ETea

© laurence B. Winn

Apr 1, 2000

Among the prophesies of our age are these:

* That local famines will occur regularly by 2020,

* That we will see enormous third world slums with appalling filth and poverty,

* That air pollution will make make many urban areas around the globe into cities of the walking dead,

* That the US will decline in wealth and influence as a result of its successful control of birth rates.

Doom, doom, doom. Bummer. Yet this is not biblical augury. It is instead a product of the rational process as practiced by Dr. Mitchel F. Bloom of Bloom Forecasting, Inc., in "The Next Generation: A Forecast for the Year 2020" and "A U.S. Forecast for the Year 2020".

Bloom's forecasts are based on trend analysis, but we can also understand them using well-established relationships of population biology and frontier theory.

Growth in the relative number of retirees in the US, compared to younger people, is a matter of record. They are the baby boom generation. It will not come as a surprise that the relative numbers of young and old would have remained unchanged if the baby boom birthrate had been sustained to the present day. What will happen instead, according to Bloom, is that the number of US workers supporting each retiree will drop to 2.5 by 2020. We are to expect fierce divisions between generations and races as young workers, increasingly black, Asian, Native American and Mexican, battle to reduce the benefits of elderly, chiefly white, Social Security beneficiaries.

Certain kinds of violent crime are on the increase in the US. Bloom's forecasts reflect the statistical trends. Independently, we know from daily news sources that improvements in automotive security systems have moved car thieves from lock-smithing to carjacking, often with fatal results. We know from the same sources that schools and workplaces have become killing zones for monsters who appear to us normal until they explode. This concept is more fully explored in "The Trouble with Paradise". Zero-sum economics lends a bitter element to the conclusion that the wealth of he killer’s victims is rightfully the killer’s own, having been acquired from him by secret privilege and socially condoned stealth. In addition, says Bloom, "It appears that the entire legal system is increasingly out of control and the concept of fairness and justice all but forgotten." With this as background, who among us would be surprised by the headlines?

Destructive economic feedback is clearly at work in the US, where counselors instruct young people to seek employment in Pacific rim-proof occupations that emphasize knowledge of local laws, language, customs and culture, jobs like marketing and public relations. Then they fret when standardized tests show a deficit in students' understanding of science and mathematics. American educators are fearful, they say, because, unless students do better in the critical fundamentals of technology, America will have a hard time maintaining its standard of living. A model of reality that produces that kind of internal contradiction should be rejected, yet we cling to it. Why?

Water shortages, soil depletion, politics, corruption, poor storage facilities and worse roads will drive large numbers of third world farmers to the cities to escape the alternative of starvation, according to Bloom. What happens to the abandoned resources is not clear, since it is not susceptible to trend analysis, but it is probable that the effect is to concentrate wealth in the hands of fewer individuals, a hallmark of enclosure (see "First Principles"). Low wages and poor living conditions are the expected outcome of indifference to the needs of a captive labor market.

What happens inside the giant third-world slums will be largely dependent on perceived chances of escape. Bloom ignores this factor in his analysis, assuming that crowding alone will produce the conditions that John Calhoun observed in rats. If he is correct, then cities like Lagos in southwest Nigeria will limit their population increases by reproductive failure before 2020.

Where frontiers exist, Bloom will not be correct. As long as a small fraction can escape the slums, wages will be relatively high, families relatively secure. Some may even ascend to middle class status. Everything depends on the willingness and ability of people to cross international boundaries and seek work in the first world. From the standpoint of the US, this amounts to an invasion of cheap labor from the south. Because Americans have not provided for their own escape, conditions should worsen there, and the rat-like behavior of the Calhoun experiments should become more evident among Americans even at low population densities.

None of this is likely to affect the world's politicians and power brokers. In fact, they seem to believe that nothing will solidify their enjoyment of the present more than cheap labor made servile by desperation. That is why, in the US, education of the elite is a goal of organizations like the Mars Society and the National Space Society, to draw from them the understanding that they will prosper better if they get with the program, and the program is, because I cannot resist cute acronyms, Extraterrestrial Territorial Expansion for America -- ETea.