The Democratization Of Life

“Printing made us all readers. Xeroxing made us all publishers. Television made us all viewers. Digitization made us all broadcasters.”

– Lawrence Grossman

The recent trend of globalization, which cannot be more than 20 years old at its best, has awakened to all of us the possibility of living a life all over the world while we sit in front of our PC. The technological advancements, coupled with the subsequent progresses in financing, investment and politics, have translated all of our aspirations to memorable careers where speed has been dictating all the terms – and those who lost out were not stupid but only unacceptably slow. In fact, I can comfortably move on to say that there are now only two kinds of people in this world: the “fast” and the “slow”. If you have an internet connection that’s faster than you neighbor’s, it doesn’t even matter if he’s much richer: you can be assured of a spot in the finals. If you can make a telephone call from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro and make an investment in something that’s being tipped as the “next big thing”, you’ve just gone one step ahead of the race. If a helicopter is rigged with personnel from the Indian reserve security forces in order to escort an electronic voting machine to a far off island with less then 5 occupants, then you can take pride in the fact that democracy is still alive and revered in the nation. However, up until this point, I have only spoken of what a more open world with larger markets and fading boundaries can do to empower specific activities, i.e. business and politics. What can it do to empower te individual? Rather, if globalization has indeed bettered the state of the world, what is it done to better the state of an individual?

Lest we forget, there are always two sides to every coin. I can have all kinds of names and notations for these sides, and in this case, I can call them “what have you given from it” and “what have you taken from it”. Speaking of the global village, we have given it the power to dominate over everything in this world. We have given a small company in Brazil the authority to drive into a section of the Amazon rainforest, cut down a thousand trees, sell the timber and free the landscape. We have given the local authorities the power to sell that land to people interested in erecting business houses there, and we have given the company contractors the authority to sell the timber. We have given the authority to local occupants to begin building a sky scraper on that plot of land, and the traders to export the timber to South Africa, where it is serviced into being usable in the construction industry. We have enabled the ongoing construction of the business house to demand more quantities of support-grade timber, which is now brought in from South Africa, and we have enabled the respective governments to slap duties and taxes on the import and export – the money from which will eventually trickle into the household of a destitute man who will feed his family of seven. At the same time, the business house is complete and its offices are occupied by various companies who put people in their cabins just to gather more and more information for them to make more money – the kind of information that made you take a decision in the first place to let these things happen. You can wonder how we could have given it so much, and the lies in one very important outcome of this New World we inhabit: networking. You, me and everyone like you and me are now part of one very large, inexhaustible network. We’re connected together over the internet, through the telephones, televisions and radios. We’re connected through the books we read, because those who read the same books can be thought of as having the same interests and as forming similar opinions – pertaining to goals if not to ideas. In the end, we have given ourselves to belong to this network. We have opened our markets to a wider range of prospects, and we have exposed the local manufacturer to international competition. But what have we received in return?

We have received the access to information. By throwing all the fish in this world into one big lake, we’ve made sure that if ever we wanna have fish again, we just have to go fishing in that one lake. In other words, we have democratized information. If the stock market takes an alarming dip in London, one phone call to New York can disturb investors in the US enough to pull out all their funds from the British market and into other more promising economies that have shown stabler rises, say, Thailand. It is all in the open now, and if you want to get to the big fish first, it won’t help if you’re there first in the morning. Your bait has to be tastier. If you want someone to spend money on you, then you’ve to make sure you’ve got something to offer which no one else does. Ultimately, what we’ve taken from it all is what we did give it: power. The only difference is that the system which we call globalization has taken in power in one form and transformed it into power of another form. For instance, if I elect a government in my country that promises to open up its markets to a greater extent and liberalise the economy, then I will have given the global players one extra country to align with. In exchange, I will break down the walls around me that were once restraining me from reaching out to a larger customer base. If I were to design a T-shirt and think about marketing it on a larger scale, I will now be in a better position to do so. It’s like droplets of ink in water: before, the bucket was only half full. Now, it’s up to the brim. A single drop of ink can now penetrate through to a greater depth; you’ve to just be careful as to not let it get too diluted – you’re facing a larger group of people now. For the message to be driven through, you’ve to keep hammering it in.

