I've read somewhere the phrase "Our engineers know more and more about less and less". As things go, people will feel totally worthless on their own, because their skills and knowledge will be quite useless without big organizations and managers. It hurts to realize that you, with your years of education&training, is lower than an ant in a big scheme of things.

This was inevitable as everything we do and create gets more complicated. It now takes computers to administer the government, complete an engineering project, diagnose an illness, plan a vacation, or even play some of the most popular games.

The concept in play is "structural decomposition": the number or levels of organization in any activity or endeavor. It's been posited that computer programmers are the most skilled in this cognitive skill, since there are about twenty levels of decomposition between the actual end-user doing their work with use of the software's functionality and the individual instructions that comprise a program. The average mathematical formula only has about three levels and is practically flat by comparison.

Life is more complicated than ever, as measured by its levels of decomposition. Think of the layers of detail in the tasks you perform every day, even something as prosaic as going to work, before you even get any work done. Compare this to life just one hundred years ago before the Information Revolution, much less pre-industrial life. As a result very few people have a grasp of the entirety of a project, company, or other organization. Don't feel so humbled by the ant. Of course he understands a greater percentage of what's going on in his world than you do, but only because his world is so simple. Measured by your quantity of understanding you still have it over him.

You also very likely have it over your ancestors. As you probably know, the IQ scale is periodically adjusted to maintain the average at 100, but without this normalization the average would be more than ten points higher than it was merely when the concept of IQ was first developed less than 150 years ago. People are smarter than their forebears because they have to be to function successfully in a more complicated world. Imagine what the average IQ probably was a thousand years ago before the invention of industry, or five thousand years ago before the invention of metal tools, or ten thousand years ago before the invention of cities. Or twelve thousand years ago before the invention of farming made permanent settlements possible, when people only possessed what they could carry and only did what they could do during lulls in the obsession with hunting and gathering for subsistence.

Rather than being hurt by my humble role in keeping civilization running, I am proud of my species for creating this civilization and not only keeping it running for ten thousand years, but continuously improving it. No one among us, not the brightest leader or the most visionary scholar or the most talented engineer or the most beloved teacher, understands more than a few details of how civilization works. It is an organism unto itself and we are its cells. But unlike the ants, whose instincts guide them into building and maintaining colonies, we have created something that actually conflicts with our instincts.

We are a pack-social species whose ancestors lived in small extended family groups with people they knew intimately, not a herd-social species like herbivores who live in anonymous groups of strangers that stretch from horizon to horizon. For us to live harmoniously and cooperatively with people we don't know is a remarkable achievement of our huge forebrain, which gives us the unique ability to override and redirect our instincts. We've overridden our instinct to distrust strangers from tribes to villages to cities to nations... to the point that we're on the verge of joining the whole human race into one worldwide state. We've created a system of organization that has not collapsed in all that time, despite the blunders we've made along the way, despite the warnings of folks like The Baron who think it's all a big fortuitous mistake that will blow up on his watch. This system, which is bigger than all of us and to a certain extent autonomous, is self-correcting and even self-improving. It learns from its mistakes and it experiments with new ideas. As a result we have written language, arts, transporation, medicine and electricity. The majority of people on earth have surplus income, houses, formal education and communication with almost the whole world.

How much of all this do you really think any one person could possibly know? There is simply too much. Even within a microcosm of a business or a big engineering project, there is too much. Yes we have managers but to a large extent big organizations run themselves. The bigger they are the more this is true, right up to the level of civilization itself, the biggest organization.

Fraggle,

As usual, I really enjoy your post. :)

The majority of people on earth have surplus income, houses, formal education and communication with almost the whole world.
What? :confused:
How so?


I think a good way to understand the bigger picture is to learn and experience all parts of it. Of course, it is impossible to learn EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING, but it is definetely possible to learn a bit about everything. For instance, I have studied computer programming, accounting, marketing, psychology, philosophy, quantum physics, astrophysics, chemistry, physics, subatomic particle physics, calculus, numerology, astrology, theology, several languages and much much more! Besides, once I heard of a guy who managed to get several degrees (don't remember exactly how many, but I remember it was a lot of degrees... like at least 10...!).

I think it is really useful to know quite a bit about a lot of things. It gives you a more broad and deeper perspective about life.....

As things go, people will feel totally worthless on their own, because their skills and knowledge will be quite useless without big organizations and managers.

