though they don't employ direct manipulation of the DNA itself.
Good point. Cows might not survive long in the wild, either. The main problem I have with the genetic modification is that it's done almost solely for profit. For example, if the companies could find a way to reduce the corn's nutritional value, but improve the yield of the crop, they'd certainly do it. And that is just what they did. The corn that's prevalent in the US today has much less nutritional value than previous types. It's designed to have more starch for the making of corn syrup, used in about half of the items at the grocery store nowadays.
I laugh at the "natural" products. Lay's natural potato chips are the same as their un-natural (no "natural" label) potato chips. Guess which costs more? There's no regulation of the label, like there is for "organic". It's legal to call GM foods natural.
This works both ways. GM crop owners could be irate at having their fields "contaminated" by pollen from nearby organic crops, thereby lowering their yields. I don't want to minimize this problem, but it's a complex one that largely deals with property rights and needs to be sorted out by courts (similar to people who are upset by smells of manure from neighbouring farms, which can be very substantial).
Again, I don't see the distinction between direct manipulation of DNA and cross-breading/hybridization. Take domesticated animals. No significant genetic engineering is taking place in the world's farm animals thus far, yet we have reach AMAZING degrees of technological management of selective breeding. I have relatives on a dairy who tell me that selective breeding alone has quadrupled the quantity of milk an individual cow can produce in the last 30 years. There are severe consequences to this, by the way, why many negative health genetic health attributes of these super milk producers.
Heck, we have gotten to such a state in turkey breeding programs that farmed turkeys can't even mate on their own anymore (i.e. they are too heavy to mount each other)!
I fail to see the distinction of the use of insemination and super-sophisticated breeding software (e.g. telling you exactly which semen to order to get the traits you want) for profit and modifying some DNA. If anything, direct genetic manipulation of animal DNA might be more humane (e.g. allowing us to get the high milk production we want without the in-breeding or bad health traits that also seem to accompany the high milk producers of today).
Genetics has far more to do with expected life span than most behavioral decisions. That's why everybody seems to knows a guy that ate bacon and eggs for breakfast every day until age 93. Meanwhile, cousin Phil is in pretty good health and dies of a heart attack at 42. It's all genetics.
That's because their isn't (or may not be) one. So long as GM means selecting genes from within species, the two are literally identical...well, GM is more efficient is all. And if you consider cross pollination, then scratch species from that previous definition.
But the primary arguments of Markor seem to be that we can't possibly know what is safe, and that there is no reasonable justification to do this in the first place. Both points offered succinctly here.
You are correct that the majority of GM is used to increase yields. But is this a bad thing!?! The world is currently facing food shortages. That's a minor annoyance for us, because some formerly disposable income is transferred to buying food instead, but it's life or death in many places. Again, GM is used to maximize yield, not profit. It just so happens you can do both simultaneously in most cases.
What about health risks? Every part of a vegetable that we are concerned with will be a chemical compound of some sort. The ones that are safe are already pretty well mapped out, because these are the things we need for nutrition. Vitamins, minerals, and glucose fall into this category. So do a large category of benign chemicals like fiber. It seems to me like if you have tomato A and tomato B, you can trivially check the safety by testing that B doesn't add any compounds. If it does, it must be tested for safety like any drug would be by the FDA before it is released as food. Of course, I anticipate in the not too distant future this will become unnecessary. We've mapped human DNA, in time we'll figure out what it codes to. When that happens, we can test what GM fruit X codes to against our DNA and know for sure if it's safe.
Sometimes in science a phase of high risk is required to get to a stabilized phase of low risk. Bridges used to fall down in high winds, but they don't seem to do that anymore. It's because we've improved the process.
We also see that bee populations are being decimated now and scientists are not sure why. Life would be hell if bees disappeared; a large part of our quality of life depends on them. Is it just a coincidence, or might the built-in factory-engineered toxins in GM crops be the culprit? There was a time when the DDT was heavily used and many bird species were "coincidentally" dying out too. We're at the same stage with GM crops that we were with DDT at one time: we don't know what the long-term damage might be, but it could well be disastrous.
