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Space Vs. Poverty Debate In India
MarkWhittington writes "Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was obliged recently to defend his country's space program, which involves the spending of billions of rupees when India still has a large number of people living in abject poverty. The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
Bring home the moon cheese and there will be enough for everybody!
1) Humanity eliminates all poverty, is subsequently wiped out by asteroid....CONGRATULATIONS!!!
2) Poverty, one aspect is that it's strongly tied to a lack of space. If we develop the means to expand our habitable environments. Poverty can be greatly reduced. We see this, with the discovery and colonization of America's, which in fact improved Europe by allowing many of the impoverished to migrate and become land owners.
but once they nuke pakistan from orbit they'll have enough wealth to spread to everyone!
that's how nuking works, right?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You cannot eat research.
Those early men who tried to make fire by rubbing some sticks together in vain were obviously wasting their time. They could have better spent that time chasing a mammoth, and humanity would have been far better off.
...Tell them to fuck off.
I'm sure you'll be able to phrase it more diplomatically, but that's the answer you need to give detractors.
Sacking a space program is not going to solve poverty. It's not even going to help in any way.
Keeping a space program isn't going to magically cure poverty, but your country will see a rather nice return on investment, to say nothing of the return mankind itself will be rewarded with.
Yes, because driving West in a wagon with a gimpy wheel and grandma strapped to the roof to some new homestead next to a river and zap apple trees is perfectly comparable to development of the Moon- an airless, irradiated wasteland a quarter million miles up slope on a large gravity well.
Ah well, at least they won't die of dysentery.
they hire workers with it.
Does a country have to eliminate poverty to become great? Or does greatness help to eliminate poverty? Or is there a balance of the two?
Ultimately, that's probably the question I'd be asking if I was the Indian prime minister.
"The poor you will always have with you"
http://bible.cc/matthew/26-11.htm
We will always have poor, and we will always have the responsibility to care for those who cannot help themselves, and help those who can help themselves to begin helping themselves (you have my welfare policy in a nutshell). But, we cannot allow it to be an all consuming policy that detracts from allowing those who do earn from progressing and from mankind as a whole from advancing.
Spave vs Poverty debate is a false dichotomy and I encourage Slashdotters to not fall into this trap.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's a weird coincidence that all these stories are coming up now.
One of the main plot points in the new Doctor Who episode (which occurred in the future) was that the Indian Space Authority was involved in making sure that a huge out of control spacecraft did not hit earth. It was obvious that the Indians were major powers in space at the time of this story... to the point that they were taking the initiative to protect the entire earth.
Now there is a lot you can read into this story, but at least on some aspects it implies that the Indians become a major technological force in the U.S. One interpretation is that they use this to help bring massive numbers of people out of poverty.
I don't know... it's interesting that these questions come up at the same time that a sci-fi author sees that India could be a major force in the future world's space programs.
Right. Because the space program's goal is to load tons of rupees into a launch vehicle and launch them into orbit. And that's not counting the rupees stuffed into the launch platform to muffle the rocket exhaust or the solid fuel boosters whose fuel consists primarily of shredded rupees.
The money spent developing these capabilities is spent on Indians working on jobs. Developing a technological industrial base will help far more people over the long term than just dumping truckloads of rupees on the streets in Calcutta would.
Means that you also have technology to improve the situation on the ground - satellite monitoring is useful for planning and development.
And you also develop technology that has spin-off use on the ground.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
there shuld be one single global space program..
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
so these goals don't seem mutually exclusive to me
"U.S." should of been "world."
Us USAsians are arrogant.
Spending money on ambitious projects in space will make India richer in more than the monetary sense of the word. How much do you value the pride of a nation? Or the pride of individual engineers working on a space program?
Not everything is measured in GDP. You need big ideas to unite people and to create (at least an illusion of) movement towards the better life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY
Whitey on the Moon, by Gil Scott-Heron
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
Space exploration vs poverty relief always comes up, but IMHO it's a red herring. As big as space budgets sound, at the national scale they're generally a pittance - much smaller than is already spent on poverty assistance or any of a great range of things. Heck, in the US we spend less on the space program than we spend on oil exploration subsidies to highly profitable businesses.
Personally, I wonder if it's "convenient misdirection," holding up the space exploration budget as "potentially wasteful" in order to keep the general populace from looking in more wasteful places. In addition there doesn't tend to be a wealthy, powerful champion for the space program these days. The contractors who get rich on the space program also get rich on defense programs - one of those possibly more wasteful places - defense programs are easier to defend.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
"The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
If by that you mean the debate that rich people believe that the government shouldn't be using their money for space; so they can keep it and spend it on hookers and blow... then I guess that's a parallel.
The best thing about UDP jokes is I don't care if you get them or not
Item 1: The poor in India aren't poor due to overtaxation.
Item 2: India's government is in better shape than most in Asia but there's still a fair level of corruption.
Item 3: If the corruption were cleaned up and civil institutions were impartial then the working poor could improve their situations in just a generation or two.
Item 4: The amount of money spent on the space program is pretty negligible in the big scheme of things. At least it gives the country a boost in the international ranking of such things and showcases the smart people in India which can have a lot of intangible benefit.
