Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Lessons for the First World
Before, moving forward with Collapse, I want to make the point that it is vital to understand the phenomena described in Rwanda, Easter Island and in Central America as generic phenomena – as events, conditions and human reactions that could, given similar conditions, happen anywhere, even in Europe and the USA.
It is too, easy to miss or dismiss the generic lessons and implications of these stories because they’re about contemporary African and ancient cultures, believing they are nothing like us. Thinking that way would be a sad mistake. You and I would probably do the same things in similar situations. The point of Diamond’s work is for us to understand that and do what we can to prevent those situations.
In the next two chapters of Collapse, Jared Diamond, does a comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, DR, two different countries sharing the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and a discussion of China. A common theme in both chapters is that both China and the DR have/had top-down command-and-control governments which were able to perform better than the “market.”
In the DR, Balaguer, the dictator for thirty years protected the forest and other natural resources, while growing the economy, and in China the leadership reduced the birthrate and slowed the pressure of population growth. The point in both cases, is that the scope, scale and danger of the problems requires a top-down, command and control approach, rather than the laissez faire/denial/trust the market approach of the current US government. Indeed, both countries used a combination of centralized command-and-control and decentralized market incentives.
It is too, easy to miss or dismiss the generic lessons and implications of these stories because they’re about contemporary African and ancient cultures, believing they are nothing like us. Thinking that way would be a sad mistake. You and I would probably do the same things in similar situations. The point of Diamond’s work is for us to understand that and do what we can to prevent those situations.
In the next two chapters of Collapse, Jared Diamond, does a comparison of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, DR, two different countries sharing the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and a discussion of China. A common theme in both chapters is that both China and the DR have/had top-down command-and-control governments which were able to perform better than the “market.”
In the DR, Balaguer, the dictator for thirty years protected the forest and other natural resources, while growing the economy, and in China the leadership reduced the birthrate and slowed the pressure of population growth. The point in both cases, is that the scope, scale and danger of the problems requires a top-down, command and control approach, rather than the laissez faire/denial/trust the market approach of the current US government. Indeed, both countries used a combination of centralized command-and-control and decentralized market incentives.
