China & the high tech society

When I posted recently about the troubles of having an authoritarian high tech society, one of the examples that came to my mind was modern China. Another actually is pre-revolutionary France -- not as high tech, I'll admit, but one in which the populace had rising, but unmet, expectations.

I am reading a book now on modern China -- China: Fragile Superpower: How China's Internal Politics Could Derail Its Peaceful Rise. The commentary describing the book remarks

She sets out to explain why it is not a mere fantasy and why we, basically, need to be nice to China to keep the nightmare at bay.

["It" is war between the US & China.]

When I read the tea leaves, I doubt that anything can prevent breakage in China. It's an authoritarian country that is trying to turn itself into a modern, high tech society, which seems impossible enough on the surface. Then add in:

Inside China, she argues, the party leadership is hemmed in by threats to its stability: a rapidly aging population, the rise of the Internet, privatization of the economy, a widening gap between urban rich and rural poor, a restive population fed up with corruption, pollution that not only sickens but kills, mounting unemployment in an economy that needs to grow 7 percent annually just to provide jobs for 25 million new people entering the workforce.

In other words, even if China did not have an authoritarian government, it would have trouble. Does it look like the government can square this circle?

"All around them," Shirk contends, "the leaders see new social forces unleashed by economic reforms that could subvert the regime." Moreover, Shirk describes a regime -- half Mafia, half corporate board -- so obsessed with staying in power that it is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges. In a country where communist ideology is dead and a dog-eat-dog form of capitalism is ascendant, you'd think economic interests would be supreme. That's not the case, Shirk argues. After the crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, the military and security services gained even more power than they already had in a society built on Chairman Mao's maxim that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."

The headlines today read: China Locks Down Restive Region After Deadly Clashes Does this mean that things have gotten so bad the government can't prevent the news from getting out or that they are becoming more open?

The big question though, is how much longer will China be stable & in what way will it explode?

All models are wrong, but some are useful

It seems to me -- and I realize that there are many would would disagree violently -- that this applies to the idea of God.

To start with, I (unlike most people it seems) distinguish the idea of God from religion. Religion, I claim, is a social phenomenon. God is (and I speak loosely here) a mystical one. Religion trades on the idea of God, but it's really about people.

The ideas that people have about God (including the things that religion claims) are, in essence, models. The best of them say "there is something there, but we can't describe it or say what it does or how it works". This, of course, doesn't give much to work with. :-)

People go on to flesh out these ideas, with what they believe about God. Being as how God is something that can't really be described, these ideas -- which are mental models -- must be wrong in some way. However, the models themselves do have effects on people and thus, are more or less useful to the people that hold them.

The models people hold about God don't affect what it is (so I claim), but they do affect the people that have them. Thus, while they are wrong (God being ineffable and all), some are useful. Also, I will add, the models that are useful to one person may or may not be useful to another.

People that believe in an angry or vengeful God will find the world a fearful place (or perhaps it is the other way round, frightened people will believe in an angry God), while people who believe that God is on their side, however hard it may be to understand how that happens, will have a reason to reject fear. Angry and frightened people will foment strife, peaceful and secure people will work for peace. Thus, what people believe to be true of God matters, independent of the nature of the deity itself.

High tech societies

It has occurred to me that in a high tech society, there must be a large population of people that use their own good sense to make significant decisions.

For example, the way that my job works is that people come to me & say something to the effect of "We have this vague idea of something that needs to be done. Go do it." My task then, is to make something sensible of that vague idea & then implement what I come up with.

This general pattern is the norm for most of the people that I know. It isn't, of course, the way that everyone's job works, but my kind of job is essential to keeping the technology running. [My particular job is actually about making new technology, but new technology is required for wealth creation.]

The point here is that a high tech society requires a large supply of people who have almost complete freedom to do anything sensible in their jobs. In short, it trains people to think and act for themselves.

An authoritarian (much less totalitarian) government requires people to follow instructions, to do as the government decrees. This is incompatible with having people make decisions for themselves.

It follows that a society with a large amount of advanced technology is incompatible with an authoritarian regime. As people learn the habit of thinking for themselves in their jobs, they are likely to continue that behaviour to the rest of their lives and in particular, start to have independent thoughts about the way the government organizes their society. These people have de-facto power, since they keep the technology working -- they keep the lights on & the economy running. Sooner or later, there will be change. It may be peaceful, but it is more likely to be violent, a la the French Revolution.