Most of us ARE totally worthless on our own! Think of the people that you've thought of as "great men" in our society, when even those "great men" died, little or nothing changed ...and we call them "great men". Now think of what would happen if you died. How much would change in the world?

Most people in our modern society can't even change out the faucet in their kitchen sink, or other such mundane tasks that are required around our own homes.

We're making, if not already made, ourselves totally dependent on others ...few have any of the skills needed to even survive, much less thrive. Just 100 years ago, families lived and worked on farms, and were dependent on no one. Now?

It hurts to realize that you, with your years of education&training, is lower than an ant in a big scheme of things.

Yeah, yet we humans continually pump ourselves up with to great importance with our own overblown egos. We know we're worthless, yet we tell ourselves the greatest lie of all.

And some people call that progress? And some even glorify it?

Baron Max

Fraggle, As usual, I really enjoy your post.

Yeah, it helps inflate our egos, don't it? Makes us all feel sooooo important ....when we're really nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, sure, we tell ourselves how great we are, how intelligent, how wonderful, how smart, .....yet if we died tomorrow, little or nothing would change. Humans don't like to think like that, our overblown egos demand that we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we're really important.

Baron Max

Yeah, it helps inflate our egos, don't it? Makes us all feel sooooo important ....when we're really nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, sure, we tell ourselves how great we are, how intelligent, how wonderful, how smart, .....yet if we died tomorrow, little or nothing would change. Humans don't like to think like that, our overblown egos demand that we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we're really important.

Baron Max


Don't worry. I'm a nobody like you.

Don't worry. I'm a nobody like you.

...LOL! Ya' know, I actually worry about people who DON'T know that they're really just one of many nobodies! :D

I've always told people who make claims of someone's "greatness" ...just let them die or be killed in a accident, then you'll see just how "great" they really we ...to you and everyone else. People lament the passing of some "great" person, then life just keeps on going without so much as a hitch!

Baron Max

Everybody dies and still the world didn't stop turning around. That says enough.

Yeah, it helps inflate our egos, don't it? Makes us all feel sooooo important ....when we're really nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.Statistically, almost every one of us is that. I would argue that a few people here and there left visible marks on the world. But indeed for any of the rest of us it can be said that if we hadn't done what we do, someone else would have come along and done pretty much the same thing so we would not be missed by humanity as a whole.

But it is the aggregation that is meaningful and that aggregation has performed splendidly. No one Mesolithic nomad figured out how to cultivate crops or domesticate animals, but over the span of a couple of thousand years most of the world had agriculture--excepting the aboriginal Americans, who can be excused because of their late start. No one Neolithic villager decided to try moving several tribes into one giant "village" with edifices made of wood and stone, in order to create a larger surplus and have more comfort and culture, but cities nonetheless began both proliferating and expanding.

The key is that none of mankind's great advances were even of a type that could have been achieved by a single great person. They were all collaborative endeavors. Only a family can cultivate an orchard, only a clan can build a city and it takes at least two clans to populate one. These ideas had to take root in many minds--I'd venture too many to even have resulted from the evangelism of one clever and persuasive person, before the age of mass communication or even written language. This was a combination of synergy and synchronicity, many people becoming aware of the same problem or desire at the same time and contributing many minute ideas to its solution or fulfilment.

I continue to hold civilization itself up as a monument to the creativity and industry of mankind, not of individual men and women. Our species has succeeded in overcoming many of its base instincts and created an organization that survives, grows, and improves itself. It's as though civilization itself is a living organism, as though we have created a new kind of life.Oh, sure, we tell ourselves how great we are, how intelligent, how wonderful, how smart, .....yet if we died tomorrow, little or nothing would change. Humans don't like to think like that, our overblown egos demand that we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we're really important.I have never tried to convince anyone that I or any individual is wonderful or important except to his own microcosm of friends, family, and business associates. None of us is important to civilization, as proven by the fact that each of us does eventually die without causing any perceptible change. But why should that mean we can't take pride in our species as a whole, in our increasingly integrated community? Especially in the civilization we have created and continually upgraded, the civilization that is inseparable from the species?

Why can't we take pride in being one six-billionth of that? It is so big that one six-billionth of it is still big enough to take pride in. After all, that one six-billionth of civilization includes most of what you can see by rotating your head, which is pretty impressive by the standards of our uncivilized ancestors. Just because it is statistically impossible to isolate and measure my contribution to civilization doesn't mean that I haven't made one. Just by being a responsible citizen, earning my salary, loving and supporting my friends and family, speaking up on important issues, making people laugh at an occasional joke or dance to an occasional song with bass by yours truly, writing an occasional letter to the editor that starts a discussion or teaching an occasional youngster how to do something important, I have made contributions that are too small to show up on a government chart but are nonetheless tangible.

