Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Doug Willhite <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Becoming a Third World Nation
by John Michael Greer
In the course of writing last week’s Archdruid Report post, I  
belatedly realized that there’s a very simple way to talk about the  
scope of the brutal economic contraction now sweeping through  
American society – a way, furthermore, that might just be able to  
sidestep both the obsessive belief in progress and the equally  
obsessive fascination with apocalyptic fantasy that, between them,  
make up much of what passes for thinking about the future these days.  
It’s to point out that, over the next decade or so, the United States  
is going to finish the process of becoming a Third World country.

I say “finish the process,” because we are already most of the way  
there. What distinguishes the Third World from the privileged  
industrial minority of the world’s nations? Third World nations  
import most of their manufactured goods from abroad, while exporting  
mostly raw materials; that’s been true of the United States for  
decades now. Third World economies have inadequate domestic capital,  
and are dependent on loans from abroad; that’s been true of the  
United States for just about as long. Third World societies are  
economically burdened by severe problems with public health; the  
United States ranks dead last for life expectancy among industrial  
nations, and its rates of infant mortality are on a par with those in  
Indonesia, so that’s covered. Third World nation are very often  
governed by kleptocracies – well, let’s not even go there, shall we?

There are, in fact, precisely two things left that differentiate the  
United States from any other large, overpopulated, impoverished Third  
World nation. The first is that the average standard of living here,  
measured either in money or in terms of energy and resource  
consumption, stands well above Third World levels – in fact, it’s  
well above the levels of most industrial nations. The second is that  
the United States has the world’s most expensive and technologically  
complex military. Those two factors are closely related, and  
understanding their relationship is crucial in making sense of the  
end of the “American century” and the decline of the United States to  
Third World status.

The US has the world’s most expensive military because, just now, it  
has the world’s largest empire. Now of course it’s not polite to talk  
about that in precisely those terms, but let’s be frank – the US does  
not keep its troops garrisoned in more than a hundred countries  
around the world for the sake of their health, you know. That empire  
functions, as empires always do, as a way of tilting the economic  
relationships between nations in a way that pumps wealth out of the  
rest of the world and into the coffers of the imperial nation. It may  
never have occurred to you to wonder why it is that the 5% of the  
world’s population who live in the US get to use around a third of  
the world’s production of natural resources and industrial products –  
certainly it never seems to occur to most Americans to wonder about  
that – but the economics of empire are the reason.

A century ago, in 1910, it was Britain that had the global empire,  
the worldwide garrisons, and the torrents of wealth flowing from  
around the world to boost the British standard of living at the  
expense of everyone else’s. A century from now, in 2110, if the  
technology to maintain any kind of worldwide empire still exists –  
and it can be done with wooden sailing ships and crude cannon,  
remember; Spain managed that feat very effectively in its day –  
somebody else will be in that position. It won’t be America, because  
empire is the methamphetamine of nations; in the short term, the  
effects feel great, but in the long term they’re very often lethal.  
Britain managed to walk away from its empire without total  
catastrophe because the United States was ready, willing, and able to  
take over, and give Britain a place in the inner circle of US allies  
into the bargain; most other nations have paid for their imperial  
overshoot with a century or two of economic collapse, political  
chaos, and social disintegration.

That’s the corner into which the United States is backing itself  
right now. The flood of lightly disguised tribute from overseas,  
while it made Americans fantastically wealthy by the standards of the  
rest of the world, also gutted America’s domestic economy – the same  
economic imbalances that funnel wealth here also make it nearly  
impossible to produce goods or provide services at home at a cost  
that can compete with overseas producers – and created a culture of  
entitlement that includes all classes from the bottom of the social  
pyramid right up to the top. As always happens, in turn, the benefits  
of empire are failing to keep pace with its rapidly rising costs, and  
in addition, rising demands for imperial largesse from all parts of  
society are drawing down an increasingly straitened supply of wealth.  
Meanwhile other nations with imperial ambitions are circling like  
sharks; the wisest among them know that time is on their side, and  
that any additional burden that can be loaded onto a drowning empire  
will hasten the day when it goes under for the third time and they  
can close for the kill.

This view of the world situation is not one that you’ll find in the  
cultural mainstream, or for that matter any of its self-proclaimed  
alternatives. The contrast with a century ago is instructive. A great  
many people in late imperial Britain knew perfectly well that the  
empire on which the sun famously never set – critics suggested that  
this was because God Himself wouldn’t trust an Englishman in the dark  
– had had its day and was itself setting; the lines of Rudyard  
Kipling’s poem “Recessional” –

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo! All our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

– simply put in powerful imagery what many were thinking at that  
time. You won’t find the same sort of historical sense nowadays,  
though, and I suspect the role of the myth of progress as the secular  
religion of the modern world has a lot to do with it. In 1910, the  
concept of historical decline was on a great many minds; these days  
you’ll hardly hear it mentioned, because the belief in history as  
perpetual progress has become all the more deeply entrenched as the  
foundations that made the progress of recent centuries possible have  
rotted away.

The resulting insistence on seeing all social changes through onward- 
and-upward colored spectacles has imposed huge distortions on our  
perceptions of recent events. One good example is the rise and fall  
of the so-called “global economy” in recent decades. Its proponents  
portrayed it as the triumphant wave of a Utopian future that would  
enable everybody to live like middle-class Americans; its critics  
portrayed it as the equally triumphant metastasis of a monolithic  
corporate power out to enslave the world. Very few people saw it as  
the desperate gambit of a faltering imperial society that could no  
longer even afford to run its own economy, and was forced to  
outsource even its most basic economic functions to other countries.  
Nonetheless, this is what it has turned out to be, and it had the  
predictable result that several other nations used the influx of  
capital and technology to build their own industrial sectors, bide  
their time, and then enter the market themselves and outcompete the  
very companies and countries that gave them a foot in the door.