Somebody's Gotta Do It

I ran across this sentence buried in a post, entitled Somebody's Gotta Do It the other day:

Yet I can’t tell you how often I’ve sat down with an activist whose latest policy paper is all about solutions, and in heart-to-heart conversation they reveal that they don’t really think our species has much of a chance of avoiding major catastrophe, maybe even extinction.

Ok, so we are heading to disaster. I'm not going to worry about extinction. If it happens, c'est la vie, or c'est la morte, but there isn't anything to concern myself with after that. :-)

In the meantime, this is my big three list of things to look for:

1. A way (or some ways) to organize society that is humane, sustainable and attainable. I know there are people who offer solutions, but I have yet to hear one that I believe would be both good & could actually happen. The ones that sound good usually seem to require a population made of saints, which I think has no more chance of happening than an ice sculpture of Notre Dame being around the morning after a big party in Hades.
2. Population control and/or reduction
3. Sustainable and abundant energy

The last of these strikes me as the most tractable, but I don't see any major progress happening.

In the meantime, I think I'll watch out for the disaster.

The growth of poverty

I have heard people say things to the effect that we, the relatively rich of the world, can't continue hogging the worlds resources.

I think this is a misunderstanding of the problem -- not that I do understand it, of course. However, the view from 20,000 feet looks something like:

- 50 years ago, say, there were about 1/2 as many people in the world.
- In the last 50 years, the amount of global wealth has grown a lot.
- In the rich parts of the world, the amount of wealth per person has grown and the growth of the population has stopped.
- In the poorer societies, the wealth of the society has grown, but the wealth per person has not. They have produced more people, not more wealth per person. [I claim that the wealth of the society must have grown, or these societies could not have increased their populations so dramatically.]

Hence I conclude that the problem is that there is something structurally wrong with poor societies that prevents them from bringing their people up from poverty.

In this light, it is actually worth asking why the richer societies have provided more wealth per person when the norm through history is to have large numbers of poor and a few rich people in most larger societies. It seems to me that a large part of the reason is possibly the migration of a reasonably technologically advanced society to a new continent. That by itself isn't enough to explain the difference though, since the US, for example, provides more for its people than Mexico.

Another idea is that of the labor movement, which forced the owners of the means of production to share the proceeds with their laborers.

In more recent history, much of the wealth in the rich societies has come about as a result of skilled labor. These skills tend to be rare, in that they can take years to develop and there tend to be relatively few people who develop any given set. As a result, the people who have the skills tend to be valuable to those that would employ them, resulting in high wages.

In other words, I suspect that a highly technological and specialized society will tend to produce wealth for a larger segment of the society due to the high value of the specialized skills needed to make it work and the high barrier to entry (the time required) to gain those skills.

Another guess

So here's another guess at a possible future ...

In the next two to four years, the world economy more or less claws its way back to not shrinking. The US grumbles, but the rest of the world has more trouble.

After a while (e.g. 2-5 years), either China or Pakistan goes unstable. There is widespread civil unrest in those countries. At some point, Pakistan and India go to war.

Then the middle east and north africa go unstable. This causes oil production, which was dropping already, to drop quite a lot.

That in turn, affects food production, which was barely keeping up with population growth, to drop. Asia and Africa see local fighting, of the Somali pirates and Darfur crisis variety in much larger amounts.

The lack of food and civil disturbance drives people into environments, like refugee camps, in which many people are crowded together with minimal sanitation and food. These spawn epidemic diseases, which spread beyond the camps to the cities.

Some people react by forming into militias to take over their neighbors resources. Existing infrastructure (e.g. roads, bridges, farms, oil wells) is destroyed. This reduces the effective carrying capacity of the affected regions.

World population drops, due to starvation and disease, mostly, with some warfare thrown in.

Another guess at the future

Here's a thought as it one way future events could play out:

• Obama & the Democrats win the 2008 election
• The US economy goes into recession starting in 2008
• The world goes into recession somewhat later in 2008
• Oil hovers for a while and then continues going up
• Political unrest continues, esp in Africa and the middle east
• The US and the world sink more deeply into the economic doldums
• The Republicans win in 2012
• Starting in 2012, within a year or two the dominos fall:
  




• The new president takes a hard line in the middle east and Pakistan, possibly invading Iran
  
• Pakistan falls into chaos
  
• Pakistan and India go to war
• Indonesia falls into chaos and civil war
• Saudi Arabia erupts into civil war
• Followed by the rest of the middle east
• Oil exports from the middle east fall to a small fraction of what they were
• China erupts into civil war
  

And then things get "interesting" ...