sociology 36 hours

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SOC 2020 Lecture Ten

Prof. D. Fasenfest

Global Inequality My father was born in 1913 and died in 2006. In the course of his lifetime, it took him half a day to travel by wagon from his village in Poland to the nearest big city. By the time he passed away he could go literally halfway around the world in the same time. A letter took months to travel from Paris to New York around the 1800s, but with the invention first of the telegraph and then telephone the potential for information transmission across great distances in a matter of minutes depended only on the investment of capital to lay the cable necessary to carry those signals. Indeed, while you could call Los Angeles from New York with little difficulty in 1950, there were still areas in the most rural and poorest parts of this country that did not have more than one phone in some central location like a church or community store. Trying to call someone in Asia or Africa was a challenge in the best of times. Today we experience almost instantaneous communication using the Internet, wireless telephones and other forms of satellite-based transmission of information. From a time when everyone thought the world was flat, through a period when we did not have a clear understanding of our world to the present where almost everyone has seen a photo of the earth from some space capsule orbiting our planet, the planet has gotten smaller. At the same time the population of the world has grown by leaps and bounds, and the ability of people to travel great distances means that we are much more likely to encounter people from other countries than our great grandparents ever imagined (in their day meeting people from another part of their own country was a great curiosity). We have spent most of the semester exploring the nature and extent of a variety of social problems in this country. Now we must consider that the same problems—to greater and lesser extent—exist everywhere in the world and to some degree the more serious the problems abroad the more likely it is that they will impact on our lives here. Take, for example, population growth globally. At first thought we can ask…so what? Why does poverty in Russia or hunger in Africa or child labor in Asia affect us here in our country? The answer is complex, and yet easy to understand at the same time. Poverty in Russia means that people who contract diseases that are more or less contained in our country cannot deal with them properly. Typically once the symptoms disappear the expensive drugs are no longer taken. In some cases (and for an increasing number of diseases) the rapid reproduction of virus and bacteria cells results in the survival and then domination of drug resistant strains. Infections may take days or even longer to turn into fully developed symptoms, and in that time given the increased global mobility the drug resistant strains can make their way to our country and at best result in much higher public health costs, at worst create serious health problems in this country. Similarly, hunger in Africa creates social and political unrest, first in local areas, then in regions, and in some cases, it turns into major civil and military conflict that threatens regional and even global security. This process takes time to develop, but by the time it is a serious

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problem the solution is expensive, and as we have seen for the past 50 years can lead to costly and significant involvements by our country’s military—draining our own resources. Child labor in Asia has been blamed for creating—along with intense poverty and population growth— an environment of low cost labor. This has been true for a long time, but only in the past 30-50 years have transportation advances meant that large amount of material can be transmitted long distances at a low cost. In addition, our economy has experienced significant changes in the way we work and the skills needed. The consequence, generally labeled as globalization, has been a significant change in where work is performed and has arguably resulted in large numbers of unemployed in this country and other advanced industrial nations. Jobs in the US have gone to China and India most recently, but in some industries, they have gone to the Philippines, Mexico, Malaysia and other low cost regions of the world (we should be mindful that this is little more than the extension of the pattern of jobs leaving the old industrial regions of the Northeast for the low cost areas of the South and later the Southwest of this country). The incredible and rapid global transformation has been driven by both the population changes and technological advances described in the text. To get a feel for the way technology impacts upon our daily life and how society is organized consider the telephone. At first a revolutionary apparatus that allowed instant communication, as noted above it was a capital- intensive enterprise requiring massive wiring of regions, cities, streets and even houses (I bet you all still live in homes with phone wires along side the electric and more recently cable wires coming into the building). The penetration of telephones into a society—that is, the number or share of households with phone service—was a mark of industrial development and the general wealth of a society. Whole regions of the world outside of North America and Europe were without reliable phone service—certainly outside major or capital cities—because there was not enough of a market to warrant the investment (keep in mind that most countries got phone service through national monopolies…so the point was not whether lines could be laid, but whether the customer base could afford the service, and therefore would provide enough revenue to justify the expense). The invention and subsequent reduction of production costs of wireless phone service meant that whole regions of the world required only a series of transmission towers or access to satellite signals in order to connect isolated communities by phone. In some parts of the world there are no phone lines, just wireless service—and even if it is not reliable it provides a link to the global economy. Even in the US people are opting out of a land line to cut out one of their monthly bills. Something that was a luxury even 10 years ago is now a necessity and hardly a teenage in this country is without a cell phone. In some markets—Norway the best example— people can do almost anything with one’s phone, up to and including paying for a soft drink at a vending machine. Banks now advertise checking your balances via text messaging, and phones serve as calendars, music players, cameras and video recorders, and access to the Internet. Without question this technological change has brought about many positive changes in our lives. But it is also behind the ability to control production around the world from one central office—and the factory of old, with management in one building beside the factory next store has resulted in the global factory of today. This new technology has brought us to the world, and the world to us. When there is anything of interest happening, we see images of it almost immediately as people capture the drunken fall of a celebrity or the mass demonstrations

