Entry tags:

whole earth discipline

Whole Earth Discipline: Urban Promise
Brand's annotations



This entry should have been done by Randy McDonald

This begins with an examination of the benefits modern technology of the sort that can send middled-aged SF fans into fits of rage can have for people in developing nations. Cellphones don't require landlines to be strung before they can be used and apparently people have been rather cunning about coming up with ways to use them to replace services they otherwise would not have access to:

Some people carry just a card and borrow a phone when needed. Safaricom, in Kenya, has a service called M-Pesa that lets the cell work as an ATM; to send someone money, you text-message the appropriate code to them, and they get cash from a local M-Pesa agent. Cellphone minutes are traded by phone as a cash substitute. Credit card payments are made by cellphone. Remittances from relatives overseas come by cellphone. [...]

It's like the Street finds its own use for technology.


[Speaking of the cyperpunk writers, have any of them reviewed this book?]

Note that I have not used a cell-phone in years so I don't know what Western cell phones are used for.

There's a crapload of money to be made in developing nation markets like this: Brand mentions Grameenphone but Mo Ibrahim's Celtel has also found riches in the African market.

There follows a somewhat infuriating (to me) discussion of population. Brand talks about the fears of overpopulation that his mentor Paul Ehrlich contributed to with statements like

[Ehrlich's] book begins: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” It concludes with Ehrlich recommending “compulsory birth regulation,” including government-provided sterilants in water and staple foods.

As I recall Ehrlich was also in favor of using threats to cut off foreign aid as way to blackmail developing nations into implementing the birth control policies Ehrlich favoured.

By the 1990s, it was clear to people like Brand that these population bomb models were incorrect. As Barry Commoner apparently predicted out in the 1970s, birth rates have in general plummeted. In fact, a useful model that Ehrlich and his ilk could have used could be found in the work of Warren Thompson, whose earliest papers on demographic transition date back to the 1920s!

Well, we all make mistakes and it's not like the population control people were the only ones eager to offer unsolicited advice, sometimes backed up with blackmail or bayonets, to developing nations. The people on the right will always have Chile and Argentina's disappeared to be proud of.

He then goes on to discuss some implications of current trends, which can be summed up with "even prosperous and peaceful populations can shrink alarmingly quickly under the right conditions". See discussions over on Demography Matters for more detailed explanations as why this can be bad for economies.

He then talks about solutions should falling birthrates be deemed undesirable but even the most successful of the methods he mentions (France's) only gets the rate up to just under replacement rate. More work is suggested.

The annoying part is that he still tries to salvage some dignity from the horrifically, nightmarishly wrong models he and Ehrlich used in the 1960s and the subsequent inhumane, colonialist policies that were proposed by Ehrlich and his ilk by suggesting that promoting the error-rotted models at least made people aware of the problem. Pardon me while I go scream in an empty room. Population rates would have fallen whether or not the west talked about forcing the third world to embrace condoms.

He doesn't mention Romania's decree 770, which just as a matter of clarification he had no hand in the creation of, not least because it would have been diametrically opposed to the policies he would have favoured. Here's wikipedia:

However, even at the start, reproductive freedom was severely restricted. Wishing to increase the birth rate, in 1966, Ceauşescu promulgated the decree 770 restricting abortion and contraception: only women over the age of 45 who had at least four children were eligible for either; in 1989, the number was increased to five children.[9] Mandatory gynecological revisions and penalizations against unmarried women and childless couples completed the natalist measures. The birthrate of 1967 was almost double the one of 1966, leaving a decreţei cohort who suffered because of crowded public services.[citation needed]

Despite the failure of decree 770 to accomplish its stated goals, expect panicky people to demand similar measures and by expect, I mean I can find examples in google already and by people I mean this is mostly going to be promoted by men (Note that I would count religious efforts to limit female autonomy as being in a different category).

He's bullish on the potential of what he calls the South (although it's really more the Equatorial than south, given the deplorable lack of land in the southern hemisphere). I think he's a little unclear about the limits of convergence: we've seen other underdeveloped economies experience impressive growth rates but they don't keep that growth rate up once they become developed nations. That said, a 22nd century world where everyone is roughly making the same amount per capita is one where the planetary economy is centered on Africa and Asia, not Europe and North America.

The chapter ends with a rather Jane Jacobian paean to the creative potential of urban life, even urban life that falls outside the usual sanctioned borders of behavior.