Eradicating Poverty

Wallace, my partner in Equitopia Productions is going to be a doctoral candidate this Autumn under Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University. For those of you who do not know who Jeffrey Sachs is and are not inclined to google him, here is a link to his wikipedia entry. Dr. Sachs is big on eliminating poverty globally and Wallace is proposing in his thesis to use the World Bank to accomplish it.

The path to eradicating poverty is clear. It is a three step process, though they are best undertaken more or less coincidentally rather than sequentially. First, you need to educate your population so that they are qualified to discharge the duties of the jobs that will be internationally available. Second, you must create a rule of law that will maintain a peaceful society, but of equal and even greater importance, one in which contractual relationships can be enforced.

Lastly, and this is most important, a business and economic environment that is friendly to trade and to foreign investment must be created. Simply put, if you offer a well educated population in a commodious economic, social and political environment at a competitive price, the world economic engine will descend upon your country and lift it out of poverty.

The problem, of course, is that poverty is not only a scourge, it is also an effective political weapon. In 1933, Stalin essentially starved 7,000,000 million Ukrainians to death in an effort to impose the collectivist ideology. Profoundly impoverished populations become more pliable and this fact has been used to control or squelch movements many times since.

Additionally, many third world nations resist the formula for poverty eradication because they fear or resent a potential influx of foreign products, foreign memes and foreign ownership. Pride in one's people is normal and, one might argue, a sign of a healthy and dynamic society. Yet, in this case, pride is interfering with the well being of the people.

The World Bank can play a part in ameliorating the latter. The World Bank, specifically, has the stated goal of reducing poverty and, in its most ambitious form, to eradicate it by 2015. Wallace will be exploring in his doctoral sequence new and ostensibly more effective ways of tying loans to specific performance metrics. It should be rather simple, save for the points made above. In essence, some of the nations don't really want to cooperate and often perceive the efforts as a new form of debt enforced colonialism.

However, things change and in the next few decades things will change profoundly and rapidly. These changes can fundamentally modify the dynamics of the battle against global poverty and may do so with blinding speed.

In the Future 101 we explore many of the mechanisms of the Information Age that will lead to an Income Explosion. It will begin in the developed world but it will relatively quickly spread to virtually all populations. As mentioned above, there are very real concerns over the isolation from global economic, social, cultural and political arenas imposed by local governments.

My contention is that these confounding problems will likely show little resolution until a critical point is reached that will precipitate a rapid resolution. The reasons for this will revolve around the strong tendency of technological, economic, social and political change to take place in a profile described by some type of Sigmoid function. This is why at the future 101 we say, 'Don't think exponentially, think sigmoidally.'

As we explore briefly in 'A Superior Knowledge of Futurity' the best analogical model for how the present becomes the future is a system of endogenously related sigmoid equations. When the the degree of relationship is small the system resembles a number of sigmoid functions quite closely. As the degree of relationship increases the sigmoid functions begin to deform. At a certain point they will be prone to periods of extreme discontinuity. I reprint the example here.

There are two important lessons we can learn from this. The first is intuitive. That is simply the observation that isolation works. Some societies are isolationist with the intent to stop outside influences from destabilizing their society. While the effectiveness of this strategy may seem obvious, here we see a practical demonstration that it is something more than just memic pollution. The socio-economic system becomes structurally destabilized.

Second and more profound, we now see a clear indication of why history is more inclined to revolution than evolution. It seems to be inherent in the sigmoid path by which nearly all trends progress. As these sigmoid functions become more inter-determinant they also become progressively less stable. That may be how improvements in material science may cause perturbations in the development of automobile technologies. Or it can be demonstrated by how growth in the internet impacts social and cultural change.

The point is that the critical factor is the degree of the endogenous relationships. Where the sigmoid equations modify each other only slightly, the result remains primarily sigmoidal in their paths. When they begin influencing each other more, a point is reached where they frequently pass over a threshold from seemingly placid trends to spectacular and chaotic change.

This leads us to a tentative conclusion that simply an increasing degree of global inter-relatedness is destabilizing. It also probably means that as economic and technological inter-relatedness increases globally, efforts by some third world nations to opt out of the cultural and political changes is likely to be futile. We will also surmise that, in all likelihood, these changes, referencing the graph above, when they occur will not be slow or quiet.

The critical sigmoidal function today is probably Internet penetration and the degree of global connectivity. It influences the sigmoid functions of nearly everything. Through usage, virtually everything affects the Internet. It is precisely this that can lead to a revolutionary upheaval. What is particularly fascinating about this is that the revolution is created not by any specific act but rather by the mathematical characteristic of highly endogenous sigmoid systems being prone to instability.

In a way, we can say that it doesn't matter very much what we do to become interconnected with third world nations, rather it is only important that we do. Certainly, the World Bank is forcing interrelationships. But so is the Internet and it is doing so with much finer granularity. My take is, however, that whatever Wallace does, he is going to be inclined toward success.

The Income Explosion is coming, it will be global and it will lay waste to any Industrial Age social or political institutions that stand in its way.