No. I am saying countries like Vietnam and etc still requires foreign investment or foreign borrowing to buy the equipment from other countries. Those equipments will not be given to more underdeveloped regions for free.K. A. Pital wrote: ↑2020-04-29 11:05am So once again, decarbonization and demise of personal air travel will limit the possibility of purchasing machines, electronics, etc. from China? Is that what you are saying? If people no longer fly to Halong bay Vietnam would be unable to buy electronics from China, or is Vietnam still perfectly capable of buying electronics, machine tools, heavy duty vehicles from China, or South Korea, or wherever else, if not able to make them locally? Explain yourself.
Not all industries scale easily. Some industries will still be more investment heavy, which means those countries will take a long time before they can build those up from scratch. Yes, ideally they should able to build up a diverse industries with local expertise in all necessary aspects of their economy. However, I have not seen a workable solution as to how they are able to achieve it other than sheer blind faith.And? I mean, under globalization they won’t be able to achieve parity, without it they won’t be able to achieve parity. But in the second case they would have to build up diversified economies with a variety of experts in all fields of production, from agriculture to aviation, from computing to construction etc. In the first case they would have no engineers of their own, no scientists, being doomed to being the poor back-end of some global supply chain or worse. In the second case, they would be building up a diverse working class that has to specialize in various fields.
Right now, the only region that have managed to move from developing status to developed status are the East Asian economies that made use of a combination of protectionism and globalism to grow their domestic industry while at the same time attracting expertise and investment to flow into their economies.Dancing like a jester in front of the king won’t make the jester into a king, ever, either. So I guess you are saying, not only cement the status quo but also cement it in a way that won’t deprive the masters of their status abroad?
If you want to deglobalise the world, then there needs to be a system that can still allow developing countries to gain the necessary investment and expertise from the countries that have developed. If not, all it does is to reinforce existing disparity.
What incentive exist for governments to transfer their knowledge and skills? And without it being a form of neo-colonialism in which transfer of knowledge and skills shift from an economic/capitalist-incentive to a mere politically driven incentive. Companies, cooperatives and nation-states are not altruistic enough to do so without finding new and different ways to exploit the developing world.Yes, of course it does. Governments can cooperate & agree to transfer knowledge and skills. Companies and cooperatives can also do so, if they are not hell-bent on protecting industrial secrets & monopoly domination, that is.
Solving sustainability does not necessarily solve global inequality. There is every reason to believe there will be those that seek to entrench or further global inequality on the basis of solving sustainability. Colonialism was built upon seeing the rest of the world as a mere market for the goods produced by the West. It was built upon the idea of preventing the colonised world from gaining the necessary technology to produce goods they would otherwise have.Indeed they are separate, but connected to each other. Because the West rose on global-scale plunder, murder and destruction of environments and habitats, the other nations seeking to develop cannot utilize the same model. There are no other ten Earth to plunder for cheap forest, coal & oil, there are no other ten continents to enslave as colonies & suck dry to help your industries. So it naturally follows that the inequality which resulted from mass plunder, colonialism and Western global empire, or prior incidents of imperialism, can hardly be solved by applying the same solution, ie being imperialistic, because there are very few areas left where you can do so.
If the developing nations are not able to develop, then many aspects of the more advanced technology will still be held solely by the developed world, and the developing nations are going to become even more dependent on the developed world as a mere market.
I am not necessarily defending the status quo, or saying I have a solution. I am simply critiquing the idea that eliminating tourism actually helps the people of the developing world by much. It reduces the environmental damage done to the developing countries and to the planet, but it also eliminates an entire industry that keeps a number of people employed. Eliminating the tourism industry does not magically translate greater industralisation or development of expertise in other more sustainable aspects of industries.I fully agree with you, and yet you seem to have missed the point: tourism solves neither sustainability NOR equality issues, so even if these are separate issues as you say, seems your solution solves neither. The people from poor countries do not become equal to the people from rich countries due to tourism, as you might have noticed, and additionally mass air travel is destroying the planet for all people alike. This seems fairly evident. What is your actual point?
It still cost massive amount of investment to retrain someone working in the tourism industry to an engineer, scientists, and etc. Where is those investment going to come from if a country is heavily reliant on tourism for most of their GDP? More foreign borrowing from IMF or World Bank?
How are you going to ease the pain of the transition for the people that are going to find themselves out of work? Transition of economy is something that can be easily mishandled and wreck utter devastation onto the communities. They may not die from environmental damage, but the people are simply going to starve to death instead.
Yes they are. But the solutions offered by people from developed nations do not take their perspective into account when it comes to planning out a more sustainable economic model. Which means before one can cheer about the end of the aviation industry, we need to provide solutions for how to ease the transition for the developing countries first, developed countries second.Yes, if you watch the news, the developing world is begging for action on climate change from rich nations - and in much stronger terms than any lf the rich nations themselves - but so far has gotten little reaction. Australia and the US, two apparently-wealthiest ones, sabotage all such requests and pleas. So the developed world is sabotaging action requested by those threatened most.