As the U.S. have resolved the dilemma by slashing both the space program and the poor!!
I have to agree that in the case of India; that has serious infrastructure problems, the money would be far better spent on the basics. Once India takes care of most of its' pressing matters and can provide reliable clean water, sanitation, electricity etc to the vast majority of the population, perhaps then they can reach for the stars as a bonus. If you take all the money put into the space program and invest in infrastructure, like the electrical grid/power would the average citizen not be far better off and have a better future? Let's not build towers in the air on foundations quite shaky.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
It's a weird coincidence that all these stories are coming up now.
Not a coincidence at all. This is an election year in the US and the sitting President is trying to cut space spending and shift the money to social programs.
Space programs may require a lot of high-tech work, but all high-tech work requires low-tech work. Ie. someone's got to dig the ditch to run the cables, someone's got to build the giant silos and buildings, someone's got to run the steel mill.
Money is like energy - it is not created or destroyed, simply transferred (at least, for ordinary economic activity - there are exceptions). Their space program is funding things on Earth, not shooting barrels of money into space.
Now, maybe it's not the most efficient way to create jobs for the poor, in the short-term, but think long-term. You cannot deny that the space program is a good thing in the long run. So when you look at it that way, it isn't a bad idea to spend some money "inefficiently" now, in order to improve things in the long run.
Yup, this was said aroudn 2,000 years ago and while the overall standard of living of the poor has improved, there are still people considered to be living in poverty. Now poverty in rural India is a lot different than poverty in the US or EU - my understanding of poverty in rural India is that it is nearly a foraging existance, subsisting on whatever is handed out or can be found lying around. Money? Not only is there none at all, but there wouldn't really be anything to spend it on either. So it is not a lot different from poverty 2,000 years ago.
The problem is poverty is caused by a number of things and "lack of opportunity" isn't a big one. From what I have seen, in most cases it is a matter of bad choices and uninformed choices. An abject failure to learn is also part of the scenario, in a big way.
In the US it is easy to see people spending $20 on lottery tickets rather than food for the baby when it is pretty clear to them that food for the baby is what is really needed. The result is often begging, borrowing or stealing trying to get the $20 for food for the baby. A few weeks later, the same thing happens again. Sooner or later the friends and relatives figure out it is just a really good idea to become really scarce when their friend or relative is looking for money.
Just making bad choices - partying instead of studying, for example, is enough to screw up people's lives in ways they can't imagine when they are young. Having made some bad choices some folks are able to pull it together and with a lot of drive, determination and ambition actually get somewhere but this is pretty rare. Mostly, the bad choices end up leading to more bad choices and not learning from them instead.
Absolutely, there are rich people that inherited the money and had someone to rescue them every time they screwed up or made a bad choice. But these people are the exception. For the most part they are the end of the line and their children will not be leading privileged lives. There are people that happened to fall into an opportunity and have managed to not screw things up, but again this is rare. Most people with more money and resources than their neighbors simply made better choices, planned for the future and have more determination and ambition.
What all of this means is there is no "solution" to poverty. Right now the US could rearrange things so as to give every single citizen a million dollars. Not counting what this would do to inflation and the economy as a whole, this would in effect eliminate poverty. Right? Except it is pretty much a dead certainty that within ten years there would be people who would have blown through the money and be "poor" again. Maybe as little as five years there would be significant numbers of these people. This would mean the entire exercise - and whatever side effects it would have - would be a waste of time. Which is why nobody seriously proposes doing something like this, at least not anyone with any sense of history and how these things work.
So there is no decision between space and poverty - there isn't anything to be done for "poverty" in a real sense. Oh, I suppose slavery is a solution - you take all the poor people and make them relatively pampered slaves and don't make catching escapees a priority. I am sure this would result in anyone with much ambition escaping but those that did and didn't like it would just come back to be taken care of. It would be a solution, but I don't think it is one that the West has much stomache for. At least not yet. Keep pushing the "fight against poverty" and that is where we will end up in some form or another because it is the only real "solution".
The point of going to space was not simply to say, "we've done it." but all the advances it caused us to make, and to be able to better explore the universe, we need to start somewhere.
And we're still reaping the rewards of having raced to space.
This.
A rat done bit my sister Neelu
With goras on the moon
The technology that is necessary for us to live off the planet will have a purpose first on Earth allowing us to live in different environments than we can currently survive in.
When you can grow tomatoes in the Sahara the people there will be much better off, that is one technology that is necessary before we move on to other rocks.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
social programs (uhm, like ROADS and BRIDGES and INFRASTRUCTURE) has been ignored - totally - by the repubs the last several terms.
halliburton has been making a pretty penny; but our infra is rotting away.
I'd LOVE to see investment back in our own country. we once used to think that was needed and a Good Idea(tm). wonder why we stopped wanting to invest in ourselves.
oh right, greed and the 'got mine, fark you!' mentality. the old codgers who run things aren't going to be alive decades from now, and they simply don't CARE about our well being.
its overdue and I hope we do dial back on frivilous things and take care of the basic 'meat and potatoes' that has been ignored for too long.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
In the US, if the US had spent trillions of dollars on its people, instead of on wars, there would be no poverty in the US at all.