IMO, a smart society nips the disasters in the bud before they happen. You can see that happening with human cloning, for example. I think if the majority of our society was paying attention to GM foods, they'd be outlawed. Instead we have a minority buying organic and hoping they aren't still screwed by cross-pollination, bee die-offs, and dead zones in the ocean.
Isn't this all just making a right, or at least confusing the issue, out of two wrongs? I don't like extreme cross-breeding/hybridization either, any more than I like GM foods or the idea of cloned humans for soldiers. It should all be outlawed, even if it's just intuition that's against it. Why even allow something to begin with that could backfire so badly, or is obviously wrong, such as cloned humans or too-big-to-mount turkeys?
Jack LaLanne is a sample of one to be sure, but he's also someone who was the picture of health in his 50s on his exercise show, and long after proclaiming his way to be the healthiest way, he's now 94 and still going strong. He's probably got great genes, but I'd wager that overall he's been about as lucky in health as Warren Buffett has been about money.
Well, it's so efficient that they can now build a toxin into every cell, so potent that insects that contact the plant develop abnormally. That's not an efficiency I want. It's obviously far riskier to our long-term quality of life than what has been done before outside of the lab.
Do we really need to solve the "problem" of the Earth not currently supporting the current human population? Again I'm no expert, but it seems obvious to me that GM foods are not going to prevent massive die-offs of humans. Or, if GM foods and other technologies are the savior that sustains 8 billion people, it won't have been worth it anyway, considering the reduced quality of life of the average person. It seems obvious that many more resources other than plant crops are being exhausted, and many species are being forced toward extinction. I'd rather there be less people and fish in the ocean. Plus less wars for resources, like oil and fresh water.
While I don't wish anybody to die of starvation, I also definitely don't see the point in making the Sahara desert, say, able to support large human populations through technology. A lot of people are starving in this world now because they or their parents followed untenable beliefs that (directly or indirectly) promote having as many kids as possible. The root cause of the starvation is their faulty belief system, not lack of technology. Sometimes it's best to let nature take its course, as painful as it may be to watch.
You have way more faith about this than I do. The FDA is a big fat failure, stuck deeply up the butts of lobbyists, in my book. It's only about once a month I read about another drug they approved that—oopsy—turns out to have death for a side effect. Consumers are largely left to their own judgment now. (I also doubt that we'll build a starship and find another habitable planet to colonize in time. Color me cynical!)
I agree wholeheartedly. In general it's good to experiment. Most people over 40 probably owe their lives to scientific discoveries. I think that's appreciated by the crowd who is adamantly opposed to GM foods. They just think the experiment is too risky in this case. After all, some collapsing bridges is not in the same league of consequences as say, bees becoming extinct. And/or they think that correcting the overpopulation problem is by far the better choice.
You think there are too many people, and apparently you would like to see a bunch of them die off. However, you are extremely concerned that some small subset of that overall population (the ones who shouldn't die off) might develop illness later in life (thus shortening their life).
How are these not contradictory statements?!? Further, how do we decide which people are the right ones to off?
Finally, I think the key insight about GM is that, if successful, it is actually an extremely environmentally friendly solution to the problems we have. If you can grow the same quantity of crops on 1/4 the land, then the rest can lie fallow or even be returned to wildlife. This is a good thing! If we pests love to eat tomatoes but for some reason ignore corn, and we can find out why that is and transplant that gene to the tomatoes, it might mean we don't need to use pesticide. This is also a good thing!
Again, this is strictly a utilitarian view. But to suggest that banning GM food to potentially benefit one American's late in life at the expense of definitely starving dozens of others is rather vain.
Once again I think you've really hit the nail on the head.
America spends an immense amount of economic and political capital to stay on top of the heap. We outspend the rest of the world on our military and use it in ways that frequently go against our own supposed moral superiority. We spend so much effort trying to be #1 that we've lost sight of those in the mirrors.