Just as we’re now capable of transforming ourselves into uber-individuals in terms of creativity (owing to a greater number of inspirations) and productivity (thanks to the increased access to information), the family as a fundamental unit of society has also been impacted by advancements in technology. Earlier, our fathers and grandfathers had to choose between sacrificing one luxury in order to attain another; today, it’s no longer a matter of what luxury you have – but how you use them to get better results. Earlier, there existed a sizable disparity in terms of wealth and accomplishments between those who had chanced upon just one more opportunity than the rest. Today, that disparity is negligible. When a working father realizes that his job is not being threatened by earthquakes and tornadoes tearing down his office but seemingly inexplicable dips in the stock market that are capable of shutting his company down, he will look to offset risk as much as possible by making intelligent investment decisions and not building his cabin underground. He will also realize that his children have to be brough up with different goals in mind than just settling down because he will now know that there is a long way to go before that. Today’s is a world of competitors, and there are three roads one of which you can take.

1. You stick to what you know and discard anything new and innovative as junk that won’t last the day. If this is going to be your outlook on the world, you will also find that by the end of the day, you will become part of your own idea – you’re old, and you haven’t lasted it.
2. You keep moving around without an anchor. With nothing to hold you down to a specific set of goals, you cannot have a strategy that encompasses all things. The competition in each field is fierce, and you should be able to accommodate for changes in all of them before you make a decision. In other words, you’re either a paranoid prodigy or a dead man.
3. You strike a balance between being moved around and anchored to one set of goals. And yes, it is traditionally easier said than done.

When Intel’s Gordon Moore stated his notorious law in 1965, I think he had an idea of what that law would come to mean 45 years down the line. Moore’s law, coupled with the advent of globalization in this frighteningly unipolar world, is what is making a difference today and now. Again, it’s only a measure of how fast you are. If you’re very fast, you’re one man who’s capable of changing the lives of a million men, women and their families at the click of a button. If you’re not fast enough (there’s no “slow” indicator on this switchboard), you’re one of the millions whose life is going to be determined by the guy with the faster internet connection.

(I wrote this piece while reading Thomas L. Friedman’s ‘The Lexus & The Olive Tree’, a book he wrote in 2000 about the coming of globalization. I just wanted to express my interpretation of the details of the book through this post.)

Monetary Aids: Boon Or Bane?

“…the government of the world must be entrusted to satisfied nations, who wished nothing more for themselves than what they had. If the world-government here in the hands of hungry nations, there would always be danger. But none of us had any reason to seek for anything more. The peace would be kept by peoples who lived in their own way and not be ambitious. Our power placed us above the rest. We were like rich men dwelling at peace within their habitations.” – Winston Churchill

Foreign aids, in times of distress resulting from large-scale calamities and famines, provide a temporary solution regarding the basic needs of the endangered people until proper order has been established by the home government. Therefore, looking at monetary aids from this perspective, foreign aids will seem to be the solution to global poverty. But, it is more of a bane than a boon. They will definitely help in the shorter periods of time (i.e. until order has been restored), but in the long term, they will only do to make beggars out of countries. What is important is that there must exist a development program which is sustainable in nature so that the economy prospers, making it possible for the people to earn their livelihood. For this, the mandatory conditions, at a glance, will be political stability at a broader (country) level, and social stability at an internal (society) level. This means that there has to be peace as the first step for making progress. The next step would be to focus on what is best suited for the nation to make economic progress, and then start working on a sustainable program for developing it. A good example would be Japan, which was reduced to rubble post-WW II. It, then, recorded Asia’s fastest industrial and economic growth, which was achieved through a minimal quantity of resources. Another example would be Singapore, depending mainly on industrialization and tourism. Both nations do not go to war, thereby ensuring external peace as well as eliminating causes for many an internal strife. Further, they have a disciplined approach to life that also helps.

Let us now come to a situation wherein foreign aids are imposed upon defenseless Third World nations, further crippling economies. This has been shown, through extensive research, to be profoundly crippling as far as the poor are concerned. An imposed aid can only function to generate devious bureaucracies, which in turn serve to sap the initiative that brought them about in the first place. Ultimately, the moral effect would be to, simply put, snap the enterprise of the common man, and draw potential intellectuals into non-productive activities. Foreign aids, concerning untimely occasions, will create a ‘moral tone’ in international affairs thereby denying one the hard-task of wealth generation, substituting it with indigenous handouts; what will ultimately be realized is a curbing of individual freedom and a suppression of popular choice. Of course, such actions do not go without its handful of defenders. What such men and women don’t understand is that such foreign aids are fundamentally bad, and that, far from being incremented, must be halted before more damage is done. What is even more grievous is that lobbyists in the halls of power argue that ‘aid’ must not be stopped because the poor would not survive without it. Willy Brandt, ex-chancellor of Germany, headed the Brandt Commission in 1980. The Brandt Commission Report was then generally well received for its ideas and programs on globalization and free trade. Excerpt: “For the poorest countries, aid is essential to survival”.