Some might argue there would be no US at all ;-)
The space program is an effort to combat poverty, by providing opportunities to get those poor, homeless PhD-carrying souls into a proper workplace!
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open your own wallet to help them, you're a saint.
If your compassion for the poor makes you want to open someone else's wallet to help them, you're a thief.
That is all.
"still has a large number of people living in abject poverty."
70% of the population live on less than $2.00 a day. That makes 850,000,000 or so living in abject poverty. I think that qualifies as a "large number".
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
The harsh reality is that you are right. India is an emerging economy with the second largest labor force on the planet. If they concentrate every nickel they can beg, borrow, steal or earn into poverty, maybe, in a few decades, they might pull it off, but then they will be many decades behind the Russians, Chinese, Americans, Europeans and Brazilians, and in the long term they will suffer for it. In the short term, it is a gamble that means tens of millions remain in abject poverty. In the long term, it means being a space power, with full access to orbit, the Moon and beyond.
The fact is that history is full of sad tales of great nations left behind. China was probably the wealthiest most powerful nation on Earth in the 14th and 15th centuries. Blessed with some of the most fertile territory on Earth, a high population, a long tradition of civil government that had even managed to survive invasions and civil war, it could have become a major mercantile power, and by the time the Europeans reached East Asia in force, they would have been faced with a potent power standing in their way. Instead of leaping ahead, it withdraw, and let the Western Powers walk all over it. Even the upstart Japanese, once they figured out where the world was headed, leaped ahead of them to become probably the fastest agrarian to industrialized state in just over half a century, soon enough to be able to sit at the table with the big boys during the Unequal Treaties and even kick the crap out of the Russians.
I think countries like India and Brazil ponder the Japanese model of industrialization, and realize therein lies the formula to, in a few decades, to sit at the table with the big boys. Does it mean that many will live in poverty in the meantime. Sadly yes. Resources, no matter what monetary and economic scoring system you choose, are finite. But clearly they realize, as the Chinese have, that they are decades behind the major space powers, and there will come a time, maybe a century, maybe longer, when being able to access resources in space is going to be monumentally important, and they have a choice to either be one of the "Space Powers" or end up being client states.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Because if you buy it off of foreign companies, you are ultimately beholden to foreign governments.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
These debates have always bothered me. Does a nation/society/culture/state/collective do nothing with its resources if there are some with less than others? Seriously ... this debate seems a red herring because it can never be concluded.
My sig paints a picture of my general mindset around 'progress' - I kind of find space exploration a silly idea but what the hell does it matter what I think? It's not like I set national budgets or anything like that. Nevertheless, can't we ask that question of every resource expenditure of ourselves and others? What business did I have buying my kid an XBox 360 when I don't have 100% of his expected college expenses saved?
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I specifically know two families both very good friends of mine. These two families both live well below the poverty line. However that will never change as they really have zero ambition to change that fact. As odd as it sounds they are perfectly happy making next to nothing. Both families have nothing but opportunity to do something about it yet refuse.
Got Code?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5smPcN8AoE
Doing things with money, like having a space program makes jobs, and if done right can be a big boost to many people in India. What else do you what them to do with the money, give it to poor people? I think we all know that will not produce any long term good.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Well, there's an easy solution: Go around cutting grass and smashing pots until you have enough rupees.
(You may have to buy a bigger wallet at some point, though.)
(Also be careful to not accidentally hit chickens while doing this.)
40 space-acres and a M.U.L.E.?!! That's racist!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm pretty sure we can already grow tomatoes in the Sahara (hydroponics). The problem is that it's not cost effective. It's cheaper to grow them elsewhere, then ship them to the Sahara.
"The debate raging in India parallels a similar one that has simmered in the United States for decades."
The debate in the US hasn't been going on "for decades." It's been going on for about one decade give or take a few years. It matters that it hasn't been going on "for decades" because it's essentially a result of scavenging science budgets for warfare and debt service and of the decline of US commitment to science as the global warming debate has soured Republican lawmakers on science in general.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
as a percentage of total fed budget:
9.52% - Welfare
17.4% - Healthcare
0.48% - NASA
keep on simmering...
http://www.canucklehead.ca/look/avatarded.html they'll tell you hunger in the world is to blame on piracy probably (great movie tho, but nice point i thought)
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Mmm wait, how about this! Put 5 billion rupees in a prize pool and set up a reality show where contestants fight to the death until only one is left standing, and that guy gets the 5 billion rupees!
No, wait, that's a horrible idea. Don't do that...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Fire allowed us to eat more and eat better. So that research, you COULD eat. Go back to the drawing board, you really had a good thing going until your specific meataphor :D
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
if they'd start eating the cows.
Be seeing you...
... and spends trillions on defence, space programmes etc.
But, presumably that's good America poverty, and inherently better than bad Indian poverty :/
Public money is for public use, not space jaunts. Besides, space "colonies" are just plain murder.
E Proelio Veritas.
Indian democracy is suffering from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
Casteism