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in Tibet with the same camera phone technology, whose image is immediately broadcast via YouTube to a world hungry for information. Take any teenager from a relatively well-off country and that person can be in a mall almost anywhere in the world and find more or less the same stores (and laid out in more or less the same way). Fashion, culture, art and everything else that constitutes “culture” is now global. And so are the desires and expectations of more and more of the world as they become acutely aware of all that they do not have, all that they are denied because of their poverty and the squalor of their existence. For some the lure is from the country to the city (and even when the lure is not there, changes in the country drive many people off the land—much as early technology converted agriculture in Europe and North American and drove workers to the cities) in search of a better life and greater economic opportunities. For others the lure attracts Pilipino workers to jobs in Dubai, North Africans to France and Italy, Latin Americans to the US—by whatever means possible. All are in search of a better life. But for some the response is outrage, whether it is at the culturally bankrupt societies of the west from the vantage of religious fundamentalism (of all types of religions) or at the unjust political processes at home and abroad that seem to keep populations poor and deny people simple things like clean water, simple medical treatment, adequate housing and schooling, safe communities to live and reasonable jobs to provide for one’s children. Last week we discussed urban issues, and it bears looking at the urban structure of the developing world to understand the nature and depth of the challenge facing the world (and by extension our society). In 1950 just under 2 billion people world-wide lived in a rural environment, about 0.75 billion people lived in urban settings in the industrialized (more developed) world, and just over 100 million people in the developing world lived in what was classified as urban areas. Projections are that by 2030 the rural population will have grown to just over 3 billion people—with environmental damage as they move into forest lands, clearing the trees to create cultivatable plots—the developed urban population will grow to about 1.2 billion people (a 50% increase for both), but the urban less-developed population will balloon to over 4 billion people, over a 5-fold increase in a relatively short period of time (at most about 3 generations).

The economic and social (not to mention political) consequences of this growth in countries without the social and economic infrastructure to support it will mean widespread poverty and political tension. Mike Davis, in his book Planet of Slums (2006, Verso), outlines the range of issues and concerns—from housing and sanitation to the supply of water, to the economic drain on struggling economies—this growth has and will continue to have on much of the world. Even in our country today the issue of sufficient drinking water pits the demand of farmers for irrigation water against the demand of cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas (rising out of the dessert). Here in Michigan, there is concern that the economics of bottled water has a negative impact on the State’s water table and may harm the Great Lakes. And so it goes—one can only imagine the issues that rise up in countries that can’t afford to deal with the problem. What, then, are the prospects for change, and why should we be concerned about what happens outside of the US? First, you can get a sense of the kinds of difference in living

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standards by looking at the weekly food consumption of families in a variety of countries (see the file GLOBAL COMPARISONS OF FOOD BUDGETS in your Course Material directory). By comparing visually and economically the range and cost of a week’s worth of food laid out in front of a typical family we can begin to get a sense of the differences across countries as well as an idea of what is happening in the very poorest of nations. Sadly, in many countries without enough food for their own populations agricultural production is reserved for export crops because a) there is not a good market for local production (people don’t have money to buy the food), and b) even with the costs of transportation cash export crops provide the landowners with more income. Industrial crops like cotton and flaxseed and specialty consumer crops like macadamia nuts and cashews are exported to the developed world, and agricultural production does little to improve the food supply in those exporting countries. Technology only goes so far in helping, and often makes the situation worse. Improved farming techniques from chemical fertilizers to increase yield to better machines for planting and harvesting require capital and end up being used for export crops. To get to the size of farm big enough to warrant these new technologies small family farmers are driven off the land and into the cities where they can no longer eek out even a subsistence income. We now face new concerns about our water supply as traditional water filtering systems cannot clean out many of the new boutique drugs that enter our ecology further threatening the availability of water necessary for almost all human activity. Communication technologies improve the flow of information, only to create a better understanding among the worlds poor exactly what is happening to them and how bad their lives are in comparison.