To quote further, at the International Conference on Financing for Development, held in Monterrey, Mexico, US President George W. Bush pledged to increment development assistance to poor nations, in terms of monetary aids, through the establishment of the new Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). The fund would set strict standards of accountability and long-term sustenance for the aid-acceptors and would reward select poor countries with as much as $5 billion in aid by 2007. Now, the proposed Account is a step forward because it builds on a consensus that development works best when poor countries have strong policies on governance and economic reform and take responsibility for reducing poverty and seeding sustenance so as to spur growth.

But what President Bush has failed to recognized it that the MCA also poses a great risk: by dealing with recipient countries only on such a cheap basis, the fund will surely undo significant progress in improving donor-recipient coordination. Backsliding in this area could condemn poor countries to court suspicious sources of money, thereby increasing the chances of corruption and subsequent collapse of order: simply put, back to square one. Also, one has to note that the United States has ventured into this aiding-market alone. Therefore, sensitive issues regarding failure of reception could have adverse effects on the donor’s economic scenario. Secondly, narrow focus on the development of top-few countries may generate funds so as to execute economic reformations – but only in those countries; the majority low-income nations will then face seclusion.

Of the Third World nations, Africa contains many lessons concerning the fraud of ‘aid’. It has gradually given up the ability to posses the self-sufficiency required in food production; it must be noted that African countries did enjoy that before developmental aids were invented. Since 1960, the per-capita food production has fallen steadily owing to dependence on international aids. Today (as of 2002), 70% of the people of the sub-Saharan nations live below the poverty line, with the result that the continent has the highest infant mortality rate, lowest average life-expectancy, lowest literacy rate, fewest doctors per head of population and the fewest children in school, on the planet. Since 1969, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita has shrunk at a constant rate of 3.4% per annum! What people don’t see is that the poor do thrive without it in some countries, and that the suffering of miseries occurs not in spite of aid, but because of it. However, such statements undervalue the people of the poor countries concerned. As such, they are logically refutable when uttered by those who want us to believe that foreign aid works. At the tail-end of close to a hundred years of industrialization and allied developments, we are told that many countries have lost the ability to survive a moment longer unless they receive even larger amounts of aid. Let me ask you a question. If foreign aids really do work, then the poor countries must be better off now than when they started to receive the aids. Where is that improvement? There is a stark lack of concession that prudent management of resources, a willingness to share responsibility to fulfill common needs and improve living standards are just missing from the root agendas.

The truth is that the people in most of such countries seldom come in contact with the aids in any tangible shape or form. After the multi-billion dollar influx of money has been filtered through ‘officials’, ‘agency staff’, dishonest ‘commission agents’ and the like, there is very little left to go around. This trifle, furthermore, is then used up thoughtlessly by those in power who have no mandate from the poor. Small wonder, then, that the effects of ‘aid’ are so often vicious and destructive for the most vulnerable members of the society. Also, over fifty years of aid-work, the channels of resource transfer, titled ‘agencies’, should have dealt with the problems they were established to solve, closed shop and stopped spending funds from developed to developing countries. Solution: if the people ever are to receive their entitled quantities of aid, they must have the necessary and proper, in every sense of the word, communication with the government they have elected. Being irredeemably out of touch with the poor can only serve to make the situation worse.

In fact, these ‘agencies’ have sunk their roots deep enough so that they have grown year after year with even bigger budgets, and ever more projects to administer.

All the above-said notwithstanding, what is to be said about the successes of the foreign aids?

In the past half-century, the goal of these ‘aids’ has been to solely create and entrench a new breed of influential and wealthy gang of parasites. In this campaign, led chiefly by the IMF and WTO, ‘aid’ has perpetuated the rule of incompetent individuals, heading governments characterized by massive ignorance and irresponsibility. Foreign aids, therefore, has condoned the most consistent cases of human rights abuse. In the today of enlightened minds, the oustering of these evils can be achieved only if the victimized are willing to recognize ways to assist one another according to their needs and needs only. They must begin to act on their own set of agendas, in line of priorities they themselves have set. They, therefore, must not be aided, but must be provided with equal opportunities so as to aid themselves.