More broadly, it seems to have escaped the attention of a great many  
observers that the day of the multinational corporations is drawing  
to an end. The struggle over Russia’s energy resources was the  
decisive battle there, and when Putin crushed the Western-funded  
oligarchs and retook control of his country’s energy supply, that  
battle was settled with a typically Russian sense of drama. The  
elegance with which China has turned international trade law against  
its putative beneficiaries is in its own way just as typical; a  
flurry of corporations owned by the Chinese government have spread  
operations throughout the world, using the mechanisms of global trade  
to lay the foundations of a future Chinese global empire, while the  
Chinese government efficiently stonewalled any further trade  
negotiations that would have put Chinese economic interests at home  
in jeopardy. More recently, China has begun buying sizable stakes in  
the multinational corporations that so many well-meaning people in  
the West once thought would reduce the world to vassalage; the day  
when ExxonMobil is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CNOOC may be closer  
than it looks.

The same biases that make such global changes invisible have impacts  
at least as sweeping here at home. Faith in progress, coupled with  
the tribute economy’s culture of entitlement I mentioned earlier,  
have made it nearly impossible for anybody in American public life to  
talk about the hard fact that America can no longer afford most of  
the social habits it adopted during its age of empire. It’s almost  
impossible to think of an aspect of daily life in America today that  
will not change drastically as a result. We will have to give up the  
notion, for example, that most Americans ought to go to college and  
get a “meaningful and fulfilling” job of the sort that can be done  
sitting at a desk. We will have to abandon the idea that it makes any  
sense to spend a quarter of a million dollars giving an elderly  
person with an incurable illness six more months of life. We will  
have to relearn the old distinction between the deserving poor –  
those who are willing to work and simply need the opportunity, or who  
have fallen into destitution through circumstances outside their  
control – and those who are simply trying to game the system. The  
great majority of us will get to find out what it’s like to make  
things instead of buying them, even when that means a sharp reduction  
in quality; to skip meals, or make do with very little, because the  
money to pay for anything more simply isn’t there; to treat serious  
illnesses at home because care from a doctor costs too much; I could  
go on for paragraphs, but I trust you get the idea.

All these changes, it needs to be said, would be inevitable at this  
point even if the industrial world depended on renewable resources  
and had a stable, sustainable relationship with the planetary  
biosphere that supports all our lives. The United States has played  
its recent hands in the game of empire very badly indeed, and  
responded to each loss by doubling down and raising the stakes even  
higher. If, as a growing number of perceptive commentators have  
suggested, the US government has been reduced to borrowing money from  
itself in order to pay its bills – the theme of last week’s Archdruid  
Report post – the end of that road is in sight. It’s hard to see this  
as anything but a desperation move on the part of a political and  
economic establishment that sees no other options for short-term  
survival and thinks it has nothing left to lose. It’s the exact  
equivalent of paying household bills by running up debt on credit  
cards; it can buy a little time, but at the cost of making bankruptcy  
a certainty once that time runs out.

The global context of the crisis, though, also needs to be kept in  
mind. The industrial world does not depend on renewable resources,  
and its relationship with the biosphere is leading it straight down  
the well-worn path of overshoot and collapse; the endgame of American  
empire, while it would be taking place anyway, has the additional  
factor of the limits to growth in play. In an alternate world where  
energy and resource flows could be counted on to remain stable for  
the foreseeable future, it’s quite possible that one of the rising  
powers might offer America the same devil’s bargain we offered  
Britain in 1942, and prop up the husk of our empire just long enough  
to take it over for themselves.

As it is, it cannot have escaped the attention of any other nation on  
the planet that something like a quarter of the world’s dwindling  
resource production could be made available for other countries, if  
only the United States were to lose the ability to purchase energy  
and other resources from outside its own borders. It’s not hard to  
think of nations that would be in a position to profit mightily from  
such a readjustment, and nothing so unseemly as a global war would  
necessarily be required to make it happen; to name only one  
possibility, it’s by no means unthinkable that the United States,  
having manufactured “color revolutions” to order in countries around  
the world, might turn out to be vulnerable to the same sort of well- 
organized mob action here at home.

Exactly how things will play out in the months and years to come is  
anybody’s guess. One of the consequences of America’s descent into  
Third World status, though, is that a great many of us may have scant  
leisure to contemplate global and national issues amid the struggle  
to keep food on the table and a roof over our heads. In the long run,  
this shift in focus may have certain advantages; I have argued in  
previous posts that those nations that undergo the deindustrial  
transition soonest, and are thus forced to learn how to get by on the  
very modest energy and resource flows available in the absence of  
fossil fuels, may find that this gives them a head start in making  
changes that everyone else will have to make in due time. Still,  
making the most of those advantages will require a very different  
approach to economics, among other things, than most of us have  
pursued (or imagined pursuing) so far.

Interestingly, this brings us back to the point where this blog’s  
exploration of deindustrial economics started some months ago: the  
thought of the maverick economist E.F. Schumacher. Among his other  
achievements, Schumacher developed a theory of economic development  
for the Third World that cut straight across the assumptions of his  
own time and ours alike, and proposed a route toward relative  
prosperity that took the limits to growth and the failures of empire  
into account. That route was not taken in his time; it may be the  
only way left open in ours. We’ll discuss it in detail in next week’s  
post.

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Original article available here: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/


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