Have I no right to take pride in them? In being one of the billions of humans who have done their best and in so doing, in aggregate, have made civilization what it is today?

"The majority of people on earth have surplus income, houses, formal education and communication with almost the whole world."

What? How so?I'm not sure I understand your question. The stupid way economists calculate GDP, it never includes things people produce for their own consumption. ("Prosumers," Alan Toffler calls them/us.) So any agricultural society with a positive per-capita GDP by definition has a surplus. Even if it's only enough to buy a radio or a bicycle, it's discretionary income that can be allocated to comfort or capital. It's only in the truly squalid parts of the Third World that a sizeable proportion of poor people are not subsistence farmers, and in those countries a three-figure per-capita GDP indeed measures a "negative surplus," a euphemism surely already coined for abject poverty.

Houses... Most human beings, even poor ones, live in permanent dwellings. Formal education... This may be the shakiest of my assertions but I feel confident that 51% of humanity has had some schooling. Communication... The Electronic Era is responsible for that. There are very few villages in the world that don't have at least a communal TV set, much less a radio.

Not to dwell on it, but "majority" really does mean "more than half" and except for education I think I'm well beyond that absolute minimum. My minimum may seem silly to you but we are (or should be) comparing modern life to life in the past, all the way back to the Stone Age, and by these measures most lives that seem mean to us are wonderfully rich.

Yeah, it helps inflate our egos, don't it? Makes us all feel sooooo important ....when we're really nothing at all in the grand scheme of things.

Oh, sure, we tell ourselves how great we are, how intelligent, how wonderful, how smart, .....yet if we died tomorrow, little or nothing would change. Humans don't like to think like that, our overblown egos demand that we lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we're really important.

Baron Max
I'm really sorry you don't understand a word of what he says... :rolleyes:
I guess you are jealous, because nobody likes your posts... :rolleyes:

I'm not sure I understand your question. The stupid way economists calculate GDP, it never includes things people produce for their own consumption. ("Prosumers," Alan Toffler calls them/us.) So any agricultural society with a positive per-capita GDP by definition has a surplus. Even if it's only enough to buy a radio or a bicycle, it's discretionary income that can be allocated to comfort or capital. It's only in the truly squalid parts of the Third World that a sizeable proportion of poor people are not subsistence farmers, and in those countries a three-figure per-capita GDP indeed measures a "negative surplus," a euphemism surely already coined for abject poverty.

Houses... Most human beings, even poor ones, live in permanent dwellings. Formal education... This may be the shakiest of my assertions but I feel confident that 51% of humanity has had some schooling. Communication... The Electronic Era is responsible for that. There are very few villages in the world that don't have at least a communal TV set, much less a radio.

Not to dwell on it, but "majority" really does mean "more than half" and except for education I think I'm well beyond that absolute minimum. My minimum may seem silly to you but we are (or should be) comparing modern life to life in the past, all the way back to the Stone Age, and by these measures most lives that seem mean to us are wonderfully rich.
Well... but there are A LOT of other things that GDP misses. For example, environmental collateral damage. What about people that live in garbage dumps? Or that have sewer running in the "streets", or inside their "house"? Is a shack with one "room", no furniture, no electricity, no water and with holes on the ceiling a "house"? I'm sorry, but I just believe the other half should have what we have as well. We consume way too much. Why should we consume so much while most people in the world are poor? Is there really a "scarcity" or what we really have is a "uneven concentration of capital"?

I'm not sure I understand your question. The stupid way economists calculate GDP, it never includes things people produce for their own consumption.
I've heard that US government calcultate GDP in more convoluted ways than that. It includes rent that homeowners would have paid for their homes, had they been renting those homes instead of owning. GDP jumps 10% or so automatically in this way. Quite possible home gardens etc. are also somehow included.

Well... but there are A LOT of other things that GDP misses. For example, environmental collateral damage.The way the GDP is calculated, it only counts money that changes hands. That's the reason it does not include "prosumption." For that reason it does not count depreciation, amortization, or any other decrease in the value of capital assets until, indirectly, the time they are sold for less than they cost. When a project is launched to clean up a river or reseed a forest, the cost of the wages and materials to do it will be counted then. We will then have a vague way of measuring the cost of the damage but we will not have charged it against our GDP in the years it occurred. This is consistent with conservative accounting practice, which does not presume to assign value to anything until someone pays someone else for it, proving that it in fact has that value.

