The Roots of Arab Poverty

© Laurence B. Winn

Jan 1, 2002

Not long ago, Alan Schwartz, a professor of law and management at Yale, inked an op ed piece for The New York Times about the origins of terrorism.

"Many Arabs blame us for their poverty," he wrote, "But in fact they are not poor because we are rich; they are poor because of the policies their countries pursue." And he goes on to explain how the U.S. can urge, by financial and diplomatic means, the Muslim nations to see the truth of this.

Even if his main points were not debatable, and they are, Schwartz offers no path to success other than the usual circular logic about changing minds and hearts ... to get Arabs to be something other than they are, you have to make them something other than they are. It seems clear that the Muslim/Arab view is correct enough: they can't have what others own (except by forced redistribution). And Americans own a lot of what there is.

Try a thought experiment: A new continent appears as if by magic in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It is so large, larger inside than outside, like Dr. Who's call box "Tardis", that it could hold, say, five times the earth's current population. It is also further away than it possibly can be, so far that even its nearer shore is three days transit time by ICBM. Moreover, it is not owned by anyone, and all of its natural resources are unowned as well, free for the taking, assuming the wilderness doesn't kill you.

What would happen?

The common sense expectation is that the old world powers would claim all of the new world for themselves and distribute the land and its resources among their favorites. But the expected strategy can't work because of the vastness of the domain and the great distances involved. We know this because it hasn't worked before, notably in America from the 15th century through the 19th. In these circumstances, the bosses may have a will, but they can't enforce it. The journey is too long, the land too vast and the way too hard.

This is what really happens: People, mostly poor, arrive by whatever means they can. They may promise to do the will of their masters to obtain transportation, then melt into the wilderness. Some of these are the same ones who, with education but with no prospects, would have joined any cause that offered to pay them and care for their families, even if it required their death.

In the new country, old monopolies are meaningless. They are too far away to serve the new markets. The elite class is powerless, unable to hold its servants who, if abused, run away and press deeper into the wilderness. Nor can the elite form a coalition against change, blocking new technologies and industries, because change occurs outside of their jurisdiction.

On the new continent, anyone who is willing and able to serve has value, women included equally, because there is more work than hands to do it. The frontier is the birthplace and natural home of the human resource.

Not every part of the New World fares equally well, of course. In some places, old tyrannies are transplanted, if only because the colonists are unwilling to do without them. Other groups choose their home sites poorly, on marshland or too far from fresh water or in locations that are too exposed to natural hazards or have unstable climates. Other groups lack the technology and skills to survive in the new environment. But some win, and win big, and that's what the folks back home hear about and remember.

With all this going on, you would think the elite classes would feel bamboozled, and they might, if the merchants did not have trade that the bosses could tax. By analogy with past frontiers, it is possible to predict that the products flowing into the old world from the new would include materials similar to existing ones, but far superior in quality and more interesting (like furs from Hudson's Bay), materials once common in the old world, now used up (like timber from the primeval American forests), previously unknown materials (like ambergris from the Caribbean) and stories of adventure to make media moguls drool (like the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition).

Now, pfft, we do away with Atlantis. We still have our angry young men with time on their hands, however. Some enlightened and omnipotent force has to make the Saudi royal family give up their bad economic practices, force the war lords of sub-Saharan African to part with their revenue for granting monopolies on trade, make certain Muslim and Arab countries provide a basic rule of law, cause them to educate women and teach mathematics and science instead of the Koran.

Well, it's going to take a darned big army, probably bigger than any army the Pentagon can hope to raise.

However, there exists within our reach an alternative policy, namely development of a frontier not much different from the one we have envisioned. The literature describing earth-like habitats in space and the means of building them using resources from "the land" are numerous and detailed, so there's no point in discussing them here. (See, however, some references below.)

We have seen how a new frontier would address the root problem, which is enclosure, not just a symptom of enclosure that we call terrorism. This is no panacea. There will still be individuals who can't fit into the matrix of society. Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Sundance, and the Claytons leap to mind. But the problem of criminality on frontiers is individual, not structural, as our current difficulties are. If you buy frontier theory, you know that we are looking at the inevitable results of enclosure, the absence of frontiers.

Frontier theory holds that our greatest enemy is not someone you can shoot or something you can blow up. It is the zero-sum law that applies under enclosure and says that some people really are poor because others are rich.

Know that we are not powerless to work our way through this. However, success requires our recognition that $100 billion a year - more than seven times NASA's present budget - would be better spent opening a high frontier in space than as a mere (proposed) addendum to the $347 billion* we must spend annually to protect ourselves by conventional (and not too successful) means.
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*request the Pentagon is considering for Fiscal 2003. (Aviation Week & Space Technology, December 3, 2001)

References:

Getting at the Roots of Arab Poverty, www.nytimes.com, 12/1/01

The Fertile Stars: Man's Look at Space as the New Source of Food and Energy, Brian O'Leary, Everest House, 1981

Pioneering the Space Frontier: The Report of the National Commission on Space, Bantam Books, 1986

The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, Gerard K. O'Neill, William Morrow & Co., 1977

Colonies in Space: A Comprehensive and Factual Account of the Prospects for Human Colonization of Space, T.A. Heppenheimer, Stackpole Books, 1977

Breakout into Space: A Mission for a Generation, George Henry Elias, William Morrow & Co., 1990.