I never push back against an optimism agnostic, and I’m grateful to have someone with a smart sense of humor at the proverbial party. On the haves-v-have-nots issue, I’m fairly optimistic for a handful of reasons, all of which are of course subject to change. Economics is a funny business.

It’s gratifying to me to see Hans Rosling’s work featured on this site so recently. Rosling’s visualization of the global spread between and poor is excellent, and it does indeed show that while the poor have generally raised their quality of life, the gap between rich and poor has grown, and unsurprisingly it is Africa more than any other region that occupies the bottom. Historically, though more regionally than globally, we have seen this stretching between rich and poor before: The slumming of Western European cities during the nineteenth century, the slumming and horrors of Chinese cities and coastal districts during the twentieth, and many others. In each case, we ultimately see a rubber-band effect; the stretching only goes so far before the more important measures of quality-of-life snap forward for the poorest members of society.

The common measures of the difference between the wealthiest and poorest are also in absolute values, not relative values, and do not take into account technological and production deflation. In many important ways, for example, I am much wealthier than King Louis XIV, even though I am a lowly designer, researcher, and speaker.

Just as with a real rubber band, one end never truly catches the other; the poor never entirely catch up to the rich, of course, and the rich always race ahead again (just as is happening in the United States, Europe, and Japan right now). But, barring major regional disruptions, the snapping effect generally occurs given enough time.

We can’t speak of haves and have-nots without speaking of Africa. It is long overdue to come into its own, and while its woes and weights are far too broad to review and have for so long been overwhelming, a number of decentralized, life-improving technologies are edging into asymptotic growth in parts of Africa (peer-to-peer cellular networks, inexpensive UV water treatment, micro-manufacuring, etc., all in field use now). This growth is promising. A few other technologies on the horizon are promising, as well, including augmentations to natural systems that would prevent the transmission of malaria to humans while leaving the mosquitoes, who are critical to many ecosystems, alive and healthy.

I could keep going, but… I’m reminded this is a comment field.

Cheers,
John Barbour
@AeaeaActual

AeaeaActual – can you outline your optimism (by using examples of past technologies, say, or some other method)? i’m not pessimistic, but more agnostic, i’d say.

also, one clarification I’d like to make (though I consider the book the product here) is that my time at SRI was primarily with Atomic Tangerine, and though we did overlap some with several groups involved in linguistics research I was not directly doing that research myself. Sorry for the mistake – it was my fault.

We need to have important conversations about how GRIN technologies will impact and be accepted or rejected by the larger populace. Unlike Mr. Meadows, I’m fairly optimistic that in the long run robotics is likely to narrow the gap between the haves and have-nots, but as a society we have a lot of contingent decisions to make, driven by ethics, to be sure that we do more good than harm.

Ta. @AeaeaActual