China, India, and dozens of other nations have spent the last 10-20 years building infrastructure, promoting the virtues of careers in engineering, science, and medicine, and vastly improving their education systems (i.e. no longer relying on American universities). Americans have spent the last 30 years promoting self-promotion. The only careers kids aspire to anymore? Acting, music, sports. Parents constantly encourage kids to play more sports, practice more instruments, etc. Engineering, science, and math are too hard; you can get an MBA with half the effort and make substantially more money. Large portions of our culture revolve around get-rich-quick schemes (e.g. American Idol, America's Got Talent) or becoming an overnight celebrity.
The things which made us #1 during/after WW2 - hard work, ingenuity, superior education - are long gone.
Well, I said I don't wish anyone to die of starvation. I'd rather that we find a way to get through this period of overpopulation, without anyone starving and without causing long-term damage, until the root cause of the problem (people having 3+ kids) is fixed. When everyone has 2 kids or less on average, attrition (incl. kids not living to parenthood) will reduce the population over time, until it reaches a sustainable level. That the ideal.
Reality is a different story. For example, religions & cultures aren't going to change their "be fruitful and multiply" mandate voluntarily. We already see die-offs due largely to overpopulation, like the 1994 Rwandan genocide (their population doubled in the 20 years prior to the genocide). I think die-offs of a billion+ people are inevitable in this century, given the building pressures on the environment due to overpopulation, like fish stocks nearing depletion and once-large lakes disappearing. Also it seems that climate change will take a large toll. For example, it now looks like Australia has over double the population it can support long-term, given its current rainfall outlook (it seems it's not a severe drought they are experiencing now, but rather the last 150-odd years there have been abnormally wet ones on average). No "population controller" will need to decide who dies, because it will happen more naturally, via wars, famines, genocides, etc.
Yes, I want the survivors to have the opportunity to live long, healthy, prosperous lives. Why not?
This is where you have more faith in the technology than I. If, say, GM is killing off the bees, then the technology could spell the end of civilization as we know it. I believe if the companies that make GM seeds knew that it killed off bees, they'd hide that knowledge, and the FDA doesn't do adequate testing.
Well geez, Wally, don't bees gather pollen?
I just don't see the need to take such a large risk when better solutions are available.
Final question. What are the better solutions that will provide enough food at attainable prices without causing even more ecological damage. I'm all for doing these things if they exist and are scalable. In fact, if I knew of any believable other solutions, you wouldn't even need to argue against GM. You could simply advocate those positions and I would already be on your side.
GM food = positive upside with a chance of a catestrophic downside.
We really want to be doing lots things that have a small downside and a chance of a huge upside.
That implies there is no single easy solution.
Often a good-looking short-term solution is a horrible long-term solution. DDT is an example. Looked like a wonderful chemical at first. Did you know that DDT is being used in Africa, to fight malaria? Some countries there have chosen to sacrifice the chain of life on which all their lives depend, in exchange for some lives saved now. Should we use the same logic in the US to bring back DDT here? (What's a few birds-of-prey species worth against wiping out the West Nile virus? Surely we'll find a way to deal with those pesky rodents that explode in population, and other problems. Another chemical perhaps?) Another example is antibiotics. Some doctors advocate greatly reducing the use of antibiotics, since evidence is piling up that shows that the widespread use of anitbiotics leads to so-called superbugs that are resistant to any antibiotic yet created. These doctors fear that saving thousands of lives now may cost millions of lives later. The list goes on and on...
2% of the world's population owns 98% of its wealth, or whatever the amazing stat is. Do whatever it takes to change that stat to "no 2% of the world's population holds more than 10% of its wealth", and you'll probably have solved the world hunger problem, plus a hundred other major ones. People will still be able to be very rich (just not super duper rich), so the argument that society fails if people can't become rich fails.
I'm convinced that people in some countries will be very difficult to help in the long run, though. If they're having 5 kids on average, they're almost certainly going to experience hunger. But if you help them to survive, they'll just bump it up to 10 kids on average. Famine may be the best teacher for them, sad to say.
This, I definitely agree with you on.
In poorer countries, many couples believe that they need to have many children so that some of of them will survive to take care of the parents when they become old and enfeebled. Better distrubution of wealth, health services, and education will help change that mind-set.