Televisions before toilets, always · 9:34am Mar 2nd, 2021
Still reading Vultures Picnic, by Greg Palast. The book that pointed out the finance minister up a tree with an invisibility hex. There's a lot of background to Armenia and Azerbaijan that feels prescient, for a book that's now ten years old.
One thing he says that caught my eye; In countries that strike oil money, the people always get televisions before they get toilets.
Now, there's a very obvious way this is true. This is where the term 'petrodollars' really comes in - when the US buys oil, it buys it with US currency. There are reasons for this, but I will cut to the quick on them and just say that you could fill at least five Olympic swimming pools with the blood that is on Henry Kissinger's hands.
But what this essentially means is that those countries are largely exchanging bulk quantities of a natural resource for value-dense, industrial-economy imported goods. This is because a lot of development is limited by infrastructure, which is a problem you can't solve just by throwing money at it. Everyone who's played any Factorio-like game should feel this in their bones; To get heavy construction equipment out, you need highways, to get the highways built, you need a cement factory, to get the cement factories built, you need heavy construction equipment-
Foreign investment absolutely comes in to build infrastructure. But it builds it straight from the point of natural resource extraction - the oil wells in this case, but rare mineral mines are a great historical case for this - to the ports or borders. This is why it's farcical to say "The British built railways in India" - it was to move wealth out of the country as fast as possible. The benefits to the locals were incidental.
A side effect of this: how democratic a country is correlates broadly to how straight the road is between its capital city and its nearest major airport.
Back on topic.
The extreme end result of this would be Dubai. Dubai has the resources to build massive skyscrapers, and try for some of the world's tallest buildings. They never got their toilets, really. While they're building one now, Dubai has so much money to throw at the problem that the solution, for the moment, has been an entire fleet of sewage trucks and septic tanks servicing its high rises.
"What would that even look like", you ask?
Anyway. I mostly bring this up because there's a few people that think there's no point in counting things like food and housing as benchmarks for inflation, because consumer electronics are so wondrous and cheap, and use the processing power of a smartphone as a benchmark for societal progress.
Most really meaningful forms of wealth are a lot more complicated and invisible than that though, and importantly way more community based. Infrastructure isn't as sexy to point to, but it's the reason why there's televisions before toilets, always.
I mean, of course tv comes before toilets, if they weren’t there already. Aerial electrical wires and a broadcast signal are a lot simpler to supply, logistically, than an entire water and sewer infrastructure.
But yeah, some people just run things shittily.
I've worked in several "third-world/developing" countries, and I've seen this phenomenon many times. Once, in Georgetown, I watched a homeless man crawl out of his cardboard shelter in the morning and check his cellphone for messages. Believe me, it's cellphones before almost anything else. TVs are ancient tech.
This may be a bit tangential, but something I've seen and marveled at is what China is doing about the chicken-and-egg infrastructure problem: Container factories.
These are self-contained mini-factories built into a shipping container frame. Wherever a container can be put, one of these factories can be set up. The only input needed is electricity and raw material. The one I saw near Takoradi was powered by an ancient diesel generator. Colored plastic beads went in one end, and household items came out the other.
In Guyana, another one was fed by water from an old wooden tank while a worker shoveled cement in to a hopper. Formed, decorative building blocks slid out and were stacked nearby where there were some houses being built. The molds got swapped out to make paving stones. The factory would later be moved to another building site.
This modular approach can be used to chain factories together to accomplish larger-scale jobs like water purification and sewage treatment, and they even have a model that's a biofuel electricity generator. It's the closest I've ever seen to drag-and-drop infrastructure.
So... these problems can be addressed, if not solved outright. It's just not the western powers who are doing it.
5465031
This is sick, do you have anywhere I can read or look into container factories more?
I'd never heard of them until I actually saw them in operation! Unfortunately, the US blocks the Chinese sites that advertise them, and now The New Eastern Outlook, where one could get East Asian news and information is also blocked. You might have more luck where you are. (Try: journal-neo.org) Googling "container factory" gets mostly factories that build containers, but since the West has begun to catch up, Unilever is touting one.
The straighter the road, the more democratic they are? That doesn't seem right. Is that what you meant?
5465048
The other way 'round, I'd think.
5465077
I would have thought so too. That's why I'm confused.
Not the first acquaintance I've had with this sort of idea or some of the examples, but thank you for the blog post.
"I mostly bring this up because there's a few people that think there's no point in counting things like food and housing as benchmarks for inflation, because consumer electronics are so wondrous and cheap, and use the processing power of a smartphone as a benchmark for societal progress."
My best guess is that some of them say they think that, but not in good faith, because they have food and housing and the status quo is particularly good for them, while others genuinely believe that themselves because if they didn't they'd have to face how bad a lot of things, potentially including their own lives, actually are these days.
5465145
Inverse correlation is still correlation.
I frequently see the, "technology makes life so much better today, clearly a rising tide lifts all boats" argument to justify poverty not being so bad, as though people in poverty today are much better off than people in poverty twenty years ago due to cheap gadgets that let them have fun on the internet and see YouTube videos. Kind of like circuses without the bread, or televisions without toilets.
So clearly, as advanced as technology is in the United States, our citizens in the third millennium should be among the happiest in the world, whether or not they live in poverty—
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f2/Unipolar_depressive_disorders_world_map_-_DALY_-_WHO2004.svg/1920px-Unipolar_depressive_disorders_world_map_-_DALY_-_WHO2004.svg.png
Age-standardised disability-adjusted life year (DALY) rates of unipolar depressive disorders by country (per 100,000 inhabitants) in 2004.
—huh. That's weird. Lifetime prevalence in the US for Major Depressive Disorder is 17%, the highest of anywhere in the world. And that's two years before the housing market crashed, back when the economy was roaring.
It's a mystery...
5465568
Most of them are using those electronics to find out about bad things they can't stop; the people the bad things are happening to are only a small portion of the total.