I'm just quoting the rules of accounting and econ to you, not championing this system.What about people that live in garbage dumps? Or that have sewer running in the "streets", or inside their "house"? Is a shack with one "room", no furniture, no electricity, no water and with holes on the ceiling a "house"?I don't understand the question. What about them? Are you asking whether we account for their hardship in the GDP? Then no. No more than we account for damage to the environment. For the same reason: There is no reasonably accurate way to assess the cost until someone engages in a monetary exchange to fix it.

Or are you asking me whether I "accounted" for these people in my statement that the majority of humanity are better off than their ancestors were in the Stone Age? Well yes, I believe I did. I don't think there's any question that these people constitue substantially less than half the population. And please understand that I am comparing life today to life in the Mesolithic Era, when nobody had furniture, electricity or ceilings because nobody had a permanent residence. They were all nomads who followed the food and possessed only those things they were able to carry without the aid of vehicles or draft animals. I'll grant that living in a garbage dump or on the bank of an open sewer is a worse life than being a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but regardless of how my heart aches for the people who live that way they constitute a small portion of humanity. People who live in one-room shacks that are at least proof against the weather and predatory animals, and who have an adequate if uninspiring diet, are better off than the people who had not yet invented agriculture and civilization.I'm sorry, but I just believe the other half should have what we have as well. We consume way too much.Where do you get your figure of "half" from? It's obvious from your passion that you must have the statistics on world poverty at your fingertips. Most of us will probably fall over if they show that even fifteen percent of the world's population--900 million people--live more poorly than my minimum standard, slightly superior to a Stone Age subsistence. This is compared to one hundred percent before this all started. Nowhere did I state that life is perfect or even that the fruits of civilization have been distributed evenly. What I stated is that life is far better than it was before agriculture started the journey to civilization, and that most of the people we consider destitute are better off than absolutely everybody was back then. Life without permanent settlements was basically the life of chimpanzees augmented only by fire, clothing and stone tools. And ever since we invented permanent settlements we have continuously improved on the idea of living better than nature provided for us. Why should we consume so much while most people in the world are poor?The problem is not that we consume too much but that in certain parts of the world people don't have enough. It has been demonstrated often enough that there is little relation between the two.

It is quite possible and indeed very common for a people to sink into poverty without any transactions with other peoples. Communism was the most spectacular example of that, it did it to about 30% of the world's population. Today the most common cause of poverty is still dishonorable or simply stupid government. Many Third World nations have all the resources to build a prosperous economy within a single generation, but they have leaders who siphon off the capital--and often even the food and medicine--to sell on the black market and spend on themselves or dissipate in wars. A common pattern is for the people to revolt and install a socialist government that will not create capital but will at least dissipate what it inherits in an egalitarian fashion--but they don't have the advantage of the pre-existing capital that took Soviet socialism seventy years to dissipate. Then a dictator takes over and starts the cycle over. These people are simply toggling between dishonorable government and stupid government. A few Latin American countries, notably Chile, have broken the cycle, so perhaps their model will give hope to the rest of the Third World.Is there really a "scarcity" or what we really have is a "uneven concentration of capital"?There is no scarcity. Population is expected to peak and start falling in this century, and there is enough capacity to produce food, clean water, energy, etc., to support that many people, if it is well managed. The First World is getting a handle on the "well managed" part of the equation and the Third World is getting a handle on the population part.

What's missing is the capacity of the Third World to manage itself. They need to stop killing each other because the dissipation of resources is not balanced by the reduction in population. They need to stop keeping women down, because a complex world like ours needs a good balance of masculine and feminine energy in all its sectors; freedom and education for women correlate strongly with emergence from the cycle of poverty and warfare. They need at least rudimentary democracy, even if it's not the Euro-American model. They need leaders who both care about their people and have faith in a free market economy, because they have no time and capital to waste on experiments with failed systems.

If they can provide these things for themselves, the rest of us will glady pitch in and provide all manner of help. Chile is a magnificent example of how this transcendence into world civilization can rescue a country, but it's so small and quiet that few of us even know about it. So instead, look what has happened in a country that only opened itself up to transcendence to the limited extent of China! The per-capita GDP is growing at the rate of about ten percent per year. And about the only help that the average American gives to the Chinese people is to spend as much money as possible at Wal-Mart. Our favorite pastime pumps up their economy.