See my earlier point on political dependency. Political agreement are not done solely for the sake of altruistic reasons. Economic transition is easier said than done.Exactly, and it seems were are in agreement here, because I said above: these things are matters of policy, of agreements. Nobody transfers expertise and knowledge while sipping pina coladas on a beach. People do so when executing government agreements or commercial agreements. Also, please google “path dependency” and come back to me explaining why we should remove extreme path dependency from our considerations. It necessarily follows that people will transition to other forms of occupation when certain industries are removed. We don’t use asbestos in construction and we don’t use lead in water pipelines, we don’t burn wood in house cheminees with few exceptions, and occupations related to this are of course no more existent, or severely curtailed in number. But so?
Those still requires an investment that has to come from somewhere, and ways of trying to gain access to new ideas and technology. And not all developing countries have the scale needed to build strong and self-reliant industries. What works for China due to its geography and population size might not work for smaller developing nations like East Timor.Why? The source of all wealth is transformative collective labour of humans, and human ideas. People will use their labour, and ideas, to improve their life. Governments and companies can order technology, and humans can also invent technology. But producing pina coladas for tourists is not actually inventing anything. It is servitude.
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Vietnam is making use of globalism to buy themselves some breathing space, by basically emulating the Chinese model ( including protectionism). Incentivising MNCs to build factories in Vietnam still enables the country to be able to observe and gain first-hand experience and expertise. You have talked about agreements between nations. However I do not believe the developed world will be willing to share their expertise without gaining some forms of benefits in return. You cannot make agreements fair if the bargaining position still ultimately favours the developed world over the developing world.I see your criticism. But you also admit that globalism is not reducing the gap, and that it is not helping the countries build diversified and resilient economies (all the more obvious now when rona has shut everything down and locked all borders). Thirty years of globalism and non-diversified, fewer-goods-and-servics economies have made the countries vulnerable and weak, and oftentimes utterly dependent on the global “deciders”, the rich nations. This is not solving any issues, it is exacerbating them and perpetuating into infinity. Also it removes all agency from nations, forces them to make their economies carbon-copies of blueprints laid out by the rich nations, who hold them at gunpoint via control of debt, reserve currency arrangements, etc.
The victim can seek to take advantage of the robber's greed to get the wealth back.The robber has gotten his huge share of wealth, but of course his victims cannot get this wealth, and cannot reach him.
That would depend on every rich country being happy not to take advantage of their wealth and expertise in further exploiting those that are not as well-off. Scale still matters to many countries, especially if they are smaller than their neighbours. A world in which East Timor cannot achieve parity of any kind is going to leave them even more vulnerable.But do they? Is the level of wealth fundamentally important, or the quality of life of the citizens? If by purchasing power the citizens can afford all the same things they could in a rich nation, what is the ultimate difference? Why should China have a GDP or whatever other indicator you can come up with of 40k per person, if it has essentially the same living standards for most of its population at 20k per person?
I agree. However, you are not proposing any concrete solutions that could allow a developing nation to build a strong and sustainable economy from where they are today. How is East Timor going to get from where they are now currently to having a strong, sustainable and diversified economy? What sort of bilateral agreements can they hope to get, without being subjected to unfair demands?I challenge your narrative precisely because there are many points in it to be challenged. What good is wealth built, say, on exporting wholesale all the wood in your nation, cutting down all the forests to the last tree? This is a form of wealth that is based on plundering your own compatriots, privately appropriating profits & leaving an entire nation deforested at the end of the cycle, with no other sources of income to boot. So “wealth” should appear from strong, sustainable and diversified economies.
You are making an argument for a developed world that can make the transition far less painful. My point has never been about saying the status quo is ideal by any stretch. My entire argument is that the vast majority of the proposed solutions stems from the perspective of the developed world, and not from the developing world.So far the West is failing that test, because its economies historically built on plunder, plentiful resources or stolen resources. It also fails sustainability. The East is doing better with diversified & resilient, but sometimes failing on sustainability as well.
We all have a lot to learn, but building one-shot poor economies that crumble at the first sight of crisis is untenable. It is untenable exactly because we are under capitalism. If the one shot or one thing these economies make fails or is no longer needed, then they are fucked. Nobody will care to do anything. When socialist nations phase out a factory, they would reassign the workers to different factories to make different goods. Under capitalism nobody will.
Indeed, previously existing phenomenon of “ghost towns” is being repeated on a much larger scale, there are entire “ghost nations” by now that lost a significant share of their able-bodied populations via labour force drain, useless and abandoned, making nothing important and bound to lose even more of their population in the future. Is this the way we want to go forward?
If yes, why?
You talk about socialist nations being able to phase out a factory and ease the transition for its workers. Sure, that sounds nice. However, that is still taking the perspective of a developed nation that have a factory in the first place. It is not taking the perspective of a developing nation that do not have a factory to begin with.
It's people's perspective that I take an issue with. Before we can talk about decarbonsing transport or ending the tourism industry, we need to ensure there are sufficient safeguard and measures in place for the developing world FIRST .
How is the developed world going to take the money they are spending on tourism and to spend it on the developing world in a more sustainable way. That needs to be the how policies are formulated and pushed forward. And not merely a rhetoric about how tourism itself is bad and we should end it.