The Space Between Us
The developed world is balanced precariously on a bed of dependency
Posted Sep 17, 12:03 pm in consumerism, environment, human nature, human resources, sustainability
The growth of the number of linkages that our society depends on has been staggering over the past century. If you look back at books that detail the lifestyles of pioneer families in the American West, or farmers in rural India, or peasants in England during medieval times, you’ll notice that there the organizational distance that took any given commodity from its point of growth or manufacture to the end user was quite small, and typically involved only a few parties. Nowadays, there are countless organizational linkages that are involved in any given product we might own.
Take this computer I’m typing on right now, for example. There were probably 100+ manufacturers involved in the creation of this computer if you include all the components and parts, and many of those manufacturers purchased parts from other manufacturers, and so on. When it comes down to it, maybe 50,000 people were involved in building this computer in some way. And while computers might be an extreme case, by no means is it atypical of the amount of organizational growth in the economy.
The number of middlemen and organizations that separate manufacturers from end users has increased dramatically. There are the people that source materials, people who manufacture them, people who store them, people who distribute them, and people who sell them. Compare that to the maybe 25-50 people that were probably involved in the creation and sale of everyday items in simpler times, where blacksmiths bought iron ore from some organization, forged tools from the iron, and sold the tools directly to end users.
Even if you held the number of items constant in a comparison of items in your home to that of a medieval person’s home, the number of people involved in the process of furnishing your home would dwarf the number of people involved in the processing of the home from a distant time ago. Consider even the house itself: your wood, nails, and tiles come from far away, and involve many transporters, salesmen, manufacturers, etc. A peasant’s hut in the middle ages was made from wood from a local forest that didn’t need to be transported far, and essentially crafted from scratch (that is, without many pre-manufactured parts) by locals.
In other words, the number of people who are working for you now is much, much higher that it was for people in the past. This is important for several reasons.
Firstly, this means that there is an interconnectedness in the current economy that was never experienced to this degree in the past. This is what Thomas Friedman describes as the “flattening” of the world (of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this choice of phrase defies the significance of the word “flat,” since it was actually the roundness of the earth that made us realize the interconnectedness more than previously thought!).
Secondly, it means that there are many, many more things that can go wrong in the functioning of our society. If you are more dependent on more people to get you your daily food and water, it also suggests that there are more places where problems can develop, and many more ways in which the chain can fail. Any such failures in the chain will affect more people, which is bad not only because of the potential magnitude of the inconvenience (or perhaps crisis), but also because the ever extending length of this chain has divorced people from having basic knowledge how they can get what they might need in the absence of the middlemen.
Think about what would happen if there was a crisis in the supply chain that prevented food from getting to all the grocery stores in your area, and you can start to imagine the severity of this problem. Not only are people completely dependent on grocery stores to get them their food, but in the event that the stores are unable to provide, people have no idea how to get the food they need. They might figure out that they need to grow vegetables themselves, but would they know how to do that? Would they have space to do it?
People in third world countries are used to dealing with breakages in the chain. They don’t rely on electricity. They don’t depend on getting water delivered directly to their houses. For that reason, they have organically developed street smarts about how to get what they need whenever they need it, and they are never overreliant, or even confident, that the system will be able to deliver it to them.
While many in developed countries might look down on the apparent primitiveness of this situation, in many ways, it is the Westerners who are at a long-term disadvantage in a survivalist sense. They are the ones who can be easily brought down by something like a terrorist plot, an oil crisis, a natural disaster, or a transportation strike.
A friend of mine described how the recent onset of Hurricane Gustav took out power in her hometown in Indiana last week. As of yesterday— several days later— the power was still out. How well do you think the people were adapting to this? Certainly not as well as my relatives in my parents’ hometown in India would, since, for reasons that have never fully been explained, they don’t have power every Tuesday of the week.