It doesn't help for us to feel guilty about our prosperity and start giving it up. All that will do is cause a recession in some really large countries that will affect the whole world economy. We don't even need to send boatloads of carrots to Bangladesh or of fresh water to Uganda. If they can just transcend their national dysfunction (as Bangladesh shows every sign of doing) all we have to do is follow the rules of the free market: invest in their businesses and buy their products.

If you want to help, I can give you one single organization to support. Our entire charity budget goes to the Central Asia Foundation in Boseman, Montana. This is an entirely private charity that builds schools in the most dreadful regions of the Middle East--schools which are required to accept girls in those cesspools of Islamic fundamentalism. Their budget is laughable by the standards of the Red Cross or the Peace Corps. Yet in just a few years they have build a hundred schools. Think of all those primitive villages that now have educated women to balance the idiotic, bellicose, Luddite leadership of their men.

The key to peace and prosperity on earth is education for women.

The way the GDP is calculated, it only counts money that changes hands. That's the reason it does not include "prosumption." For that reason it does not count depreciation, amortization, or any other decrease in the value of capital assets until, indirectly, the time they are sold for less than they cost. When a project is launched to clean up a river or reseed a forest, the cost of the wages and materials to do it will be counted then. We will then have a vague way of measuring the cost of the damage but we will not have charged it against our GDP in the years it occurred. This is consistent with conservative accounting practice, which does not presume to assign value to anything until someone pays someone else for it, proving that it in fact has that value.

I'm just quoting the rules of accounting and econ to you, not championing this system.
Yes, I know all that. I'm an accountant myself. But at least we tend to include fair market value in the notes to the financial statements. We also evaluate the value of the assets when we trade them, while as you said, the government doesn't even include them. As you said, the GDP calculation is only cash basis. But in accounting, we also do accrual basis.

Also, you have to remember that it would take way too much time to continulously evalute all the assets. It seems to me that the two questions we need to ask are: is it cost-beneficial? and is that value material?

I don't understand the question. What about them? Are you asking whether we account for their hardship in the GDP? Then no. No more than we account for damage to the environment. For the same reason: There is no reasonably accurate way to assess the cost until someone engages in a monetary exchange to fix it.
Well... I was answering you to your statement that our civilization is in great shape. I mean... we may be long ways from the stone age, but there are still quite a few people out there who are still in the stone age! What we need to consider is not the GDP, but the standard of living of the entire planet. Not an averagem though! It has to be pro-rated! When the 10% richest control over 85% of the world's wealth and the 50% poorest lives on no more then 2 bucks a day (and a large percentage are paid 8 cents an hour), then you have to question the economic theory that states that resources are scarce!!!!!

Or are you asking me whether I "accounted" for these people in my statement that the majority of humanity are better off than their ancestors were in the Stone Age? Well yes, I believe I did. I don't think there's any question that these people constitue substantially less than half the population. And please understand that I am comparing life today to life in the Mesolithic Era, when nobody had furniture, electricity or ceilings because nobody had a permanent residence. They were all nomads who followed the food and possessed only those things they were able to carry without the aid of vehicles or draft animals. I'll grant that living in a garbage dump or on the bank of an open sewer is a worse life than being a nomadic hunter-gatherer, but regardless of how my heart aches for the people who live that way they constitute a small portion of humanity. People who live in one-room shacks that are at least proof against the weather and predatory animals, and who have an adequate if uninspiring diet, are better off than the people who had not yet invented agriculture and civilization.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Only a very tiny percentage of the world population are actually enjoying all the benefits that we created. Yes, a lot of poor people have a roof over their heads... but when you live in a slum, chances are your quality of life is worse then of people in the Mesolithic era. Ever been in a slum?


Where do you get your figure of "half" from? It's obvious from your passion that you must have the statistics on world poverty at your fingertips. Most of us will probably fall over if they show that even fifteen percent of the world's population--900 million people--live more poorly than my minimum standard, slightly superior to a Stone Age subsistence. This is compared to one hundred percent before this all started.
http://www.sciforums.com/Poverty-Statistics-Is-There-Really-No-Corruption-t-44808.html

You even posted in that thread... :)
The statistics are there.

