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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."
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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
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!!
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.
The experience gained from government sponsored space exploration allows the government to tackle large problems in a coordinated way.
Basically it's a good team building exercise.
Now as to your comment about Indians not being smart enough to staff a call center with people who speak the language of those whom they will support. A reminder, they are the ones getting paid for this, not the ones paying for it, from their end it's working out quite well.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
They eat plenty of water buffalo, although a lack of big walking steak isn't their main problem. Raising cattle takes a lot of water and land, and any well-irrigated land will produce far more vegetable matter. If a field is big enough to raise one buffalo then it's big enough to feed a family year-round, so you have a choice of daal bhat (rice & lentil soup) for a year or steak for six months and then starving. In addition, if you have a buffalo then you use it as a tractor, it'll produce more food alive than it will by slaughtering it. The question is akin to asking why so few people in the US fly their own plane when there's thousands rusting in the desert.
Most people in India will eat meat maybe once a week, a little chicken with the daily daal bhat. Even if they all decided that cows were fair game, they'd be back to square one in a few months, with less fertilizer.
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