Overheads
Geschrieben von Andreas am 29. März 2004 22:13:16:
Als Antwort auf: Widersprüche im System geschrieben von Andreas am 29. März 2004 21:52:18:
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Introduction
It is the crucial role played by confidence in keeping a complex society in existence which means that the consequences of ambition outstripping capacity are so devastating. Political, economic and social stability hinges upon people's commitment to the whole project. Given that the rewards of the majority are obviously far less than those of a minority, such commitment in a free society depends very much on the belief that for everyone tomorrow will be better than today. Stagnation, let alone retrenchment, is a severe threat to that commitment. When our ambitions eventually come up against our capacities, and the delusion behind the notion that babies' lives can be saved regardless of cost is starkly revealed, the shock is likely to be the final straw for political, economic and social relationships that are already stretched to breaking point.
Welfare and Security
We therefore find ourselves in a historical trap. We cannot move backwards because our consciences will not allow it. We must move forwards though we know, in our hearts, that it will lead ultimately to disaster. We tinker with remedies, but they all incorporate their own built-in paradoxes, and the system develops with a life of its own. It carries us, conveyor-like, to the point where economic reality must eventually call in its dues.
Health and education
The future for the health service is perhaps illustrated by the situation in Russia, whose health system has all but fallen apart following that nation's bankruptcy. Even disposable syringes are not readily available any more, and there is a growing incidence of preventable infectious diseases, such as diphtheria and cholera. This suggests a population that is under stress, malnourished and increasingly vulnerable to illness, as well as a health system that is breaking down. This is part of the dark age scenario - the abrupt reversal of trends to improve people's standards of living that have been moving steadily in one direction for hundreds of years.
Thus, universal education and initiatives like BS5750 are largely overheads. To be sure, people like education and training. It is better than working, and qualifications are often used as a convenient but more or less arbitrary measure for assessing the level of rewards for particular types of work. However, the extent to which these deliver improved performance and thus repay the resources devoted to acquiring them is rather dubious. For the most part, their effect is probably either neutral as far as our productivity is concerned or actually negative.
Growth of government
The question is how big can government grow, and at what point does the burden of dependency become too great for the remaining supporters to hold up. There is no simple answer to this, for the viability of a society depends on social and political as well as economic relationships. In some economically successful countries, like Japan, relatively little of GNP passes through government hands and transfer payments are small. Many economically successful countries, however, as in Germany or Scandinavia, have high tax burdens and elaborate systems of transfer payments. In fact, Europe's lowest-taxed country, Greece, is also one of its poorest. Britain's tax burden is average to low, below even that of the US, yet our economic performance is not one of the most sparkling. All this suggests that governments are not so large yet that they are seriously damaging the viability of their societies. Our ambitions in this respect are still some way below our capacities. The experience of the communist countries shows that, with sufficient integration and cohesion, the government can claim practically all productive activity and still remain viable - for a while. Thus, as far as we are concerned, system collapse by this means is not going to take place tomorrow. Nevertheless, the conveyor belt keeps on moving and the eventual outcome remains plain.
Crime and protection
World-wide, spending on the military and on criminal justice is at very high levels in historical perspective. It has been the experience of every ascendant power that these costs have increased during its period of ascendancy, contributing to its eventual bankruptcy and decline in favour of some new power. However, this general pattern now seems to be being played out on a global scale. For example, although military spending has fallen in most countries since the second world war, the fall has been less substantial and less rapid than after other major wars in previous centuries. And since the next fifty years seem very likely to be more troubled than the last fifty, we can expect the decline in military budgets to be reversed. The same story seems likely to apply to the costs of prisons and policing within our increasingly disintegrated and discohesive societies. When previous great powers bankrupted themselves on the overheads of protection, during the last half millennium, there was some nascent power ready to take their place. However, the international system is now fast running out of such fresh blood. It is the entire world that is heading towards bankruptcy and, beyond that, decline and the oblivion of a dark age.
Parasitism
According to an American author writing around 1980, 3.1 persons receive benefits for every worker who pays social services taxes today. Yet, younger people worry what will be the attitude of the taxpayer in 2030, when 5 persons receive benefits for every ten workers. Surveys show that four fifths of workers paying social security taxes do not have full confidence that they will actually get what the law presently offers. Among workers around 35, who still have 30 years of payments to make, half have no confidence at all that their benefits and pensions will even be paid when they retire. At the moment, these are just responses to opinion polls, concerning issues that people do not have to confront in their everyday lives and normally put out of their minds. However, there is a gathering problem here. As the mismatch between our ambitions and our capacities becomes increasingly glaring, the lack of confidence in the future will push forward into people's consciousness. And when such confidence really disappears and it becomes obvious that it has disappeared, the system will break down properly.
Conclusion
In this part of the book, we have seen that the political, economic and social relationships that normally hold human groups together are weakening and rupturing on all scales. Although there are continual fluctuations in such relationships, in this final chapter we have seen that there is an overall movement carrying us towards their catastrophic breakdown. Our perennial demand for greater comfort lies behind certain trends that are undermining our ability to provide it. Thus, Herman Kahn identifies the 'failures of success' in the following terms. Affluence means that people cannot bear to wait for what they desire. Continuous economic growth means that people make unrealistic demands of the government. Mass consumption means that aesthetic and commercial standards are determined by the tastes of the masses. There is a neurotic concern with avoiding pain and death. We have met all of these in the discussion above.
The problem is that, even though we may be rather aware of the disaster to which we are heading, we cannot get off the conveyor belt we are on. We cannot go back in a controlled fashion to what we know for sure will be a somewhat harder, somewhat meaner society. We have to move forward because, whatever our fears, the future is still uncertain. In any case, the whole logic of the system depends upon the belief that things will go on getting better indefinitely. To confront that belief deliberately, here and now, would surely only bring forward the crisis of disappointment. We must therefore press on with our ambitions, though our capacities may be falling behind. We must go on accumulating our burdens. In putting off the day of reckoning, however, we ensure that the shock when it comes will be devastating indeed. We ensure that it will be the kind of shock that on many past occasions, and in every part of the world, has precipitated the descent into a dark age - a dark age that wipes away our mistakes, resets our expectations to zero, and allows the journey to begin again.