Nowhere did I state that life is perfect or even that the fruits of civilization have been distributed evenly. What I stated is that life is far better than it was before agriculture started the journey to civilization, and that most of the people we consider destitute are better off than absolutely everybody was back then.
That's exactly what I dispute. And I think it might be something too hard to measure... But anyways... my take is that most people are worse off. That is... 50% of the popualtion. Yes, in terms of percentage, we are better off, but not in actual numbers. And I just can't treat people like I treat numbers. Which is what makes me a very peculiar, balanced accountant... ;)

Life without permanent settlements was basically the life of chimpanzees augmented only by fire, clothing and stone tools. And ever since we invented permanent settlements we have continuously improved on the idea of living better than nature provided for us.The problem is not that we consume too much but that in certain parts of the world people don't have enough. It has been demonstrated often enough that there is little relation between the two.
Really? How? So if I eat 50 loafs of bread a day and 10 poor people eat 1 each at the most, then we have scarcity?


It is quite possible and indeed very common for a people to sink into poverty without any transactions with other peoples. Communism was the most spectacular example of that, it did it to about 30% of the world's population. Today the most common cause of poverty is still dishonorable or simply stupid government.
What about the corporations? 6 of the biggest corporations hold more then 45 nations' GDPs.

Many Third World nations have all the resources to build a prosperous economy within a single generation, but they have leaders who siphon off the capital--and often even the food and medicine--to sell on the black market and spend on themselves or dissipate in wars.
In some cases, yes. But that is only the perceived corruption. You see, corruption is tricky. There are two sides of corruption: perceived and actual. In a rich country, the perceived corruption will always be lower then the actual corruption because the government is rich enough to hide the corruption well. In a poor country, those two corruptions will be more closely together, because they don't have as many resources to hide the corruption. Also, the dollar figure can often be higher for the richer country, because there is more money to manipulate (and, of course, it is easier to hide). But that's another discussion altogether....

What's missing is the capacity of the Third World to manage itself. They need to stop killing each other because the dissipation of resources is not balanced by the reduction in population. They need to stop keeping women down, because a complex world like ours needs a good balance of masculine and feminine energy in all its sectors; freedom and education for women correlate strongly with emergence from the cycle of poverty and warfare. They need at least rudimentary democracy, even if it's not the Euro-American model. They need leaders who both care about their people and have faith in a free market economy, because they have no time and capital to waste on experiments with failed systems.
Still, not that simple. There are problems even with the systems we have in place in north america. For instace, democracy is based largely on a fallacy of population. It can also be bought, through lobbysts. It's also not very efficient due to a lack of variety in the candidates, lack of wisdom of the population, and several other issues. it is not hard to create a fascists state that looks like a democracy. If the slaves don't know they are slaves, they will not revolt. Take a look at the US right now, for instance...


If they can provide these things for themselves, the rest of us will glady pitch in and provide all manner of help. Chile is a magnificent example of how this transcendence into world civilization can rescue a country, but it's so small and quiet that few of us even know about it. So instead, look what has happened in a country that only opened itself up to transcendence to the limited extent of China! The per-capita GDP is growing at the rate of about ten percent per year. And about the only help that the average American gives to the Chinese people is to spend as much money as possible at Wal-Mart. Our favorite pastime pumps up their economy.
True. But what about the environmental implications? What about those huge dams that the chinese are trying to build, for instance? And all that car exhaust...

It doesn't help for us to feel guilty about our prosperity and start giving it up.
Not what I'm saying. I just think we need to support the poor. Not just give them stuff, of course. Helping them to create sustainable communities in their countries...

All that will do is cause a recession in some really large countries that will affect the whole world economy. We don't even need to send boatloads of carrots to Bangladesh or of fresh water to Uganda. If they can just transcend their national dysfunction (as Bangladesh shows every sign of doing) all we have to do is follow the rules of the free market: invest in their businesses and buy their products.
True. But once again, we have the environmental issue...

If you want to help, I can give you one single organization to support. Our entire charity budget goes to the Central Asia Foundation in Boseman, Montana. This is an entirely private charity that builds schools in the most dreadful regions of the Middle East--schools which are required to accept girls in those cesspools of Islamic fundamentalism. Their budget is laughable by the standards of the Red Cross or the Peace Corps. Yet in just a few years they have build a hundred schools. Think of all those primitive villages that now have educated women to balance the idiotic, bellicose, Luddite leadership of their men.
Well, that's a good charity...

The key to peace and prosperity on earth is education for women.
Well, I'm sure that's part of the equation. But is it really the key?



I don't mean to be annoying. I'm just saying that everything has a trade-off. It's just not easy to make decisions. Specially when we are dealing with a gigantic self-evolving organism such as our civilization. :)